Oversimplifying it by calling it "sand" is highly misleading. A Xeon E5-2697 V4 is ultimately produced from a few cents worth of "sand" (silicon,actually), but it will set you back $2700. Silica is a major constituent of sand; it is not sand. First, you must reduce the silica to 99% pure silicon in an electric arc furnace. Then you must further purify it chemically to less than one part per BILLION of impurities (for ICs; somewhat less for solar cells). Then you must dip a seed crystal into a melted pool. Then you carefully withdraw the seed crystal, resulting in a cylindrical ingot of a single crystal of silicon.
Then you must diamond-saw the cylinder into wafers. About 1/2 of the cylinder is turned into dust by this process, and must be recycled. Then you might polish the wafers to remove the machining marks from the sawing, or for solar cells (not ICs) you can just leave them there. Then you must dope the material with highly pure boron and phosphorous. Then you heat treat very carefully it to get the doping to migrate properly. Then you must deposit very very thin patterns of palladium/silver, nickel, or copper electrodes to the front. Then you want to carefully apply a titanium dioxide or silicon oxide anti-reflective coating, to reduce reflective losses. Finally you encapsulate the cell in silicone rubber or ethylene vinyl acetate. Finally you mount the cells on a backsheet, interconnect them, install the sheet in a frame, and cover it with glass.
All of these steps are highly exacting, and require a constant high level of knowledge and QC.
I'm sure I have vastly oversimplified a lot of the steps, and glossed over some, but perhaps I have a, just a bit, shown a glimpse of why it costs such a huge amount to "just throw some sand on your roof".
P.S. - silicon (and the boron dopant also) is a metalloid - a "not quite" metal. Metalloids have a metallic appearance, but they are brittle and not very conductive. Sometimes aluminum is classified as a metalloid, so the distinction is obviously pretty vague.
In a Marx-style communist society, there is very little government because everything is owned locally by the workers.
It is interesting and thought-provoking to compare this to distributism (read G. K. Chesterton, and Catholic social teaching, circa 1900). But I think you need to focus on something a little more specific than "everything", and be a bit more specific about who owns this something than "the workers".
Hugely oversimplified, the "something" (I believe) should be "the means of production; of earning a living", and the poles (I believe) are:
Capitalism: the means of production (factories, classically) are owned and hoarded by a privileged few. New wealth is magically generated from existing wealth to benefit mostly the already-wealthy. Very few can amass significant wealth except by starting from a position of wealth, or obtaining it from the largesse or incompetence of someone who already has it. The exceptions are outliers. There will always be the occasional Edisons. There is very little private property ownership and very little autonomous enterprise by a huge portion of the people.
Socialism: the means of production are owned by the people (workers) in common. The fruits are distributed to the people. All this must be controlled by some kind of powerful centralized authority. This authority can, in principle, be either democratic or autocratic (which in turn can be either benevolent or cynical). There is no private property ownership and no autonomous enterprise by any individuals (ultimately, in pure socialism).
Distributism: the means of production are distributed to the people individually and thereafter owned by each. The people are free to engage in autonomous enterprise individually and in groups small and large. The land flourishes with private property ownership and autonomous enterprise.
There is, of course, overlap in the real world, but these are the natural poles. Now, it is plain that capitalism is self-booting, starting from a grossly mis-proportioned distribution of property. And socialism can be brought about either by revolution or by democratic initiative. Its benefits are apparent to the people. But distributism suffers in that it is difficult to envision how the initial distribution can be brought about. But when you think about it, it is no more far-fetched in principle to set up than socialism; and by the same forces.
Guess what - cars that run on gasoline / petrol are moving to high-pressure fuel systems and direct injection now too. Because it's better.
Absolutely right - with qualifications. Designers have found that they need to have combination GDI (gasoline direct injection) plus "conventional" port injection, because straight GDI was found to be impractical for engine life and pollution issues.
GDI yields very similar particulate problems to diesel. If/when people catch on to the truth that you can't see the dangerous kind of particulates, and that you get them with gasoline, not just diesel, you've got serious problems.
Where in the world are you getting that diesel engines are more complex?
It's called "knowledge" and informing oneself. I can help you a little, because I have been driving diesels (and keeping them maintained) for 33 years, and I know how they work, and I know how the technology has changed during this time.
