Lets take for example the evolutionary change of water dwelling animals to land dwelling animals. The gradual approach does not seem to make sense. I see no evolutionary advantage to half of a leg or anything less than a fully functional one.
Google for something like "stubby legs bottom dwelling" to see plenty of examples of water dwelling critters with leg-like appendages. It's
a very common adaptation, apparently useful both
for locomotion and for hanging on tight, both excellent capabilities to have when you're living in shallow/moving water.
But for something more like extreme like going from water to land, I just don't get how the intermediate organisms are more successful
Water's-edge habitats (sorry, I'm not a biologist, I don't know the correct word) are subject to both seasonal variation and long-term climatic variation. Lots of critters have body parts and behavior that help them survive such variation.
Walking Catfish, for example. Now, what if you're such a beast out on a stroll to the neighboring pond-that-hasn't-dried-up-yet, and you happen upon something good to eat? You just might survive when your non-strolling brethren perish.
Well most of the money has already been spent, the robotics have already been designed and partially built, and the entire mission has been practiced several times over on the Hubble mockup facility at Goddard.
I must have missed the part where we've already flown successful autonomous rendevous/docking flights...
We would develop a lot more technology and knowhow by doing the repair robotically,
I agree, except that Hubble is not likely to
survive long enough to fund/design/build a
robotic repair mission (not to mention the
practice robotic missions that would precede
the actual repair if the thing is done properly).
The astronauts all know they've got a 1-in-50
chance of having a bad day on any given mission,
and that the ISS strategy doesn't improve those
odds all that much. We're overdue for a
catastrophic main engine failure, for example.
A Hubble repair mission is about the best use
of a shuttle mission that I can think of.
hah, no, those WW II devices were quite complicated and did have precision detonators, initiators,
No and yes.
Little Boy (the Hiroshima bomb) was a U235 gun bomb, simple, rugged and dead-nuts reliable. That's why it was
used first; there was really no way for it not to work. However, it also consumed very nearly the
entire world's supply (at the time) of U235.
There was only one.
Fat Man (the Nagasaki bomb, and approximately the
Trinity bomb) was the sort of complex plutonium
bomb you're thinking about.
From a terrorism POV, you're worried about somebody either getting a fully functional military bomb (from the FSU or whereever),
or a sufficient quantity of 20% enriched U235.
If Tim McVeigh had two big chunks of the latter,
he could definitely have made a nice, crappy, effective U235 gun bomb, it's really that level
of technology.
If Gore had won in Florida, it would have been
because all the unambiguous votes in Florida were
counted. That never happened.
(And Gore's team never fought for that, not that it
would have made any difference if they had; the Supreme court disallowed anything resembling a
full count.)
The Orlando Sentinel (not exactly a bunch of
radical lefties) was among a group of news organizations that did real substantive
work on what the results of a full vote count
would be; for example,
here and
here. You do the math.
Ancient history now, I suppose, but those that do not remember history...:-)
A healthy stomach/intestine can easily absorb 15,000 calories a day
Yes, Tour de France riders run at this sort of level.
If your stomach/intestine didn't absorb all the calories in your food,
Hmmm, no. Humans are quite capable of passing un-needed calories through undigested. Not as
high a percentage as McDonald's-snarfing Americans might like, but...
Or, is this just a means of generating nuclear material for creating nuclear weapons?
Sorry, but that's just silly. The Chinese military
has plenty of Pu and U enrichment facilities for weapons material (just
like the USA does), and they are in secure government owned-and-operated sites (also just like in the USA).
No need for them to futz around with trying to use
power stations for weapons material production.
How would YOU do it, if not by using the name as the first level check?
I would ignore names and ID's. This approach is
stupid. Trivial to fake. I am very angry that my government is wasting my money and time on this utter BS. If you really want air transport security, you:
Massively increase spending on physical search
of people and baggage. 3X-5X would probably be a minimum. This means everybody, including maintenance, food service and airport staff gets
screened, every time, fast.
