Vonage's device they send you doesn't adjust the TOS value in the IP packet. I checked with a hub and ethereal. I have the Cisco device, newer customers are getting the Motorola. Don't know about that.
So, it's at the class of service level of everything else. Which doesn't have any packet loss and has low latency. In order to give themselves competitive advantage, Comcast could only trust the TOS and DSCP values in VOIP flows coming from their equipment [...]
QoS labeling on the internet currently can't be trusted - because Microsoft some time back "improved" their network stack by demanding unnecessarily high QoS for their packets.
It's come around to bite them now. Because Microsoft systems cry wolf on QoS, the WAN doesn't trust user-supplied QoS labeling and either ignores or rewrites it. This is why QoS isn't generally deployed in the WAN.
In the enterprise LAN, VoIP applications (at least when using Cisco equipment) works around it thus: The LAN is partitioned into multiple VLANs, with the VLAN containing the VoiP (and other streaming devices) receiving priority over the ones containing workstations.
Also: I hear that the Cisco desk phones with the internet extension jack (for expanding your cube's single network connection by plugging the phone into it and plugging your workstation into the phone) rewrite the QoS on packets they receive from the workstation jack.
There one good thing about the idea to have the FCC regulate VoIP communications, it would be a federal offense for Comcast to reduce the quality of their service or to restrict access.
Or if Comcast downgrades QoS on VoIP and SBC (or "Alternative Internet and Cable TV", or Direcwave, or "Joe's 802.11g ISP and grill") doesn't, switch ISPs. (And complain to the FTC that Comcast didn't deliver their promised internet connection - or start a class-action suit.) See how long Comcast stays in business. B-)
I am sure that Anti-Trust legislation would apply as well.
If they downgraded QoS on Vonage's VoIP streams and left their OWN sip streams running hot, you betcha! Giving different priority to the same service by competing third parties is using market dominance in one product to compete unfairly (and thus illegally) in another.
And just how much stronger could dino muscles have been than modern mammalian muscle? 140% stronger, 170%? That's really stretching it, and it still isn't nearly enough.
When doing comparisons be careful to avoid human muscle. Humans are cursorial hunters (jogging after their prey until it collapses from heat exhaustion.) Most of their muscles are set up to only use a few percent of their fibers at a time - and switch to another batch when the first run out.
That's why hysterical strength is so much greater: Under great stress you CAN use your whole muscle power for a few contractions - like a mother lifting a car off her kid (a rather common event, actually). But it comes at a cost: The bones, pads between them, and muscle attachments are NOT built to the necessary strength for this. Use of hysterical strength normally means some serious, often permanent, injury.
Most other animals (including even our close relatives the chimps) use a much higher fraction of their muscles all the time - or under only moderate provocation - and have the structure to support this use. (That's why they're so dangerous to people who handle them without having armor on and weapons handy.)
Land animals probably can't be much bigger than an elephant.
Not if they're going to be chased around by lion prides, packs of canids, and humans. (The square-cube law also applys to dumping heat.) You can build a workable animal MUCH bigger than an elephant. But now that there are warmbloods specializing in running things to collapse and eating them you can't keep a population of things that large viable in the wild.
I'll tell you the problem with the scientific power that you're using here. It didn't [re]quire any discipline to attain it. You read what others have done and you took the next step. You didn't earn the knowledge for yourself so therefore you don't take any responsibility for it. You stood on the shoulders of geniuses to accomplish something as fast as you could and before you even knew it you had it.
So you only "earn" the "right" to make a product if you personally developed every single scientific theory and technological breakthrough necessary to construct it, working from first principles you personally developed?
Reminds me of how "The New Math" created a generation of ilnumerates by (instead of teaching counting and arithmetic skills) requiring them to invent for themselves the entirety of several millenia of number theory behind arithmetic and mathematics - while being distracted by "helpful" information about multiple bases and the like.
You stood on the shoulders of geniuses to accomplish something as fast as you could and before you even knew it you had it.
It was a GIANT who characterized his own scientific breakthroughs as being able to see farther than others because he stood on the shoulders of (previous) giants.
Following the Ian Malcom character's advice leads to abandoning, not just genetic engineering, but all of science, history, engineering, industrial society, archetecture, farming, hut-building, and even stone knife making. Humanity would be reduced, not just to the level of hunter-gatherers, but to the level of purely instinct-driven animals (below primates, cats, birds, and even some reptiles).
= = = =
None of which in any way detracts from your point, which was dead on. B-)
Another wild hypothesis without a shred of verifyable evidence.
I couldn't read it THIS time (because the server is slashdotted). But I did read it - or another describing the same theory - when it first became newsworthy some years ago.
There's plenty of evidence for it.
First off, the prediction comes straight out of physical modeling of what happens when a big asteroid hits:
- A bunch of rocks are kicked every which way.
- If the asteroid is big enough a LOT of them go into space.
- A fraction of them have enough energy to get above the atmosphere but not achieve escape velocity.
Once you realize those three things, it's straightforward for a physicist to calculate, for various size impacts on various sites (land, shallow ocean, deep ocean), how MUCH mass goes up, how MUCH of it comes back down, WHERE it comes down, HOW FAST it comes down, and what the results are.
