The compressibility of water is.0000034 lb/ft2. For a change in pressure of one pound per square inch, water is only compressed by about 3 one-millionths of its original volume.
However, at very large volumes, this small compression can become significant. For example, if water were truly incompressable, the oceans would stand about 100 feet higher than they do today. Compression of water in the ocean basins reduces global sea level by 100 feet.
I know the macro and micro worlds are quite different, but water does compress, and pipes and hoses do stretch, therefore there must be some delay in the propagation of the pressure wave, right?
Speaking from some minor experience with fire hoses and associated equipment, slamming valves on and off with a relatively incompressible fluid raises holy hell with fittings, pumps and hoses. It's called a "water hammer," and the effects can be costly. I'm not quite sure if this would be a problem in a microsopic array.
I can expand on the above poster's story from a slightly different angle.
My father is a pastor in a small, somewhat fundamentalist church. I know many other pastors families well, and I know quite a few more by name or I half-recognize them. I know the scene. Quite a few pastor's kids, PKs, go a little bit nuts when the leave the nest.
We tend to have a little more education than the average kid, we live in a freakin' social fishbowl, and we tend not to be all that impressed with authority. My parents were rather moderate and tolerant, but the rest of the community seemed dedicated to keeping me on the straight-and-narrow even if it wasn't their business. In fact, we tend to spend way more energy than is sane in general rebellion and self-destructiveness. It really is fun to needle authority figures in a completely polite, respectful way. Making the authorities redundant or irrelevant is even better. Most of us get over ourselves in a few years, but the damage is done.
Some more vigorous bible-thumping famlies in the church end up destroying their children. They either become another generation of mindless, misinformed bible thumpers or they turn into whores.
I can't begin to imagine the pressure that the child of a self-appointed, bible thumping politician will face. I think it's pretty much a guarantee of some heinous behavior. I hope she makes it back to her sense, but I wouldn't guarantee it.
And yeah, kids'll route around fundie parental b.s., sometimes without destroying themselves.
Send all "real" correspondence via high security encryption.
No! Even if they can't crack the encryption, this still gives information away. Prudence dictates that all correspondence flows look the same and that all channels be completely full at all times.
Thermal depolymerization has been brought up several times. I don't know if all the chains we need can be derived from turkey guts, and other organic wastes, we can use a little less crude. If this vitrification process helps us get a reasonable, complete and cheap system for fission reactors, then a lot of other things could be possible.
Cheap energy changes everything. It'll take a lot of meat to cover the amount of plastic we use, but that's another story.
Yeah, uranium is scarce, and current mines might run out. That might be a problem, but I don't really know.
But take a look at this page. Speaking as a citizen of the United States, I'd much rather kiss some Canadian ass to get our energy source, than to deal with a bunch of enthusiastic Wahhabi nuts.
Even if the Canadians and the Australians run out, I submit that we are better off owing them and having cleaner air, than stumbling on like we are now. Who knows what kind of fun technology will come along in the next 50 years? That said, I'm not really wired into the nuclear materials world, but I don't hear a whole lot of panic over short supplies of the appropriate ores.
We might still need crude for specialty applications, and we'll probably still be worrying about what happens in the middle east, but I can't think of a huge downside to cutting down on our oil consumption.
Well, Vivendi did start out running sewers in France, didn't it? Vivendi's finances have gone down the toilet anyway, and Gabe Newell may have his hand on the flush lever.
Steam is an annoying abomination, and Valve may be in the wrong here, I don't know. But Vivendi's sub-companies have been screwed up in the recent past and their debts are monstrous.
Their hassles with Valve merely bring unity to their situation, IMO.
Ok, the good. The wind blows all the time, land is cheap, the population is ridiculously small and shrinking, small towns are dying, and some parts are getting desperate.
Now, the bad. It's really frickin' cold in the winter, the wind blows all the damn time, and it gets worse in the winter.
There isn't exactly a huge industrial base except for some mining stuff. The only people crazy enough to live there are thick-headed, terse, and incredibly stubborn, parts of my family are representative. The rural population is relatively old too. Maybe that is a plus, I'm not sure.
