Wood doesn't have an exceptionally high tensile strength. Douglas fir, for example, which is the main wood used for house building in the Western U.S. and is fairly strong for a softwood has a tensile strength of 14-22 ksi (1 ksi=1000 lb/in^2). A cheap plain carbon steel should have a yield strength of around 30ksi and an ultimate tensile strength of around 50ksi although with heat treatment and rolling you can get yield strengths of nearly double that quite easily.
Further, in most materials the tensile strength is the same as or very close to the compressive strength (the most important exception being concrete which has a high compressive strength and a tensile strength of approximately 0).
If you do any analysis of "spanning gaps with weight bearing members" you'll find that one side of the member is loaded in tension and the other is in compression and the tensile strength is of critical importance.
There are a few reasons why I'd rather rip than download.
The first is that the quality of the rips on the internet is usually lower than I would like. I'm one of those people who finds the occasional compression artifacts on DVDs distracting and the artifacts on the 650-700 MB files you typically get online are much worse.
The second is that I like the extra materials that are on the DVD, especially the commentary tracks which are also not typically on downloaded videos.
It is true that you can download.ISOs of movies to solve both of these problems but they aren't all that common and take much longer to get than the 6 minutes it takes me to get to the rental place.
Would I pick up a $5 disposable DVD while I'm grocery shopping and rip it? Possibly, but I'd also gladly pay $1-2 more and just buy the movie. In fact I'm pretty sure that if first run DVDs were $6-7 that I wouldn't be tempted to pirate anything.
You lost me right at "Ethics is unconcerned with the actions of others." Ethics isn't a real-world application of the Prisoner's Dilemma. It's basically the opposite. That all depends on your perspective on ethics.
Let's think about this carefully. You are correct in saying that heat=power(P)=Voltage (V)* Current(I). Let's say that I have to light up a 60W light bulb. In the case I could supply it with either 5A at 12V or.5A at 120V. Of course, if I tried that, it wouldn't work because the resistance of the wire inside the light bulb would need to be different. In the case of a 120V bulb, I would need a resistance of R=V/I=120V/.5A=240 ohms. In the case of a 12V bulb I would need a resistance of 2.4 ohms.
Your household wiring has a fixed resistance. For the sake of me not having to look anything up, let's assume it's 1 ohm between the junction box and the bulb. With a 120V system, you have a total resistance of 241 ohms, so.498 Amps flow through the wire and the power dissipated at the light bulb is 59.5W and the power dissipated in the wires is.24W With a 12V system the total resistance is 3.4 ohms so 3.6A flows through the circuit. The light bulb dissipates 31.1W (or is about half as bright as it should be) and the wires dissipate 12.9W or about 54 times as much power
I can understand intuit (or any financial institution) not supporting a browser that isn't considered to be production software by its authors. The same thing happens to users of IE8. Besides, most people who are using beta versions of a browser have another, stable, browser installed.
It's funny, when I moved to my new apartment complex I could see about 40 wireless networks and every one of them was secure. I think that secure networks are becoming more common as the cable and DSL modems with built in wireless access that they provide come secure by default.
The most efficient solar thermal plants use tracking parabolic dishes that have Stirling engines built into them. They are the absolute most efficient way to convert sunlight into electricity. They are also mechanically complex and don't have a 30 year history of producing power like the parabolic trough systems have. The parabolic troughs are cheap to build and have a long history of producing reliable power but are about half as efficient as the dishes using a Stirling engine.
There are a lot of technologies that are competing right now and the real question is not which one is the most efficient at converting sunlight to electricity, but which has the lowest system cost for generating a given amount of electricity. This question is not yet answered. Remember, there is no shortage of sunlight.
There are a lot of trade offs. On one hand, the absolute best place in the U.S. for solar power of any kind is the Mojave desert. On the downside, transmission loses are significant (and, as you point out, you really don't want all your power coming from a small area). So far, there are 4 big (500 MW-ish) CSP plants that will be built there and one that will be built near San Luis Obispo near transmission lines and fairly far from the best sunlight. It will be interesting to see what designs and strategies dominate in the future.
