What about when you look at places like the US? US Heatwaves, specifically:
"...Although temperatures and humidity levels have been much above average, the number of deaths resulting from this summer's heat has not approached the magnitude of heat waves of the recent past. The 1995 Chicago heat wave resulted in more than 400 deaths in a 9-day period as shown in the adjacent plot. In the disastrous heat wave of 1980, more than 1250 people died across the U.S. as the direct result of extreme conditions, with an estimated 10,000 deaths related to heat stress. Additional information on heat and drought-related deaths and economic impacts during the past 20 years can be found in the Billion-Dollar U.S. Weather Disasters technical report...."
And as for jumping into bed with dictators! Christ, who do you think puts them in power before France or anybody else has a chance to get into bed with them?
Do yourself (and us) a favour by reading about the 1963 coup in Iraq, when the CIA backed Saddam against Abd-al Karim Qasim, the then nationalist leader of Iraq.
"...This ship isn't built for offense. Heck, with a fibre glass hull it's not even built for defence...."
What's not "offensive" or even "defensive" about a glass fibre hull? Or a carbon-fibre reinforced plastic hull, seeing as that's what the ship we're discussing has?
The idea of having armour plate so thick that shells would bounce off (and they did) went out with the Dreadnought class of ships. With the onset of guided missile technology and smart torpedoes, the emphasis has been on survivability, rather than impregnability (which is now unattainable and/or uneconomic).
Naval architects are now designing boats that allow missiles and torps to puncture the hull. In the case of missiles, aluminium soft-spots are used above the waterline to allow the missiles to travel right through the boat, so they detonate late, and cause less damage. Torpedo damage cannot really be countered, but smart use of watertight compartments and magnetic/acoustic decoys can help keep them away from the critical areas of the boat. Torps are in a sense, a bigger threat: if a 1 tonne torpedo warhead detonates a few feet below the keel of a boat, it will break the boat's back come what may, unless the boat is absolutely massive (eg. Nimitz class).
No troll, but I hadn't condidered the deterrent effect of being dragged into court and losing.
At the moment, the PTO can spew patents like it's going out of fashion, and the result is that some other guy gets to go to court to challenge the obviously dubious specimens.
If the situation were switched, so that the PTO stood a chance of being the one in court, it might be better. I still don't think it's a great idea, but right now I'm damned if I can think of a better one.
"That's why I've been saying that the PTO should be sued everytime an invalid patent is found that caused financial loss to a defendant having to prove it invalid."
And who's going to be funding the payouts which will result from such lawsuits?
Well I've got to hand it to you: That's a major factor in the choice of material for military hardware: It's got to look cool. I've heard they're going to start using that sticky film that looks like a carbon-fibre weave on Bradleys and and Abrahms so they look cool and demoralise the enemy - probably put a big Type-R decal on the back so they go faster too.
"...it also has several disadvantages. Carbon fiber tends to be very tempermental to temperature changes, and will crack easily with severe cold/heat..."
Cites? I'm looking at Design Data for Reinforced Plastics, 1994, (Chapman and Hall) and can see no corroborating statement.
"...Also, although carbon fiber is fairly flexable, it's still brittle. It's doesn't crack when impacted, it shatters"
Depends more on the matrix material. If it's an epoxy, the CF composites can exhibit brittle behaviour, if the matrix is PP, PEEK or PES, you get a tougher structure.
Thanks for sharing your knowledge and insights, it's always a pleasure to get it straight from an expert.
Nice place to visit, excellent seafood restaurants, pleasant friendly people, beautiful women (if a little bit scaly).
Eventually, it was the little things that got me down and made me come back home: Not being able to put my base unit under the desk due to the water level, the constant wading, the never-ending drone of UFO's coming in to land at the Pythagorus Intergalaxy space port. I suppose the last is my own fault for renting a crib right under the flightpath, but it seemed cheap at the time.
Happy days, but I'm glad I left when the contract was ended. The boss offered me a permanent position, but if I was to stay I'd have to go through the whole getting-gills-implanted thing and vowing to "forsake dry land forever" at the citizenship ceremony. At the time, with Josh (my brother) having smashed his car up and Dad losing his job, I simply didn't need the extra hassle.
"...legislating away a technical problem is like Congress passing a law which would prohibit a motor vehicle from travelling the speed of light. which makes no sense...."
It's not down to congress, it's down to the states, and they've all got legislation in place to limit the unladen & laden weight of vehicles.
All vehicles travelling at c or near c (>0.01c) will be far too heavy to be allowed on the public roads.
I wouldn't try this on a regular basis: This could be seen as an attempt to defraud a party (the USPS, of their rightful payment) by means of the USPS.
That's a prima-facie case of Mail fraud which is very broad, easy to prove and attracts draconian penalties.
