No it was not, it was purely a matter of 1st amendment rights. That particular provision of the campaign finance law was carved up and enabled for the explicit purpose of shutting the NRA, whose membership is large enough that they can and have, had candidate killing results at the polls, out of the election process. Because we care about the 2nd amendment, and because we have watched voting records, and publish the results in a format that can be taken directly to the polls to guide the majority of its members and readers in how we vote, the power of that number of people, being guided more by the records of how these candidates have voted in to the past than in any promises made in the current campaign, is a power the liberals who would do away with the Bill of Rights completely, fear the most. So they wrote that thing to specifically muffle the NRA in the first place and it actually survived the first challenge the NRA made against it in that version of the SCOTUS. I thought at the time that the approach the NRA lawyers took was too narrow.
Now, what is needed obviously is to saddle these groups with a much more stringent requirement of reporting where the money they spend and/or donate actually comes from, so folks like George Soros and friends will have their names on record. Nothing less will clean the window glass looking into the political arena and give the voter all the info he needs to be able to cast his vote in confidence that he/she cast it for the best candidate being offered. Sometimes we feel that we are being forced to vote for the lessor of two evils, and we are now seeing with the third party activities, the results of that discontent with the 2 party system. Frankly the present environment is such that the really decent thinking men often refuse to participate in what we see at times is a far more broken system than Madison (Federalist Papers)or Paine (Common Sense and the Rights of Man) could have imagined. You cannot participate in politics today without unwittingly becoming part of the problem.
IMNSHO, the maneuvering of the republicrats to maintain the 2 party only system are equally un-constitutional and will only become fair when there is a 3rd or 4th box choice for each office on the ballot, suitably labeled as "None of the above". And if 'none' wins, then we start all over with the candidates who failed enjoined from running again with any professed party affiliation, only allowed on their own name as an independent. And if no one comes forward, obviously that office wasn't that important, it can sit empty for the next 2-4-6 years as the office is scheduled.
The Bill of Rights is the single most important defender of individual freedom in the history of mankind, and those who would nibble away at the basic framework of it, need to have their names publicly attached to the money that buys these often fraudulent campaign adv's we are all being bombarded with between now and Super Tuesday.
We have said for a long time, that the 1st amendment survives in some part, because of the 2nd amendment that millions of us stand guard over.
-- Cheers, Gene "There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order." -Ed Howdershelt (Author)
But, are the people who are charged with doing all this hiring cognizant of the type of folks to hire? I'd almost bet the farm they are far more interested in the results of a background check, than in the potential talent of the person being considered. Its the government way.
IMO what they want is someone who is intimately familiar with a code base whose source can change in response to perceived or actual threats, sometimes by tens of kilobytes a day. I'll submit that such a person does not exist who can also get a clean bill of health from the background checking spooks. And may not exist at all.
Another poster said of the payscale, that it is more than likely 10% of what that same person could earn working the other side of the line or at a large commercial firm.
Point being, if he can do the job, he is worth whatever he asks, and conversely if he cannot do the job, he is excess baggage to be removed from the payroll. And a thousand people is IMO, a very unrealistic figure. 10 good guys/gals in constant communication should be able to handle any attacks in almost real time, by writing the defense code in almost real time. Say about 50 altogether for 24/7/366 coverage. But pulling 50 such people out of the enterprise arena, assuming they are willing to pay what they are worth, would leave a minor but detectable vacuum in the talent pool.
One old farts nickles worth.
-- Cheers, Gene "There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order." -Ed Howdershelt (Author) Man's unique agony as a species consists in his perpetual conflict between the desire to stand out and the need to blend in.
-- Sydney J. Harris
Yes, I have run into that attitude in job interviews, and it sucks.
But, I am one of those people who was a boy geek 4 decades before the name was invented. I have an 8th grade and a couple pieces of freshman in high school education, and at the time a rather severe food allergy that made attending and absorbing anything from school difficult at best. So at 14, I went out to fix tv's for a living. Then I found the food allergy and stopped drinking milk products for several years.
School had taught me how to read phonetically, and I was pretty good at it and enjoyed it, gobbling up everything I could find on the electronics and physical subjects.
Getting tired of consumer electronics, I switched to broadcasting in 1962 shortly after obtaining an FCC 1st Phone. Never slowing my reading, in 1972 I passed the C.E.T. exams, again without cracking a book specifically to study for it. The sign on my usually vacant (because I'm someplace else actually working) office door has usually said Chief Engineer since 1977.
I retired in 2002 in my 67th year, or tried to, I still get odd jobs, from 18 years as the CE at a medium market station in West Virginia, I am blessed with having enough money to afford some hobbies and keep myself in things to do, although that is becoming limited because of type 2 diabetes, so the cold weather hunting and fishing sports are less enjoyable now, but I'm happy and I figure I've had a good ride as I look at my 76th birthday in about 10 days.
Am I a millionaire?, hell no, but I do have money in the bank and I didn't have to screw a lot of people over to get here either, I simply gave them a job well done, keeping them making the money they willingly paid me some of.
There is I believe, something to be said for honesty. I don't have any ulcers and I sleep as well as can be expected at my age.
-- Cheers, Gene "There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order." -Ed Howdershelt (Author) Man's unique agony as a species consists in his perpetual conflict between the desire to stand out and the need to blend in.
-- Sydney J. Harris
Trapdoor to shark pit underneath the plaintiff's lawyers is optional.
But it should not be. Get rid of the lawyers that file this frivolous stuff and eventually we'll run out of anything for a buck lawyers. That cannot be anything but desirable.
Then we'll maybe have some common sense in the American justice system again.
-- Cheers, Gene "There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order." -Ed Howdershelt (Author) Hubbard's Law:
Don't take life too seriously; you won't get out of it alive.
Is a very dangerous substance, usually in short supply in Kalifornia. Too much of it might be a good thing for Kalifornia as it might reduce the idiot percentages a bit.
You do know our government use our tax dollars to bail out the financial sector.
Wrong, so wrong I can't rate its level of stupidity in English, my keyboard doesn't have the letters to adequately describe it.
That wasn't our tax dollars in the immediate sense at all, no tax was levied to generate that money, they simply printed more money & called it a loan. They can't take it back out of circulation now, so they sell it to the Chinese, not understanding well enough because they are passing the responsibility on to future taxpayers that this is the inflation driver. It takes 28 dollars today to buy what one dollar did when I first went to work in 1948!
Its your kids, grand kids and if they are still speaking English then, your great grand kids who will still be paying interest on it, never having succeeded in actually paying down the principle of the loan because the interest exceeds our GDP.
If you had a child born this year, that child owes nearly $140,000 in back taxes the day he or she was born. That is what you should be pissed about, and pissed enough about it to fix it, by whatever means it takes to restore sanity to the fiscal arena, and to restore America to a Nation of laws that are enforced
I could see this bull shit coming 20 years ago when I married for the last time. Looking at the mortgage the wife had, I saw that at the current payment, we would still be paying on it when we were in our late 70's. So I went shopping for a new loan, got one for 6% & 7 years and didn't even double the payment. Paid it off over a decade ago while we were both still working. Locally owned bank. And guess what, that paper never left their vault till they handed me the mortgage and abstract, marked paid in full. The bank knew it was good paper, one they didn't have to worry about, so they didn't have to sell it at a discount to cover their ass.
Soap boxes are fine, but haven't been able to effect the ballot box enough as the good people are scared away, regularly. Juries, by the nature of the sealed environment they work in, are regularly flamboozled into rendering a non-sense verdict that doesn't punish.
Thanks to SCOTUS we have a box left...
