Do you have a link or cite for any evidence of Taiwan having nuclear weapons? You are the second person in the discussion to suggest the existence of these, but the best information I know is that the U.S. successfully discouraged the Taiwanese weapon program.
It actually IS important whether Ford is producing cars or tanks. Cars are useful for a great number of purposes, and serve to enhance the productivity of labor. If I have a car, I can get jobs further from my home, I can be more flexible in my schedule, parents can drive kids to activities, etc.
If Ford builds a tank, it can be used to destroy other tanks. Useful, necessary, but not as productive as automobiles.
You have fallen prey to the "broken window fallacy." I.e. after a storm, there's plenty of business in fixing broken windows. Why not just break windows deliberately to stimulate the economy? Because fixing windows diverts material and labor from other possible uses. Divert more than is done so now, and something else must be given up, which is more valuable.
We could double the size of the American steel industry very quickly by having the government buy lots of American-made steel and dumping it the ocean. But it wouldn't be productive to do so. Especially when a lot of foreign countries subsidize their own steel industries. If South Korean taxpayers are willing to make steel cheaper for Americans, I say let them! Better than using American taxes to do so.
Do you have a link or description of any evidence indicating Taiwan has these nuclear weapons? My understanding is that Taiwan had a nuclear program, which the US managed to discourage.
Israel didn't get the raw material for their nukes from the U.S., by the way. Much more help from the French and later the South Africans. The U.S. did its best (both unintentionally and intentionally) to keep their eyes closed about the Israeli program.
Re:billboards that watch you... rf noise?
on
The Year In Ideas
·
· Score: 3, Informative
The signal that is being picked up is not "noise" in the sense of "random noise" but rather "noise" in the sense of "unintentional emission."
The signal that is being picked up is the "local oscillator" of the receiver in the car radio. Essentially, almost every radio receiver uses a heterodyne receiving technique. The incoming radio waves from all sources are "mixed" in a non-linear circuit with a "local oscillator" signal produce within the receiver. The non-linear nature of the mixing circuit means that signals appear at the frequencies which are the difference between the incoming radio waves and the LO frequency.
For example, if you are tuning to FM frequency 104.1 MHz, the LO is tuned to a frequency of 114.8 MHz, creating a "copy" of the FM stations' signal at 10.7 MHz. This 10.7 MHz is called the "intermedicate frequency". Then, the actual circuitry to decode the radio modulation and create sound is designed to work off of the 10.7 MHz IF signal.
That way, the actual tuning of the radio is done by changing the LO frequency over a range of about 90 MHz to 120 MHz, using digital synthesis techniques. The LO is a sine wave, so it is easy to generate. Whatever gets mixed to the 10.7 MHz gets turned into sound coming from your speakers.
The way Mobiltrak appears to work is that most radios are not that well shielded, so the 114.8 MHz LO signal leaks out and can be detected by the Mobiltrak receiver. That LO signal contains no information, so it can't really tell if you are listening, but most people don't emit MHz signals from their car for any other reason.
You guys are all absolutely right. Which is why the proposal is a way to dig to the OUTER CORE which lies just beneath the mantle. That is, the mass of iron only gets through the first major layer beneath the crust. The Slashdot blurb, as usual, misses the crucial detail.
Once it gets to the outer core, which is mostly iron, it doesn't get any deeper because the buoyancy of the iron will keep it at roughly the same level.
Look, the beta decay energy is kinetic energy of the electrons: one 0.2 MeV from the initial decay, with a 0.94 MeV happening afterward (half-life 64 hours) from the yttrium-90 product.
That's all there is to it. Those beta particles have MeV energy (in the rest frame of the nucleus), and you aren't going to get 7000 MeV by decelerating or catching it in pixie dust in rotary motion or anything else.
The thermal conversion of conventional RTG apparently is about 6% efficient. So, at most, even with some pie-in-the-sky absolutely perfect technique, you will only improve by a factor of 20. Not a factor of 150,000.
