Seems to just be a long list bragging about all the stuff they deleted. Golf clap for them. I'm so glad I won't be able to find stuff I'm trying to find, just what I always wanted in a website.
Bye bye guys don't forget to rm -Rf / on the way out.
From the Wikipedia article, a Sterling Engine can be a steam engine
Incorrect. Not even close. Stirling engines basically rely on the expansion and contraction of a gas at different temperatures, usually by moving the gas between hot and cold areas using some displacer gadget, and usually a heat regen unit it between to increase efficiency. The resulting pressure variations in the overall system, make the typical crankshaft arrangement rotate.
Steamies more or less work like a simple air engine, here's an intense pressure on one side of a piston and open to the air or to a vacuum on the other, now reverse the valves in time with the crank and off you go. Not entirely unlike a 2-cycle IC engine, although stereotypically ICs cylinders are almost all single acting and steamies are stereotypically mostly double acting (like having two pistons in one cylinder, back to back in opposite directions, sorta kinda). You can condense the steam outside the cylinder to make a vacuum but its considered extremely bad form to condense inside the cylinder, hydro-lock and kaboom are inevitable... which is why steam locomotives put on such a show with open cylinder drain valves when starting up, start up with those drains closed on a cold cylinder, the cylinder fills with condensed water, and bang it shatters open once it hydrolocks. Once the cylinder is hotter than boiling water its all good and they close the cylinder drains.
Note that you can play word games. Instead of providing heat to one side of a very low power stirling using an electric heater, you could sit it atop a hot steam radiator, making it "steam powered stirling". Or you could even pipe raw heating steam around the hot cylinder as a heat source, instead of a flame or electric heating element. Or, you could play games and an electrically heated stirling got its electricity from a steam turbine at the local nuke plant, so its technically a steam powered stirling, or more accurately a nuclear powered stirling. Possibly, instead of using air or helium in your Stirling like a normal engineer, you could use steam of various levels of superheat, so you could have 400 degree steam in the "hot" side and 300 degree steam in the "cold" side. But thats just playing word games to obfuscate the actual thermodynamics of the situation.
We've developed the world's smallest steam engine, or to be more precise the smallest Stirling engine
That's kind of a big mistake. The/. car analogy would be like "eh, we built a car, or maybe a truck, whats the difference". Diesel or gas is actually too similar to be a fair comparison. Eh, I bought me a new computer, a PC, or maybe a mac, or perhaps a thomas the tank engine alphabet learning laptop, whatever, its a new computer, or maybe etch a sketch, i donno.
The article also has the most long winded intentionally obtuse explanation of brownian motion I've ever read. I think in this modern post 911 world or whatever pompous rot, if your writing sucks more than 10 units worse than wikipedia, you should be forced to just include a quote from wiki and be done with it.
I think of it just like building a model railroad, except its a model subway. And its about half scale instead of "N" or "HO" scale.
It would be fun to have your own subway, just for the sake of having your own subway.
And you get to build an electric car, well, a electric railroad car, without having to hear an infinity of people whining about how it only has a 300 mile range per charge and is therefore useless under all conditions.
If I ever have enough rural property to build a railroad, I'm going to way outdo the live steamers have a subway instead of an aboveground railroad.
And if you've seen the "classic" movie "running man" you can pretty much guess what this is going to be. Maybe for the somewhat less severe offenders it'll be more like "survivor" challenges, or "ow my balls" from idiocracy.
Real Christian psychological warfare? That would be to use the cross for its intended purpose.
Well now, that would be more like Roman psychological warfare. Roman psychological warfare includes rolling giant ballistas up to just outside arrow range of the enemy, even if they don't work they scare the heck out of them. But I'm guessing the NK would be unimpressed with giant ballistas. Oh another roman classic was ye olde decimation punishment of rebellious legions, which the NK probably already practice anyway.