Most people think that all of North Dakota is flat. It isn't. The ground elevation doesn't vary greatly, but it is always going up and down enough to make installing large, even rows of of windmills annoying, but maybe that's nothing to a civil engineer.
It's also really damn cold in the winter, and boring. Long distance travel really sucks in the winter.
It might be a good place to start a large windmill farm, but I think the environmental conditions would beat the hell out of almost anything mechanical that is exposed 24/7 for years on end.
I only know a small part of N. Dakota, so I may be way off.
Well, I do believe they are working on that. What if you could stick somebody inside a scanner that would tell you if a person recognizes an object or had seen that object or a person before. Would that be useful for password cracking? How about a brain-scan tells when a person is lying?
Unless you can make a tinfoil helmet that is strong enough to keep "them" from whacking you on the head with a baseball bat and then draging your unconscious body back to the lab, you're secrets are not safe.
Or "they" could skip the high tech crap and threaten you with goatse type pics.
Didn't Japan's equivalent of the Federal Trade Commission put the beat down on Microsoft for demanding that all OEMs that use WinXP for any of their machines include it on all machines? I may be way the heck off, but it would make it easier for them to do what you're thinking about.
I'm not sure, I may have my news reports mixed up again.
What would happen if Microsoft limited the administrator account to 16 colors and maybe a low resolution. Would people learn quickly to use a user account to play games? Would administrators still be able to get their work done with said limitations?
This is just one of those off-the-top-of-the-head-and-not-thought-out type ideas, but i'm curious.
Once this new software package is installed and the scope hooked up, how much effort do these searches take, and how smart do the searchers have to be?
I am SO guessing on this, but there can't be that many super smart astronomer types out there and it may be a waste to have them on less than awesome machines. Can a non-moron, non-specialist handle the datagathering and analysis with this package? I'm mostly just curious about this.
In one town where I used to live there was a law to cover just this kind of situation. They didn't call in B&E, I think it was called "prowling." You could get minorly busted just for looking in car windows and trying the locks.
In Florida it means
The State must prove two elements to sustain a conviction for loitering and prowling. First the accused must be loitering and prowling in a manner not usual for law abiding citizens; and, second, the loitering and prowling must be under circumstances that warrant a justifiable and reasonable alarm or concern for the safety of persons or property located in the vicinity. As to the first element the State must prove more than vaguely suspicious presence. As to the second, it must prove conduct that is alarming in nature, indicating an imminent breach of the peace or a threat to public safety.
This could lead to tragedy. Every now and then some poor Korean kid will off himself by playing games for 96 hours in a row.Imagine what would happen if they actually had to exert themselves? Maybe they should add some kind of pulse sensor to these tiles.
Going to hell now...
Btw, everyone knows that the first real use for this will be military or Doom 4 related.
Weren't some functions in NT 4.0 accesible only after a hard ctrl-alt-del ? Maybe it's time to build some hard coded, hardware only goodness into mobile OSs. The only way to say ok would be to push an actual, real, clickity-click button.
Ok, it's not direct injection, but it's pretty close. Throw in some motion tracking markers on the common tables and process for position information and you have a heck of a 3D, somewhat communal interactive display.
These are non trivial problems, but I don't see any show stoppers except for the a high dork-o-meter rating from the headmounted camera/laser assembly. It's not like there's many women hanging around users of these systems anyway, so it's no big deal anyway.
I just don't see keeping my head stock still in front of a 15 inch monitor for hours at a time for any reason.
I'm not sure how frying a few voting machines to make a point is an act of insurrection or rebellion, even if it is criminal. It seems like a rather large leap that I just can't quite make. Furthermore, I don't see how martial law would be declared when a few thousand hours of overtime by the local law enforcement & FBI would take care of things. Turning the army on the populace just to take care of mid-grade felonious conduct is a heavy thing. But who knows, it could happen.
I do think the distinction between goal and perceived goal is worthwhile though. It isn't a clean-cut demonstration like some of the ciil rights marches. It's pretty easy to decide what is happening when people are getting whacked on the head and chewed on by dogs, and a lot less easy to understand the trashing of some very spendy machines.
Also, I'm wondering if those contingency plans include a way to go to a backup manual voting system. It might be a good idea.