I'm a trained member of the scientific community, and when I see someone ignoring conservation of energy in such a gross way, the person loses the "respected member" label pretty damn quickly. The "free energy" crowd is substantially more generous with their respect, but that hurts their credibility more than anything else. The physics arguments Brown lists are not nearly rigorous and are unpersuasive. Experimental results from these kind of "free energy" devices are usually fraught with all sorts of misunderstandings of the importance of phase in AC power transfer, and even the misunderstanding of what the term "50 watt light bulb" means.
My advice: look for a different field to get excited about.
If you think you are going to crack iron oxide with a 75 watt RTG source, I wish you luck. But don't expect to be breathing much oxygen.
I'm extremely skeptical of the Nucell claims. Strontium-90 has decay power of about 1 Watt per gram. (1.14 MeV from two beta emissions to Zr-90, 5 * 10^12 events/gram sec, 1.6 * 10^-19 J/eV).
But the Nucell battery claims to extract 7500 W per gram. Neat trick. Perhaps that 10 kV source they have hooked up to "start" it has something to do with it.
Your link refers to radiothermal generators. They are NOT reactors. They are simply lumps of metal that stay hot for a long time because of internal radioactivity, and a device to convert that heat to electricity. RTGs have only moderate outputs, finite lifetime, but are compact, light, and robust. RTGs are basically nuclear batteries.
A reactor is a totally different beast, depending on actively maintaining a steady chain reaction [as in REACTor] of atomic fissions. The fuel in a reactor gets much hotter in the pile than it would in a RTG source. It also gets used up (ignoring potential breeding) more rapidly than by natural decay. It requires a heavy, bulky, complicated, less robust amount of machinery and much heavier shielding than an RTG. In return for which you get buttloads of power which can be regulated.
A RTG "decayor" is to a nuclear "reactor" what a pile of AA batteries is to a power plant.
If you buy a CD from an artist and you don't like more than half the tracks on the CD, this means one of two things.
It could also mean the artist shot his load on five good tracks, and filled the rest of the CD with seven listenable-enough-to-not-be-embarrassing tracks, to get his five good tracks distributed.
You've also got artists like James Brown or Ray Charles who have put out so much stuff over so many years, that there is a lot of chaff in the wheat. It's great to be able to get a few James Brown tracks that really rock, without having to buy a few CDs that mostly rock indifferently.
Hate to break it to you, but your three examples are three of the most pathetic machines of that era. Each had crippling defects that made them dead-ends in the evolution of personal computing.
Unless you were going for a +1 Funny, in which case, better luck next time.
$5 isn't just a different price point---the PIC is a different beast entirely. It is dramatically biased toward low transistor count and low usage of Si real estate. Try to find a PIC with more than 8k of RAM and you'll see what I mean. You can also get PICs in 8 pin packages. I don't know very much about the fab processes for either, but I'm guessing the layers of interconnect and critical fab requirements on a PIC are very few compared to an Athlon.
A modern main processor has tremendous need for I/O and on-chip memory. Tens of millions of transistors and hundreds of I/O pins, all of which have to be packaged and tested, and every transistor is a potential failure that reduces yield. The size of the chip is huge compared to a PIC, but even if you shrink the die, there is no way to reduce the test requirements, lead count, and number of fab steps to economize for low-cost production.
The PIC is a design meant to hit a low price point. The Athlon is a design meant to hit a performance target. Even Moore's law doesn't (by itself) change the latter to the former.
In fairness to the original poster, the 80 degrees could have been 80 degrees Celsius, if the poster happened to be in the 95% of the world population that is not in the U.S.
Though I have a hard time imagining a bottle in the sun getting that hot.
By "indistinguishable" they generally mean to someone looking at a ring on a finger, or even under a light microscope. But there are ways to distinguish them in the laboratory, through fluorescence, and so forth. The impurities in natural diamonds are different from the ones in synthetics, so deBeers and dealers will still be able to laser-mark their diamonds as natural, and be able to distinguish forgeries, at least for the time being.
The tough part is convincing brides-to-be to accept only the deBeers mark as evidence of lasting commitment, rather than a synthetic diamond that is potentially bigger, just as pretty, and much easier on the groom-to-be's wallet.
But hey, the point is to make the groom cough up as much as he can afford, or more, right? So deBeers might not have so much threat after all.