-- Cheers, Gene "There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order." -Ed Howdershelt (Author)
Been there, done that. I wonder if some of the code I cleaned up was his output, but then I look at the calendar and realize I was probably doing that long before he was a gleam in his fathers eye.
Please, deliver us from pompous assholes who think they can write professional grade code after a cs-101 class. They get a passing grade from their prof because the prof is a ducking fummy, drop the project half done, and I get to clean up the fscking mess and actually make it work.
Funny part is I had no idea who Knuth was when I cut my first code on an RCA 1802 cpu in the late 70's. But that code did the job it was intended to do, didn't crash unless there was a long power failure (long = more than 8 hours, battery backup), and continued to do that job for well over a decade. And I did it by looking up the hex value to enter into the monitor that board had, byte by byte, no assembler or compiler even existed at the time. I also built from scratch most of the hardware to interface it to a video tape recorder, and the video itself for that application.
Jerks like that can come back and re-apply when they have matched that. I am sick to death of idiots who remove an assembly code optimization that speeds a function up by reducing its execution time to 5% of that which the compiler generates just because they can't see that a copy of B to A, clearB is an 8 bit left shift needed in a crc algorithm, but does in 2 instructions, no loop, what it took the compiler 20 something to do each time it went through the loop to make a single left bit shift on a 16 bit value, and repeat 8 times because that cpu didn't have a barrel shifter. The attitude that the compiler cannot make a mistake is pure BS and we all know it.
Yeah, I can be a crotchety old fart, when somebody pulls my trigger. Not knowing who Donald Knuth is, or never heard of half a dozen others that corralled all us cats that were around long before the internet was a publicly available tool, trying to teach us how to write code that Just Worked(TM), is tantamount to saying that Einstein was an idiot, or that Newtons third law is wrong.
You got it, precisely. And that is what the government is scared shit less of.
Thomas Jefferson also commented on it, I believe in a letter to Hamilton, where the now famous quote "The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants,"
and most quotes stop at the comma but Jefferson continued "and God help us if we go twenty years without it."
He was well aware of the avarice that would float to the surface in his fellow man. I think he could foresee that it would be a problem, but he would be aghast at the level he could easily observe in today's houses of government, beit the feds or any state (pick one).
Now the crazies can get free ink by just being crazy, and that free ink might even get them elected if they are good enough at lying. We've seen it at all levels over the past 60 years I've paid attention. What we need are to have a few of the more flagrant examples to 'walk the plank' or 'stretch a rope', or even face a firing squad, publicly so that all who would follow in their footsteps can see where the path they are on will take them.
-- Cheers, Gene "There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order." -Ed Howdershelt (Author)
My question is more one of when are they going to build a bridge over Ohio? OTOH, I just made a trip to Cinci, used my gps & cruise control to stay legal, and wasn't hassled. But that doesn't mean I wouldn't vote to build that bridge. 3 states need it, Ohio, Iowa, and PA (mostly because all their roads are built by the lowest bidder, and they treat it like the golden gate bridge painting, when they get to one end of that road, they then pack up & go to the other end of it & start all over again. Gotta keep all them union folks working steady don'tcha know. I have never seen PA with 50 contiguous miles of clear, good condition, no construction bypasses road.
Bear in mind that the sources of this info most assuredly do have a dog in this fight. A big enough dog to make them be a little loose with the facts.
Now, since I am not that much of a chemist, I have NDI what free radicals the UV at stratospheric heights might, or might not create. What I do know is that hydrogen is lighter than helium. And I know that helium, once leaked from your kids party balloon, is headed for outer space, never to come back to this planet. This is why, 50 years ago it was considered a strategic war material under total control of the feds. We used it for testing fuel pressure regulators that went into the birds that gave John Glenn his first ride, and it was used to pressurize the ullage volumes of the fuel tanks in all of that generation of birds. In fact, the Atlas tanks had to be kept under enough pressure to prevent collapsing when they were laid down on the trucks for shipment. But for shipment, nitrogen was used as it was the leftovers from almost any air reduction process and cheaper than dirt.
But because helium has such a large expansion ratio, it was the gas of choice once the bird was standing up, and this pressure had to be scaled by the regulators such that there was just enough to keep them from collapsing once the weight of the fuel was added. And of course it was raised considerably when the bird was launched. How much was classified, and may still be.
While I was testing these regulators they had to maintain the correct pressures within a 2 or 3 psi range of what they were programmed for based on the weight of the fuel in the tanks, so they had to be able to raise the pressure quite rapidly when the launch acceleration kicked in.
I was in the office collecting some 12AU7 tubes to repair the strip chart recorder when the driver of one of the helium tank trucks came in and was paid by check made out to the treasury, in the amount of $11,500 for the load he was about to feed into our tanks. That of course was 1960 dollars.
I believe today it is treated as a commercial resource as they have figured out how to recover it easier from wherever they get it. But its still a one time use resource, the leakage is gone forever. I don't see where an even lighter gas, even if its not as chemically inert as helium, isn't also largely lost forever if the gas itself leaks. I also have serious doubts about any claims of.1% leakage. By the minute maybe.
But you are forgetting that hydrogen is very light, and any leakage heads for outer space as fast as it can get there.
This is equivalent to losing the water, forever.
-- Cheers, Gene "There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order." -Ed Howdershelt (Author)
In a way that relates to long term survival of mankind, I have to look at the consequences of this when it has replaced about 95% of the petro-crap we use now to run everything. That could happen as the petro becomes ever harder to extract in a safe mode, which as we are seeing, doesn't seem to be the case for deep sea drilling.
Hydrogen, once split, is a very small molecule, and like helium, is hard to store in a pressure vessel because it will slowly walk right through the walls of the vessel, even Monel metal ones. Since the other side of the vessel wall is at local atmospheric pressure, and hydrogen, being even lighter than helium, will head skyward as fast as its weight difference can make it go in the presence of the viscosity of the air. And AFAIK, it never stops, escaping into space because we don't have gravity sufficient to retain it by a factor of 20+.
Why is this important? Simple, really. Eventually we will run out of the raw material to make water, and since we are breaking it down to make this fuel, if this leakage is not being re-combusted, therefore giving the planet back its water, there will come a time when water will become scarce. Fresh water for human consumption already is a problem in some locales.
Since hydrogen can be stored in a manner similar to the acetone soaked foam filling in a bottle of welding acetylene, at very low pressures compared to direct storage as a compressed gas, such storage should be mandated from the gitgo as it will reduce this loss by 95+%...
I don't see us running out of water nearly as quickly as we have run out of petro stuffs, but in the Lazarus Long view, it may well happen. We will have made a replica of the planet Dune and I don't think that is what the folks promoting this envision. Too many will see this as a short term profit generator, and will not care what happens 100k years in the future, its not their watch. Those folks should not be trusted with your investment dollars.
-- Cheers, Gene "There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order." -Ed Howdershelt (Author)
Well, speaking from the ancient engineer's viewpoint, I would be willing to bet that turbines design was killed not by the designing engineers stupidity, but by some bean counter that removed the feather-able blades feature to control its ultimate rpms. Since that is a fairly complex mechanism, they were 40% cheaper to build that way.
And of course all the engineers were fired when the design was done, so the bean counters were free to do as they damned well pleased, which was to screw up what was probably a good design on paper.
And I would hope that the bean counters attempts to sue the engineers get thrown out of court.
Defective brakes my ass. Brakes waste energy, and that whole pylon does not have enough surface to dissipate the heat that would be generated by trying to control the blade speeds with nothing but mechanical, or electrical (suicide type) braking. One feathers the blade pitch, to reduce its coupling efficiency to the movement of the air past them. Even turning the head out of the wind can only done very slowly, and with great force required because of the gyroscopic moment of that size of a spinning wheel.