- F77 has no concept of dynamic memory allocation, so if you wished to tie your memory footprint to the problem size, you'd have to jump through these kind of hoops.
Typically you'd call a C function or even a bunch of assembler at startup to grab a big honkin' block of core, then equivalence your main store (an array) to the address of the core. All your dynamic data goes in arrays equivalenced to LOC's within the main store. It's usuall better to keep an eye on block allocation and deallocation programmatically!
"...this dude is a V.C. scammer looking for the next big dig...."
And what's so bad about a dude being a VC SCammer? What's wrong with scammers being scammed for once, eh?
Speaking as one who's been on the wrong end of VC shark's attention, I honestly don't give a flying fuck about them getting turned over once in a while.
My bitterness stems from myself and a friend's meetings with VC's in the late 90's, towards the end of the.com bubble. We had a *product*, a business plan, and a viable exit strategy for capital investors.
All we got out of these meetings was a rule of thumb: If they meet you in the morning, they're semi-serious. If they meet you for lunch or in the afternoon, you're paying for the booze (GBP400 in one instance), and they think you're fools.
Fools? We certainly were...
T&K.
The definitive word on "Pooh pooh"
on
The Wrong Stuff
·
· Score: 1
From Blackadder Goes Forth:
"If there's one thing I've learnt from the army blackadder, it's never ignore a pooh-pooh. I knew a major once, got pooh-poohed, and made the mistake of ignoring the pooh-pooh. He pooh-poohed it! Fatal error! Because the soldier who'd pooh-poohed him had been pooh-pooing lots of other men, who'd pooh-poohed their pooh-poohs. In the end I had to disband the regiment, morale totally destroyed... by pooh-pooh!"
"...Money is tight here now (I work at NASA and am embroiled in the CEV start-up operations) and NASA is terrible at managing a tight-budget program like this would have to be...."
Here's a sneaky bit of inside info: Everyone is crap at managing programs on this sort of scale!
The complexities and pitfalls of multi-million, let alone multi-billion projects leave managers flipping coins or using more sophisticated predictive methods, only to be told "Most likely" (darn, better give the damn thing a longer shake next time).
The only, repeat only way a really big (ie. 10^7 US$+) project will come in on time and on budget will be if the cost and duration are subject to renegotiation between customer and prime contractor at regular intervals - I'm no expert on XP, but this close partnership seems to echo some of XP's tenets.
That's how it is. We are just unable to account for all variables and possiblities without building in truly ludicrous contingencies. Even if the customer would finance these contingencies - and they won't - the immense financial safety net is still a frank confession of our technical inability to plan and organise effectively on these sorts of scales.
How long before LucasArts comes down on them like a ton of wookie shit?
It looks like they've ripped off chracter and vehicle design wholesale, and like it or not kids, the copyright in said designs resides with the guys who thunk it first.
"Shit, Stevie Wonder got writing credits on "Wild Wild West", another unoriginal hiphop cover that most people think was blatantly ripped off"
Well, the only people who could imagine that the "Wild Wild West" theme ripped off Stevie Wonder must be as blind as, well, Stevie Wonder.
His big shit-eating grin (the sort that says "Woo-hoo! more money for old rope!") as he's playing piano in the video doesn't really portray a man who's been ripped off.
"...Americans also say that all that time. Read the 10th Amendment to our Constitution. If you fail to understand where we are coming from then you fail to understand a basic fact about Americans. It'll be a cold day in hell before we surrender our sovereignty to the UN, World Court or any other institution that allows the likes of Libya and Syria to chair Human Rights commissions..."
I really wouldn't be beating the human rights drum w.r.t the US very loudly, especially right now.
- Let's face it: By the time this is all done and dusted and linux is demonstrated to be unencumbered (or not), we'll all be favouring soft foods, sitting in the rocking shair on the porch and dishing out Werther's to the grandkids.
T&K.
Re:Feh, shoot them when they come through the door
on
Kazaa Offices Raided
·
· Score: 1
"... Oop, didn't aussie's already give up their guns?..."
And what happens when a freedom lovin' citizen of the good ol' U S of A greets The Man with a gun in his paw?
Slashdot Mirror
What about when you look at places like the US? US Heatwaves, specifically:
And as for jumping into bed with dictators! Christ, who do you think puts them in power before France or anybody else has a chance to get into bed with them?
Do yourself (and us) a favour by reading about the 1963 coup in Iraq, when the CIA backed Saddam against Abd-al Karim Qasim, the then nationalist leader of Iraq.
Your ignorance shames you.
T&K.
"...This ship isn't built for offense. Heck, with a fibre glass hull it's not even built for defence.
What's not "offensive" or even "defensive" about a glass fibre hull? Or a carbon-fibre reinforced plastic hull, seeing as that's what the ship we're discussing has?