I believe what you are speaking of is more commonly known in English as the skin effect. The frequencies for metals to become non-conductive are quite high, as can be demonstrated by looking in a mirror. The reflection you see is due to visible electromagnetic waves (over 10^14 Hz) causing conductive currents in the metal. Metals are still conductive until you reach the ultraviolet, when you exceed the plasma frequencies, so that electrons can no longer keep up with the field oscillations. At that point, just about everything begins to look like a lossy dielectric, because everything is made of atoms.
For microwave-frequency waveguides, the air is not conducting ordinary current. ["Displacement" current is another matter: changing electric fields contribute to Maxwell's equations similarly to flows of electric current.]
What matters about air is that it is low LOSS. Even good conductors have some loss in them, so transmitting charge currents causes ohmic losses and inefficiency. Transmitting electromagnetic waves in dielectrics [=NON-conductors] reduces the loss. You still need good conductors to create the guide walls, until you get to optical frequencies and use different refractive indices.
Even at 60 Hz, the electric energy going through lines is in the fields between the lines, not within the wires. The losses are due mostly to charge currents flowing within the highly conductive wires.
what the hell does europe know about world peace or stability?
Europe has gone, in a mere 50 years, from a time in which Germany and France had gone to war with each other every 50 years or so, on average, for as long as anyone could remember, to where war between Germany and France is unthinkable.
I was stunned to hear a Norwegian some months ago ask Secretary of State Powell what the U.S. had done for the world. The answer is that 60 years ago, Norway had to worry about German troops marching through her streets. Now Norway's geopolitical worries are thousands of miles away. That's not, of course, the U.S.'s achievement, but the U.S. did lay the foundation through the Marshall Plan and NATO.
European nations can barely fight wars against anyone nowadays. This is something that hasn't been true since before the beginning of the European nation state.
Europe invented the concept of World War, and have now disinvented it. I'd say thats a pretty amazing lesson in world peace and stability.
No, I maintain that Bush is dumb, because he isn't intelligent. If you could offer any evidence that he *were* intelligent, I assume you would have by now.
The scant supposed evidence you offered is invalid, as I have demonstrated.
I have said nothing about Democrats' intelligence, collective or otherwise. Their lack of intelligence is *your* belief, which *you* have to justify.
Pursuing a painless and popular policy doesn't require intelligence. Otherwise, only smart people would be giving out candy at halloween.
Getting your policies enacted when Congress is controlled by your own party doesn't require any particular brilliance either. And it isn't any mystery to Democrats. The mystery to Democrats seems to be how to counter what are essentially attractive lies that are told by Bush.
Remember when: "Here are four dollars representing the surplus. One goes to social security, one goes to tax cuts, one goes to paying down the debt..." Well, that never happened, because his numbers simply didn't add up. Remember when he said that "the safest investment in the world, Treasury bonds, gets higher return than the social security trust fund," ignoring the fact that the social security funds are invested in...guess what, Treasury bonds? I could go on for days, without even getting to his Iraq-related statements.
Now, his consistent use of misleading or utterly false logical foundations for his policies is either a sign of: 1) lying, or 2) ignorant stupidity. Which would you prefer?
Which has absolutely nothing to do with my point. In fact, the fiscal imbalance only contributes to the underlying problem.
And proves nothing about the President's intelligence: when the economy looked good, he wanted tax cuts, when the economy was bad, he wanted tax cuts. When the economy shows one quarter of growth, he wants tax cuts. Not a whole lot of analytic skills in evidence there.
The U.S. cannot simply erase the trade deficit without changing one of two things: our propensity to consume rather than save/invest, and the popularity of the U.S. economy with foreign investors. That's simply the algebra of trade deficits.
Our propensity not to invest is probably not going to change any time soon. The popularity of the U.S. economy with investors is probably a good sign. If other countries start deciding they have better places to invest, that would reduce the trade deficit, but also be a real bad sign for the U.S. economy.
Now, the fact that the U.S. president has no mental capacity to understand this, and believes the electorate is at least as stupid as he is, do not change the underlying truth.
Yeah, I thought of this, too. There was a BBC radio story on this the other night, I think: Russia considering pricing its oil in euros, and what effect that would have on the US.