That minor detail was ignored 70 years ago by the Win-Charger people, who kept putting ever bigger tails and control mechanisms on them as speed regulators. It worked, usually. But in swirling winds could easily generate sufficient force to break the then wooden propeller blades off at the hubs. I watched my grandfather carving new blades for his on at least 2 occasions, but after the second one he understood the failure and put the old rusty, much smaller tail back on it. Then the blades lasted long enough to make giving them a good coating or 4 of marine varnish worthwhile. Battery overcharge was not a problem as he was always rigging another 32 volt light bulb someplace that didn't have light before, making that one less place he had to carry a kerosene lantern for evening chores. He tested the sp of his batteries daily and grandma's wash day was often put off a day to charge the batteries as grandma had the only electric washing machine in Madison County IA (yeah, the county that the movie Bridges made famous) all during WW-II. Why? The old Maytag gas motor on it had kicked back and broke her ankle, and in 1939 that was a major blow to running a farm well. Grandpa said that isn't going to happen again and much of the next 2 years crops went to buy that 32 volt system.
That short movie makes me ask once again: If sense is so common, why is common sense so darned scarce? Boggles my mind.
-- Cheers, Gene "There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order." -Ed Howdershelt (Author) You have literary talent that you should take pains to develop.
IT's all about people feeling sorry about a fat native crying.
I don't think so. Speaking as a wasp diabetic, type 2, the research should have provided a link. Unfortunately, the link as others have pointed out, is likely far more related to the modern diet than to any one specific genetic factor.
What every respondent here has failed to ask, is: "Did they find what they were looking for?" Barring info to the contrary, I have to assume that they did not manage to find that "smoking gun". What pi$$e$ me off, is that no one else here even asked the question. And you call yourselves Homo-Sapiens?
I do not know these people, but I do have extensive experience with several other tribes, and between the genocide we have visited on many of them, and our current policies, I can state with a reasonable certainty, that these folks are reasonably intelligent, and that they have learned to both like the diet we provide, and how to game the system. Had there been a magic elixer developed from this research that really could improve their lifespan even beyond the 20 years that our modern medicine has already provided them if they can dodge the diabetic bullet, I suspect the benefits to all mankind would have rapidly accrued, and that there would not now be the hullabaloo about 'Informed Consent'.
Rant mode ON.
Unfortunately for a lot of us, that magic pill has not been brought to market if it does indeed exist. So far, it appears that the most promising treatments appear to be related to some of the stuff on the shelves outside the pharmacists authority. The drug companies have tried to get patents on some of it, and the Patent office, because the stuff is natural, laughed their asses off while pointing the applicants at the door.
So what do they do next? Simple really, now they are trying to get stuff like the Chondroitan Sulfate and Glucosamine and all patent medicines like it, declared as something the FDA has authority over so that it requires a prescription to get it. St. Johns Wort, comparable to Prozac & probably fewer side effects like obesity, and Saw Palmetto is comparable to all the fancy FloMax stuff for prostate problems. The cost to you? Will be 50 to 1000x what you can buy it for at Wallies today. Such BS is their way of trying to inject themselves into the revenue stream, and when you next are in touch with your congress critters, make sure the vote you cast next time depends on how they voted no on any such legislation.
A new waitress girl showed up at my favorte greasy spoon, 23 years old, 3rd grade education from the cotton fields of northern Arkansas, beaten to hell by her first man, a full blooded Sioux. I was also 23. She handed me a big wood screw the 3rd night she was there as I came in to get some vittles & asked if that was what I was looking for, and she had already told the rest of the help there that I was going to be her next & last husband 10 minutes after I walked in and asked for couple of cheeseburgers the first time. Both in dire need of a one night stand, we talked in between catching up, and I realized that here was the girl I'd been waiting for for 10+ years before the first hour was over, so she went to my rented room with me that night and we found a J.P. 2 weeks later. She went, without argument, anyplace I went, was a hell of a good cook, a good mother, kept a clean house, was a deadly accurate instinct shooter & caught as many fish as I did, and was always ready to play, including standing up in the boat once. Her love was unconditional. Wise way beyond her paper education, I was able to teach her the fundamentals of the then new semiconductor stuff even as I was learning it in the early 60's.
The beginning of the end, and we neither of us understood it at the time, was a patch of skin on the front of a leg that suddenly didn't have any feelings. Now I know that the name of that is a T.I.A., and it should have been a huge red flag to go see what was going on as it might have been fixable then. But we were both 10 foot tall and bulletproof.
3 months later that blood clot got bounced loose as she was trying to break a 3 year old & still proud gelding to ride, and went to the middle carotid artery on the left side. She was right handed, and ran down in the middle of a sentence of gibberish as I came in from a wee hours shift doing maintenance at the tv transmitter with thoughts of having a little fun before I took a nap. I phoned the doc, wrapped her in a blanket because it was cold out that time of the morning and hauled ass to the body shop, where the best neurosurgeon west of the river took one look at the blank left 2/3rds of her brain and told me to get the family headed this way, there wasn't anything he could do with the tools at his disposal in mid 1968. So I did what I had to do. And 42 years later in 2010, I still miss that girl. If there is a hereafter, I hope we can find each other. 2 of the 3 children we had have also passed, the big C, so maybe we can have a family reunion when my time is done.
More than you wanted to know I expect, but then this is slashdot. Bare souls are a road hazard.
And I got interested in things electronic early on, & had quite a few jobs too, but the die was cast when I went to work at the Zenith wholesaler, fixing the tv's the dealers couldn't, when I was but 16. I went on from there in tv servicing, picking up a wife with 2 kids and made 3 more along the way with her before she passed at an early age from a stroke. I was by then doing broadcast engineering, and that paid fairly well, and my reputation for both my difficult personality, and my technical expertise is fairly well known. Retired at nearly 68 in 2002 after being the CE at a medium market station for 18 years, my phone still rings when something needs the old mans attention yet. Because my self taught education is somewhat eclectic, and my interests aren't limited to electronics, I now have time to carve a little wood into furniture, with some of that carving being done on a cnc milling machine I built. Hunting, fishing etc also figure into the picture, and its still a race to see if I get to have the time to do all that I have wanted to do before I feel its time to just fall over & be done with it. Now 20 years into my 3rd marriage, we'll probably wind up changing each other diapers eventually if my diabetic heart doesn't stop first, but that is the commitment one makes. What can I say, yes, I've made some mistakes, but overall, its been a hell of a ride so far.
Like one fellow I know who always reply's, when asked how he is, 'above ground and not in jail', both huge plus's in my personal dictionary. Then I always add that I woke up this morning, whats not to like about that?;)
Which, after all....is the whole purpose of this exercise in the first place, eh? (Besides being you last 4x years to act like a kid, party and have fun)
With an attitude like that, I can't say as I blame the prof. You are paying that prof to teach you, not your computers hard drive. That way, you will have that knowledge at your beck and call, anytime, anywhere, and not subject to the vagaries of a failing hard drive you likely didn't even have to sweat to earn the money to buy, cuz daddy has a fat wallet.
People like you are throwing away the best part of your lives as far as the ability to learn quickly and well are concerned. The time to party reasonably is when _you_ have enough income to pay for the party. And if you don't learn well, then obviously you are not going to be able to afford much of a party.
You'll have to excuse me if you think school time is only another excuse to party, then I have relatively little sympathy if you wind up 20 years hence driving a taxi, or even cleaning the local dairies milking barn. School time is learning time, party time is when you are paid well enough to afford to party on your own nickle. Its called personal responsibility, but I expect that may be a new concept to some.