Yeah but then you're back to the old psychological problem of literally living inside a tin can. You're not going to convince the hot green skinned Orion girl from the bar to visit your tin can bachelor pad, your best bet is drink a few more synthahol beers until the Wookie starts looking good. Or something like that.
Also aluminum corrodes like heck if unpainted or not anodized. It can survive awhile, but... For a good laugh, ask a machinist to flycut some aluminum and run your hand along the smooth fresh surface, your skin will be pitch black from the aluminum itself. Filthy stuff. Which explains why all consumer aluminum is either painted or anodized. The only thing filthier than a bare unfinished aluminum surface is a freshly cut cast iron surface. But I digress. Maybe a simple wax finish could be diverted from the agricultural dome? At least you could touch the shiny tin foil walls without discoloring your hands.
One "bright" idea I just came up with is electrochemically plating everything. You're still stuck living inside a shiny tin can, but at least you can select a tarnished silver tin can, or a bright gold tin can, or a tarnished red/brown/green copper tin can, or for the extremist i-device fans, a shiny chrome plate tin can...
Chicken and the egg situation, hard to bootstrap on Mars. According to my oil relatives in Louisiana, it takes a good barge full of oil or water based drilling mud to fill a hole that deep, and all our current drilling technology on earth relies on that drilling mud to cool and clean the cutting bit which would otherwise approximately instantly jam, overheat, lose its temper/hardness and thereafter fail to cut. Not saying its impossible to make that hole by an entirely new technology, just saying the entire technological infrastructure for doing it on earth relies on an "infinite" supply of oil or water, to make the hole, to get the oil/water outta the hold, to use the new oil/water to make more holes to... repeat chicken and the egg style.
I guess you could revisit 1840 or whatever and use old fashioned "spuds" and men in spacesuits wielding shovels, but at a foot or so per day thats gonna take awhile to get the goods.
You could use it to produce plastic products, but crude oil does need a lot of refining before it can even be used as a feedstock.
Lots of refining and processing, but less than, say, vegetable refuse. Thermal depolymerization is a good although energy intensive start. Of course vegetable refuse would be under intense demand for compost... that the problem, eat, or paint.
Also, you wouldn't need paint on mars, because the atmosphere there is not as corrosive as the atmosphere on earth (it doesn't have any oxygen to speak of).
Nope you'd need paint or some kind of surface finish indoors just as much as you "need" it on earth. According to shows I've seen on HGTV (no I'm not in the closet, I just watch TV sometimes, you know?) buying a couple cans of paint raises the value of your trendy hip martian space station bachelor pad by at least 25000 pieces of gold pressed latinum. You'd have to pretty much live inside a bare metal tin can, or maybe more like bare concrete. Paint would actually become kind of an important "strategic asset" as a coat of paint indoors helps prevent valuable atmosphere from escaping thru almost microscopic cracks and such. I donno if you can even manufacture "air tight" concrete under ideal conditions on earth, much less in an early colony on mars. Maybe sinter in place an enameled ceramic coating for air tightness?
Check your math. Your own link lists 18 dead, and 529 people "in space", for some strange value of "in space". Plenty of "astronaut" job title holders don't technically get in space, or don't get a mission assigned at all.
That's not even a tenth as dangerous as being a German U boat sailor in WWII.
Loggers "score" 55 deaths per 100K workers per year on the job, as of 2009. However that's a pretty broad category, including picker crane operators whos main danger is hypothermia from sitting around all day, the truck loader guys who mainly have to worry about getting run over; for the guys actually waving chainsaws in the air on a regular basis, the number is about 10 times higher.
I'd say that further research indicates I was wrong, overall an astronaut is "about" as likely to die on the job as a logger. However, note there are a couple orders of magnitude more wounds and permanent non-fatal maiming accidents that deaths in logging, and astronauts pretty much either don't get a scratch or they die, so assuming the only danger is death, and only death, skews the results quite a bit. If your criteria for dangerous is "any permanent severe career limiting damage" then I believe I was originally correct, logging is way more dangerous.