On the whole, I don't think it matters much. Saudis want riyals, so they end up selling the dollars that the Danes buy. Or they want UKP to buy Bentleys.
The other thing limiting the impact is that Danish consumers buy gasoline, heating oil, etc., in kroner [Thank you CIA factbook]. In all, only the US's 25% of the world oil consumption is driven directly by dollar prices. The other 75% is influenced by the dollar-X exchange rate. This does create a large, active market in hedging against fluctuations in dollar-X exchange rates, but I still think the end result is that any trend in the dollar's overall value is going to cause the offsetting effect in oil prices. I.e. that the U.S. gains no real price advantage over the other 75% of the world economy.
Some econometrist should probably jump in to point us to real research instead of wild-ass guessing.
There isn't anything universally "good" about the USD declining in value.
As for me, I'm getting paid in USD, so if the value of the USD goes down, it acts like a paycut. Sure, local businesses are priced in dollars, but any inputs that come from overseas are going to feel pressure to raise their dollar prices. And don't fool yourself about how much of that cost of a nifty Palm pilot, wireless LAN card, etc., is influenced by the exchange rate. Making imported cars more expensive doesn't help *me*---"domestics" stay the same, so the cost of buying an automobile can only go up.
There isn't any "normal" economic mechanism for "correcting" the trade deficit. The trade deficit and current account deficit are two sides of the same coin. If people need dollars to buy USD-denominated stocks and bonds, they have to give us funny-colored pieces of paper in exchange. Those funny-colored pieces of paper don't have any value in the U.S. They only are useful to buy goods, services, and financial instruments that are denominated in yen, yuan, euros, etc. That is, in the end, they can only be used to buy foreign stuff. [I'm leaving out domestic investment, because the U.S. doesn't have any (net) to speak of.]
In summary, the main reason the U.S. has a trade deficit is because people in other countries are sending the US goods and services in order to get stocks, bonds, and dollars. And, indirectly, because Japanese and Chinese people are saving rather than consuming, and there aren't enough domestic investment opportunities to use up all that savings.
Sure, a declining dollar might sound good to an out-of-work autoworker in Detroit, but if it happens because no one in the world wants to invest in the U.S. economy any more, that doesn't sound like good news to me. Sounds more like the country being run like a third-world banana republic, but that's a longer discussion than I'm in the mood for now.
the only software i haven't been able to run is MS Project in my project management class last summer.
This is such a major gap in MSOffice for Mac OS X. People complain about the Windows monopoly, and the Office monopoly, but nothing compares to the utter lack of any visible competition for MS Project.
The sad thing is that MS Project has to be the most mediocre, frustrating, ill-featured member of the MS Office "family." If Resource Levelling changes my task durations one more time, I'm going to go stark raving mad. (Yeah, I know my task somehow got marked "effort driven"...)
Browsing Apple's Mac OS X Resource page, I did encounter PMX. It claims to import.mpp files reasonably well.
Plutonium is an important barrier to nuclear weapon development, but simulation is key to compact, deliverable, high-yield weapons, which are even more dangerous.
Not necessarily. Know what ECC stands for? One of the C's is for Correction. Given enough extra bits, you can arrange the coding so that valid memory words all differ from one another by two or more bit flips. Given a single bit flip, and assuming it was only a single bit flip, you can uniquely determine the corresponding valid memory word. If the hardware is functioning properly (e.g., it was just a cosmic ray hitting a RAM cell), then you can rewrite the valid combination, and keep going.
Given proper hardware & BIOS support, error correction coding should allow for detection, reporting, AND CORRECTION of single-bit errors in 64-bit words. Of course, a bargain basement motherboard & BIOS is not going to correct the error, but you get what you pay for.
Also, there is no possible way to back up the statement that RAM errors are pretty far-between on Macs. Non-ECC RAM errors, if they are in working memory, corrupt data or program code without leaving a fingerprint. You just get bogus results, or a bizarre, probably non-reproducible application crash.
Slashdot Mirror
Do you have a link or cite for any evidence of Taiwan having nuclear weapons? You are the second person in the discussion to suggest the existence of these, but the best information I know is that the U.S. successfully discouraged the Taiwanese weapon program.