Its also something I only got 9 years of, but I have never stopped learning, even at 75. But I don't recommend that you become your own teacher, I can testify that the less traveled road is also poorly maintained. The one advantage I have is a tested above average IQ, and the schooling I did get in the early 40's, taught me how to read and comprehend what I was reading even if I had never seen that word before and because I understood, I, 70 years later still enjoy the act of reading.
If it produced more power and torque when the mix master gauge said it was lean, then the mix master gauge was lying to the operator. Yes, it really is that simple.
This snake oil has popped up about every other year since the 30's at least. In the Lazarus Long view, we are back to a very classic case of TANSTAAFL. My 20mpg 3 door GMC 4wd has 107k on it right now, still running on the factory spark plugs, and I fully expect it to hit the 200k mark or more. As to whether I might be around when it does is not a great bet as my present mileage seems to be in the 12-13k a year range now that I'm retired so at that rate I'll be in the middle 80's when it hits 200k miles. As a diabetic, my warranty expired 2 decades ago.
If this vehicle costs 1.5x off the floor, needs fuel with both octane ratings and cetane ratings, that will be 1.25x fuel cost multiplier if not more, and 2x or more to keep running when it needs service, it will have to make 100 mpg when I fire up to go to the nephews dairy farm 440 miles northeast of me just to break even at similar accumulated mileage. And the basic engine block should be good for 200k miles to compete with today's modern spark ignited stuff.
Repeat after me, TANSTAAFL, TANSTAAFL. Got it? Good. On to the next subject.
Some wag way up the log asked if the exhaust smelled like bullshit too. That I am intimately familiar with, having been raised in farm country. My guess is that it will be like the pig farm, which has been said many times to smell like money. To the pig farmer at least.;-) But at least the pig farm doesn't make a lot of NOX, just methane. This methane can be captured and used to run an I.C. generator to run the farm with, often with enough left to spin the light meter backwards at the end of the billing month, this with its 25/1 or more compression ratio, will make NOX, lots of it.
Generally speaking, that is the bingo statement in this bunch of slashdot knowitalls. Gravity is forever pulling it in, but over lengthy periods of time, the degree of in is going to be determined by the density of the material, and the slowly cooling core of this rock's shrinkage as it cools, which is almost purely thermal. Unforch this shrinkage is resisted by a somewhat rigid layer of rock etc which is essentially floating of the hot, molten rock (and iron) of the core, and is relatively thin, punctured occasionally by a pipe of hot rock up to the surface called a volcano. One can get a feeling for the insignificance of what man can do by visiting the biggest of those volcanos that we honor here in the states with the status of a National Park, the first one ever, Called Yellowstone. It hasn't actually erupted in 600 thousand years, apparently using the mechanisms such as Old Faithful, to relieve the pressures. But I digress.
The point is, that this crust is A: floating about on the molten core, and B: forces related to things as simple as the corolius effect cause individual pieces of it to move about, running into each other, with one of them usually losing the battle and being subducted under the other, to be once again heated and made more plastic and eventually absorbed back into the core.
This crusty surface, because its more rigid, resists the shrinkage of the core for as long as it can, and eventually has to give way, as it did under Haiti a few weeks ago, and under Chile just a few days ago. As it will again and again under the western edge of California, where at some places along the San Andreas Fault, the slippage is estimated as much as 120 feet overdue.
This planet is cooling, and the core is shrinking, but as long as it remains plastic, these 'adjustments' will continue. Only when the core solidifies, fixing these bits and pieces of crust in place for all time, will such really violent events largely stop. Then, we will have fewer events, and more general events as the crushing will tend to distribute itself into smaller events, physically closer together.
That will take a while yet, geologically speaking. Probably just about the same time this little G type star we call the sun begins its red giant phase, having consumed its readily available hydrogen fuel, and will have begun that long slide to a cooling, burnt out ember of its former glory. However, it will struggle on down through the periodic table, with its core becoming ever hotter in order to achieve the fusion that keeps it going, and this increased radiation pressure will blow away the lighter elements making it a red giant for a while. There isn't enough mass in it now to take it all the way to iron, which takes more energy to fuse than is recovered from the fusion. Were there that much mass which would allow it to continue to that point, then at that point you generally have a supernova because the absorbtion of the energy it takes to fuse iron sucks the heat out of the core, removing the radiation pressure that supports it, so the majority of it falls inward at nearly light speed until there is either a neutron star, or a black hole at the center. The rest bounces back at relativistic velocities, all of this taking place is an amount of time limited by the transit time of light over the diameter of the star. If we are far enough away to survive the radiation blast, we sit and admire yet another supernova. And we get to study the neutrinos released by such an event. We actually caught 7 of them from the SN1987A supernova.
In the meantime, all we can do is try to instrument this rock, with an eye toward better predictions of where the next such event might take place, hopefully with enough of a warning that folks can either leave the area, or at least be better prepared for it. And that may be the best we can do given the conditions.
But, there has to be a mindset that says we have to do it, and so far, that most economical of misery prevention methods has not found a hell of a lot of fav
No it isn't, not by a hell of a long row of apple trees. If you can't afford the ink, then you aren't going to be heard. The 'media' is so controlling in their quest to get paid for every second of A/V, or square inch of paper, that the only place to be heard is what is often called mom & pop radio in the small towns. Getting a word in edgewise on a radio station with more than a kilowatt of AM, or 3kw ERP of FM, is only done as part of the 'public service' stuff they might do, like running a radio flea market usually called the 'swap shop'. And politics is generally considered as being off topic unless pop has his own agenda and it matches yours.
As for this idea, I think its one that needs to become real. The slanderous postings not-withstanding, and even those tend to get snoped to death if they are in fact slanderous, will either do the job that needs to be done, or fail, and someone suing only gives the bad publicity more ink.
Generally when somebody hollers 'smoke', its because there really is a fire, and it needs to be contained for the public good. If the fire they 'contain' with the ability of this proposed site to read from anyplace on the planet with a connection happens to be your own pet make a billion off of destitute retirees in the image of Bernie Madoff's methods, well, sorry but you're an asshole that needs to be disabled, put your efforts into trading a little sweat for a living instead.
If you got caught fudging global warming data to suit your own agenda, same deal.
Sorta like Johnny Carson and his monologue using shoes and fits. We make own own beds in this world, and one should be careful what you make yours from. If you effectively stole it from others, then it really does seem to be justice when its stolen back from you.
No I don't, and whats more I don't care since your first reply directed to me didn't even reference anything in my post, and wasn't even in the same thread according to the subject line. Do you get some sort of amusement out of changing the subject and thread?
Or is/. now broken & just tosses out emails willy-nilly? I doubt it.
I have NDI what you are smoking, but if its that bad, I sure as hell don't want any of it. Next thing you know, you'll be chasing cars and barking at the moon. And what are you going to do with the car once you catch it? Oh wait, this is/., so you'll piss on the tires to mark your territory, then walk away.
No, we're basically libertarians, far more interested in maintaining the integrity of our Bill of Rights than in what some knee-jerk globalist has to say.
Yeah, it might be easy come and easy go, but AFAIAC, that should work both ways.
To clarify that, I mean that any actions one of our citizens takes against an interpol agent who is illegally hassling him, including leaving his body for the scavengers, should be just as ignored. No questions are to be asked other than where do they want the remains to be shipped. After all, what is sauce for the goose, really ought to be sauce for the gander. If a few of their over stepping agents meet with an untimely demise, it just might convince TPTB that it wasn't such a great idea after all.
We used to burn witches at the stake. It was sorta barbaric, but so is this.