About a third of Mt Everest climbers die enroute. Now that, is dangerous.
They've noted that in a large proportion of areas on Earth where there is liquid water there isn't necessarily life,
Where are you finding this biologically empty, spectrographically pure water on earth? Supposedly a billion humans don't have access to safe drinking water, so there appears to be a demand for some of this stuff... I'm guessing they're talking about fossil aquifers miles below the surface?
I know you were not being serious, but if they found oil it wouldn't be of any practical value since mars lacks an oxygen atmosphere.
It would be of immense practical value as a reservoir of organic chems.
Heres a weird example to think about. If we colonize mars, nothing will be painted. All plain bare metal. Why? No organic compounds and solvents to spare to make paint, and filtering paint solvents out in the air handlers is a PITA anyway. No problemo you say, we'll just power coat everything, powder coat is made out of plastic which is made out of... Err, we'll make everything interior out of aluminum and anodize it, you just anodize aluminum and dip it in hyperconcentrated organic dyes, and those dyes are made out of... Hmm. All those sci-fi sets with great paint jobs are just not gonna happen, are they?
The best artsy craftsy idea I can come up with is ceramic enamel jobs done with solar powered rock grinders and solar powered kilns. But again, put up a solar powered artsy kiln and someone is gonna whine that it should be PV cells instead of a kiln at the focus...
Technically you could turn your olive oil into paint given a huge energy intensive chemical plant, but wouldn't you rather... eat? I'd rather spend the kilowatt hours and Kg of carbon on a nice beef steak than a nice paint job. Hmm.
Technically ballistic. Also we are in range. I'm surprised no one has launched an empty one or a dud (thinking optimistically) at the continental USA just for the LULZ. Bonus points if you launch from a mobile launcher parked right outside one of our empire outposts... Its not like we're going to respond by nuking our own guys in the green zone...
Probably we're busy writing patriot act II and once we're done, we'll launch it ourselves, at ourselves, and then propose the new act which suspiciously just had the ink dry on it before the "attack". I'd look to a couple months before elections, if it appears Obama would lose. Thats probably the most effective scheduling. Remind me not to visit CA in September of 2012.
Thats pretty wimpy psychological warfare, as decorating pine trees in the living room and shopping and fighting people on black friday and singing about red nosed reindeer is hard core capitalist worship, its not christian at all. I don't even know how you visually "do" christian christmas worship other than something like a 200 foot tall "nativity scene" which unfortunately makes no sense to someone not already versed in christian theology (my son, when he was very little, called it "the farmers", too little to know any better, yet +1 insightful as it was, after all, in a barn scene...)
Now real christian psychological warfare would be a larger than life Easter scene of the last supper with the table unbiblically piled with tons and tons of yummy food... most of the NK either are currently starving or recently were starving so a big food display is going to rile them all up to no end. Maybe they do that? Waving a bunch of food in front of a starving man with a gun is probably unwise, maybe its going too far?
I know it sounds insane, because it was, but since it was a stupid idea, I'm sure its being vigorously enforced to this day. Can anyone surprise me with a more modern anecdote? Perhaps with a different slightly newer TI model. But I guarantee it will be enforced that every single device on the desk will be identical, whatever it ends up being.
Didn't we always hear that kids _must_ be raised on Windows so they can function properly in the workplace? Reminds me that the number of people claiming this seems to has gone down, probably because the hordes of school leavers that are unemployable now because they learned Windows XP or Windows Vista instead of Windows 7.
Yeah my mastery of "Bank Street Writer" has been vital on the job. That and knowing how to optimize autoexec.bat and config.sys.