It actually IS important whether Ford is producing cars or tanks. Cars are useful for a great number of purposes, and serve to enhance the productivity of labor. If I have a car, I can get jobs further from my home, I can be more flexible in my schedule, parents can drive kids to activities, etc.
If Ford builds a tank, it can be used to destroy other tanks. Useful, necessary, but not as productive as automobiles.
You have fallen prey to the "broken window fallacy." I.e. after a storm, there's plenty of business in fixing broken windows. Why not just break windows deliberately to stimulate the economy? Because fixing windows diverts material and labor from other possible uses. Divert more than is done so now, and something else must be given up, which is more valuable.
We could double the size of the American steel industry very quickly by having the government buy lots of American-made steel and dumping it the ocean. But it wouldn't be productive to do so. Especially when a lot of foreign countries subsidize their own steel industries. If South Korean taxpayers are willing to make steel cheaper for Americans, I say let them! Better than using American taxes to do so.
Do you have a link or description of any evidence indicating Taiwan has these nuclear weapons? My understanding is that Taiwan had a nuclear program, which the US managed to discourage.
Israel didn't get the raw material for their nukes from the U.S., by the way. Much more help from the French and later the South Africans. The U.S. did its best (both unintentionally and intentionally) to keep their eyes closed about the Israeli program.
The signal that is being picked up is not "noise" in the sense of "random noise" but rather "noise" in the sense of "unintentional emission."
The signal that is being picked up is the "local oscillator" of the receiver in the car radio. Essentially, almost every radio receiver uses a heterodyne receiving technique. The incoming radio waves from all sources are "mixed" in a non-linear circuit with a "local oscillator" signal produce within the receiver. The non-linear nature of the mixing circuit means that signals appear at the frequencies which are the difference between the incoming radio waves and the LO frequency.
For example, if you are tuning to FM frequency 104.1 MHz, the LO is tuned to a frequency of 114.8 MHz, creating a "copy" of the FM stations' signal at 10.7 MHz. This 10.7 MHz is called the "intermedicate frequency". Then, the actual circuitry to decode the radio modulation and create sound is designed to work off of the 10.7 MHz IF signal.
That way, the actual tuning of the radio is done by changing the LO frequency over a range of about 90 MHz to 120 MHz, using digital synthesis techniques. The LO is a sine wave, so it is easy to generate. Whatever gets mixed to the 10.7 MHz gets turned into sound coming from your speakers.
The way Mobiltrak appears to work is that most radios are not that well shielded, so the 114.8 MHz LO signal leaks out and can be detected by the Mobiltrak receiver. That LO signal contains no information, so it can't really tell if you are listening, but most people don't emit MHz signals from their car for any other reason.
You guys are all absolutely right. Which is why the proposal is a way to dig to the OUTER CORE which lies just beneath the mantle. That is, the mass of iron only gets through the first major layer beneath the crust. The Slashdot blurb, as usual, misses the crucial detail.
Once it gets to the outer core, which is mostly iron, it doesn't get any deeper because the buoyancy of the iron will keep it at roughly the same level.
Look, the beta decay energy is kinetic energy of the electrons: one 0.2 MeV from the initial decay, with a 0.94 MeV happening afterward (half-life 64 hours) from the yttrium-90 product.
That's all there is to it. Those beta particles have MeV energy (in the rest frame of the nucleus), and you aren't going to get 7000 MeV by decelerating or catching it in pixie dust in rotary motion or anything else.
The thermal conversion of conventional RTG apparently is about 6% efficient. So, at most, even with some pie-in-the-sky absolutely perfect technique, you will only improve by a factor of 20. Not a factor of 150,000.
I'm a trained member of the scientific community, and when I see someone ignoring conservation of energy in such a gross way, the person loses the "respected member" label pretty damn quickly. The "free energy" crowd is substantially more generous with their respect, but that hurts their credibility more than anything else. The physics arguments Brown lists are not nearly rigorous and are unpersuasive. Experimental results from these kind of "free energy" devices are usually fraught with all sorts of misunderstandings of the importance of phase in AC power transfer, and even the misunderstanding of what the term "50 watt light bulb" means.