So they calculated that. And came to the conclusion that for impacts of a certain range of sizes the result would be several hours of a rain of sand, all over the Earth, at speeds of up to several miles per second (plus rains of rocks of varying density at different distances from the crater and its antipode). The sky becomes essentially solid meteor trails for hours.
And those are HOT! Hot enough to dry out most of the plants and set them afire. Hot enough to kill any animal life on the surface that can't get underground or under water right away and then stay there for hours.
So if the sky turned into a broiler oven over the whole Earth for several hours all at once, what does this predict? One hemisphere is day and the burrowing nocturnals survive, the other is night and the burrowing diurnals survive. (And in particular regions it got REALLY hot, or REALLY shocked by the primary impact or the secondary rain of rocks, and NOTHING survived).
So they looked at the fossil record and that's what they found. Prediction confirmed - very good evidence for the model. Further, they could now tell WHAT TIME OF DAY the impact occurred and roughly where.
Then they looked in the area where this model predicted the impact should have been and FOUND A CRATER of the correct size (along with plenty of other evidence that this PARTICULAR crater's impact coincided with the extinction event).
Looks solid to me. Unless something new comes up I consider the puzzle of the extinction events solved.
The only question I have is: Why is this news NOW?
One small correction. I think you mean "GSM has lower voice quality than IS-136."
IIRC, They're both TDMA systems.
I believe that's correct.
However, in common usage when speaking about cellphone systems, "TDMA" refers to the specific earlier non-GSM system only, rather than to the class of all TDMA technologies, while GSM is referred to by its own name regardless of whether its underlying technology is a member of the class of TDMA systems.
The system called TDMA is the first deployed member of the class of all TDMA systems, while later systems get their own names. When there was only one, the generic was adequate - now that there are more you need additional names.
I'm reminded of "IBM Machines" - back when mainframes were pretty close to all the commercial general-purpose computers there were and IBM made essentially all of them.
If you send the same input to three different IP addresses (extra-paranoid: use three different top-level IP blocks) and get the same result back, you can be reasonably certain that the result is valid.
Actually, just double. First use "Comparison Mode". If the two come back different, resolve it by switching to "voting mode", doing a third frame at a third site and seeing which it agrees with. (If all three disagree you've got a systematic problem and you need to debug the whole project.)
If there are -any- discrepancies in the images, assume that one (or more) was improperly rendered, discard all three, and try again with three new addresses.
A disagreement proves that at least one of your sites had a problem. But (unless there's some non-randomness to your selection of the three sites) the fact that ONE of your first set had a problem does NOT mean that the OTHER sites in your first set are any more likely to have misrendered than the new sites. So there's no reason to throw away the results from your first set. Just use the additional site(s) to select which one of your first set was wrong.
If a significant fraction of your sites are compromised to make identical misrenderings, you still don't want to throw away your original set. Keeping them all and going to 5, 7, 9, etc gets you closer to the likelyhood of the right answer, while discarding them and repeating a 3 site run with new sites gives you a greater probability of accepting the wrong answer.
= = = =
But all redundant systems fail if you have a systematic problem that may affect more than half of your potential samples. For instance: A virus infection that causes a systematic corruption of the rendering process (i.e. changing the texture map so the pants are transparent or carry an image of genitilia). If more than half render wrong than right, more redundancy makes you accept more wrong frames.
Somehow I'm thinking that the proposal John Kerry made in 1971 to raise gas taxes doesn't apply to 2004, it being 33 years later and all.
I haven't yet heard him repudiate the position and give logic for his change of heart. Has he actually changed his mind? Or has he just fiugred out that it's best to shut up about tax hikes during the campaign?
Tell you what: If he gets elected and gas taxes go up, I get an "I told you so!" point, and if he gets elected and they don't, you get one. Fair?
Not that this stops the Bush people from using it against him in those ridiculous commercials.
Why shouldn't they? The Democrats slam Republican candidates with reports of their Vietnam-era statements and college misadventures all the time. Sauce for the goose.
No, the only safety concern that I have with Hydrogen is that it tends to escape from a confined space much more quickly than does Helium.
It also burns with an invisible (ultraviolet) flame - and a leak is essentially ALWAYS lit. (NASA used to find them by having a worker walk slowly forward holding a big piece of cardboard edge-on in front of him, stopping when it caught fire. B-) )
In fact, vegetable oils can be run straight in mixed fuel vehicle which starts on ordinary fuel, and then cuts over to vegetable oil.
My wife-to-be once rescued her dad when he ran his Diesel Rabbit's tank down to where the engine was sputtering while out in the boonies, far from any filling station with a diesel pump.
She fed it several quarts of veggie oil from the local food store, cut with a pint of tranny fluid to keep the injectors from waxing up. Worked fine.
Not recommended for long-term use. But it will get you home in a pinch.
Dick Cheney wanted to raise taxes by more, and more recently you partisan fucking moron.