A couple years back I was reminiscing about "Print Shop" and wondering why there's no app for that, are not banners and signs still "cool", then I realized its been consumed by word processors and temporary printer driver configurations... an example where learning old apps actually holds you back in the modern world.
an ebook would have been cheaper and better for their eyes, kids have a harder time staring at displays all day long
LOL hilarious. Yeah kids hate video games and they hate watching TV and the older ones really hate spending hours on that facebook thing. Just can't get them to look at a screen...
I have multiple teachers in my family and I watch the news. The background is little johnny comes to school with a black eye on occasion and no one cares when you report it, doesn't really matter why. Little johnny breaks the $100 whatever (window, computer keyboard, mouse, textbook, lab equipment, whatever). Well its gonna be hard to look him in his black eye tomorrow, so the written report will be the teacher somehow broke it, even if she tells the kid its going on his permanent record, the actual written report which the kid never sees is going to be a bit different. This lead to comical written reports, "explain why did you put elmers glue in the keyboard again, ms art teacher?". Theres a lot of cover up going on. Then too there's a bit of fairness. Little johnny who you know gets beaten at home gets a cover up... why punish little sally for dropping the ipad just because you think she isn't being beaten? Are you sure? If she shows up dead tomorrow how will you live with yourself? Should "good" parents have to pay replacement money as a punishment for being "good"? If you determine it was an honest accident and "teachable moment" or whatever about responsibility, you just put it on your account instead of the kids account and move on.
All you're really proven is that about 90% of the time, damage is just an honest mistake / accident. Teachers can and do nail the kid to the wall if its blatant like smashing the device over another kids head, or intentional destruction, or hitting the teacher with it, or some kind of 3-strikes and you're out personal policy, but that kind of stuff is kinda rare.
I think we've finally seen a more reasonable price point out of the Kindle ($80) would be low enough that a large portion of the parental population wouldn't murder their child after just one being destroyed.
You're too optimistic. I have multiple teachers in my family and I watch the news and kids get beaten all the time for losing less money for cheaper textbooks and library books and hats and mittens and such. Think about it, $80 is a lot of crack or malt liquor, the kid just lost your high money, you've got a fist and you remember the pains of going thru withdrawal last time, in some inferior subcultures that kid is in serious physical danger...
Teachers love to teach the device not the concept.
I grew up in an era where you had to own THE TI-81 in school, and we were taught at the detail level of individual button press solely to use that calculator. not any other brand. not even any other model. Simply not allowed. In fact we were tested on exactly which keys on a TI-81 were required to graph a certain segment of a sine wave, for example.
I know it sounds insane, because it was, but since it was a stupid idea, I'm sure its being vigorously enforced to this day. Can anyone surprise me with a more modern anecdote? Perhaps with a different slightly newer TI model. But I guarantee it will be enforced that every single device on the desk will be identical, whatever it ends up being.
I am 100% certain that the math teacher will find some math related app and 100% of the kids will be required to use that exact app. I don't think the teacher is going to be amused at not only having to find a useful free app (good luck) but it has to run perfectly "keystroke" identical on ios, all android devices, and who knows what else (webos? somebody's laptop?)
...and they could have just have easily been using Netbooks or Laptops for this.
Perversely, the walled garden means management cant intentionally add spyware to them as easily as a PC. Laptops take 5+ minutes to boot and load all the inventory monitor, virus scanner and its updates, OS updates, keyloggers both management approved and downloaded accidentally off the internet, and the battery is dead by the end of the first class... then what?
If you go laptop, you need a AC power outlet at each desk, which is going to be expensive to wire, and the kids are going to stick wires in there to intentionally electrocute each other.