My advice: look for a different field to get excited about.
If you think you are going to crack iron oxide with a 75 watt RTG source, I wish you luck. But don't expect to be breathing much oxygen.
I'm extremely skeptical of the Nucell claims. Strontium-90 has decay power of about 1 Watt per gram. (1.14 MeV from two beta emissions to Zr-90, 5 * 10^12 events/gram sec, 1.6 * 10^-19 J/eV).
But the Nucell battery claims to extract 7500 W per gram. Neat trick. Perhaps that 10 kV source they have hooked up to "start" it has something to do with it.
Your link refers to radiothermal generators. They are NOT reactors. They are simply lumps of metal that stay hot for a long time because of internal radioactivity, and a device to convert that heat to electricity. RTGs have only moderate outputs, finite lifetime, but are compact, light, and robust. RTGs are basically nuclear batteries.
A reactor is a totally different beast, depending on actively maintaining a steady chain reaction [as in REACTor] of atomic fissions. The fuel in a reactor gets much hotter in the pile than it would in a RTG source. It also gets used up (ignoring potential breeding) more rapidly than by natural decay. It requires a heavy, bulky, complicated, less robust amount of machinery and much heavier shielding than an RTG. In return for which you get buttloads of power which can be regulated.
A RTG "decayor" is to a nuclear "reactor" what a pile of AA batteries is to a power plant.
If you buy a CD from an artist and you don't like more than half the tracks on the CD, this means one of two things.
It could also mean the artist shot his load on five good tracks, and filled the rest of the CD with seven listenable-enough-to-not-be-embarrassing tracks, to get his five good tracks distributed.
You've also got artists like James Brown or Ray Charles who have put out so much stuff over so many years, that there is a lot of chaff in the wheat. It's great to be able to get a few James Brown tracks that really rock, without having to buy a few CDs that mostly rock indifferently.
Hate to break it to you, but your three examples are three of the most pathetic machines of that era. Each had crippling defects that made them dead-ends in the evolution of personal computing.
Unless you were going for a +1 Funny, in which case, better luck next time.
$5 isn't just a different price point---the PIC is a different beast entirely. It is dramatically biased toward low transistor count and low usage of Si real estate. Try to find a PIC with more than 8k of RAM and you'll see what I mean. You can also get PICs in 8 pin packages. I don't know very much about the fab processes for either, but I'm guessing the layers of interconnect and critical fab requirements on a PIC are very few compared to an Athlon.
A modern main processor has tremendous need for I/O and on-chip memory. Tens of millions of transistors and hundreds of I/O pins, all of which have to be packaged and tested, and every transistor is a potential failure that reduces yield. The size of the chip is huge compared to a PIC, but even if you shrink the die, there is no way to reduce the test requirements, lead count, and number of fab steps to economize for low-cost production.
The PIC is a design meant to hit a low price point. The Athlon is a design meant to hit a performance target. Even Moore's law doesn't (by itself) change the latter to the former.
In fairness to the original poster, the 80 degrees could have been 80 degrees Celsius, if the poster happened to be in the 95% of the world population that is not in the U.S.
Though I have a hard time imagining a bottle in the sun getting that hot.
I just wish the file didn't get saved unless I told the viewing app to save it.
.PDF opens in Acrobat, for good viewing, but "save" is disabled.
I actually have more trouble with the opposite scenario: the
So, either I have to
1) remember to "save target to disk" instead of just clicking
2) root through my cache (where the f*ck is it kept, again?) for a cryptically named file.
3) go back and do number (1) because I forgot, causing a second, equally long, completely redundant download.
By "indistinguishable" they generally mean to someone looking at a ring on a finger, or even under a light microscope. But there are ways to distinguish them in the laboratory, through fluorescence, and so forth. The impurities in natural diamonds are different from the ones in synthetics, so deBeers and dealers will still be able to laser-mark their diamonds as natural, and be able to distinguish forgeries, at least for the time being.
The tough part is convincing brides-to-be to accept only the deBeers mark as evidence of lasting commitment, rather than a synthetic diamond that is potentially bigger, just as pretty, and much easier on the groom-to-be's wallet.