If the voting machines are corrupt, then a little revolution may be necessary. I wonder if frying machines counts as non-violence. Probably not.
Yeah, I didn't think of the no weapons allowed thing. I wonder if photography is discouraged in the actual voting area? You routinely see politicians photographed while dropping their ballot into a box. I wonder if things are different when using the machines. i don't see any good reason why the election staff would care, but you never know these days.
I'm not to surre that this is appropriate, but if you're gonna damage the machines, use stun gun, maybe with long, narrow probes soldered onto the arc-points. Much handier than a 15 pound sledge.
And how the heck is the above post flamebait? Extreme, yes, but it's a half-way reasoned post. Now I'm OT. Oh well.
So, we're talking about a different set of bacteria then, huh?
And no, that was most definitely not too much information. More is better. It's odd though, my dad has this problem and he is a nearly life long vegetarian, he hasn't had a drink in 30+ years, at least, he can still give me a hard time in an arm wrestling contest, has never smoked, most of his relatives lived well past the statistical norm and are so cussedly stubborn about living, and he still has this problem. Go figure.
If I ever am unfortunate enough to have one of these babies implanted I'm also gonna get a big tattoo on my chest that says something to the effect of "Hey you, paramedic, (misc. clinical information and info about where the on/off switch is), and I'll buy you a beer if I live.
My dad has to take some pretty hefty doses of antibiotics before any dental work. Apparently he has some minor heart valve issues and the bacteria from his mouth can get into the blood stream when the dentist is doing his thing and cause havoc. Does this have anythign to do with what you are talking about? Is the dentist just covering his butt?
I think there are some real gems in the original song, and it's really too bad that only naive people can listen without almost crying these days.
That said, the lyrics in the JibJab version viewed in contrast with the original lyrics comprises a valid commentary. It was hilarious, I think, and makes cynical fun of the original's point of view. That's my take on it.
Then again, only a moron would confuse the two versions. I think that the JibJab guys are screwed.
Then Feynman is as full of crap as most of the commenters here seem to think Van Allen is. Belief is fine and dandy but it would be most accurateto say that science is proving and the proof of the ignorance of the experts. As long as we are reasoning by maxim, we might as well have some fun with it.
I'm not trying to say Van Allen is wrong even though I think he is.
Slashdot Mirror
I know the macro and micro worlds are quite different, but water does compress, and pipes and hoses do stretch, therefore there must be some delay in the propagation of the pressure wave, right?
Speaking from some minor experience with fire hoses and associated equipment, slamming valves on and off with a relatively incompressible fluid raises holy hell with fittings, pumps and hoses. It's called a "water hammer," and the effects can be costly. I'm not quite sure if this would be a problem in a microsopic array.
I can expand on the above poster's story from a slightly different angle.
My father is a pastor in a small, somewhat fundamentalist church. I know many other pastors families well, and I know quite a few more by name or I half-recognize them. I know the scene. Quite a few pastor's kids, PKs, go a little bit nuts when the leave the nest.
We tend to have a little more education than the average kid, we live in a freakin' social fishbowl, and we tend not to be all that impressed with authority. My parents were rather moderate and tolerant, but the rest of the community seemed dedicated to keeping me on the straight-and-narrow even if it wasn't their business. In fact, we tend to spend way more energy than is sane in general rebellion and self-destructiveness. It really is fun to needle authority figures in a completely polite, respectful way. Making the authorities redundant or irrelevant is even better. Most of us get over ourselves in a few years, but the damage is done.
Some more vigorous bible-thumping famlies in the church end up destroying their children. They either become another generation of mindless, misinformed bible thumpers or they turn into whores.
I can't begin to imagine the pressure that the child of a self-appointed, bible thumping politician will face. I think it's pretty much a guarantee of some heinous behavior. I hope she makes it back to her sense, but I wouldn't guarantee it.
And yeah, kids'll route around fundie parental b.s., sometimes without destroying themselves.
No! Even if they can't crack the encryption, this still gives information away. Prudence dictates that all correspondence flows look the same and that all channels be completely full at all times.