If you go tablet, the kid needs to carry... the tablet. Charge it at night, it'll run all day. If you forget, the old fashioned dunce chair in the corner becomes "the charger chair" to sit next to the teacher's charger and wall outlet. If you go laptop, the kid needs to carry the laptop, the power adapter which will get lost or forgotten, the power cable from outlet to adapter which will get lost, the inevitable ipod/phone USB charger cable (lets face it, its gonna happen) and probably an old fashioned ethernet cable for locations/times when wifi is not available, and probably a flash drive or two to trade music files with friends, and add a random USB cable or two to hook up to printers/scanners/etc that are not on the LAN (Printer on the lan at work is convenient, on the lan at school means the local 2600 readers are going to anonymously print goatse out on the principals office printer, therefore no printers allowed on the lan at school). The laptop PLUS accessories is going to be bulkier and heavier than all but the stoutest Calc or Physics books, negating most of the purpose.
Yes, I've read textbooks on a regular old fashioned desktop. I suppose I could on a laptop or netbook. It just makes more sense to use a tablet.
To see how bad things can get when you don't have them, try a vanilla Emacs. Emacs will by default scroll through text not per line and not per page, but per half-page, this makes it extremely easy to lose track in a document, as you have no real indication for how far it has scrolled. Proper smooth scrolling can easily fix that,
Isn't it much simpler, easier for the user, more intuitive, to simply "go one page down" when you press "page down"?
Slow animations would help if there was an emacs bug where it scrolled down a completely random number of lines each time.
However, that class of bug is best fixed at the cause rather than the effect stage. The bug is Page down should be page down, not "down a random number of lines".
I agree with you 100% that user interactivity and response time is critical and, of course, often ignored.
The most important effect to remember is that all "UI improvements" supposedly are the result of spending time/money/effort and seem to have no other justification, other than maybe a paid study proving that spending money is great. In ye olden days we blew lots of money to upgrade from 2400 baud RS-232 monitors and stat muxes to get nearly instant updates, low latency and speed was the ultimate (expensive) cure all... Now spending lots of money time and effort on making page changes ultra slow is supposedly the new ideal. I think not.
I think he made it up. I am not making up (but could be completely wrong) that coincidentally the difficulty of preventing decoherence scales exponentially. And that is the primary limiter to # of qubits and performance, more or less correct?
In the very long run, I think quantum computing is going to be very much like DSP, in that the "hard work" is handling the analog signals to get "the problem" in and out. Inside ye olde DSP processor, a couple gnomes magically make it work, and superficially seem to be the hard part, at least partially correctly as some of the math is hideous. But the real problem is the unavoidable analog/RF work.
Kind of like how supercomputing is defined as taking a CPU bound process and making it an IO bound process, more or less.
Slashdot Mirror
Who cares about deletionists? They're the last thing we need.
http://sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/notes_on_content
Seems to just be a long list bragging about all the stuff they deleted. Golf clap for them. I'm so glad I won't be able to find stuff I'm trying to find, just what I always wanted in a website.
Bye bye guys don't forget to rm -Rf / on the way out.
From the Wikipedia article, a Sterling Engine can be a steam engine
Incorrect. Not even close. Stirling engines basically rely on the expansion and contraction of a gas at different temperatures, usually by moving the gas between hot and cold areas using some displacer gadget, and usually a heat regen unit it between to increase efficiency. The resulting pressure variations in the overall system, make the typical crankshaft arrangement rotate.
Steamies more or less work like a simple air engine, here's an intense pressure on one side of a piston and open to the air or to a vacuum on the other, now reverse the valves in time with the crank and off you go. Not entirely unlike a 2-cycle IC engine, although stereotypically ICs cylinders are almost all single acting and steamies are stereotypically mostly double acting (like having two pistons in one cylinder, back to back in opposite directions, sorta kinda). You can condense the steam outside the cylinder to make a vacuum but its considered extremely bad form to condense inside the cylinder, hydro-lock and kaboom are inevitable... which is why steam locomotives put on such a show with open cylinder drain valves when starting up, start up with those drains closed on a cold cylinder, the cylinder fills with condensed water, and bang it shatters open once it hydrolocks. Once the cylinder is hotter than boiling water its all good and they close the cylinder drains.