Slashdot Mirror
No it was not, it was purely a matter of 1st amendment rights. That particular provision of the campaign finance law was carved up and enabled for the explicit purpose of shutting the NRA, whose membership is large enough that they can and have, had candidate killing results at the polls, out of the election process. Because we care about the 2nd amendment, and because we have watched voting records, and publish the results in a format that can be taken directly to the polls to guide the majority of its members and readers in how we vote, the power of that number of people, being guided more by the records of how these candidates have voted in to the past than in any promises made in the current campaign, is a power the liberals who would do away with the Bill of Rights completely, fear the most. So they wrote that thing to specifically muffle the NRA in the first place and it actually survived the first challenge the NRA made against it in that version of the SCOTUS. I thought at the time that the approach the NRA lawyers took was too narrow.
Now, what is needed obviously is to saddle these groups with a much more stringent requirement of reporting where the money they spend and/or donate actually comes from, so folks like George Soros and friends will have their names on record. Nothing less will clean the window glass looking into the political arena and give the voter all the info he needs to be able to cast his vote in confidence that he/she cast it for the best candidate being offered. Sometimes we feel that we are being forced to vote for the lessor of two evils, and we are now seeing with the third party activities, the results of that discontent with the 2 party system. Frankly the present environment is such that the really decent thinking men often refuse to participate in what we see at times is a far more broken system than Madison (Federalist Papers)or Paine (Common Sense and the Rights of Man) could have imagined. You cannot participate in politics today without unwittingly becoming part of the problem.
IMNSHO, the maneuvering of the republicrats to maintain the 2 party only system are equally un-constitutional and will only become fair when there is a 3rd or 4th box choice for each office on the ballot, suitably labeled as "None of the above". And if 'none' wins, then we start all over with the candidates who failed enjoined from running again with any professed party affiliation, only allowed on their own name as an independent. And if no one comes forward, obviously that office wasn't that important, it can sit empty for the next 2-4-6 years as the office is scheduled.
The Bill of Rights is the single most important defender of individual freedom in the history of mankind, and those who would nibble away at the basic framework of it, need to have their names publicly attached to the money that buys these often fraudulent campaign adv's we are all being bombarded with between now and Super Tuesday.
We have said for a long time, that the 1st amendment survives in some part, because of the 2nd amendment that millions of us stand guard over.
--
Cheers, Gene
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)
But, are the people who are charged with doing all this hiring cognizant of the type of folks to hire? I'd almost bet the farm they are far more interested in the results of a background check, than in the potential talent of the person being considered. Its the government way.
IMO what they want is someone who is intimately familiar with a code base whose source can change in response to perceived or actual threats, sometimes by tens of kilobytes a day. I'll submit that such a person does not exist who can also get a clean bill of health from the background checking spooks. And may not exist at all.
Another poster said of the payscale, that it is more than likely 10% of what that same person could earn working the other side of the line or at a large commercial firm.
Point being, if he can do the job, he is worth whatever he asks, and conversely if he cannot do the job, he is excess baggage to be removed from the payroll. And a thousand people is IMO, a very unrealistic figure. 10 good guys/gals in constant communication should be able to handle any attacks in almost real time, by writing the defense code in almost real time. Say about 50 altogether for 24/7/366 coverage. But pulling 50 such people out of the enterprise arena, assuming they are willing to pay what they are worth, would leave a minor but detectable vacuum in the talent pool.
One old farts nickles worth.
--
Cheers, Gene
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)
Man's unique agony as a species consists in his perpetual conflict between
the desire to stand out and the need to blend in.
-- Sydney J. Harris
Yes, I have run into that attitude in job interviews, and it sucks.
But, I am one of those people who was a boy geek 4 decades before the name was invented. I have an 8th grade and a couple pieces of freshman in high school education, and at the time a rather severe food allergy that made attending and absorbing anything from school difficult at best. So at 14, I went out to fix tv's for a living. Then I found the food allergy and stopped drinking milk products for several years.
School had taught me how to read phonetically, and I was pretty good at it and enjoyed it, gobbling up everything I could find on the electronics and physical subjects.
Getting tired of consumer electronics, I switched to broadcasting in 1962 shortly after obtaining an FCC 1st Phone. Never slowing my reading, in 1972 I passed the C.E.T. exams, again without cracking a book specifically to study for it. The sign on my usually vacant (because I'm someplace else actually working) office door has usually said Chief Engineer since 1977.
I retired in 2002 in my 67th year, or tried to, I still get odd jobs, from 18 years as the CE at a medium market station in West Virginia, I am blessed with having enough money to afford some hobbies and keep myself in things to do, although that is becoming limited because of type 2 diabetes, so the cold weather hunting and fishing sports are less enjoyable now, but I'm happy and I figure I've had a good ride as I look at my 76th birthday in about 10 days.
Am I a millionaire?, hell no, but I do have money in the bank and I didn't have to screw a lot of people over to get here either, I simply gave them a job well done, keeping them making the money they willingly paid me some of.
There is I believe, something to be said for honesty. I don't have any ulcers and I sleep as well as can be expected at my age.
--
Cheers, Gene
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)
Man's unique agony as a species consists in his perpetual conflict between
the desire to stand out and the need to blend in.
-- Sydney J. Harris
Trapdoor to shark pit underneath the plaintiff's lawyers is optional.
But it should not be. Get rid of the lawyers that file this frivolous stuff and eventually we'll run out of anything for a buck lawyers. That cannot be anything but desirable.
Then we'll maybe have some common sense in the American justice system again.
--
Cheers, Gene
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)
Hubbard's Law:
Don't take life too seriously; you won't get out of it alive.
... Dihydrogen Monoxide.
Is a very dangerous substance, usually in short supply in Kalifornia. Too much of it might be a good thing for Kalifornia as it might reduce the idiot percentages a bit.
You do know our government use our tax dollars to bail out the financial sector.
Wrong, so wrong I can't rate its level of stupidity in English, my keyboard doesn't have the letters to adequately describe it.
That wasn't our tax dollars in the immediate sense at all, no tax was levied to generate that money, they simply printed more money & called it a loan. They can't take it back out of circulation now, so they sell it to the Chinese, not understanding well enough because they are passing the responsibility on to future taxpayers that this is the inflation driver. It takes 28 dollars today to buy what one dollar did when I first went to work in 1948!
Its your kids, grand kids and if they are still speaking English then, your great grand kids who will still be paying interest on it, never having succeeded in actually paying down the principle of the loan because the interest exceeds our GDP.
If you had a child born this year, that child owes nearly $140,000 in back taxes the day he or she was born. That is what you should be pissed about, and pissed enough about it to fix it, by whatever means it takes to restore sanity to the fiscal arena, and to restore America to a Nation of laws that are enforced
I could see this bull shit coming 20 years ago when I married for the last time. Looking at the mortgage the wife had, I saw that at the current payment, we would still be paying on it when we were in our late 70's. So I went shopping for a new loan, got one for 6% & 7 years and didn't even double the payment. Paid it off over a decade ago while we were both still working. Locally owned bank. And guess what, that paper never left their vault till they handed me the mortgage and abstract, marked paid in full. The bank knew it was good paper, one they didn't have to worry about, so they didn't have to sell it at a discount to cover their ass.
Soap boxes are fine, but haven't been able to effect the ballot box enough as the good people are scared away, regularly. Juries, by the nature of the sealed environment they work in, are regularly flamboozled into rendering a non-sense verdict that doesn't punish.
Thanks to SCOTUS we have a box left...
--
Cheers, Gene
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)
Been there, done that. I wonder if some of the code I cleaned up was his output, but then I look at the calendar and realize I was probably doing that long before he was a gleam in his fathers eye.