Even information about the information is useful
Thermal depolymerization has been brought up several times. I don't know if all the chains we need can be derived from turkey guts, and other organic wastes, we can use a little less crude. If this vitrification process helps us get a reasonable, complete and cheap system for fission reactors, then a lot of other things could be possible.
Cheap energy changes everything. It'll take a lot of meat to cover the amount of plastic we use, but that's another story.
Yeah, uranium is scarce, and current mines might run out. That might be a problem, but I don't really know.
But take a look at this page. Speaking as a citizen of the United States, I'd much rather kiss some Canadian ass to get our energy source, than to deal with a bunch of enthusiastic Wahhabi nuts.
Even if the Canadians and the Australians run out, I submit that we are better off owing them and having cleaner air, than stumbling on like we are now. Who knows what kind of fun technology will come along in the next 50 years? That said, I'm not really wired into the nuclear materials world, but I don't hear a whole lot of panic over short supplies of the appropriate ores.
We might still need crude for specialty applications, and we'll probably still be worrying about what happens in the middle east, but I can't think of a huge downside to cutting down on our oil consumption.
Well, Vivendi did start out running sewers in France, didn't it? Vivendi's finances have gone down the toilet anyway, and Gabe Newell may have his hand on the flush lever.
Steam is an annoying abomination, and Valve may be in the wrong here, I don't know. But Vivendi's sub-companies have been screwed up in the recent past and their debts are monstrous.
Their hassles with Valve merely bring unity to their situation, IMO.
Ok, the good. The wind blows all the time, land is cheap, the population is ridiculously small and shrinking, small towns are dying, and some parts are getting desperate.
Now, the bad. It's really frickin' cold in the winter, the wind blows all the damn time, and it gets worse in the winter.
There isn't exactly a huge industrial base except for some mining stuff. The only people crazy enough to live there are thick-headed, terse, and incredibly stubborn, parts of my family are representative. The rural population is relatively old too. Maybe that is a plus, I'm not sure.
Most people think that all of North Dakota is flat. It isn't. The ground elevation doesn't vary greatly, but it is always going up and down enough to make installing large, even rows of of windmills annoying, but maybe that's nothing to a civil engineer.
It's also really damn cold in the winter, and boring. Long distance travel really sucks in the winter.
It might be a good place to start a large windmill farm, but I think the environmental conditions would beat the hell out of almost anything mechanical that is exposed 24/7 for years on end.
I only know a small part of N. Dakota, so I may be way off.
Rent a goose. Really!
Well, I do believe they are working on that. What if you could stick somebody inside a scanner that would tell you if a person recognizes an object or had seen that object or a person before. Would that be useful for password cracking? How about a brain-scan tells when a person is lying?
Unless you can make a tinfoil helmet that is strong enough to keep "them" from whacking you on the head with a baseball bat and then draging your unconscious body back to the lab, you're secrets are not safe.
Or "they" could skip the high tech crap and threaten you with goatse type pics.
Didn't Japan's equivalent of the Federal Trade Commission put the beat down on Microsoft for demanding that all OEMs that use WinXP for any of their machines include it on all machines? I may be way the heck off, but it would make it easier for them to do what you're thinking about.
I'm not sure, I may have my news reports mixed up again.
Try the Dakotas, North Dakota in particular. Believe me, they don't have a heck of a lot going on anyway, and this would be perfect for them.
What would happen if Microsoft limited the administrator account to 16 colors and maybe a low resolution. Would people learn quickly to use a user account to play games? Would administrators still be able to get their work done with said limitations?
This is just one of those off-the-top-of-the-head-and-not-thought-out type ideas, but i'm curious.
Once this new software package is installed and the scope hooked up, how much effort do these searches take, and how smart do the searchers have to be?
I am SO guessing on this, but there can't be that many super smart astronomer types out there and it may be a waste to have them on less than awesome machines. Can a non-moron, non-specialist handle the datagathering and analysis with this package? I'm mostly just curious about this.
In one town where I used to live there was a law to cover just this kind of situation. They didn't call in B&E, I think it was called "prowling." You could get minorly busted just for looking in car windows and trying the locks.
In Florida it means
Findlawis our friend.The lawyers have already covered this base, and it belongs to them. Sorry trolls, beat you to it.