Several very large concentrating solar power plants are under contract to be built in California in the next couple of years. Off the top of my head I can think of several:
Type Manufacturer Capacity Parabolic trough Solel 530 MW Tracking dish Stirling Energy 500 MW Tracking dish Stirling Energy 300-900 MW Fresnel reflector Azura 180 MW
There are also a couple of other projects in the works. California currently has around 350MW of solar thermal power generation capacity online (and has since the last energy crisis). The technology works well and is getting cheaper and cheaper. It is likely that it is already cheaper than natural gas (but it is less flexible about when you get your energy).
If only there were another way for musicians to make money.... hmmm.... I've got it! They could try to get a bunch of people to pay to see them perform. That's just crazy enough to work!
By the way, radio stations pay significant fees to broadcast music to music publishers (ever hear of BMI or ASCAP?) There's plenty of money to be made in music with $5-$8 albums (hmm, that's about what Amazon charges to download an album in MP3 format).
Actually, liminally is a perfectly good word. It's the adverbial form of liminal meaning above the threshold of perception (thus subliminal means below the threshold of perception.
Oh, god! I just corrected someone's grammar on Slashdot. I must retreat to my moms basement and get tested for Aspergers immediately!
I should add that one of the good side effects of the "war on terror" is that contaminated steel is probably significantly more likely to be caught before it gets used.
You're probably thinking about the 1983 incident that happened in Juarez Mexico. Part of a piece of cancer therapy equipment fell off when the unit was being transported in a pickup truck. The two guys sold it to a scrap metal dealer. It turns out what they had was a source capsule containing 1000 pellets of Co60. The truck broke down shortly afterward and the now radioactive vehicle gave very high doses of radiation to several people (including the children of the driver of the truck). However the bigger problem was that the container fully broke open at the scrap yard, scattering the pellets throughout (and rendering two of the workers sterile). These pellets were mixed in with steel that was used in furniture for fast food restaurants and in rebar. The incident would probably have gone undetected except a shipment of rebar from one of the foundries that bought steel from the scrapyard was accidentally delivered to Los Alamos National Lab where it set off radiation detectors. The steel, some of which had already been installed in restaurants was recalled and most was accounted for. This was the worst of these incidents that is known about however, such incidents are fairly common (meaning that a piece of contaminated steel is detected by someone every year or 2).
The EV1 was leased out before the CARB ZEV requirements came into effect. GM was really the only car maker who took them seriously and really tried to meet them with a decent car and the EV1 was as much a test platform as anything else. Like all of the cars they put out that way they were leased out with the intent of GM getting them back at the end of the testing period. However, it isn't quite true that they scrapped every one of them. I can remember one that served as a hybrid vehicle test platform at UC Davis after they were pulled from circulation.
The GM EV1 existed for one reason - to meet the California Air Resources Board Zero Emissions Vehicle mandate that required a certain percentage of cars sold in the state to be electric. The mandate was repealed when the car makers proposed significantly improving the emissions controls on a big proportion of the cars that they sold. This solution gave more emissions reduction and was much cheaper than forcing manufacturers to make uneconomic electric cars - a rare example of smart regulation.
From a user's perspective, I would have rather had them wait until the 2.0 update came out to release this info so that there would be a hackable version 2.0 available. As it is, it's pretty likely that Apple will fix the vulnerability that these folks have discovered before releasing the new firmware.
Slashdot Mirror
Wood doesn't have an exceptionally high tensile strength. Douglas fir, for example, which is the main wood used for house building in the Western U.S. and is fairly strong for a softwood has a tensile strength of 14-22 ksi (1 ksi=1000 lb/in^2). A cheap plain carbon steel should have a yield strength of around 30ksi and an ultimate tensile strength of around 50ksi although with heat treatment and rolling you can get yield strengths of nearly double that quite easily.
Further, in most materials the tensile strength is the same as or very close to the compressive strength (the most important exception being concrete which has a high compressive strength and a tensile strength of approximately 0).