100% air marshall coverage on commercial passenger flights with max gross over X,000 lbs. (you decide how big you want X to be...).
100% security screen on bizjet flights over X,000 lbs max gross (yes, Carly, Steve, and Larry, that means you).
This is very expensive. If you do it right, security screener and air marshall become well-paid, prestigious, sought-after jobs.
You don't do it (like the current situation), then
you're just pretending you want security and (willfully or not) hoping that the bad guys and the public at large are too fscking stupid to notice.
BTW, this isn't even starting on truck/train/ship/air freight security. If you're gonna be scared about something, be scared about that.
FWIW, I don't think you should be scared about terrorist threats at all; they want you to be scared. (Figuring out who "they" are left as an exercise for the reader. Hint: there's more than one.:-)
Though I'm not sure what it says about his judgement.
I agree totally, that was my first reaction after
reading the details of the flight. One imagines that (in private, over a nice glass of single-malt) Rutan gave Melville a friendly dress-down:
"Now, let me get this straight, Mike. Exactly how many uncommanded 90-degree rolls would it take for you to start thinking it might be time to shut down the motor?"
(A damn fine achievement, nonetheless. That whole team are folks I want on *my* side.)
I am honestly surpised that no one has built a zepplin with the new ultralight solar panels
Don't be. Three 200HP Lycomings are generating
about 447KW of output at full throttle. Allowing
for flights at other than perfectly-sunny
high noon, you'll need more than 1MW of solar
panel capacity!
Oh, and in the morning and
afternoon you won't be able to travel east-west.
Oh, and you can't do night-time sightseeing or
advertising flights at all.
...making their tools run on something more recent than Redhat 7.1.
Mmmmm, pretty much all God's chillun, including Mentor, will
be shipping new releases on RHEL v3 by the end of the year, see
the
EDAC Platform Roadmap.
Gets interesting if you need old legacy app versions
to run, though. Linux does not (yet) deal with that
as effectively as Solaris.
You could call it incompetent, but like a lot of American heavy industry, they tend to be very conservative, very CYA, and very driven by next quarter's balance sheet. Nothing new there.
as well as evil.
Naaah, mostly just greedy (and short-term-profit
driven). Why risk your tail spending billions of dollars on refinery expansion and related infrastructure when you can just let your profits ride up on shortage-driven prices?
Re:It's worse than that
on
Out of Gas
·
· Score: 1
They took a V6 Ford Taurus and made it a hybrid. It averaged 66 MPG.
Reference?
I also do not understand is that how these hybrids cannot beat the fuel economy of a 1989 3 cylinder Geo Metro.
Your 1989 Metro weighs about 1500lb. A 2004 Civic
Hybrid weighs about 2600lb. That's why.
Wasn't there an article some time back which said that the combined computing power of all the shuttle computers system could be handled by a single laptop?
Ummmm, not the part where you get to fail two of the
(redundant) flight computers and still keep flying.:-)
I'm not sure why, but it looks like my 1992 1.5L Civic Hatchback is(was) more fuel efficient (city and highway) than the modern 2004 Civic Hybrid
Oh, you have a VX? Yes, those were/are great for gas milage. However I think you'll find 92 Civics weigh about 2000lb, while the 04 Civics weigh about 2600lb! Drop a 75-gallon drum full of water in the back seat, drive around for a couple weeks, and let us know how much the milage drops.:-)
The scope of the patent is very narrow and covers only a (longish) list of explicit and application-specific extended-push
actions, and only on palm-type devices.
Your Palm power button is safe (not on the list), as are the buttons
on your wristwatch, Mac mouse, car radio and garden tractor (totally different field of application).