It's easy to recognize liberals. They're the ones with no sense of humor. B-)
But I suppose that people who make political points by systematically attacking their opposition with slanders disguised as jokes will interpret jokes about their own guys as vicious attacks.
Possibly. You'd have to build a structure to hold your plumbing/tankage up rather than letting 'em sit on the ground, and it would have to be strong enough to withstand weather and the occasional car crashing into a support.
Also: It would be built by some politician's nephew. B-)
So we might find, after we spend the money to become energy-independent, that we have to spend even MORE on defense.
Not if this dries up the bulk of terrorists' funding for food, shelter, clothing, training, weaponry, transportation, propaganda, research, etc.
Osama was a billionaire (thanks to his inheritance) and increased it (thanks to his construction business) before he went to war - first against the Russians, later against the US. He is beileved to still have much of it - and to have boosted it significantly by shorting insurance companies just before 9/11. (Terrorism for fun and profit!)
There are plenty of other major political figures with big bucks - only some of whom even got it as a result of what we've ALREADY paid for oil. (Arafat, for instance, is filthy rich on money he skimmed from charitable aid and resistance-movement contributions to the Palestinians.) And those bucks are invested and growing.
They do NOT suddenly go broke if we stop buying oil. But they have one less reason to hold off on blasting us.
Some WMDs are cheap and easy. Nerve agents, for instance, are available inexpensively by the ton as insecticide. Biologicals can be fermented in continent-depopulating quantity (with EXTREME care, of course) in less space than it takes to make a keg of home-brew beer, and for not much more investment. And we saw several landmark buildings damaged or destroyed and over three thousand people killed by a handfull of dedicated "warriors" armed only with plane tickets, boxcutters (which are essentially razor-blades-on-a-stick), and consumer-grade GPS receivers.
So I don't think cutting off middle-eastern oil purchases will leave the terrorists too poor to take further shots at the USA.
Crappy reception at home. AT&T converting sit
on
Where's Your 'D-Spot?'
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Anyway, I can't use my cell phone in my own house, which rules out using it as a land line replacement. I can barely get decent reception in my back yard.
I now have a similar problem in the "East Bay" of the SF area.
My house has aluminum foil on the vapor barrier of the insulation, so I expected poor reception when I first got my phone. But it worked fine at that time. (Proababy due to the large windows.)
But lately my reception all over the east bay has been getting rotten, and it has been virtually impossible to get a connection at home.
The phones aren't flaking out. (I've enabled the field test mode in both mine and my wife's. The signal strength meter still indicates about the same strength it used to on the road, and the two phones agree.)
But I've recently found out that AT&T wireless is converting many of its 800ish MHz TDMA cell cites to GSM. (My phones are TDMA.) With the reduced number of TDMA channels available I now have some major dead spots - at home, at work, near the 880/237 interchange, etc.
Even when I DO see good signal strength, making a call will often make the signal disappear. I think what is happening is the phone is reporting that it's in communication with the cell on the control channel - but when all the signal channels are in use so you can't get a new one, the phone reports it as "service unavailable" as if it couldn't reach the cell.
Unfortunately, I have already purchased a pots-adapter cradle for the phone model in question, to use the phone for service in my vacation home, and this wouldn't work with a newer phone. GSM has lower voice quality than TDMA. I use the phone for travel, and TDMA+AMPS coverage is still far broader than GSM+TDMA, and there are few (one?) GSM+TDMA+AMPS phone models available. And if I switched I'd either have to buy the phone or lock into the service for two more years.
So I am in no hurry to switch to GSM. And if I do (and if Verizon has added coverage at my vacation home location, which wasn't available when I first got a cell phone) I'll want to switch carriers as well.
Nobody seems to have realized that we have long passed the point where it is much more cost-effective to substitute fossil fuel consumption with something else than it is to defend our alleged interests in Persian Gulf oil with military might.
You're making a big assumption: That if the US was no longer buying (and defending the people selling) middle eastern oil, the terrorist would stop trying to kill us.
If, for instance, some of them are trying to kill us for ideological reasons unconnected with our oil consumption, THOSE terrorists will continue to try. And if the economy of the middle east crashes because we stop buying their oil, a lot of starving people over there will blame us for THAT. Such people will be easy recruits.
It doesn't take many terrorists to cause a problem. (No more than a couple hundred IRA (and predeceessor) "soldiers" at any given time have kept Britain hopping for a LONG time.)
So we might find, after we spend the money to become energy-independent, that we have to spend even MORE on defense.
In fact, algae might be a way to re-sequester some of that carbon, by growing large masses of algae then simply burying it deep, somewhere where it will not decay and release CO2 again.
In fact this happens in the oceans already. Algae die and sink. Some of the carbon they take down forms sediment and just sits (until it gets indorporated into rocks) Some takes millenia to be carried by the bottom currents to an upwelling.
A recent theory of ice ages has them partly resulting from a positive feedback loop:
- Ice sheets sequester water and dry the land.
- More desert area means more nutrient-containing dust carried into the air.
- Nutrient-containing dust settles into the ocean, encouraging algae production.
- Algae pull CO2 out of the air, reducing the greenhouse effect.