But hey, the point is to make the groom cough up as much as he can afford, or more, right? So deBeers might not have so much threat after all.
I believe what you are speaking of is more commonly known in English as the skin effect. The frequencies for metals to become non-conductive are quite high, as can be demonstrated by looking in a mirror. The reflection you see is due to visible electromagnetic waves (over 10^14 Hz) causing conductive currents in the metal. Metals are still conductive until you reach the ultraviolet, when you exceed the plasma frequencies, so that electrons can no longer keep up with the field oscillations. At that point, just about everything begins to look like a lossy dielectric, because everything is made of atoms.
For microwave-frequency waveguides, the air is not conducting ordinary current. ["Displacement" current is another matter: changing electric fields contribute to Maxwell's equations similarly to flows of electric current.]
What matters about air is that it is low LOSS. Even good conductors have some loss in them, so transmitting charge currents causes ohmic losses and inefficiency. Transmitting electromagnetic waves in dielectrics [=NON-conductors] reduces the loss. You still need good conductors to create the guide walls, until you get to optical frequencies and use different refractive indices.
Even at 60 Hz, the electric energy going through lines is in the fields between the lines, not within the wires. The losses are due mostly to charge currents flowing within the highly conductive wires.
what the hell does europe know about world peace or stability?
Europe has gone, in a mere 50 years, from a time in which Germany and France had gone to war with each other every 50 years or so, on average, for as long as anyone could remember, to where war between Germany and France is unthinkable.
I was stunned to hear a Norwegian some months ago ask Secretary of State Powell what the U.S. had done for the world. The answer is that 60 years ago, Norway had to worry about German troops marching through her streets. Now Norway's geopolitical worries are thousands of miles away. That's not, of course, the U.S.'s achievement, but the U.S. did lay the foundation through the Marshall Plan and NATO.
European nations can barely fight wars against anyone nowadays. This is something that hasn't been true since before the beginning of the European nation state.
Europe invented the concept of World War, and have now disinvented it. I'd say thats a pretty amazing lesson in world peace and stability.
No, I maintain that Bush is dumb, because he isn't intelligent. If you could offer any evidence that he *were* intelligent, I assume you would have by now.
The scant supposed evidence you offered is invalid, as I have demonstrated.
I have said nothing about Democrats' intelligence, collective or otherwise. Their lack of intelligence is *your* belief, which *you* have to justify.
Pursuing a painless and popular policy doesn't require intelligence. Otherwise, only smart people would be giving out candy at halloween.
Getting your policies enacted when Congress is controlled by your own party doesn't require any particular brilliance either. And it isn't any mystery to Democrats. The mystery to Democrats seems to be how to counter what are essentially attractive lies that are told by Bush.
Remember when: "Here are four dollars representing the surplus. One goes to social security, one goes to tax cuts, one goes to paying down the debt..." Well, that never happened, because his numbers simply didn't add up. Remember when he said that "the safest investment in the world, Treasury bonds, gets higher return than the social security trust fund," ignoring the fact that the social security funds are invested in...guess what, Treasury bonds? I could go on for days, without even getting to his Iraq-related statements.
Now, his consistent use of misleading or utterly false logical foundations for his policies is either a sign of: 1) lying, or 2) ignorant stupidity. Which would you prefer?
Which has absolutely nothing to do with my point. In fact, the fiscal imbalance only contributes to the underlying problem.
And proves nothing about the President's intelligence: when the economy looked good, he wanted tax cuts, when the economy was bad, he wanted tax cuts. When the economy shows one quarter of growth, he wants tax cuts. Not a whole lot of analytic skills in evidence there.
The U.S. cannot simply erase the trade deficit without changing one of two things: our propensity to consume rather than save/invest, and the popularity of the U.S. economy with foreign investors. That's simply the algebra of trade deficits.
Our propensity not to invest is probably not going to change any time soon. The popularity of the U.S. economy with investors is probably a good sign. If other countries start deciding they have better places to invest, that would reduce the trade deficit, but also be a real bad sign for the U.S. economy.
Now, the fact that the U.S. president has no mental capacity to understand this, and believes the electorate is at least as stupid as he is, do not change the underlying truth.