Note that you can play word games. Instead of providing heat to one side of a very low power stirling using an electric heater, you could sit it atop a hot steam radiator, making it "steam powered stirling". Or you could even pipe raw heating steam around the hot cylinder as a heat source, instead of a flame or electric heating element. Or, you could play games and an electrically heated stirling got its electricity from a steam turbine at the local nuke plant, so its technically a steam powered stirling, or more accurately a nuclear powered stirling. Possibly, instead of using air or helium in your Stirling like a normal engineer, you could use steam of various levels of superheat, so you could have 400 degree steam in the "hot" side and 300 degree steam in the "cold" side. But thats just playing word games to obfuscate the actual thermodynamics of the situation.
Obviously no engineers involved in this job
We've developed the world's smallest steam engine, or to be more precise the smallest Stirling engine
That's kind of a big mistake. The /. car analogy would be like "eh, we built a car, or maybe a truck, whats the difference". Diesel or gas is actually too similar to be a fair comparison. Eh, I bought me a new computer, a PC, or maybe a mac, or perhaps a thomas the tank engine alphabet learning laptop, whatever, its a new computer, or maybe etch a sketch, i donno.
The article also has the most long winded intentionally obtuse explanation of brownian motion I've ever read. I think in this modern post 911 world or whatever pompous rot, if your writing sucks more than 10 units worse than wikipedia, you should be forced to just include a quote from wiki and be done with it.
This kind of thing speaks to the geek in me.
I think of it just like building a model railroad, except its a model subway. And its about half scale instead of "N" or "HO" scale.
It would be fun to have your own subway, just for the sake of having your own subway.
And you get to build an electric car, well, a electric railroad car, without having to hear an infinity of people whining about how it only has a 300 mile range per charge and is therefore useless under all conditions.
If I ever have enough rural property to build a railroad, I'm going to way outdo the live steamers have a subway instead of an aboveground railroad.
to determine their punishment
And if you've seen the "classic" movie "running man" you can pretty much guess what this is going to be. Maybe for the somewhat less severe offenders it'll be more like "survivor" challenges, or "ow my balls" from idiocracy.
With only five competetitors, and all of them producing dreck, there's no need to produce anything BUT dreck.
You make it sound as bad as domestic car companies. Or banks. Or fast food "restaurants". Hmm. I think we're on to a pattern here...
Real Christian psychological warfare? That would be to use the cross for its intended purpose.
Well now, that would be more like Roman psychological warfare. Roman psychological warfare includes rolling giant ballistas up to just outside arrow range of the enemy, even if they don't work they scare the heck out of them. But I'm guessing the NK would be unimpressed with giant ballistas. Oh another roman classic was ye olde decimation punishment of rebellious legions, which the NK probably already practice anyway.
Yeah but then you're back to the old psychological problem of literally living inside a tin can. You're not going to convince the hot green skinned Orion girl from the bar to visit your tin can bachelor pad, your best bet is drink a few more synthahol beers until the Wookie starts looking good. Or something like that.
Also aluminum corrodes like heck if unpainted or not anodized. It can survive awhile, but... For a good laugh, ask a machinist to flycut some aluminum and run your hand along the smooth fresh surface, your skin will be pitch black from the aluminum itself. Filthy stuff. Which explains why all consumer aluminum is either painted or anodized. The only thing filthier than a bare unfinished aluminum surface is a freshly cut cast iron surface. But I digress. Maybe a simple wax finish could be diverted from the agricultural dome? At least you could touch the shiny tin foil walls without discoloring your hands.
One "bright" idea I just came up with is electrochemically plating everything. You're still stuck living inside a shiny tin can, but at least you can select a tarnished silver tin can, or a bright gold tin can, or a tarnished red/brown/green copper tin can, or for the extremist i-device fans, a shiny chrome plate tin can...