If you do any analysis of "spanning gaps with weight bearing members" you'll find that one side of the member is loaded in tension and the other is in compression and the tensile strength is of critical importance.
There are a few reasons why I'd rather rip than download.
.ISOs of movies to solve both of these problems but they aren't all that common and take much longer to get than the 6 minutes it takes me to get to the rental place.
The first is that the quality of the rips on the internet is usually lower than I would like. I'm one of those people who finds the occasional compression artifacts on DVDs distracting and the artifacts on the 650-700 MB files you typically get online are much worse.
The second is that I like the extra materials that are on the DVD, especially the commentary tracks which are also not typically on downloaded videos.
It is true that you can download
Would I pick up a $5 disposable DVD while I'm grocery shopping and rip it? Possibly, but I'd also gladly pay $1-2 more and just buy the movie. In fact I'm pretty sure that if first run DVDs were $6-7 that I wouldn't be tempted to pirate anything.
Actually, it's not just the penny anymore due to high commodities prices.
Coin Melt Value
Penny (current) $0.005
Penny (pre 1982) $0.024
Nickel (current) $0.059
Dime $0.021
Quarter $0.053
Golden dollar coin $0.065
So, the mint is only loosing money on nickels right now, and the pre-1982 pennies are worth melting down.
Quick, someone, rule 34 on Princess Peach!
No, I don't care about my karma any longer...
Given the nature of Slashdot's death, I think that should be:
5/7 NEVAR FORGET
Let's think about this carefully. You are correct in saying that heat=power(P)=Voltage (V)* Current(I). Let's say that I have to light up a 60W light bulb. In the case I could supply it with either 5A at 12V or .5A at 120V. Of course, if I tried that, it wouldn't work because the resistance of the wire inside the light bulb would need to be different. In the case of a 120V bulb, I would need a resistance of R=V/I=120V/.5A=240 ohms. In the case of a 12V bulb I would need a resistance of 2.4 ohms.
Your household wiring has a fixed resistance. For the sake of me not having to look anything up, let's assume it's 1 ohm between the junction box and the bulb. With a 120V system, you have a total resistance of 241 ohms, so .498 Amps flow through the wire and the power dissipated at the light bulb is 59.5W and the power dissipated in the wires is .24W With a 12V system the total resistance is 3.4 ohms so 3.6A flows through the circuit. The light bulb dissipates 31.1W (or is about half as bright as it should be) and the wires dissipate 12.9W or about 54 times as much power
For FSM's sake, though, take a moment to "accidentally" delete his porn and such while you are going about this. That's just basic courtesy.
I was thinking that it would be far more lulzy to copy it to several digital picture frames and set them up around the memorial service.
He did. But the FAT file system has only succeeded in making others want to kill.
...Bill Gates strangles puppies & treads on the heads of kittens.Please stop using NTFS.
But at least Bill Gates hasn't killed his wife.
I can understand intuit (or any financial institution) not supporting a browser that isn't considered to be production software by its authors. The same thing happens to users of IE8. Besides, most people who are using beta versions of a browser have another, stable, browser installed.
It's funny, when I moved to my new apartment complex I could see about 40 wireless networks and every one of them was secure. I think that secure networks are becoming more common as the cable and DSL modems with built in wireless access that they provide come secure by default.
The most efficient solar thermal plants use tracking parabolic dishes that have Stirling engines built into them. They are the absolute most efficient way to convert sunlight into electricity. They are also mechanically complex and don't have a 30 year history of producing power like the parabolic trough systems have. The parabolic troughs are cheap to build and have a long history of producing reliable power but are about half as efficient as the dishes using a Stirling engine.
There are a lot of technologies that are competing right now and the real question is not which one is the most efficient at converting sunlight to electricity, but which has the lowest system cost for generating a given amount of electricity. This question is not yet answered. Remember, there is no shortage of sunlight.