Yeah, I thought of this, too. There was a BBC radio story on this the other night, I think: Russia considering pricing its oil in euros, and what effect that would have on the US.
On the whole, I don't think it matters much. Saudis want riyals, so they end up selling the dollars that the Danes buy. Or they want UKP to buy Bentleys.
The other thing limiting the impact is that Danish consumers buy gasoline, heating oil, etc., in kroner [Thank you CIA factbook]. In all, only the US's 25% of the world oil consumption is driven directly by dollar prices. The other 75% is influenced by the dollar-X exchange rate. This does create a large, active market in hedging against fluctuations in dollar-X exchange rates, but I still think the end result is that any trend in the dollar's overall value is going to cause the offsetting effect in oil prices. I.e. that the U.S. gains no real price advantage over the other 75% of the world economy.
Some econometrist should probably jump in to point us to real research instead of wild-ass guessing.
There isn't anything universally "good" about the USD declining in value.
As for me, I'm getting paid in USD, so if the value of the USD goes down, it acts like a paycut. Sure, local businesses are priced in dollars, but any inputs that come from overseas are going to feel pressure to raise their dollar prices. And don't fool yourself about how much of that cost of a nifty Palm pilot, wireless LAN card, etc., is influenced by the exchange rate. Making imported cars more expensive doesn't help *me*---"domestics" stay the same, so the cost of buying an automobile can only go up.
There isn't any "normal" economic mechanism for "correcting" the trade deficit. The trade deficit and current account deficit are two sides of the same coin. If people need dollars to buy USD-denominated stocks and bonds, they have to give us funny-colored pieces of paper in exchange. Those funny-colored pieces of paper don't have any value in the U.S. They only are useful to buy goods, services, and financial instruments that are denominated in yen, yuan, euros, etc. That is, in the end, they can only be used to buy foreign stuff. [I'm leaving out domestic investment, because the U.S. doesn't have any (net) to speak of.]
In summary, the main reason the U.S. has a trade deficit is because people in other countries are sending the US goods and services in order to get stocks, bonds, and dollars. And, indirectly, because Japanese and Chinese people are saving rather than consuming, and there aren't enough domestic investment opportunities to use up all that savings.
Sure, a declining dollar might sound good to an out-of-work autoworker in Detroit, but if it happens because no one in the world wants to invest in the U.S. economy any more, that doesn't sound like good news to me. Sounds more like the country being run like a third-world banana republic, but that's a longer discussion than I'm in the mood for now.
the only software i haven't been able to run is MS Project in my project management class last summer.
.mpp files reasonably well.
This is such a major gap in MSOffice for Mac OS X. People complain about the Windows monopoly, and the Office monopoly, but nothing compares to the utter lack of any visible competition for MS Project.
The sad thing is that MS Project has to be the most mediocre, frustrating, ill-featured member of the MS Office "family." If Resource Levelling changes my task durations one more time, I'm going to go stark raving mad. (Yeah, I know my task somehow got marked "effort driven"...)
Browsing Apple's Mac OS X Resource page, I did encounter PMX. It claims to import
Plutonium is an important barrier to nuclear weapon development, but simulation is key to compact, deliverable, high-yield weapons, which are even more dangerous.
ECC detects an error it shuts down,.
Not necessarily. Know what ECC stands for? One of the C's is for Correction. Given enough extra bits, you can arrange the coding so that valid memory words all differ from one another by two or more bit flips. Given a single bit flip, and assuming it was only a single bit flip, you can uniquely determine the corresponding valid memory word. If the hardware is functioning properly (e.g., it was just a cosmic ray hitting a RAM cell), then you can rewrite the valid combination, and keep going.
Given proper hardware & BIOS support, error correction coding should allow for detection, reporting, AND CORRECTION of single-bit errors in 64-bit words. Of course, a bargain basement motherboard & BIOS is not going to correct the error, but you get what you pay for.
Also, there is no possible way to back up the statement that RAM errors are pretty far-between on Macs. Non-ECC RAM errors, if they are in working memory, corrupt data or program code without leaving a fingerprint. You just get bogus results, or a bizarre, probably non-reproducible application crash.