This could lead to tragedy. Every now and then some poor Korean kid will off himself by playing games for 96 hours in a row.Imagine what would happen if they actually had to exert themselves? Maybe they should add some kind of pulse sensor to these tiles.
Going to hell now...
Btw, everyone knows that the first real use for this will be military or Doom 4 related.
Weren't some functions in NT 4.0 accesible only after a hard ctrl-alt-del ? Maybe it's time to build some hard coded, hardware only goodness into mobile OSs. The only way to say ok would be to push an actual, real, clickity-click button.
Just ignorant speculation here
You mean like this?
Ok, it's not direct injection, but it's pretty close. Throw in some motion tracking markers on the common tables and process for position information and you have a heck of a 3D, somewhat communal interactive display.
These are non trivial problems, but I don't see any show stoppers except for the a high dork-o-meter rating from the headmounted camera/laser assembly. It's not like there's many women hanging around users of these systems anyway, so it's no big deal anyway.
I just don't see keeping my head stock still in front of a 15 inch monitor for hours at a time for any reason.
Ok, I'll bite.
I'm not sure how frying a few voting machines to make a point is an act of insurrection or rebellion, even if it is criminal. It seems like a rather large leap that I just can't quite make. Furthermore, I don't see how martial law would be declared when a few thousand hours of overtime by the local law enforcement & FBI would take care of things. Turning the army on the populace just to take care of mid-grade felonious conduct is a heavy thing. But who knows, it could happen.
I do think the distinction between goal and perceived goal is worthwhile though. It isn't a clean-cut demonstration like some of the ciil rights marches. It's pretty easy to decide what is happening when people are getting whacked on the head and chewed on by dogs, and a lot less easy to understand the trashing of some very spendy machines.
Also, I'm wondering if those contingency plans include a way to go to a backup manual voting system. It might be a good idea.
If the voting machines are corrupt, then a little revolution may be necessary. I wonder if frying machines counts as non-violence. Probably not.
Yeah, I didn't think of the no weapons allowed thing. I wonder if photography is discouraged in the actual voting area? You routinely see politicians photographed while dropping their ballot into a box. I wonder if things are different when using the machines. i don't see any good reason why the election staff would care, but you never know these days.
I'm not to surre that this is appropriate, but if you're gonna damage the machines, use stun gun, maybe with long, narrow probes soldered onto the arc-points. Much handier than a 15 pound sledge.
And how the heck is the above post flamebait? Extreme, yes, but it's a half-way reasoned post. Now I'm OT. Oh well.
So, we're talking about a different set of bacteria then, huh?
And no, that was most definitely not too much information. More is better. It's odd though, my dad has this problem and he is a nearly life long vegetarian, he hasn't had a drink in 30+ years, at least, he can still give me a hard time in an arm wrestling contest, has never smoked, most of his relatives lived well past the statistical norm and are so cussedly stubborn about living, and he still has this problem. Go figure.
If I ever am unfortunate enough to have one of these babies implanted I'm also gonna get a big tattoo on my chest that says something to the effect of "Hey you, paramedic, (misc. clinical information and info about where the on/off switch is), and I'll buy you a beer if I live.
My dad has to take some pretty hefty doses of antibiotics before any dental work. Apparently he has some minor heart valve issues and the bacteria from his mouth can get into the blood stream when the dentist is doing his thing and cause havoc. Does this have anythign to do with what you are talking about? Is the dentist just covering his butt?
I think there are some real gems in the original song, and it's really too bad that only naive people can listen without almost crying these days.
That said, the lyrics in the JibJab version viewed in contrast with the original lyrics comprises a valid commentary. It was hilarious, I think, and makes cynical fun of the original's point of view. That's my take on it.
Then again, only a moron would confuse the two versions. I think that the JibJab guys are screwed.
Then Feynman is as full of crap as most of the commenters here seem to think Van Allen is. Belief is fine and dandy but it would be most accurateto say that science is proving and the proof of the ignorance of the experts. As long as we are reasoning by maxim, we might as well have some fun with it.
I'm not trying to say Van Allen is wrong even though I think he is.