The critical nutrient was predicted to be iron. An experiment was recently done where traces of iron were seeded into some large and very barren sections of the Pacific, which experienced massive algae blooms.
This implies that if we ever actually have a problem with global warming we can turn it around by seeding the oceans - especially the south Pacific. This might even be easily and cheaply done just by adding iron compounds to the fuel of cargo ships going through appropriate regions. Or a couple C47s converted to oceanic crop-dusters could take care of it.
The main problem will be to avoid overdoing it and starting another ice age.
Another good place to put it might be OVER the freeways in sunny areas as a sunshade. That area is lost to vehicles already, so why not ALSO collect the energy to fuel some of them without using up even desert land?
Use transparent pipes and let the green light through. Like a plesant drive through a forest rather than in direct sunlight.
In fact, even the designs of some of these algae-plants are small scale - a few tubes of algae sitting on top of the van/truck collecting energy, these being fed into a centrifuge at the back to seperate the water, then through some filters, and into the engine.
Nice idea but TOO small a scale - if you want to run the truck more than a few minutes per day.
Solar input at noon-intensity is on the order of a kilowatt per square yard. Solar input is equivalent to about five hours noon-intensity per day (varying by season, latitude, and weather). A horsepower is almost exactly 3/4 kilowatt. So if your truck is about 8 square yards and COVERED with algae pipes the ALGAE only gets about 8*5*4/3 = 53 1/3 HP hours per day.
Then derate that for the efficiency of the algae and the extraction plant. Let's be 'way generous and say 20 HP hr of fuel with GOOD algae. Then you're using it to run an internal combustion engine, so divide by at least 4. Now you've got 5 horsepower for an hour to run your truck, which hast to tote a LOT of algae water and extraction plant before you even start loading cargo.
Solar powered vehicles are possible IF they're ultra-lights, OR if they use a LOT more collecting surface than the vehicles themselves to make fuel.
That's why horses eat grass rather than having chlorophyl in their skin. B-)
But if we put a pond there, isn't it no longer a desert?
Yep. B-)
Am I to believe that folks have wanted those dry arid conditions to ensure their silicon riches are preserved, and thats why nobody thought to build a pond there?
Nobody put a pond there before because it cost a LOT to come up with water in a place where there was little, and exposing what litte there is makes it evaporate and blow away. Desert is 'WAY fertile (the trace elements aren't washed out).
But plants need to dump most of their water into the air to pump their nutrients around. Then they make most of that energy into their structure, only a small fraction into their fruit, seeds, stored starch, sugar, or what-have-you harvestable material.
And they need serious manipulation and babying: Maybe clean the soil of toxins over years before starting. Dig it up every year, add fertilizer, bury the seeds, kill the weeds, add LOTS of water (if it isn't provided by rain), kill MORE weeds, kill bugs, tear up the plants, separate the fruit.
It's much cheaper to do it where the soil is already good, roads and industry are handy, water is available (and keeps raining back to be reused several times if you DO import it, as in California's central valley) than to haul water a couple miles UP and a couple hundred horizontally to start from scratch in a desert. (The trace elements are a LOT easier to haul to good soil and water.)
Net result is that using crops like corn for fuel is just about a break-even proposition.
But production of algae only needs tanks, air, water, trace nutrients, and lots of sunlight. No plows and tractors - you pump the material through a small harvesting plant rather than working a field - much cheaper. The land itself is only a support for the tanks, so you don't need to pull expensive quality dirt out of other production.
Desert has lots of cheap flat land and sunlight. Put your tanks on it. Add your air by pumping it through (powering your pumps with the absorbed solar heat) - and recapture the lost water for reuse. Your crop is 50% oil - made from water, atmospheric CO2, and solar energy. The other half is the trace nutrients, which you also recycle. Now you've converted solar energy efficiently to oil with essentially no fossil fuel input and litte water loss (mostly the water that supplied the hydrogen for the oil).
Yes, it makes VERY good sense. Low initial capital (cheap land, some machinery, lots of clear pipes or transparent tanks). A SMALL amount of water (compared to growing plants) in, along with a little bit of miscelaneous consumables (filter paper, nutrient replacement for making up recycling inefficiencies), and LOTS of sunlight. Oil out. Add a much smaller tank of some OTHER bug to fix nitrogen if you really want to cut your inputs.
Note that there's a third class: c.) People who will obey the law even at some cost when it is convenient, but will break it to get what they want if a convenient legal way to obtain it is not offered.
I think most of the people who downloaded music when online distribution was not available but now buy it online fall into this category.
- Just over 1/2 mile up. - Latitude 38 (not ideal but still good) - Handy highways. - Town and roads to the West, lots of nice empty desert to ditch in to the east (which is the direction you're headed if you want the earth's help getting to orbit).
Slashdot Mirror
Microwave.
More like toaster-oven.
Vonage's device they send you doesn't adjust the TOS value in the IP packet. I checked with a hub and ethereal. I have the Cisco device, newer customers are getting the Motorola. Don't know about that.