As the technology has advanced since around 1990 or so, the complexity has exploded. 95% of it is emissions-related, and the other 5% is efficiency-related. Injection pressures have climbed from under 100 bar to over 1000 bar in a quest for better atomization. You have injection metering now which is vastly more precise than it used to be, and typically multiple injection events per stroke where there used to be a single one. Injection is computer controlled, while it used to be purely mechanically controlled. You have high pressure EGR plus low pressure EGR, EGR filtering, and EGR cooling. You have exhaust particulate traps which require periodic cycles where raw fuel is purposely injected into the exhaust to burn the trapped shit out. The particulate traps are the only thing that allows you to have a catalytic converter which effectively reduces NOx. You have AdBlue injection into the exhaust to chemically convert the pollutants. You have precise measurement of the intake air flow mass in order to set the fuel map to avoid black smoke while still getting good power output. You even have intake air throttling now, where it used to run wide open at all times, only the fuel being varied.
Even the apparently simple compression ignition is much better controlled than it used to be. The glow plugs are much higher tech. In addition to merely being used for starting, there is now "afterglow" applied under defined conditions while running to promote more perfect combustion.
The old rule that diesel engines last much longer than gasoline engines is not so true any more, either. The extra raw fuel injection used to burn off the particulates causes the oil in the crankcase to be diluted with fuel that washes down the cylinder walls. That is not good for engine life. At 100-250,000 miles you are typically looking at replacing four diesel injectors at around $500 each. If they wear too much they can turn into blowtorches. Blowtorches you can't see or detect, melting holes in your expensive pistons.
If your turbocharger is one of the high-efficiency variable-vane designs, the vanes get clogged up with carbon from the exhaust. If you aren't careful to exercise it properly at appropriate intervals by romping on the throttle to burn out this carbon, your turbo will either bog down, never "opening up" properly under acceleration - or the opposite; it can stick opened wide, overboosting the engine dangerously.
No it wouldn't. You don't know much about Canadians. They are patriotic, and have pride and determination and skills. They are not the least little bit like sissy Ukrainians. The US invading Canada would make getting our asses whipped by a bunch of savages in Afghanistan look like a picnic.
Read up about the Devils' Brigade and the Canadian Army and Navy and Air Force in WW II. Especially the raid on Dieppe, the Battle of the Atlantic, covering the Invasion in the Channel, the assault on Juno Beach, fighting the path to Caen and then Falaise
Pretty sure four of these babies would be way too much thrust for any existing airliner. I'm pretty sure it's intended for the hipster gigantic two engine planes like the Boeing 777
So in other words, religionofpeas, you agree completely with khasim, but you are too muddled/confused to realize it, and prefer to criticize his crystal clear point.
OS X resets PATH to the system defaults stored in/etc (which you can't edit for the same reason you can't update git) on anything launched by launchctl
This illustrates why horse-shit abortions tacked onto unixoids (launchd, systemd, SELinux, AppArmor, NetworkManager, PulseAudio, etc) get in the way and impede what people who know what they are doing (or TRYING to do) at least as much as they may satisfy some developers' wet dreams.
The U.S. military did not "lose" to the Viet Cong. It essentially wiped them out. The peace then negotiated with the North Vietnamese was then not defended by the worn out US political establishment, and the North Vietnamese regular forces staged an invasion in defiance of the agreement they signed; an invasion which the US civil leadership declined to engage.
For that matter, the US did not "manage a costly draw" against North Korea. It fully achieved its objective against North Korea quite speedily, after which the Chinese invaded and were fought to a draw though they vastly outnumbered the US forces.
Learn some history, for gosh sake. Don't make absurd claims.
Re the Taliban, you make a goddam good point, though that was a chicken-shit commitment on the part of the US.
There can be no "true" or "false" political statements, else there can be no meaningful political debate - just as there can be no "correct" or "incorrect" in politics.
There can only be true or false statement of FACTS, not opinions.
the NAZIs abandoned the socialist part of their name long before they ever even got in power
Now you're just making stuff up. The Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (National Socialist German Workers' Party) never "abandoned" the Socialist "part" or any other part of their name. They remained the NSDAP until the end. It was rather the other way round. There was briefly a minor precursor party BEFORE its foundation, called the Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (German Workers' Party), and it was from this that the NSDAP was formed.