The idea of having armour plate so thick that shells would bounce off (and they did) went out with the Dreadnought class of ships. With the onset of guided missile technology and smart torpedoes, the emphasis has been on survivability, rather than impregnability (which is now unattainable and/or uneconomic).
Naval architects are now designing boats that allow missiles and torps to puncture the hull. In the case of missiles, aluminium soft-spots are used above the waterline to allow the missiles to travel right through the boat, so they detonate late, and cause less damage. Torpedo damage cannot really be countered, but smart use of watertight compartments and magnetic/acoustic decoys can help keep them away from the critical areas of the boat. Torps are in a sense, a bigger threat: if a 1 tonne torpedo warhead detonates a few feet below the keel of a boat, it will break the boat's back come what may, unless the boat is absolutely massive (eg. Nimitz class).
No troll, but I hadn't condidered the deterrent effect of being dragged into court and losing.
At the moment, the PTO can spew patents like it's going out of fashion, and the result is that some other guy gets to go to court to challenge the obviously dubious specimens.
If the situation were switched, so that the PTO stood a chance of being the one in court, it might be better. I still don't think it's a great idea, but right now I'm damned if I can think of a better one.
T&K.
"That's why I've been saying that the PTO should be sued everytime an invalid patent is found that caused financial loss to a defendant having to prove it invalid."
And who's going to be funding the payouts which will result from such lawsuits?
Ker-ching! The American taxpayer, of course!
High five, genius.
T&K,
"I'd worry less about it running NT and more about it's structural integrity. They'll soon learn what many automotive enthusiates have learned..."
Don't drink and drive? Don't brake past the apex of a curve? What the hell are you talking about here?
"...Although Carbon Fiber has it's advantages(light weight, looks cool, non-metal, etc),..."
Well I've got to hand it to you: That's a major factor in the choice of material for military hardware: It's got to look cool. I've heard they're going to start using that sticky film that looks like a carbon-fibre weave on Bradleys and and Abrahms so they look cool and demoralise the enemy - probably put a big Type-R decal on the back so they go faster too.
"...it also has several disadvantages. Carbon fiber tends to be very tempermental to temperature changes, and will crack easily with severe cold/heat..."
Cites? I'm looking at Design Data for Reinforced Plastics, 1994, (Chapman and Hall) and can see no corroborating statement.
"...Also, although carbon fiber is fairly flexable, it's still brittle. It's doesn't crack when impacted, it shatters"
Depends more on the matrix material. If it's an epoxy, the CF composites can exhibit brittle behaviour, if the matrix is PP, PEEK or PES, you get a tougher structure.
Thanks for sharing your knowledge and insights, it's always a pleasure to get it straight from an expert.
T&K.
It's from me, and one of the rare occasions when someone else smiles(?) at my humor.
T'aint such a good thing to be witty on
Keep putting in the hard yards,
T&K.
Atlantis?
Been there, done that.
Nice place to visit, excellent seafood restaurants, pleasant friendly people, beautiful women (if a little bit scaly).
Eventually, it was the little things that got me down and made me come back home: Not being able to put my base unit under the desk due to the water level, the constant wading, the never-ending drone of UFO's coming in to land at the Pythagorus Intergalaxy space port. I suppose the last is my own fault for renting a crib right under the flightpath, but it seemed cheap at the time.
Happy days, but I'm glad I left when the contract was ended. The boss offered me a permanent position, but if I was to stay I'd have to go through the whole getting-gills-implanted thing and vowing to "forsake dry land forever" at the citizenship ceremony. At the time, with Josh (my brother) having smashed his car up and Dad losing his job, I simply didn't need the extra hassle.
T&K.
"...legislating away a technical problem is like Congress passing a law which would prohibit a motor vehicle from travelling the speed of light. which makes no sense...."
It's not down to congress, it's down to the states, and they've all got legislation in place to limit the unladen & laden weight of vehicles.
All vehicles travelling at c or near c (>0.01c) will be far too heavy to be allowed on the public roads.
T&K.
I wouldn't try this on a regular basis: This could be seen as an attempt to defraud a party (the USPS, of their rightful payment) by means of the USPS.
That's a prima-facie case of Mail fraud which is very broad, easy to prove and attracts draconian penalties.
T&K.
Very common.
- F77 has no concept of dynamic memory allocation, so if you wished to tie your memory footprint to the problem size, you'd have to jump through these kind of hoops.
Typically you'd call a C function or even a bunch of assembler at startup to grab a big honkin' block of core, then equivalence your main store (an array) to the address of the core. All your dynamic data goes in arrays equivalenced to LOC's within the main store. It's usuall better to keep an eye on block allocation and deallocation programmatically!
T&K.
You don't know shit about legal procedures regarding libel in the UK, see: True Libel
Notably:
"Strictly, a libel is a defamatory statement to which there is no defence. A libel is, therefore, a narrower notion than a defamatory statement
Truth (justification) is a complete defence in defamation"
Best,
T&K.