So, it's at the class of service level of everything else. Which doesn't have any packet loss and has low latency. In order to give themselves competitive advantage, Comcast could only trust the TOS and DSCP values in VOIP flows coming from their equipment [...]
QoS labeling on the internet currently can't be trusted - because Microsoft some time back "improved" their network stack by demanding unnecessarily high QoS for their packets.
It's come around to bite them now. Because Microsoft systems cry wolf on QoS, the WAN doesn't trust user-supplied QoS labeling and either ignores or rewrites it. This is why QoS isn't generally deployed in the WAN.
In the enterprise LAN, VoIP applications (at least when using Cisco equipment) works around it thus: The LAN is partitioned into multiple VLANs, with the VLAN containing the VoiP (and other streaming devices) receiving priority over the ones containing workstations.
Also: I hear that the Cisco desk phones with the internet extension jack (for expanding your cube's single network connection by plugging the phone into it and plugging your workstation into the phone) rewrite the QoS on packets they receive from the workstation jack.
There one good thing about the idea to have the FCC regulate VoIP communications, it would be a federal offense for Comcast to reduce the quality of their service or to restrict access.
Or if Comcast downgrades QoS on VoIP and SBC (or "Alternative Internet and Cable TV", or Direcwave, or "Joe's 802.11g ISP and grill") doesn't, switch ISPs. (And complain to the FTC that Comcast didn't deliver their promised internet connection - or start a class-action suit.) See how long Comcast stays in business. B-)
I am sure that Anti-Trust legislation would apply as well.
If they downgraded QoS on Vonage's VoIP streams and left their OWN sip streams running hot, you betcha! Giving different priority to the same service by competing third parties is using market dominance in one product to compete unfairly (and thus illegally) in another.
And just how much stronger could dino muscles have been than modern mammalian muscle? 140% stronger, 170%? That's really stretching it, and it still isn't nearly enough.
When doing comparisons be careful to avoid human muscle. Humans are cursorial hunters (jogging after their prey until it collapses from heat exhaustion.) Most of their muscles are set up to only use a few percent of their fibers at a time - and switch to another batch when the first run out.
That's why hysterical strength is so much greater: Under great stress you CAN use your whole muscle power for a few contractions - like a mother lifting a car off her kid (a rather common event, actually). But it comes at a cost: The bones, pads between them, and muscle attachments are NOT built to the necessary strength for this. Use of hysterical strength normally means some serious, often permanent, injury.
Most other animals (including even our close relatives the chimps) use a much higher fraction of their muscles all the time - or under only moderate provocation - and have the structure to support this use. (That's why they're so dangerous to people who handle them without having armor on and weapons handy.)
Land animals probably can't be much bigger than an elephant.
Not if they're going to be chased around by lion prides, packs of canids, and humans. (The square-cube law also applys to dumping heat.) You can build a workable animal MUCH bigger than an elephant. But now that there are warmbloods specializing in running things to collapse and eating them you can't keep a population of things that large viable in the wild.
I'll tell you the problem with the scientific power that you're using here. It didn't [re]quire any discipline to attain it. You read what others have done and you took the next step. You didn't earn the knowledge for yourself so therefore you don't take any responsibility for it. You stood on the shoulders of geniuses to accomplish something as fast as you could and before you even knew it you had it.
So you only "earn" the "right" to make a product if you personally developed every single scientific theory and technological breakthrough necessary to construct it, working from first principles you personally developed?
Reminds me of how "The New Math" created a generation of ilnumerates by (instead of teaching counting and arithmetic skills) requiring them to invent for themselves the entirety of several millenia of number theory behind arithmetic and mathematics - while being distracted by "helpful" information about multiple bases and the like.
You stood on the shoulders of geniuses to accomplish something as fast as you could and before you even knew it you had it.
It was a GIANT who characterized his own scientific breakthroughs as being able to see farther than others because he stood on the shoulders of (previous) giants.
Following the Ian Malcom character's advice leads to abandoning, not just genetic engineering, but all of science, history, engineering, industrial society, archetecture, farming, hut-building, and even stone knife making. Humanity would be reduced, not just to the level of hunter-gatherers, but to the level of purely instinct-driven animals (below primates, cats, birds, and even some reptiles).
= = = =
None of which in any way detracts from your point, which was dead on. B-)
I read the article
Another wild hypothesis without a shred of verifyable evidence.
I couldn't read it THIS time (because the server is slashdotted). But I did read it - or another describing the same theory - when it first became newsworthy some years ago.
There's plenty of evidence for it.
First off, the prediction comes straight out of physical modeling of what happens when a big asteroid hits:
- A bunch of rocks are kicked every which way.
- If the asteroid is big enough a LOT of them go into space.
- A fraction of them have enough energy to get above the atmosphere but not achieve escape velocity.
Once you realize those three things, it's straightforward for a physicist to calculate, for various size impacts on various sites (land, shallow ocean, deep ocean), how MUCH mass goes up, how MUCH of it comes back down, WHERE it comes down, HOW FAST it comes down, and what the results are.