If I may be allowed to presume, I believe what you meant to say is that the NSDAP never really "believed in" or "practiced" "true" socialism, and that is an arguable point, though on balance I am not persuaded that the claim has much meaning. Socialism is a term representing a RANGE of economic and social systems wherein the means of production is held and controlled in common for the welfare of the people; as well as subsidiary political ideologies and theories. One of the tenets of Germany under the NSDAP was indeed the provision of various social welfare measures and programs.
You could as well claim that Germany under the NSDAP never "really" embraced "true" capitalism, yet that claim is never heard, because it is meaningless and misses the point - just like the claim in regards to socialism.
What they really and truly did do was to abandon democratic processes (elections and governmental debate, basically), and adopt a cult of personality wherein Adolf Hitler was Chancellor and Leader (Fuehrer) commanding personal loyalty and obedience from all for the duration.
As an aside, it is indeed sad that in the US almost all of the proponents of socialism run like scared rabbits from the very term "socialist". It says something about their lack of backbone and their utter failure to control the loaded taint of the word, which they fear so much.
American SF almost always (that is, with very few exceptions) has an underlying message that technology or science is bad and/or leads to disastrous consequences, or that "man should not meddle with things he is not meant to understand"
Yeah. If you completely ignore Isaac Asimov, James Blish, Ben Bova, Robert A. Heinlein, William F. Jenkins (Murray Leinster), Larry Niven, E. E. Smith, Harry Stubbs (Hal Clement), A. E. van Vogt - i.e., the (all American) masters of mostly hard SF.
Don't get me wrong. It's entirely forgivable to feel that way if you are looking only at the last 50 years, mostly the last 30 years, and you haven't been exposed to the greats.
Thinking human beings consider the MAFIAA to be the most persistent pests and stinking evil nuisances in the world and should be disconnected immediately.
Slashdot Mirror
Agreed. There is too goddam much fucking profanity.
Oversimplifying it by calling it "sand" is highly misleading. A Xeon E5-2697 V4 is ultimately produced from a few cents worth of "sand" (silicon,actually), but it will set you back $2700. Silica is a major constituent of sand; it is not sand. First, you must reduce the silica to 99% pure silicon in an electric arc furnace. Then you must further purify it chemically to less than one part per BILLION of impurities (for ICs; somewhat less for solar cells). Then you must dip a seed crystal into a melted pool. Then you carefully withdraw the seed crystal, resulting in a cylindrical ingot of a single crystal of silicon.
Then you must diamond-saw the cylinder into wafers. About 1/2 of the cylinder is turned into dust by this process, and must be recycled. Then you might polish the wafers to remove the machining marks from the sawing, or for solar cells (not ICs) you can just leave them there. Then you must dope the material with highly pure boron and phosphorous. Then you heat treat very carefully it to get the doping to migrate properly. Then you must deposit very very thin patterns of palladium/silver, nickel, or copper electrodes to the front. Then you want to carefully apply a titanium dioxide or silicon oxide anti-reflective coating, to reduce reflective losses. Finally you encapsulate the cell in silicone rubber or ethylene vinyl acetate. Finally you mount the cells on a backsheet, interconnect them, install the sheet in a frame, and cover it with glass.
All of these steps are highly exacting, and require a constant high level of knowledge and QC.
I'm sure I have vastly oversimplified a lot of the steps, and glossed over some, but perhaps I have a, just a bit, shown a glimpse of why it costs such a huge amount to "just throw some sand on your roof".
P.S. - silicon (and the boron dopant also) is a metalloid - a "not quite" metal. Metalloids have a metallic appearance, but they are brittle and not very conductive. Sometimes aluminum is classified as a metalloid, so the distinction is obviously pretty vague.
My friend, shit always floats to the top, no matter how elegant the bathroom is.
Whom you would destroy, first dehumanize him by labeling him. It's OK to do anything to him, deny him any rights, if he's not human.
First they come for the suspected terrorists and suspected child pornographers. But it won't stop there.
You might want to consider moving to a location suitable for human habitation.