Please, deliver us from pompous assholes who think they can write professional grade code after a cs-101 class. They get a passing grade from their prof because the prof is a ducking fummy, drop the project half done, and I get to clean up the fscking mess and actually make it work.
Funny part is I had no idea who Knuth was when I cut my first code on an RCA 1802 cpu in the late 70's. But that code did the job it was intended to do, didn't crash unless there was a long power failure (long = more than 8 hours, battery backup), and continued to do that job for well over a decade. And I did it by looking up the hex value to enter into the monitor that board had, byte by byte, no assembler or compiler even existed at the time. I also built from scratch most of the hardware to interface it to a video tape recorder, and the video itself for that application.
Jerks like that can come back and re-apply when they have matched that. I am sick to death of idiots who remove an assembly code optimization that speeds a function up by reducing its execution time to 5% of that which the compiler generates just because they can't see that a copy of B to A, clearB is an 8 bit left shift needed in a crc algorithm, but does in 2 instructions, no loop, what it took the compiler 20 something to do each time it went through the loop to make a single left bit shift on a 16 bit value, and repeat 8 times because that cpu didn't have a barrel shifter. The attitude that the compiler cannot make a mistake is pure BS and we all know it.
Yeah, I can be a crotchety old fart, when somebody pulls my trigger. Not knowing who Donald Knuth is, or never heard of half a dozen others that corralled all us cats that were around long before the internet was a publicly available tool, trying to teach us how to write code that Just Worked(TM), is tantamount to saying that Einstein was an idiot, or that Newtons third law is wrong.
You got it, precisely. And that is what the government is scared shit less of.
Thomas Jefferson also commented on it, I believe in a letter to Hamilton, where the now famous quote "The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants,"
and most quotes stop at the comma but Jefferson continued "and God help us if we go twenty years without it."
He was well aware of the avarice that would float to the surface in his fellow man. I think he could foresee that it would be a problem, but he would be aghast at the level he could easily observe in today's houses of government, beit the feds or any state (pick one).
Now the crazies can get free ink by just being crazy, and that free ink might even get them elected if they are good enough at lying. We've seen it at all levels over the past 60 years I've paid attention. What we need are to have a few of the more flagrant examples to 'walk the plank' or 'stretch a rope', or even face a firing squad, publicly so that all who would follow in their footsteps can see where the path they are on will take them.
--
Cheers, Gene
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)
My question is more one of when are they going to build a bridge over Ohio? OTOH, I just made a trip to Cinci, used my gps & cruise control to stay legal, and wasn't hassled. But that doesn't mean I wouldn't vote to build that bridge. 3 states need it, Ohio, Iowa, and PA (mostly because all their roads are built by the lowest bidder, and they treat it like the golden gate bridge painting, when they get to one end of that road, they then pack up & go to the other end of it & start all over again. Gotta keep all them union folks working steady don'tcha know. I have never seen PA with 50 contiguous miles of clear, good condition, no construction bypasses road.
Bear in mind that the sources of this info most assuredly do have a dog in this fight. A big enough dog to make them be a little loose with the facts.
Now, since I am not that much of a chemist, I have NDI what free radicals the UV at stratospheric heights might, or might not create. What I do know is that hydrogen is lighter than helium. And I know that helium, once leaked from your kids party balloon, is headed for outer space, never to come back to this planet. This is why, 50 years ago it was considered a strategic war material under total control of the feds. We used it for testing fuel pressure regulators that went into the birds that gave John Glenn his first ride, and it was used to pressurize the ullage volumes of the fuel tanks in all of that generation of birds. In fact, the Atlas tanks had to be kept under enough pressure to prevent collapsing when they were laid down on the trucks for shipment. But for shipment, nitrogen was used as it was the leftovers from almost any air reduction process and cheaper than dirt.
But because helium has such a large expansion ratio, it was the gas of choice once the bird was standing up, and this pressure had to be scaled by the regulators such that there was just enough to keep them from collapsing once the weight of the fuel was added. And of course it was raised considerably when the bird was launched. How much was classified, and may still be.
While I was testing these regulators they had to maintain the correct pressures within a 2 or 3 psi range of what they were programmed for based on the weight of the fuel in the tanks, so they had to be able to raise the pressure quite rapidly when the launch acceleration kicked in.
I was in the office collecting some 12AU7 tubes to repair the strip chart recorder when the driver of one of the helium tank trucks came in and was paid by check made out to the treasury, in the amount of $11,500 for the load he was about to feed into our tanks. That of course was 1960 dollars.
I believe today it is treated as a commercial resource as they have figured out how to recover it easier from wherever they get it. But its still a one time use resource, the leakage is gone forever. I don't see where an even lighter gas, even if its not as chemically inert as helium, isn't also largely lost forever if the gas itself leaks. I also have serious doubts about any claims of .1% leakage. By the minute maybe.
But you are forgetting that hydrogen is very light, and any leakage heads for outer space as fast as it can get there.
This is equivalent to losing the water, forever.
--
Cheers, Gene
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)
In a way that relates to long term survival of mankind, I have to look at the consequences of this when it has replaced about 95% of the petro-crap we use now to run everything. That could happen as the petro becomes ever harder to extract in a safe mode, which as we are seeing, doesn't seem to be the case for deep sea drilling.
Hydrogen, once split, is a very small molecule, and like helium, is hard to store in a pressure vessel because it will slowly walk right through the walls of the vessel, even Monel metal ones. Since the other side of the vessel wall is at local atmospheric pressure, and hydrogen, being even lighter than helium, will head skyward as fast as its weight difference can make it go in the presence of the viscosity of the air. And AFAIK, it never stops, escaping into space because we don't have gravity sufficient to retain it by a factor of 20+.
Why is this important? Simple, really. Eventually we will run out of the raw material to make water, and since we are breaking it down to make this fuel, if this leakage is not being re-combusted, therefore giving the planet back its water, there will come a time when water will become scarce. Fresh water for human consumption already is a problem in some locales.
Since hydrogen can be stored in a manner similar to the acetone soaked foam filling in a bottle of welding acetylene, at very low pressures compared to direct storage as a compressed gas, such storage should be mandated from the gitgo as it will reduce this loss by 95+%...
I don't see us running out of water nearly as quickly as we have run out of petro stuffs, but in the Lazarus Long view, it may well happen. We will have made a replica of the planet Dune and I don't think that is what the folks promoting this envision. Too many will see this as a short term profit generator, and will not care what happens 100k years in the future, its not their watch. Those folks should not be trusted with your investment dollars.
--
Cheers, Gene
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)
Don't quit your day job just yet.
Well, speaking from the ancient engineer's viewpoint, I would be willing to bet that turbines design was killed not by the designing engineers stupidity, but by some bean counter that removed the feather-able blades feature to control its ultimate rpms. Since that is a fairly complex mechanism, they were 40% cheaper to build that way.
And of course all the engineers were fired when the design was done, so the bean counters were free to do as they damned well pleased, which was to screw up what was probably a good design on paper.
And I would hope that the bean counters attempts to sue the engineers get thrown out of court.
Defective brakes my ass. Brakes waste energy, and that whole pylon does not have enough surface to dissipate the heat that would be generated by trying to control the blade speeds with nothing but mechanical, or electrical (suicide type) braking. One feathers the blade pitch, to reduce its coupling efficiency to the movement of the air past them. Even turning the head out of the wind can only done very slowly, and with great force required because of the gyroscopic moment of that size of a spinning wheel.