None of 'em is prior art if you buy the "limited resource computing device" constraint. Ok, ok,
some people would claim that Macs are the very embodiment of "limited resource computing", but I'm a Mac user, so I don't agree.:-)
Ooops, darn! You're on to us. Yeah, the Hubble
images are all faked by the same top-secret
studios that faked the Apollo moon landings. You
know, you can't fire government employees, so you
have to find something for them to do.
That's just it. Dubya is not spending any
money on his Mars ploy^H^Han, he's leaving the
real spending to some future president. All he's
done is put a drop-dead date on the shuttle program
that is earlier than NASA would have done otherwise.
So now we don't have very many shuttle missions
left and we've got mission rules that say thou shalt
not fly unless you've got a bailout site (ISS) or
a repair kit (costs money to develop). With that
constraint set, abandoning Hubble is a reasonable
response.
Hint: Based on his actions, Dubya doesn't give
a rat's a** about science, and doesn't understand
why anybody else does.
What does exchange offer that other MTAs, such as sendmail or postfix, don't?
You would never, ever justify Exchange as a pure-play MTA. The data store was designed by Satan on crack, it's expensive, slow, painful and slow to admin, its SMTP does not play nicely with neighbors, and (post 5.5) it won't even think about talking to you unless you give it Active Directory.
Think you're cool 'cuz you got multiple ADCs? Wrong, bucko. Exchange will not function unless it can talk to the (single-point-of-failure) operations master. I know way more than I want to about seizing operations master roles.
No, you justify Exchange based on all the "groupware" functions, or because your boss ordered you to buy it because "all the other CEOs have their snazzy little Blackberry/Exchange interface.":-)
Using calendars and tasks and notes does not make the MTA suck any less, of course.
Nah. The
Pacific DC Intertie runs between northern Oregon and Los Angeles, carrying about a 1.4GW load at 800K VDC. It was built to essentially carry fission-plant power north and hydro power south depending on the season, and has worked very well at that since 1970 or something.
It would be capable of up to 3GW at 1M VDC if the rectifiers at both ends are upgraded from mercury-arc tubes to solid state resistors. That
doesn't appear likely to happen, emphasis will go
towards additional links, which makes sense. It is a lot harder to find intertie information on Federal web sites than it was a couple years ago, for all the obvious reasons, I guess.
So long-distance transmission has been solved for over 30 years. The fundamental problem with PV and wind (for more-than-secondary use) is peak capacity; it's gonna take take a big fscking flywheel to store enough energy to handle windless/cloudy days.
Slashdot Mirror
Google for something like "stubby legs bottom dwelling" to see plenty of examples of water dwelling critters with leg-like appendages. It's a very common adaptation, apparently useful both for locomotion and for hanging on tight, both excellent capabilities to have when you're living in shallow/moving water.
But for something more like extreme like going from water to land, I just don't get how the intermediate organisms are more successful
Water's-edge habitats (sorry, I'm not a biologist, I don't know the correct word) are subject to both seasonal variation and long-term climatic variation. Lots of critters have body parts and behavior that help them survive such variation. Walking Catfish, for example. Now, what if you're such a beast out on a stroll to the neighboring pond-that-hasn't-dried-up-yet, and you happen upon something good to eat? You just might survive when your non-strolling brethren perish.
I must have missed the part where we've already flown successful autonomous rendevous/docking flights...
I agree, except that Hubble is not likely to survive long enough to fund/design/build a robotic repair mission (not to mention the practice robotic missions that would precede the actual repair if the thing is done properly).
The astronauts all know they've got a 1-in-50 chance of having a bad day on any given mission, and that the ISS strategy doesn't improve those odds all that much. We're overdue for a catastrophic main engine failure, for example.
A Hubble repair mission is about the best use of a shuttle mission that I can think of.
No and yes.
Little Boy (the Hiroshima bomb) was a U235 gun bomb, simple, rugged and dead-nuts reliable. That's why it was used first; there was really no way for it not to work. However, it also consumed very nearly the entire world's supply (at the time) of U235. There was only one.