It is interesting and thought-provoking to compare this to distributism (read G. K. Chesterton, and Catholic social teaching, circa 1900). But I think you need to focus on something a little more specific than "everything", and be a bit more specific about who owns this something than "the workers".
Hugely oversimplified, the "something" (I believe) should be "the means of production; of earning a living", and the poles (I believe) are:
Capitalism: the means of production (factories, classically) are owned and hoarded by a privileged few. New wealth is magically generated from existing wealth to benefit mostly the already-wealthy. Very few can amass significant wealth except by starting from a position of wealth, or obtaining it from the largesse or incompetence of someone who already has it. The exceptions are outliers. There will always be the occasional Edisons. There is very little private property ownership and very little autonomous enterprise by a huge portion of the people.
Socialism: the means of production are owned by the people (workers) in common. The fruits are distributed to the people. All this must be controlled by some kind of powerful centralized authority. This authority can, in principle, be either democratic or autocratic (which in turn can be either benevolent or cynical). There is no private property ownership and no autonomous enterprise by any individuals (ultimately, in pure socialism).
Distributism: the means of production are distributed to the people individually and thereafter owned by each. The people are free to engage in autonomous enterprise individually and in groups small and large. The land flourishes with private property ownership and autonomous enterprise.
There is, of course, overlap in the real world, but these are the natural poles. Now, it is plain that capitalism is self-booting, starting from a grossly mis-proportioned distribution of property. And socialism can be brought about either by revolution or by democratic initiative. Its benefits are apparent to the people. But distributism suffers in that it is difficult to envision how the initial distribution can be brought about. But when you think about it, it is no more far-fetched in principle to set up than socialism; and by the same forces.
Absolutely right - with qualifications. Designers have found that they need to have combination GDI (gasoline direct injection) plus "conventional" port injection, because straight GDI was found to be impractical for engine life and pollution issues.
GDI yields very similar particulate problems to diesel. If/when people catch on to the truth that you can't see the dangerous kind of particulates, and that you get them with gasoline, not just diesel, you've got serious problems.
It's called "knowledge" and informing oneself. I can help you a little, because I have been driving diesels (and keeping them maintained) for 33 years, and I know how they work, and I know how the technology has changed during this time.
As the technology has advanced since around 1990 or so, the complexity has exploded. 95% of it is emissions-related, and the other 5% is efficiency-related. Injection pressures have climbed from under 100 bar to over 1000 bar in a quest for better atomization. You have injection metering now which is vastly more precise than it used to be, and typically multiple injection events per stroke where there used to be a single one. Injection is computer controlled, while it used to be purely mechanically controlled. You have high pressure EGR plus low pressure EGR, EGR filtering, and EGR cooling. You have exhaust particulate traps which require periodic cycles where raw fuel is purposely injected into the exhaust to burn the trapped shit out. The particulate traps are the only thing that allows you to have a catalytic converter which effectively reduces NOx. You have AdBlue injection into the exhaust to chemically convert the pollutants. You have precise measurement of the intake air flow mass in order to set the fuel map to avoid black smoke while still getting good power output. You even have intake air throttling now, where it used to run wide open at all times, only the fuel being varied.
Even the apparently simple compression ignition is much better controlled than it used to be. The glow plugs are much higher tech. In addition to merely being used for starting, there is now "afterglow" applied under defined conditions while running to promote more perfect combustion.
The old rule that diesel engines last much longer than gasoline engines is not so true any more, either. The extra raw fuel injection used to burn off the particulates causes the oil in the crankcase to be diluted with fuel that washes down the cylinder walls. That is not good for engine life. At 100-250,000 miles you are typically looking at replacing four diesel injectors at around $500 each. If they wear too much they can turn into blowtorches. Blowtorches you can't see or detect, melting holes in your expensive pistons.
If your turbocharger is one of the high-efficiency variable-vane designs, the vanes get clogged up with carbon from the exhaust. If you aren't careful to exercise it properly at appropriate intervals by romping on the throttle to burn out this carbon, your turbo will either bog down, never "opening up" properly under acceleration - or the opposite; it can stick opened wide, overboosting the engine dangerously.
No it wouldn't. You don't know much about Canadians. They are patriotic, and have pride and determination and skills. They are not the least little bit like sissy Ukrainians. The US invading Canada would make getting our asses whipped by a bunch of savages in Afghanistan look like a picnic.
