It gets better. Water vapor is also a greenhouse gas, and it is also a product of combustion. You're contributing to global warming every time you boil water.
I think the innovation at hand is not that the fuels are eco-friendly per se, but that they are not toxic. What they've used for rocket fuel in the past was highly toxic. I remember reading a comparison on the relative toxicities of various materials. Anti-nuclear protestors like to exclaim that plutonium is "the most toxic substance on earth." In reality, a person can be exposed to and inhale a fair amount of plutonium and not show any symptoms for years. On the other hand, one good lungful of booster rocket fuel will kill a grown person. That's why boosters have to be filled in the factory; they'd be too toxic to be fueled in an open area like a launch pad.
...with.NET came from the commercials. Until I read today's Slashdot blurb about.NET, I thought it was all about jacking up wine prices after breaking your entire inventory.
I got one of those cards in 1998. Cost $80, made Quake 2 look great on my P2 200 MHz POS. The card even came with a little decal to put on your computer case that said, "I got a Canopus."
My dorm neighbors and I got a good laugh out of that.
Re:Do you have a Doctorate in Engineering?
on
Complications
·
· Score: 1
Depends on the field. I know mechanical engineering PhD's aren't very common, because most jobs that I know of can be done by someone with a B.S. or M.S. in ME, and you can pay that person less than you'd have to pay a PhD. A PhD would usually be needed if you were doing hard research, like working for NASA's R&D division, or Lockheed's Skunk Works.
Myself, I have a B.S. In my field, having a M.S. would be redundant, and having a PhD would be overkill.
...I became an engineer, not a doctor. I couldn't stand the stress of having someone's life and/or well-being in my hands. If I screw up in my job (air conditioning controls engineer), some people get temporarily inconvenienced.
IMO doctors don't get paid nearly well enough. During residency, if you compare the hours worked vs. pay, they don't get paid nearly as well as one might think. Plus most start working with a massive student debt to pay off.
"People won't buy the chip just because it's home-made," he told a news conference. "It must be competitive and fit market needs."
He said the chip would soon reside in personal computers, mobile phones and televisions, with a target production of 1 million units in 2003.
What kind of market would buy such an inferior product that I'm sure won't be that much cheaper than chips currently available from Intel and AMD? No, people in China will buy those chips because they will be forced to. Communist Chinese markets will soon be closed to foreign made chips, forcing Chinese citizens to buy these tenth-rate products, just as people in Soviet countries were forced to buy substandard Soviet products (remember the Yugo?).
I've heard of fetal umbilical cord donation. There was a news story on it the other day; essentially what they said was that dozens of mothers had donated their fetal blood, but funding had run out to store the blood samples, so the fetal blood being stored had to be thrown out. There was an option to have the parents themselves pay for the blood storage. Most parents figured that they had already done science a service by donating the fetal blood; most balked at having to pay to store it until more funding could be secured. I think the fee was about $15-$20 per month.
Immutable: (adj.) Not mutable; not capable or susceptible of change; unchangeable; unalterable.
Your comment still makes no sense and has no bearing on the article. If an algorithm were immutable, that would mean that you are completely unable to make any changes at all to the algorithm; it would have to be written on a read-only media such as a non-RW CD, a stone tablet, etc.
Perhaps you meant to say originally that information should be freely shared among all who need it; logic being that if someone needs a piece of information, then probably someone else doing a similar thing needs that information too. In which case, I present the following example:
I, as a nuclear research scientist, need to know the exact equation needed to shape high explosives to maximize yield of a thermonuclear weapon to do my work. An Iraqi/Iranian/North Korean/Afghan doing a similar task needs the same information to do his work. Therefore, I should share that information with him.
If that is what you meant, please do not go into any careers that involve national security.
The judge's statement does set a nice precedent for future similar cases. However, it is kind of sad that he even had to make a point of mentioning that; the RIAA/MPAA should never have been allowed to carry it this far.
Think of the logic here: if a company produces something that COULD be used illegally, the company could be held liable for illegal acts with that product. By the same token, the folding knife in my pocket could be used for illegal acts (assault, armed robbery, etc.), and thus the knife maker is liable for any crimes I commit with it. Also, the makers of the lighter in my other pocket should be held responsible if I can use their lighter to smoke pot. And don't get me started on Honda for all the laws I can break by using their car.
The ISS was conceived during a time when Soviet Russia had just collapsed, and Russian rocket scientists were freshly out of jobs. So I'm sure someone in the US government figured out a way to keep all those scientists employed so they wouldn't go off and design nuclear rockets for "rogue nations" like Iraq, Iran, North Korea, etc.