Fat Man (the Nagasaki bomb, and approximately the Trinity bomb) was the sort of complex plutonium bomb you're thinking about.
From a terrorism POV, you're worried about somebody either getting a fully functional military bomb (from the FSU or whereever), or a sufficient quantity of 20% enriched U235. If Tim McVeigh had two big chunks of the latter, he could definitely have made a nice, crappy, effective U235 gun bomb, it's really that level of technology.
If Gore had won in Florida, it would have been because all the unambiguous votes in Florida were counted. That never happened.
(And Gore's team never fought for that, not that it would have made any difference if they had; the Supreme court disallowed anything resembling a full count.)
The Orlando Sentinel (not exactly a bunch of radical lefties) was among a group of news organizations that did real substantive work on what the results of a full vote count would be; for example, here and here. You do the math.
Ancient history now, I suppose, but those that do not remember history... :-)
Yes, Tour de France riders run at this sort of level.
If your stomach/intestine didn't absorb all the calories in your food,
Hmmm, no. Humans are quite capable of passing un-needed calories through undigested. Not as high a percentage as McDonald's-snarfing Americans might like, but...
Sorry, but that's just silly. The Chinese military has plenty of Pu and U enrichment facilities for weapons material (just like the USA does), and they are in secure government owned-and-operated sites (also just like in the USA).
No need for them to futz around with trying to use power stations for weapons material production.
I would ignore names and ID's. This approach is stupid. Trivial to fake. I am very angry that my government is wasting my money and time on this utter BS. If you really want air transport security, you:
Massively increase spending on physical search of people and baggage. 3X-5X would probably be a minimum. This means everybody, including maintenance, food service and airport staff gets screened, every time, fast.
100% air marshall coverage on commercial passenger flights with max gross over X,000 lbs. (you decide how big you want X to be...).
100% security screen on bizjet flights over X,000 lbs max gross (yes, Carly, Steve, and Larry, that means you).
This is very expensive. If you do it right, security screener and air marshall become well-paid, prestigious, sought-after jobs.
You don't do it (like the current situation), then you're just pretending you want security and (willfully or not) hoping that the bad guys and the public at large are too fscking stupid to notice.
BTW, this isn't even starting on truck/train/ship/air freight security. If you're gonna be scared about something, be scared about that.
FWIW, I don't think you should be scared about terrorist threats at all; they want you to be scared. (Figuring out who "they" are left as an exercise for the reader. Hint: there's more than one. :-)
I agree totally, that was my first reaction after reading the details of the flight. One imagines that (in private, over a nice glass of single-malt) Rutan gave Melville a friendly dress-down:
"Now, let me get this straight, Mike. Exactly how many uncommanded 90-degree rolls would it take for you to start thinking it might be time to shut down the motor?"
(A damn fine achievement, nonetheless. That whole team are folks I want on *my* side.)
Don't be. Three 200HP Lycomings are generating about 447KW of output at full throttle. Allowing for flights at other than perfectly-sunny high noon, you'll need more than 1MW of solar panel capacity!
Oh, and in the morning and afternoon you won't be able to travel east-west.
Oh, and you can't do night-time sightseeing or advertising flights at all.
Next time, instead of looking at the website, try READING IT!
and they aren't filled with hydrogen.
Smart marketing, but absolutely nothing to do with it being a zeppelin or not.
Mmmmm, pretty much all God's chillun, including Mentor, will be shipping new releases on RHEL v3 by the end of the year, see the EDAC Platform Roadmap.
Gets interesting if you need old legacy app versions to run, though. Linux does not (yet) deal with that as effectively as Solaris.
Well, he's president of ADTI. It appears that he writes to please ADTI's contributors. No news here.
Sigh. Pretty fscking elaborate "hoax"
You could call it incompetent, but like a lot of American heavy industry, they tend to be very conservative, very CYA, and very driven by next quarter's balance sheet. Nothing new there.
as well as evil.