Read up about the Devils' Brigade and the Canadian Army and Navy and Air Force in WW II. Especially the raid on Dieppe, the Battle of the Atlantic, covering the Invasion in the Channel, the assault on Juno Beach, fighting the path to Caen and then Falaise
Pretty sure four of these babies would be way too much thrust for any existing airliner. I'm pretty sure it's intended for the hipster gigantic two engine planes like the Boeing 777
So in other words, religionofpeas, you agree completely with khasim, but you are too muddled/confused to realize it, and prefer to criticize his crystal clear point.
What makes me cry a little is that you probably honestly believe that and you have a lot of company.
Also, just as one more example, even as of OSX 10.10 Yosemite, the shipped version of bash is prehistoric.
Oh, how clever. You've built in a dependency on the shell being bash and no other. Also, that won't affect the PATH seen by cron jobs.
This illustrates why horse-shit abortions tacked onto unixoids (launchd, systemd, SELinux, AppArmor, NetworkManager, PulseAudio, etc) get in the way and impede what people who know what they are doing (or TRYING to do) at least as much as they may satisfy some developers' wet dreams.
The U.S. military did not "lose" to the Viet Cong. It essentially wiped them out. The peace then negotiated with the North Vietnamese was then not defended by the worn out US political establishment, and the North Vietnamese regular forces staged an invasion in defiance of the agreement they signed; an invasion which the US civil leadership declined to engage.
For that matter, the US did not "manage a costly draw" against North Korea. It fully achieved its objective against North Korea quite speedily, after which the Chinese invaded and were fought to a draw though they vastly outnumbered the US forces.
Learn some history, for gosh sake. Don't make absurd claims.
Re the Taliban, you make a goddam good point, though that was a chicken-shit commitment on the part of the US.
There can be no "true" or "false" political statements, else there can be no meaningful political debate - just as there can be no "correct" or "incorrect" in politics.
There can only be true or false statement of FACTS, not opinions.
In what strange reality is being a Marxist ipso facto "engaging in criminal behavior"?
Now you're just making stuff up. The Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (National Socialist German Workers' Party) never "abandoned" the Socialist "part" or any other part of their name. They remained the NSDAP until the end. It was rather the other way round. There was briefly a minor precursor party BEFORE its foundation, called the Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (German Workers' Party), and it was from this that the NSDAP was formed.
If I may be allowed to presume, I believe what you meant to say is that the NSDAP never really "believed in" or "practiced" "true" socialism, and that is an arguable point, though on balance I am not persuaded that the claim has much meaning. Socialism is a term representing a RANGE of economic and social systems wherein the means of production is held and controlled in common for the welfare of the people; as well as subsidiary political ideologies and theories. One of the tenets of Germany under the NSDAP was indeed the provision of various social welfare measures and programs.
You could as well claim that Germany under the NSDAP never "really" embraced "true" capitalism, yet that claim is never heard, because it is meaningless and misses the point - just like the claim in regards to socialism.
What they really and truly did do was to abandon democratic processes (elections and governmental debate, basically), and adopt a cult of personality wherein Adolf Hitler was Chancellor and Leader (Fuehrer) commanding personal loyalty and obedience from all for the duration.
As an aside, it is indeed sad that in the US almost all of the proponents of socialism run like scared rabbits from the very term "socialist". It says something about their lack of backbone and their utter failure to control the loaded taint of the word, which they fear so much.
Yeah. If you completely ignore Isaac Asimov, James Blish, Ben Bova, Robert A. Heinlein, William F. Jenkins (Murray Leinster), Larry Niven, E. E. Smith, Harry Stubbs (Hal Clement), A. E. van Vogt - i.e., the (all American) masters of mostly hard SF.
Don't get me wrong. It's entirely forgivable to feel that way if you are looking only at the last 50 years, mostly the last 30 years, and you haven't been exposed to the greats.
But so exhausting.
Thinking human beings consider the MAFIAA to be the most persistent pests and stinking evil nuisances in the world and should be disconnected immediately.
How does it do with piles of snow and ice on the sidewalk? Hmmm?
A forest of tiny barrage balloons on kevlar strings.