Nowadays the situation has stablized quite a bit, and I figure that the US doesn't feel quite as threatened by Russian rocket scientists. Maybe they actually saw the quality of work these guys (don't) put out, and decided that they weren't as big a threat as first thought. So, with the threat gone away, so has the need for a giant lumbering science project to keep those scientists happy.
As it is, I can't really think of a useful purpose for this space station. People said all sorts of things it could do when the project started, like be a research platform, or a jumping-off point for more manned moon missions, or a large "symbol of international unity and cooperation," but have any of those things happened? Especially the whole "unity and cooperation" thing...it's like the US and Russia are roommates who aren't getting along, and Russia isn't paying the rent.
Where's a better place for US to spend its money? Perhaps we should fold up NASA, shift its budget to balancing the budget deficit, and allow privatization of space. That way, the money being lost in space won't be my taxpayer money. Now, if only I could pull my money out of ol' Dubya's little desert expedition...
The case was full of insect eggs; she thought that perhaps cockroaches had done the damage and spent a few minutes chasing one adult through the innards.
Can you imagine when someone plays Beethoven's 5th?
Oh, building a working nuclear reactor isn't so hard. All you need is nuclear material, a big tank of water (a dump truck is probably a big enough container), and some sort of stand to put the nuclear material on inside the water. If the water gets surprisingly warm, you've done it.
I think that comment is supposed to mean that custom made germs and bacteria are patentable, whereas higher lifeforms than that are not.
But wouldn't it be something if humans were patentable? I'd take out patents George W. Bush, Carrot Top, Rush Limbaugh, and all the members of N'Sync and The Backstreet Boys just to prevent anyone from making any more of them.
...the leaders are idiots. No, really, they are. My family moved here from China because they were tired of living in a police state run by idiots with absolute control over everything. They're gradually getting better, but they've got a long way to go.
China has a long history of being run by idiots. A long series of emperors squandered China's treasures and people to build stupid things for themselves, like stone armies, terraced mountains, and The Great Wall. The Great Wall of China was started by a schizophrenic paraniod emperor who was afraid of being attacked from the north. It was continued by his descendants, who didn't have the sense to look at this project and realize it was a Big Waste Of Time.
What usually happens is that an imperial dynasty is started by a strong, good emperor, and then all his descendents are idiots. Eventually, they get overthrown by another group that sets up another imperial dynasty, and the cycle starts over again. Sort of like what caused the French Revolution, except it kept happening every century or so. The Communists are just the last in a long line of dynasties.
...would be large scale building ventilation chillers. The problems associated with having a noisy refrigerator could be ignored if you instead used this technology to provide cooling for an office or apartment building. HVAC chillers and their associated pumps already make lots of noise, so another humming noise won't make much of a difference. Plus, the fewer moving parts would make chiller manufacturers happy; less maintenance to do.
The article does mention that in these sound tubes, half the plates get hot and half get cold. It doesn't mention how hot these plates get. Perhaps they could be used for heating. Then a building mechanical equipment room could be much smaller; instead of having a chiller and a boiler, you could have just one rack of these sound tubes, a hot water heat exchanger, and a cold water heat exchanger.
...in theory it's a good idea, but you would incur a lot of installation cost; so much so that it would probably be much more than potential money savings from energy savings. You would have to run insulated ducting to the outside from inside your kitchen, conduit for power to the outside pump, make sure the compressor is weatherproof, etc. A retrofit job for this might be as much as $2000, when all is said and done. I think refrigerator costs about $150/year in electricity to run; even if you were to save 25% of that, you'd save $37.50 per year. At that rate you'd make your investment back in a little over 53 years.
But yes, installation in new construction would be much cheaper. And if you designed the house to accomodate this, like putting the refrigerator next to an external wall and putting the compressor nearby, you could make this system much more effective.
...walls that tell us to take medicine, furniture and wall panels that move aside automatically...
How about putting cute little programs in our word processing software that pop up and help us, say, write a letter or a resume? Or a doohickey on our TVs that figure out what kind of shows we like and record similar ones? Or...
Seems like these devices that are supposed to make life easier end up pissing people off. I'll take the old, non-interactive home for now.
Slashdot Mirror
...now Casper Electronics is going to get sued by Texas Instruments under the DMCA!
It gets better. Water vapor is also a greenhouse gas, and it is also a product of combustion. You're contributing to global warming every time you boil water.