So they calculated that. And came to the conclusion that for impacts of a certain range of sizes the result would be several hours of a rain of sand, all over the Earth, at speeds of up to several miles per second (plus rains of rocks of varying density at different distances from the crater and its antipode). The sky becomes essentially solid meteor trails for hours.
And those are HOT! Hot enough to dry out most of the plants and set them afire. Hot enough to kill any animal life on the surface that can't get underground or under water right away and then stay there for hours.
So if the sky turned into a broiler oven over the whole Earth for several hours all at once, what does this predict? One hemisphere is day and the burrowing nocturnals survive, the other is night and the burrowing diurnals survive. (And in particular regions it got REALLY hot, or REALLY shocked by the primary impact or the secondary rain of rocks, and NOTHING survived).
So they looked at the fossil record and that's what they found. Prediction confirmed - very good evidence for the model. Further, they could now tell WHAT TIME OF DAY the impact occurred and roughly where.
Then they looked in the area where this model predicted the impact should have been and FOUND A CRATER of the correct size (along with plenty of other evidence that this PARTICULAR crater's impact coincided with the extinction event).
Looks solid to me. Unless something new comes up I consider the puzzle of the extinction events solved.
The only question I have is: Why is this news NOW?
GSM has lower voice quality than TDMA[sic]
One small correction. I think you mean "GSM has lower voice quality than IS-136."
IIRC, They're both TDMA systems.
I believe that's correct.
However, in common usage when speaking about cellphone systems, "TDMA" refers to the specific earlier non-GSM system only, rather than to the class of all TDMA technologies, while GSM is referred to by its own name regardless of whether its underlying technology is a member of the class of TDMA systems.
The system called TDMA is the first deployed member of the class of all TDMA systems, while later systems get their own names. When there was only one, the generic was adequate - now that there are more you need additional names.
I'm reminded of "IBM Machines" - back when mainframes were pretty close to all the commercial general-purpose computers there were and IBM made essentially all of them.
Or of the singer formerly known as "Prince". B-)
If you send the same input to three different IP addresses (extra-paranoid: use three different top-level IP blocks) and get the same result back, you can be reasonably certain that the result is valid.
Actually, just double. First use "Comparison Mode". If the two come back different, resolve it by switching to "voting mode", doing a third frame at a third site and seeing which it agrees with. (If all three disagree you've got a systematic problem and you need to debug the whole project.)
If there are -any- discrepancies in the images, assume that one (or more) was improperly rendered, discard all three, and try again with three new addresses.
A disagreement proves that at least one of your sites had a problem. But (unless there's some non-randomness to your selection of the three sites) the fact that ONE of your first set had a problem does NOT mean that the OTHER sites in your first set are any more likely to have misrendered than the new sites. So there's no reason to throw away the results from your first set. Just use the additional site(s) to select which one of your first set was wrong.
If a significant fraction of your sites are compromised to make identical misrenderings, you still don't want to throw away your original set. Keeping them all and going to 5, 7, 9, etc gets you closer to the likelyhood of the right answer, while discarding them and repeating a 3 site run with new sites gives you a greater probability of accepting the wrong answer.
= = = =
But all redundant systems fail if you have a systematic problem that may affect more than half of your potential samples. For instance: A virus infection that causes a systematic corruption of the rendering process (i.e. changing the texture map so the pants are transparent or carry an image of genitilia). If more than half render wrong than right, more redundancy makes you accept more wrong frames.
Somehow I'm thinking that the proposal John Kerry made in 1971 to raise gas taxes doesn't apply to 2004, it being 33 years later and all.
I haven't yet heard him repudiate the position and give logic for his change of heart. Has he actually changed his mind? Or has he just fiugred out that it's best to shut up about tax hikes during the campaign?
Tell you what: If he gets elected and gas taxes go up, I get an "I told you so!" point, and if he gets elected and they don't, you get one. Fair?
Not that this stops the Bush people from using it against him in those ridiculous commercials.
Why shouldn't they? The Democrats slam Republican candidates with reports of their Vietnam-era statements and college misadventures all the time. Sauce for the goose.
No, the only safety concern that I have with Hydrogen is that it tends to escape from a confined space much more quickly than does Helium.
It also burns with an invisible (ultraviolet) flame - and a leak is essentially ALWAYS lit. (NASA used to find them by having a worker walk slowly forward holding a big piece of cardboard edge-on in front of him, stopping when it caught fire. B-) )
In fact, vegetable oils can be run straight in mixed fuel vehicle which starts on ordinary fuel, and then cuts over to vegetable oil.
My wife-to-be once rescued her dad when he ran his Diesel Rabbit's tank down to where the engine was sputtering while out in the boonies, far from any filling station with a diesel pump.
She fed it several quarts of veggie oil from the local food store, cut with a pint of tranny fluid to keep the injectors from waxing up. Worked fine.
Not recommended for long-term use. But it will get you home in a pinch.
Dick Cheney wanted to raise taxes by more, and more recently you partisan fucking moron.
It's easy to recognize liberals. They're the ones with no sense of humor. B-)
But I suppose that people who make political points by systematically attacking their opposition with slanders disguised as jokes will interpret jokes about their own guys as vicious attacks.