That minor detail was ignored 70 years ago by the Win-Charger people, who kept putting ever bigger tails and control mechanisms on them as speed regulators. It worked, usually. But in swirling winds could easily generate sufficient force to break the then wooden propeller blades off at the hubs. I watched my grandfather carving new blades for his on at least 2 occasions, but after the second one he understood the failure and put the old rusty, much smaller tail back on it. Then the blades lasted long enough to make giving them a good coating or 4 of marine varnish worthwhile. Battery overcharge was not a problem as he was always rigging another 32 volt light bulb someplace that didn't have light before, making that one less place he had to carry a kerosene lantern for evening chores. He tested the sp of his batteries daily and grandma's wash day was often put off a day to charge the batteries as grandma had the only electric washing machine in Madison County IA (yeah, the county that the movie Bridges made famous) all during WW-II. Why? The old Maytag gas motor on it had kicked back and broke her ankle, and in 1939 that was a major blow to running a farm well. Grandpa said that isn't going to happen again and much of the next 2 years crops went to buy that 32 volt system.
That short movie makes me ask once again: If sense is so common, why is common sense so darned scarce? Boggles my mind.
--
Cheers, Gene
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)
You have literary talent that you should take pains to develop.
IT's all about people feeling sorry about a fat native crying.
I don't think so. Speaking as a wasp diabetic, type 2, the research should have provided a link. Unfortunately, the link as others have pointed out, is likely far more related to the modern diet than to any one specific genetic factor.
What every respondent here has failed to ask, is: "Did they find what they were looking for?" Barring info to the contrary, I have to assume that they did not manage to find that "smoking gun". What pi$$e$ me off, is that no one else here even asked the question. And you call yourselves Homo-Sapiens?
I do not know these people, but I do have extensive experience with several other tribes, and between the genocide we have visited on many of them, and our current policies, I can state with a reasonable certainty, that these folks are reasonably intelligent, and that they have learned to both like the diet we provide, and how to game the system. Had there been a magic elixer developed from this research that really could improve their lifespan even beyond the 20 years that our modern medicine has already provided them if they can dodge the diabetic bullet, I suspect the benefits to all mankind would have rapidly accrued, and that there would not now be the hullabaloo about 'Informed Consent'.
Rant mode ON.
Unfortunately for a lot of us, that magic pill has not been brought to market if it does indeed exist. So far, it appears that the most promising treatments appear to be related to some of the stuff on the shelves outside the pharmacists authority. The drug companies have tried to get patents on some of it, and the Patent office, because the stuff is natural, laughed their asses off while pointing the applicants at the door.
So what do they do next? Simple really, now they are trying to get stuff like the Chondroitan Sulfate and Glucosamine and all patent medicines like it, declared as something the FDA has authority over so that it requires a prescription to get it. St. Johns Wort, comparable to Prozac & probably fewer side effects like obesity, and Saw Palmetto is comparable to all the fancy FloMax stuff for prostate problems. The cost to you? Will be 50 to 1000x what you can buy it for at Wallies today. Such BS is their way of trying to inject themselves into the revenue stream, and when you next are in touch with your congress critters, make sure the vote you cast next time depends on how they voted no on any such legislation.
Rant mode OFF.
--
Cheers, Gene
A new waitress girl showed up at my favorte greasy spoon, 23 years old, 3rd grade education from the cotton fields of northern Arkansas, beaten to hell by her first man, a full blooded Sioux. I was also 23. She handed me a big wood screw the 3rd night she was there as I came in to get some vittles & asked if that was what I was looking for, and she had already told the rest of the help there that I was going to be her next & last husband 10 minutes after I walked in and asked for couple of cheeseburgers the first time. Both in dire need of a one night stand, we talked in between catching up, and I realized that here was the girl I'd been waiting for for 10+ years before the first hour was over, so she went to my rented room with me that night and we found a J.P. 2 weeks later. She went, without argument, anyplace I went, was a hell of a good cook, a good mother, kept a clean house, was a deadly accurate instinct shooter & caught as many fish as I did, and was always ready to play, including standing up in the boat once. Her love was unconditional. Wise way beyond her paper education, I was able to teach her the fundamentals of the then new semiconductor stuff even as I was learning it in the early 60's.
The beginning of the end, and we neither of us understood it at the time, was a patch of skin on the front of a leg that suddenly didn't have any feelings. Now I know that the name of that is a T.I.A., and it should have been a huge red flag to go see what was going on as it might have been fixable then. But we were both 10 foot tall and bulletproof.
3 months later that blood clot got bounced loose as she was trying to break a 3 year old & still proud gelding to ride, and went to the middle carotid artery on the left side. She was right handed, and ran down in the middle of a sentence of gibberish as I came in from a wee hours shift doing maintenance at the tv transmitter with thoughts of having a little fun before I took a nap. I phoned the doc, wrapped her in a blanket because it was cold out that time of the morning and hauled ass to the body shop, where the best neurosurgeon west of the river took one look at the blank left 2/3rds of her brain and told me to get the family headed this way, there wasn't anything he could do with the tools at his disposal in mid 1968. So I did what I had to do. And 42 years later in 2010, I still miss that girl. If there is a hereafter, I hope we can find each other. 2 of the 3 children we had have also passed, the big C, so maybe we can have a family reunion when my time is done.
More than you wanted to know I expect, but then this is slashdot. Bare souls are a road hazard.
--
Cheers, Gene
So do I. Waking up means I will probably get another day to screw things up. ;-)
And I got interested in things electronic early on, & had quite a few jobs too, but the die was cast when I went to work at the Zenith wholesaler, fixing the tv's the dealers couldn't, when I was but 16. I went on from there in tv servicing, picking up a wife with 2 kids and made 3 more along the way with her before she passed at an early age from a stroke. I was by then doing broadcast engineering, and that paid fairly well, and my reputation for both my difficult personality, and my technical expertise is fairly well known. Retired at nearly 68 in 2002 after being the CE at a medium market station for 18 years, my phone still rings when something needs the old mans attention yet. Because my self taught education is somewhat eclectic, and my interests aren't limited to electronics, I now have time to carve a little wood into furniture, with some of that carving being done on a cnc milling machine I built. Hunting, fishing etc also figure into the picture, and its still a race to see if I get to have the time to do all that I have wanted to do before I feel its time to just fall over & be done with it. Now 20 years into my 3rd marriage, we'll probably wind up changing each other diapers eventually if my diabetic heart doesn't stop first, but that is the commitment one makes. What can I say, yes, I've made some mistakes, but overall, its been a hell of a ride so far.
Like one fellow I know who always reply's, when asked how he is, 'above ground and not in jail', both huge plus's in my personal dictionary. Then I always add that I woke up this morning, whats not to like about that? ;)
--
Cheers, Gene
Which, after all....is the whole purpose of this exercise in the first place, eh? (Besides being you last 4x years to act like a kid, party and have fun)
With an attitude like that, I can't say as I blame the prof. You are paying that prof to teach you , not your computers hard drive. That way, you will have that knowledge at your beck and call, anytime, anywhere, and not subject to the vagaries of a failing hard drive you likely didn't even have to sweat to earn the money to buy, cuz daddy has a fat wallet.
People like you are throwing away the best part of your lives as far as the ability to learn quickly and well are concerned. The time to party reasonably is when _you_ have enough income to pay for the party. And if you don't learn well, then obviously you are not going to be able to afford much of a party.
You'll have to excuse me if you think school time is only another excuse to party, then I have relatively little sympathy if you wind up 20 years hence driving a taxi, or even cleaning the local dairies milking barn. School time is learning time, party time is when you are paid well enough to afford to party on your own nickle. Its called personal responsibility, but I expect that may be a new concept to some.