Naaah, mostly just greedy (and short-term-profit driven). Why risk your tail spending billions of dollars on refinery expansion and related infrastructure when you can just let your profits ride up on shortage-driven prices?
Reference?
I also do not understand is that how these hybrids cannot beat the fuel economy of a 1989 3 cylinder Geo Metro.
Your 1989 Metro weighs about 1500lb. A 2004 Civic Hybrid weighs about 2600lb. That's why.
Ummmm, not the part where you get to fail two of the (redundant) flight computers and still keep flying. :-)
I'm not sure why, but it looks like my 1992 1.5L Civic Hatchback is(was) more fuel efficient (city and highway) than the modern 2004 Civic Hybrid
Oh, you have a VX? Yes, those were/are great for gas milage. However I think you'll find 92 Civics weigh about 2000lb, while the 04 Civics weigh about 2600lb! Drop a 75-gallon drum full of water in the back seat, drive around for a couple weeks, and let us know how much the milage drops. :-)
but what kind of processors are they? I doubt that they are x86
Hrnk? Of course they're x86. Speed and cost-efficiency, m'lad.
The scope of the patent is very narrow and covers only a (longish) list of explicit and application-specific extended-push actions, and only on palm-type devices.
Your Palm power button is safe (not on the list), as are the buttons on your wristwatch, Mac mouse, car radio and garden tractor (totally different field of application).
None of 'em is prior art if you buy the "limited resource computing device" constraint. Ok, ok, some people would claim that Macs are the very embodiment of "limited resource computing", but I'm a Mac user, so I don't agree. :-)
Ooops, darn! You're on to us. Yeah, the Hubble images are all faked by the same top-secret studios that faked the Apollo moon landings. You know, you can't fire government employees, so you have to find something for them to do.
Sheesh.
That's just it. Dubya is not spending any money on his Mars ploy^H^Han, he's leaving the real spending to some future president. All he's done is put a drop-dead date on the shuttle program that is earlier than NASA would have done otherwise.
So now we don't have very many shuttle missions left and we've got mission rules that say thou shalt not fly unless you've got a bailout site (ISS) or a repair kit (costs money to develop). With that constraint set, abandoning Hubble is a reasonable response.
Hint: Based on his actions, Dubya doesn't give a rat's a** about science, and doesn't understand why anybody else does.
You would never, ever justify Exchange as a pure-play MTA. The data store was designed by Satan on crack, it's expensive, slow, painful and slow to admin, its SMTP does not play nicely with neighbors, and (post 5.5) it won't even think about talking to you unless you give it Active Directory.
Think you're cool 'cuz you got multiple ADCs? Wrong, bucko. Exchange will not function unless it can talk to the (single-point-of-failure) operations master. I know way more than I want to about seizing operations master roles.
No, you justify Exchange based on all the "groupware" functions, or because your boss ordered you to buy it because "all the other CEOs have their snazzy little Blackberry/Exchange interface." :-)
Using calendars and tasks and notes does not make the MTA suck any less, of course.
*Blush*. The "resistors" line was clearly typed utterly unencumbered by the thought process. :-)
Nah. The Pacific DC Intertie runs between northern Oregon and Los Angeles, carrying about a 1.4GW load at 800K VDC. It was built to essentially carry fission-plant power north and hydro power south depending on the season, and has worked very well at that since 1970 or something.
It would be capable of up to 3GW at 1M VDC if the rectifiers at both ends are upgraded from mercury-arc tubes to solid state resistors. That doesn't appear likely to happen, emphasis will go towards additional links, which makes sense. It is a lot harder to find intertie information on Federal web sites than it was a couple years ago, for all the obvious reasons, I guess.
So long-distance transmission has been solved for over 30 years. The fundamental problem with PV and wind (for more-than-secondary use) is peak capacity; it's gonna take take a big fscking flywheel to store enough energy to handle windless/cloudy days.