You mean the one he proposed in 1971?
Yep!
Sounds expensive.
Possibly. You'd have to build a structure to hold your plumbing/tankage up rather than letting 'em sit on the ground, and it would have to be strong enough to withstand weather and the occasional car crashing into a support.
Also: It would be built by some politician's nephew. B-)
So we might find, after we spend the money to become energy-independent, that we have to spend even MORE on defense.
Not if this dries up the bulk of terrorists' funding for food, shelter, clothing, training, weaponry, transportation, propaganda, research, etc.
Osama was a billionaire (thanks to his inheritance) and increased it (thanks to his construction business) before he went to war - first against the Russians, later against the US. He is beileved to still have much of it - and to have boosted it significantly by shorting insurance companies just before 9/11. (Terrorism for fun and profit!)
There are plenty of other major political figures with big bucks - only some of whom even got it as a result of what we've ALREADY paid for oil. (Arafat, for instance, is filthy rich on money he skimmed from charitable aid and resistance-movement contributions to the Palestinians.) And those bucks are invested and growing.
They do NOT suddenly go broke if we stop buying oil. But they have one less reason to hold off on blasting us.
Some WMDs are cheap and easy. Nerve agents, for instance, are available inexpensively by the ton as insecticide. Biologicals can be fermented in continent-depopulating quantity (with EXTREME care, of course) in less space than it takes to make a keg of home-brew beer, and for not much more investment. And we saw several landmark buildings damaged or destroyed and over three thousand people killed by a handfull of dedicated "warriors" armed only with plane tickets, boxcutters (which are essentially razor-blades-on-a-stick), and consumer-grade GPS receivers.
So I don't think cutting off middle-eastern oil purchases will leave the terrorists too poor to take further shots at the USA.
Anyway, I can't use my cell phone in my own house, which rules out using it as a land line replacement. I can barely get decent reception in my back yard.
I now have a similar problem in the "East Bay" of the SF area.
My house has aluminum foil on the vapor barrier of the insulation, so I expected poor reception when I first got my phone. But it worked fine at that time. (Proababy due to the large windows.)
But lately my reception all over the east bay has been getting rotten, and it has been virtually impossible to get a connection at home.
The phones aren't flaking out. (I've enabled the field test mode in both mine and my wife's. The signal strength meter still indicates about the same strength it used to on the road, and the two phones agree.)
But I've recently found out that AT&T wireless is converting many of its 800ish MHz TDMA cell cites to GSM. (My phones are TDMA.) With the reduced number of TDMA channels available I now have some major dead spots - at home, at work, near the 880/237 interchange, etc.
Even when I DO see good signal strength, making a call will often make the signal disappear. I think what is happening is the phone is reporting that it's in communication with the cell on the control channel - but when all the signal channels are in use so you can't get a new one, the phone reports it as "service unavailable" as if it couldn't reach the cell.
Unfortunately, I have already purchased a pots-adapter cradle for the phone model in question, to use the phone for service in my vacation home, and this wouldn't work with a newer phone. GSM has lower voice quality than TDMA. I use the phone for travel, and TDMA+AMPS coverage is still far broader than GSM+TDMA, and there are few (one?) GSM+TDMA+AMPS phone models available. And if I switched I'd either have to buy the phone or lock into the service for two more years.
So I am in no hurry to switch to GSM. And if I do (and if Verizon has added coverage at my vacation home location, which wasn't available when I first got a cell phone) I'll want to switch carriers as well.
Nobody seems to have realized that we have long passed the point where it is much more cost-effective to substitute fossil fuel consumption with something else than it is to defend our alleged interests in Persian Gulf oil with military might.
You're making a big assumption: That if the US was no longer buying (and defending the people selling) middle eastern oil, the terrorist would stop trying to kill us.
If, for instance, some of them are trying to kill us for ideological reasons unconnected with our oil consumption, THOSE terrorists will continue to try. And if the economy of the middle east crashes because we stop buying their oil, a lot of starving people over there will blame us for THAT. Such people will be easy recruits.
It doesn't take many terrorists to cause a problem. (No more than a couple hundred IRA (and predeceessor) "soldiers" at any given time have kept Britain hopping for a LONG time.)
So we might find, after we spend the money to become energy-independent, that we have to spend even MORE on defense.
For what it's worth, part of Kerry's platform is an "alternative energy Apollo Project" to switch 20% of our energy production to renewable resources.
Is that what he was going to fund with his $.50 / gallon hike in the gasoline tax?
In fact, algae might be a way to re-sequester some of that carbon, by growing large masses of algae then simply burying it deep, somewhere where it will not decay and release CO2 again.
In fact this happens in the oceans already. Algae die and sink. Some of the carbon they take down forms sediment and just sits (until it gets indorporated into rocks) Some takes millenia to be carried by the bottom currents to an upwelling.
A recent theory of ice ages has them partly resulting from a positive feedback loop:
- Ice sheets sequester water and dry the land.
- More desert area means more nutrient-containing dust carried into the air.
- Nutrient-containing dust settles into the ocean, encouraging algae production.