Chicken and the egg situation, hard to bootstrap on Mars. According to my oil relatives in Louisiana, it takes a good barge full of oil or water based drilling mud to fill a hole that deep, and all our current drilling technology on earth relies on that drilling mud to cool and clean the cutting bit which would otherwise approximately instantly jam, overheat, lose its temper/hardness and thereafter fail to cut. Not saying its impossible to make that hole by an entirely new technology, just saying the entire technological infrastructure for doing it on earth relies on an "infinite" supply of oil or water, to make the hole, to get the oil/water outta the hold, to use the new oil/water to make more holes to ... repeat chicken and the egg style.
I guess you could revisit 1840 or whatever and use old fashioned "spuds" and men in spacesuits wielding shovels, but at a foot or so per day thats gonna take awhile to get the goods.
You could use it to produce plastic products, but crude oil does need a lot of refining before it can even be used as a feedstock.
Lots of refining and processing, but less than, say, vegetable refuse. Thermal depolymerization is a good although energy intensive start. Of course vegetable refuse would be under intense demand for compost... that the problem, eat, or paint.
Also, you wouldn't need paint on mars, because the atmosphere there is not as corrosive as the atmosphere on earth (it doesn't have any oxygen to speak of).
Nope you'd need paint or some kind of surface finish indoors just as much as you "need" it on earth. According to shows I've seen on HGTV (no I'm not in the closet, I just watch TV sometimes, you know?) buying a couple cans of paint raises the value of your trendy hip martian space station bachelor pad by at least 25000 pieces of gold pressed latinum. You'd have to pretty much live inside a bare metal tin can, or maybe more like bare concrete. Paint would actually become kind of an important "strategic asset" as a coat of paint indoors helps prevent valuable atmosphere from escaping thru almost microscopic cracks and such. I donno if you can even manufacture "air tight" concrete under ideal conditions on earth, much less in an early colony on mars. Maybe sinter in place an enameled ceramic coating for air tightness?
Check your math. Your own link lists 18 dead, and 529 people "in space", for some strange value of "in space". Plenty of "astronaut" job title holders don't technically get in space, or don't get a mission assigned at all.
That's not even a tenth as dangerous as being a German U boat sailor in WWII.
Loggers "score" 55 deaths per 100K workers per year on the job, as of 2009. However that's a pretty broad category, including picker crane operators whos main danger is hypothermia from sitting around all day, the truck loader guys who mainly have to worry about getting run over; for the guys actually waving chainsaws in the air on a regular basis, the number is about 10 times higher.
I'd say that further research indicates I was wrong, overall an astronaut is "about" as likely to die on the job as a logger. However, note there are a couple orders of magnitude more wounds and permanent non-fatal maiming accidents that deaths in logging, and astronauts pretty much either don't get a scratch or they die, so assuming the only danger is death, and only death, skews the results quite a bit. If your criteria for dangerous is "any permanent severe career limiting damage" then I believe I was originally correct, logging is way more dangerous.
About a third of Mt Everest climbers die enroute. Now that, is dangerous.
They've noted that in a large proportion of areas on Earth where there is liquid water there isn't necessarily life,
Where are you finding this biologically empty, spectrographically pure water on earth? Supposedly a billion humans don't have access to safe drinking water, so there appears to be a demand for some of this stuff... I'm guessing they're talking about fossil aquifers miles below the surface?
I know you were not being serious, but if they found oil it wouldn't be of any practical value since mars lacks an oxygen atmosphere.
It would be of immense practical value as a reservoir of organic chems.
Heres a weird example to think about. If we colonize mars, nothing will be painted. All plain bare metal. Why? No organic compounds and solvents to spare to make paint, and filtering paint solvents out in the air handlers is a PITA anyway. No problemo you say, we'll just power coat everything, powder coat is made out of plastic which is made out of ... Err, we'll make everything interior out of aluminum and anodize it, you just anodize aluminum and dip it in hyperconcentrated organic dyes, and those dyes are made out of ... Hmm. All those sci-fi sets with great paint jobs are just not gonna happen, are they?