I think the innovation at hand is not that the fuels are eco-friendly per se, but that they are not toxic. What they've used for rocket fuel in the past was highly toxic. I remember reading a comparison on the relative toxicities of various materials. Anti-nuclear protestors like to exclaim that plutonium is "the most toxic substance on earth." In reality, a person can be exposed to and inhale a fair amount of plutonium and not show any symptoms for years. On the other hand, one good lungful of booster rocket fuel will kill a grown person. That's why boosters have to be filled in the factory; they'd be too toxic to be fueled in an open area like a launch pad.
...with .NET came from the commercials. Until I read today's Slashdot blurb about .NET, I thought it was all about jacking up wine prices after breaking your entire inventory.
I got one of those cards in 1998. Cost $80, made Quake 2 look great on my P2 200 MHz POS. The card even came with a little decal to put on your computer case that said, "I got a Canopus."
My dorm neighbors and I got a good laugh out of that.
Depends on the field. I know mechanical engineering PhD's aren't very common, because most jobs that I know of can be done by someone with a B.S. or M.S. in ME, and you can pay that person less than you'd have to pay a PhD. A PhD would usually be needed if you were doing hard research, like working for NASA's R&D division, or Lockheed's Skunk Works.
Myself, I have a B.S. In my field, having a M.S. would be redundant, and having a PhD would be overkill.
...I became an engineer, not a doctor. I couldn't stand the stress of having someone's life and/or well-being in my hands. If I screw up in my job (air conditioning controls engineer), some people get temporarily inconvenienced.
IMO doctors don't get paid nearly well enough. During residency, if you compare the hours worked vs. pay, they don't get paid nearly as well as one might think. Plus most start working with a massive student debt to pay off.
No, an engineer's life for me.
Inconceivable!
"People won't buy the chip just because it's home-made," he told a news conference. "It must be competitive and fit market needs."
He said the chip would soon reside in personal computers, mobile phones and televisions, with a target production of 1 million units in 2003.
What kind of market would buy such an inferior product that I'm sure won't be that much cheaper than chips currently available from Intel and AMD? No, people in China will buy those chips because they will be forced to. Communist Chinese markets will soon be closed to foreign made chips, forcing Chinese citizens to buy these tenth-rate products, just as people in Soviet countries were forced to buy substandard Soviet products (remember the Yugo?).
I've heard of fetal umbilical cord donation. There was a news story on it the other day; essentially what they said was that dozens of mothers had donated their fetal blood, but funding had run out to store the blood samples, so the fetal blood being stored had to be thrown out. There was an option to have the parents themselves pay for the blood storage. Most parents figured that they had already done science a service by donating the fetal blood; most balked at having to pay to store it until more funding could be secured. I think the fee was about $15-$20 per month.
From here
Immutable: (adj.) Not mutable; not capable or susceptible of change; unchangeable; unalterable.
Your comment still makes no sense and has no bearing on the article. If an algorithm were immutable, that would mean that you are completely unable to make any changes at all to the algorithm; it would have to be written on a read-only media such as a non-RW CD, a stone tablet, etc.
Perhaps you meant to say originally that information should be freely shared among all who need it; logic being that if someone needs a piece of information, then probably someone else doing a similar thing needs that information too. In which case, I present the following example:
I, as a nuclear research scientist, need to know the exact equation needed to shape high explosives to maximize yield of a thermonuclear weapon to do my work. An Iraqi/Iranian/North Korean/Afghan doing a similar task needs the same information to do his work. Therefore, I should share that information with him.
If that is what you meant, please do not go into any careers that involve national security.
The judge's statement does set a nice precedent for future similar cases. However, it is kind of sad that he even had to make a point of mentioning that; the RIAA/MPAA should never have been allowed to carry it this far.
Think of the logic here: if a company produces something that COULD be used illegally, the company could be held liable for illegal acts with that product. By the same token, the folding knife in my pocket could be used for illegal acts (assault, armed robbery, etc.), and thus the knife maker is liable for any crimes I commit with it. Also, the makers of the lighter in my other pocket should be held responsible if I can use their lighter to smoke pot. And don't get me started on Honda for all the laws I can break by using their car.
The ISS was conceived during a time when Soviet Russia had just collapsed, and Russian rocket scientists were freshly out of jobs. So I'm sure someone in the US government figured out a way to keep all those scientists employed so they wouldn't go off and design nuclear rockets for "rogue nations" like Iraq, Iran, North Korea, etc.
Nowadays the situation has stablized quite a bit, and I figure that the US doesn't feel quite as threatened by Russian rocket scientists. Maybe they actually saw the quality of work these guys (don't) put out, and decided that they weren't as big a threat as first thought. So, with the threat gone away, so has the need for a giant lumbering science project to keep those scientists happy.