Its also something I only got 9 years of, but I have never stopped learning, even at 75. But I don't recommend that you become your own teacher, I can testify that the less traveled road is also poorly maintained. The one advantage I have is a tested above average IQ, and the schooling I did get in the early 40's, taught me how to read and comprehend what I was reading even if I had never seen that word before and because I understood, I, 70 years later still enjoy the act of reading.
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Cheers, Gene
If it produced more power and torque when the mix master gauge said it was lean, then the mix master gauge was lying to the operator. Yes, it really is that simple.
This snake oil has popped up about every other year since the 30's at least. In the Lazarus Long view, we are back to a very classic case of TANSTAAFL. My 20mpg 3 door GMC 4wd has 107k on it right now, still running on the factory spark plugs, and I fully expect it to hit the 200k mark or more. As to whether I might be around when it does is not a great bet as my present mileage seems to be in the 12-13k a year range now that I'm retired so at that rate I'll be in the middle 80's when it hits 200k miles. As a diabetic, my warranty expired 2 decades ago.
If this vehicle costs 1.5x off the floor, needs fuel with both octane ratings and cetane ratings, that will be 1.25x fuel cost multiplier if not more, and 2x or more to keep running when it needs service, it will have to make 100 mpg when I fire up to go to the nephews dairy farm 440 miles northeast of me just to break even at similar accumulated mileage. And the basic engine block should be good for 200k miles to compete with today's modern spark ignited stuff.
Repeat after me, TANSTAAFL, TANSTAAFL. Got it? Good. On to the next subject.
Some wag way up the log asked if the exhaust smelled like bullshit too. That I am intimately familiar with, having been raised in farm country. My guess is that it will be like the pig farm, which has been said many times to smell like money. To the pig farmer at least. ;-) But at least the pig farm doesn't make a lot of NOX, just methane.
This methane can be captured and used to run an I.C. generator to run the farm with, often with enough left to spin the light meter backwards at the end of the billing month, this with its 25/1 or more compression ratio, will make NOX, lots of it.
Yup TANSTAAFL...
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Cheers, Gene
Generally speaking, that is the bingo statement in this bunch of slashdot knowitalls. Gravity is forever pulling it in, but over lengthy periods of time, the degree of in is going to be determined by the density of the material, and the slowly cooling core of this rock's shrinkage as it cools, which is almost purely thermal. Unforch this shrinkage is resisted by a somewhat rigid layer of rock etc which is essentially floating of the hot, molten rock (and iron) of the core, and is relatively thin, punctured occasionally by a pipe of hot rock up to the surface called a volcano. One can get a feeling for the insignificance of what man can do by visiting the biggest of those volcanos that we honor here in the states with the status of a National Park, the first one ever, Called Yellowstone. It hasn't actually erupted in 600 thousand years, apparently using the mechanisms such as Old Faithful, to relieve the pressures. But I digress.
The point is, that this crust is A: floating about on the molten core, and B: forces related to things as simple as the corolius effect cause individual pieces of it to move about, running into each other, with one of them usually losing the battle and being subducted under the other, to be once again heated and made more plastic and eventually absorbed back into the core.
This crusty surface, because its more rigid, resists the shrinkage of the core for as long as it can, and eventually has to give way, as it did under Haiti a few weeks ago, and under Chile just a few days ago. As it will again and again under the western edge of California, where at some places along the San Andreas Fault, the slippage is estimated as much as 120 feet overdue.
This planet is cooling, and the core is shrinking, but as long as it remains plastic, these 'adjustments' will continue. Only when the core solidifies, fixing these bits and pieces of crust in place for all time, will such really violent events largely stop. Then, we will have fewer events, and more general events as the crushing will tend to distribute itself into smaller events, physically closer together.
That will take a while yet, geologically speaking. Probably just about the same time this little G type star we call the sun begins its red giant phase, having consumed its readily available hydrogen fuel, and will have begun that long slide to a cooling, burnt out ember of its former glory. However, it will struggle on down through the periodic table, with its core becoming ever hotter in order to achieve the fusion that keeps it going, and this increased radiation pressure will blow away the lighter elements making it a red giant for a while. There isn't enough mass in it now to take it all the way to iron, which takes more energy to fuse than is recovered from the fusion. Were there that much mass which would allow it to continue to that point, then at that point you generally have a supernova because the absorbtion of the energy it takes to fuse iron sucks the heat out of the core, removing the radiation pressure that supports it, so the majority of it falls inward at nearly light speed until there is either a neutron star, or a black hole at the center. The rest bounces back at relativistic velocities, all of this taking place is an amount of time limited by the transit time of light over the diameter of the star. If we are far enough away to survive the radiation blast, we sit and admire yet another supernova. And we get to study the neutrinos released by such an event. We actually caught 7 of them from the SN1987A supernova.
In the meantime, all we can do is try to instrument this rock, with an eye toward better predictions of where the next such event might take place, hopefully with enough of a warning that folks can either leave the area, or at least be better prepared for it. And that may be the best we can do given the conditions.
But, there has to be a mindset that says we have to do it, and so far, that most economical of misery prevention methods has not found a hell of a lot of fav
No it isn't, not by a hell of a long row of apple trees. If you can't afford the ink, then you aren't going to be heard. The 'media' is so controlling in their quest to get paid for every second of A/V, or square inch of paper, that the only place to be heard is what is often called mom & pop radio in the small towns. Getting a word in edgewise on a radio station with more than a kilowatt of AM, or 3kw ERP of FM, is only done as part of the 'public service' stuff they might do, like running a radio flea market usually called the 'swap shop'. And politics is generally considered as being off topic unless pop has his own agenda and it matches yours.
As for this idea, I think its one that needs to become real. The slanderous postings not-withstanding, and even those tend to get snoped to death if they are in fact slanderous, will either do the job that needs to be done, or fail, and someone suing only gives the bad publicity more ink.
Generally when somebody hollers 'smoke', its because there really is a fire, and it needs to be contained for the public good. If the fire they 'contain' with the ability of this proposed site to read from anyplace on the planet with a connection happens to be your own pet make a billion off of destitute retirees in the image of Bernie Madoff's methods, well, sorry but you're an asshole that needs to be disabled, put your efforts into trading a little sweat for a living instead.
If you got caught fudging global warming data to suit your own agenda, same deal.
Sorta like Johnny Carson and his monologue using shoes and fits. We make own own beds in this world, and one should be careful what you make yours from. If you effectively stole it from others, then it really does seem to be justice when its stolen back from you.
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Cheers
No I don't, and whats more I don't care since your first reply directed to me didn't even reference anything in my post, and wasn't even in the same thread according to the subject line. Do you get some sort of amusement out of changing the subject and thread?
Or is /. now broken & just tosses out emails willy-nilly? I doubt it.
I have NDI what you are smoking, but if its that bad, I sure as hell don't want any of it. Next thing you know, you'll be chasing cars and barking at the moon. And what are you going to do with the car once you catch it? Oh wait, this is /., so you'll piss on the tires to mark your territory, then walk away.
No, we're basically libertarians, far more interested in maintaining the integrity of our Bill of Rights than in what some knee-jerk globalist has to say.
Yeah, it might be easy come and easy go, but AFAIAC, that should work both ways.
To clarify that, I mean that any actions one of our citizens takes against an interpol agent who is illegally hassling him, including leaving his body for the scavengers, should be just as ignored. No questions are to be asked other than where do they want the remains to be shipped. After all, what is sauce for the goose, really ought to be sauce for the gander. If a few of their over stepping agents meet with an untimely demise, it just might convince TPTB that it wasn't such a great idea after all.
We used to burn witches at the stake. It was sorta barbaric, but so is this.