"...this dude is a V.C. scammer looking for the next big dig...."
And what's so bad about a dude being a VC SCammer? What's wrong with scammers being scammed for once, eh?
Speaking as one who's been on the wrong end of VC shark's attention, I honestly don't give a flying fuck about them getting turned over once in a while.
My bitterness stems from myself and a friend's meetings with VC's in the late 90's, towards the end of the
All we got out of these meetings was a rule of thumb: If they meet you in the morning, they're semi-serious. If they meet you for lunch or in the afternoon, you're paying for the booze (GBP400 in one instance), and they think you're fools.
Fools? We certainly were...
T&K.
From Blackadder Goes Forth:
"If there's one thing I've learnt from the army blackadder, it's never ignore a pooh-pooh. I knew a major once, got pooh-poohed, and made the mistake of ignoring the pooh-pooh. He pooh-poohed it! Fatal error! Because the soldier who'd pooh-poohed him had been pooh-pooing lots of other men, who'd pooh-poohed their pooh-poohs. In the end I had to disband the regiment, morale totally destroyed... by pooh-pooh!"
T&K.
"...Money is tight here now (I work at NASA and am embroiled in the CEV start-up operations) and NASA is terrible at managing a tight-budget program like this would have to be...."
Here's a sneaky bit of inside info: Everyone is crap at managing programs on this sort of scale!
The complexities and pitfalls of multi-million, let alone multi-billion projects leave managers flipping coins or using more sophisticated predictive methods, only to be told "Most likely" (darn, better give the damn thing a longer shake next time).
The only, repeat only way a really big (ie. 10^7 US$+) project will come in on time and on budget will be if the cost and duration are subject to renegotiation between customer and prime contractor at regular intervals - I'm no expert on XP, but this close partnership seems to echo some of XP's tenets.
That's how it is. We are just unable to account for all variables and possiblities without building in truly ludicrous contingencies. Even if the customer would finance these contingencies - and they won't - the immense financial safety net is still a frank confession of our technical inability to plan and organise effectively on these sorts of scales.
T&K.
You speak the truth there, friend.
Apparently, water is a good agent to start a ClF5 fire...
T&K.
IIRC, about the best available chemical combo is ClF5 / N2H4, which is absolutely horrendous in terms of handling, inflammability and toxicity.
T&K.
How long before LucasArts comes down on them like a ton of wookie shit?
It looks like they've ripped off chracter and vehicle design wholesale, and like it or not kids, the copyright in said designs resides with the guys who thunk it first.
T&K.
I assume from your naive posting that you believe a corporate entity's "free speech" rights have been trampled?
SCO could have stood by their statements, and fought it, but they couldn't, wouldn't and didn't.
They knew damn well they couldn't support and justify their public statements, and quite sensibly, folded.
You got a problem with that?
T&K.
"[If Sony is handing out sequels... ]
It looks like they are
T&K.
"Shit, Stevie Wonder got writing credits on "Wild Wild West", another unoriginal hiphop cover that most people think was blatantly ripped off"
Well, the only people who could imagine that the "Wild Wild West" theme ripped off Stevie Wonder must be as blind as, well, Stevie Wonder.
His big shit-eating grin (the sort that says "Woo-hoo! more money for old rope!") as he's playing piano in the video doesn't really portray a man who's been ripped off.
T&K.
I think they used that massive back projection screen to try and make that humungous POS aircraft-hanger of a "console" look dainty.
T&K.
"...Americans also say that all that time. Read the 10th Amendment to our Constitution. If you fail to understand where we are coming from then you fail to understand a basic fact about Americans. It'll be a cold day in hell before we surrender our sovereignty to the UN, World Court or any other institution that allows the likes of Libya and Syria to chair Human Rights commissions..."
I really wouldn't be beating the human rights drum w.r.t the US very loudly, especially right now.
T&K.
Marshmallows sounds like a good idea.
- Let's face it: By the time this is all done and dusted and linux is demonstrated to be unencumbered (or not), we'll all be favouring soft foods, sitting in the rocking shair on the porch and dishing out Werther's to the grandkids.
T&K.
"... Oop, didn't aussie's already give up their guns?..."
And what happens when a freedom lovin' citizen of the good ol' U S of A greets The Man with a gun in his paw?
They kill him anyway and try to steal his house and land
Ain't democracy grand!
T&K.
Hmmmm. So your cable provider offers 3mbps down/256kbps up?
Go for it: Try and max it out 24x7x365, while a T1 subscriber maxes out their 1.54mbs up/1.54mbs down.
1 month later, the cable subscriber will be...
a) Booted off the net.
b) Throttled down to dial-up speeds.
b) Both "a" and "b" while being offered a "Business" package for $$$/Month with no alternative.
T&K.