- Algae pull CO2 out of the air, reducing the greenhouse effect.
The critical nutrient was predicted to be iron. An experiment was recently done where traces of iron were seeded into some large and very barren sections of the Pacific, which experienced massive algae blooms.
This implies that if we ever actually have a problem with global warming we can turn it around by seeding the oceans - especially the south Pacific. This might even be easily and cheaply done just by adding iron compounds to the fuel of cargo ships going through appropriate regions. Or a couple C47s converted to oceanic crop-dusters could take care of it.
The main problem will be to avoid overdoing it and starting another ice age.
Another good place to put it might be OVER the freeways in sunny areas as a sunshade. That area is lost to vehicles already, so why not ALSO collect the energy to fuel some of them without using up even desert land?
Use transparent pipes and let the green light through. Like a plesant drive through a forest rather than in direct sunlight.
In fact, even the designs of some of these algae-plants are small scale - a few tubes of algae sitting on top of the van/truck collecting energy, these being fed into a centrifuge at the back to seperate the water, then through some filters, and into the engine.
Nice idea but TOO small a scale - if you want to run the truck more than a few minutes per day.
Solar input at noon-intensity is on the order of a kilowatt per square yard. Solar input is equivalent to about five hours noon-intensity per day (varying by season, latitude, and weather). A horsepower is almost exactly 3/4 kilowatt. So if your truck is about 8 square yards and COVERED with algae pipes the ALGAE only gets about 8*5*4/3 = 53 1/3 HP hours per day.
Then derate that for the efficiency of the algae and the extraction plant. Let's be 'way generous and say 20 HP hr of fuel with GOOD algae. Then you're using it to run an internal combustion engine, so divide by at least 4. Now you've got 5 horsepower for an hour to run your truck, which hast to tote a LOT of algae water and extraction plant before you even start loading cargo.
Solar powered vehicles are possible IF they're ultra-lights, OR if they use a LOT more collecting surface than the vehicles themselves to make fuel.
That's why horses eat grass rather than having chlorophyl in their skin. B-)
It will if you put a pond there.
But if we put a pond there, isn't it no longer a desert?
Yep. B-)
Am I to believe that folks have wanted those dry arid conditions to ensure their silicon riches are preserved, and thats why nobody thought to build a pond there?
Nobody put a pond there before because it cost a LOT to come up with water in a place where there was little, and exposing what litte there is makes it evaporate and blow away. Desert is 'WAY fertile (the trace elements aren't washed out).
But plants need to dump most of their water into the air to pump their nutrients around. Then they make most of that energy into their structure, only a small fraction into their fruit, seeds, stored starch, sugar, or what-have-you harvestable material.
And they need serious manipulation and babying: Maybe clean the soil of toxins over years before starting. Dig it up every year, add fertilizer, bury the seeds, kill the weeds, add LOTS of water (if it isn't provided by rain), kill MORE weeds, kill bugs, tear up the plants, separate the fruit.
It's much cheaper to do it where the soil is already good, roads and industry are handy, water is available (and keeps raining back to be reused several times if you DO import it, as in California's central valley) than to haul water a couple miles UP and a couple hundred horizontally to start from scratch in a desert. (The trace elements are a LOT easier to haul to good soil and water.)
Net result is that using crops like corn for fuel is just about a break-even proposition.
But production of algae only needs tanks, air, water, trace nutrients, and lots of sunlight. No plows and tractors - you pump the material through a small harvesting plant rather than working a field - much cheaper. The land itself is only a support for the tanks, so you don't need to pull expensive quality dirt out of other production.
Desert has lots of cheap flat land and sunlight.
Put your tanks on it. Add your air by pumping it through (powering your pumps with the absorbed solar heat) - and recapture the lost water for reuse. Your crop is 50% oil - made from water, atmospheric CO2, and solar energy. The other half is the trace nutrients, which you also recycle. Now you've converted solar energy efficiently to oil with essentially no fossil fuel input and litte water loss (mostly the water that supplied the hydrogen for the oil).
Yes, it makes VERY good sense. Low initial capital (cheap land, some machinery, lots of clear pipes or transparent tanks). A SMALL amount of water (compared to growing plants) in, along with a little bit of miscelaneous consumables (filter paper, nutrient replacement for making up recycling inefficiencies), and LOTS of sunlight. Oil out. Add a much smaller tank of some OTHER bug to fix nitrogen if you really want to cut your inputs.
A desert would be great for this.
If this is true, I expect these guys will be involved in a "tragic fatal accident". *cough* Shell *cough* Imperial.
...
Not if they ARE Shell Imperial.
Or Standard Oil. Or ARCO. Or
Note that there's a third class: c.) People who will obey the law even at some cost when it is convenient, but will break it to get what they want if a convenient legal way to obtain it is not offered.
I think most of the people who downloaded music when online distribution was not available but now buy it online fall into this category.
That's a good location:
- Just over 1/2 mile up.
- Latitude 38 (not ideal but still good)
- Handy highways.
- Town and roads to the West, lots of nice empty desert to ditch in to the east (which is the direction you're headed if you want the earth's help getting to orbit).