There are a lot of trade offs. On one hand, the absolute best place in the U.S. for solar power of any kind is the Mojave desert. On the downside, transmission loses are significant (and, as you point out, you really don't want all your power coming from a small area). So far, there are 4 big (500 MW-ish) CSP plants that will be built there and one that will be built near San Luis Obispo near transmission lines and fairly far from the best sunlight. It will be interesting to see what designs and strategies dominate in the future.
Several very large concentrating solar power plants are under contract to be built in California in the next couple of years. Off the top of my head I can think of several:
Type Manufacturer Capacity
Parabolic trough Solel 530 MW
Tracking dish Stirling Energy 500 MW
Tracking dish Stirling Energy 300-900 MW
Fresnel reflector Azura 180 MW
There are also a couple of other projects in the works. California currently has around 350MW of solar thermal power generation capacity online (and has since the last energy crisis). The technology works well and is getting cheaper and cheaper. It is likely that it is already cheaper than natural gas (but it is less flexible about when you get your energy).
Have you ever BEEN to 4chan or 7chan?
Yes, and it seems infinitely saner and more wholesome than the Church of Scientology. For one thing, I don't think 4chan has ever killed anyone.
If only there were another way for musicians to make money.... hmmm.... I've got it! They could try to get a bunch of people to pay to see them perform. That's just crazy enough to work!
By the way, radio stations pay significant fees to broadcast music to music publishers (ever hear of BMI or ASCAP?) There's plenty of money to be made in music with $5-$8 albums (hmm, that's about what Amazon charges to download an album in MP3 format).
Actually, liminally is a perfectly good word. It's the adverbial form of liminal meaning above the threshold of perception (thus subliminal means below the threshold of perception.
Oh, god! I just corrected someone's grammar on Slashdot. I must retreat to my moms basement and get tested for Aspergers immediately!
How about: The contract you're working under specifies that your product will meet the standard.
I should add that one of the good side effects of the "war on terror" is that contaminated steel is probably significantly more likely to be caught before it gets used.
You're probably thinking about the 1983 incident that happened in Juarez Mexico. Part of a piece of cancer therapy equipment fell off when the unit was being transported in a pickup truck. The two guys sold it to a scrap metal dealer. It turns out what they had was a source capsule containing 1000 pellets of Co60. The truck broke down shortly afterward and the now radioactive vehicle gave very high doses of radiation to several people (including the children of the driver of the truck). However the bigger problem was that the container fully broke open at the scrap yard, scattering the pellets throughout (and rendering two of the workers sterile). These pellets were mixed in with steel that was used in furniture for fast food restaurants and in rebar. The incident would probably have gone undetected except a shipment of rebar from one of the foundries that bought steel from the scrapyard was accidentally delivered to Los Alamos National Lab where it set off radiation detectors. The steel, some of which had already been installed in restaurants was recalled and most was accounted for. This was the worst of these incidents that is known about however, such incidents are fairly common (meaning that a piece of contaminated steel is detected by someone every year or 2).
The EV1 was leased out before the CARB ZEV requirements came into effect. GM was really the only car maker who took them seriously and really tried to meet them with a decent car and the EV1 was as much a test platform as anything else. Like all of the cars they put out that way they were leased out with the intent of GM getting them back at the end of the testing period. However, it isn't quite true that they scrapped every one of them. I can remember one that served as a hybrid vehicle test platform at UC Davis after they were pulled from circulation.
The GM EV1 existed for one reason - to meet the California Air Resources Board Zero Emissions Vehicle mandate that required a certain percentage of cars sold in the state to be electric. The mandate was repealed when the car makers proposed significantly improving the emissions controls on a big proportion of the cars that they sold. This solution gave more emissions reduction and was much cheaper than forcing manufacturers to make uneconomic electric cars - a rare example of smart regulation.
From a user's perspective, I would have rather had them wait until the 2.0 update came out to release this info so that there would be a hackable version 2.0 available. As it is, it's pretty likely that Apple will fix the vulnerability that these folks have discovered before releasing the new firmware.
I'm glad to know that the internet will still be able to fulfill its primary purpose as a porn distribution channel when we switch over to ipv6.