As it is, I can't really think of a useful purpose for this space station. People said all sorts of things it could do when the project started, like be a research platform, or a jumping-off point for more manned moon missions, or a large "symbol of international unity and cooperation," but have any of those things happened? Especially the whole "unity and cooperation" thing...it's like the US and Russia are roommates who aren't getting along, and Russia isn't paying the rent.
Where's a better place for US to spend its money? Perhaps we should fold up NASA, shift its budget to balancing the budget deficit, and allow privatization of space. That way, the money being lost in space won't be my taxpayer money. Now, if only I could pull my money out of ol' Dubya's little desert expedition...
I bow before your superior knowlege of music transcription. :-P
The case was full of insect eggs; she thought that perhaps cockroaches had done the damage and spent a few minutes chasing one adult through the innards.
Can you imagine when someone plays Beethoven's 5th?
DONG DONG DONG (squish)
Result of the Test: PASS
You entered the following words:
WHISTLE
MOON
PLOW
The words possibly displayed in the image were:
whistle
brake
moon
branch
plow
bag
bell
I guess I'm not a computer.
Oh, building a working nuclear reactor isn't so hard. All you need is nuclear material, a big tank of water (a dump truck is probably a big enough container), and some sort of stand to put the nuclear material on inside the water. If the water gets surprisingly warm, you've done it.
Perhaps the job title could be, "Digestion Byproduct Specialist."
Perhaps it was a government conspiracy to conceal the link between cancer and cigarettes...
Or perhaps they reasoned that he didn't actually have cancer, but he did smoke, and that CSM was a more accurate name than Cancer Man...
The way he ended up in the last episode was the only entertaining part of the X-Files finale.
I think that comment is supposed to mean that custom made germs and bacteria are patentable, whereas higher lifeforms than that are not.
But wouldn't it be something if humans were patentable? I'd take out patents George W. Bush, Carrot Top, Rush Limbaugh, and all the members of N'Sync and The Backstreet Boys just to prevent anyone from making any more of them.
...you would have an unlimited supply of fuel. Just make sure to bring along a good supply of beans for your camping trip, and you're set!
I didn't say China had an exclusive monopoly on idiocy, merely that there was a lot of idiocy going on in ancinet China.
...the leaders are idiots. No, really, they are. My family moved here from China because they were tired of living in a police state run by idiots with absolute control over everything. They're gradually getting better, but they've got a long way to go.
China has a long history of being run by idiots. A long series of emperors squandered China's treasures and people to build stupid things for themselves, like stone armies, terraced mountains, and The Great Wall. The Great Wall of China was started by a schizophrenic paraniod emperor who was afraid of being attacked from the north. It was continued by his descendants, who didn't have the sense to look at this project and realize it was a Big Waste Of Time.
What usually happens is that an imperial dynasty is started by a strong, good emperor, and then all his descendents are idiots. Eventually, they get overthrown by another group that sets up another imperial dynasty, and the cycle starts over again. Sort of like what caused the French Revolution, except it kept happening every century or so. The Communists are just the last in a long line of dynasties.
...would be large scale building ventilation chillers. The problems associated with having a noisy refrigerator could be ignored if you instead used this technology to provide cooling for an office or apartment building. HVAC chillers and their associated pumps already make lots of noise, so another humming noise won't make much of a difference. Plus, the fewer moving parts would make chiller manufacturers happy; less maintenance to do.
The article does mention that in these sound tubes, half the plates get hot and half get cold. It doesn't mention how hot these plates get. Perhaps they could be used for heating. Then a building mechanical equipment room could be much smaller; instead of having a chiller and a boiler, you could have just one rack of these sound tubes, a hot water heat exchanger, and a cold water heat exchanger.
My $0.02 on this idea...
...in theory it's a good idea, but you would incur a lot of installation cost; so much so that it would probably be much more than potential money savings from energy savings. You would have to run insulated ducting to the outside from inside your kitchen, conduit for power to the outside pump, make sure the compressor is weatherproof, etc. A retrofit job for this might be as much as $2000, when all is said and done. I think refrigerator costs about $150/year in electricity to run; even if you were to save 25% of that, you'd save $37.50 per year. At that rate you'd make your investment back in a little over 53 years.
But yes, installation in new construction would be much cheaper. And if you designed the house to accomodate this, like putting the refrigerator next to an external wall and putting the compressor nearby, you could make this system much more effective.
...walls that tell us to take medicine, furniture and wall panels that move aside automatically...
How about putting cute little programs in our word processing software that pop up and help us, say, write a letter or a resume? Or a doohickey on our TVs that figure out what kind of shows we like and record similar ones? Or...
Seems like these devices that are supposed to make life easier end up pissing people off. I'll take the old, non-interactive home for now.