The best artsy craftsy idea I can come up with is ceramic enamel jobs done with solar powered rock grinders and solar powered kilns. But again, put up a solar powered artsy kiln and someone is gonna whine that it should be PV cells instead of a kiln at the focus...
Technically you could turn your olive oil into paint given a huge energy intensive chemical plant, but wouldn't you rather ... eat? I'd rather spend the kilowatt hours and Kg of carbon on a nice beef steak than a nice paint job. Hmm.
They do lots of testing. However, "astronaut" is still a very dangerous profession.
Oh please. Your odds of a nice long healthy gray hair retirement are orders of magnitude better for an astronaut than for a logger or a farm hand.
cruise missiles that NK has developed...
Technically ballistic. Also we are in range. I'm surprised no one has launched an empty one or a dud (thinking optimistically) at the continental USA just for the LULZ. Bonus points if you launch from a mobile launcher parked right outside one of our empire outposts... Its not like we're going to respond by nuking our own guys in the green zone...
Probably we're busy writing patriot act II and once we're done, we'll launch it ourselves, at ourselves, and then propose the new act which suspiciously just had the ink dry on it before the "attack". I'd look to a couple months before elections, if it appears Obama would lose. Thats probably the most effective scheduling. Remind me not to visit CA in September of 2012.
Thats pretty wimpy psychological warfare, as decorating pine trees in the living room and shopping and fighting people on black friday and singing about red nosed reindeer is hard core capitalist worship, its not christian at all. I don't even know how you visually "do" christian christmas worship other than something like a 200 foot tall "nativity scene" which unfortunately makes no sense to someone not already versed in christian theology (my son, when he was very little, called it "the farmers", too little to know any better, yet +1 insightful as it was, after all, in a barn scene...)
Now real christian psychological warfare would be a larger than life Easter scene of the last supper with the table unbiblically piled with tons and tons of yummy food... most of the NK either are currently starving or recently were starving so a big food display is going to rile them all up to no end. Maybe they do that? Waving a bunch of food in front of a starving man with a gun is probably unwise, maybe its going too far?
I know it sounds insane, because it was, but since it was a stupid idea, I'm sure its being vigorously enforced to this day. Can anyone surprise me with a more modern anecdote? Perhaps with a different slightly newer TI model. But I guarantee it will be enforced that every single device on the desk will be identical, whatever it ends up being.
Didn't we always hear that kids _must_ be raised on Windows so they can function properly in the workplace? Reminds me that the number of people claiming this seems to has gone down, probably because the hordes of school leavers that are unemployable now because they learned Windows XP or Windows Vista instead of Windows 7.
Yeah my mastery of "Bank Street Writer" has been vital on the job. That and knowing how to optimize autoexec.bat and config.sys.
A couple years back I was reminiscing about "Print Shop" and wondering why there's no app for that, are not banners and signs still "cool", then I realized its been consumed by word processors and temporary printer driver configurations... an example where learning old apps actually holds you back in the modern world.
an ebook would have been cheaper and better for their eyes, kids have a harder time staring at displays all day long
LOL hilarious. Yeah kids hate video games and they hate watching TV and the older ones really hate spending hours on that facebook thing. Just can't get them to look at a screen...
I have multiple teachers in my family and I watch the news. The background is little johnny comes to school with a black eye on occasion and no one cares when you report it, doesn't really matter why. Little johnny breaks the $100 whatever (window, computer keyboard, mouse, textbook, lab equipment, whatever). Well its gonna be hard to look him in his black eye tomorrow, so the written report will be the teacher somehow broke it, even if she tells the kid its going on his permanent record, the actual written report which the kid never sees is going to be a bit different. This lead to comical written reports, "explain why did you put elmers glue in the keyboard again, ms art teacher?". Theres a lot of cover up going on. Then too there's a bit of fairness. Little johnny who you know gets beaten at home gets a cover up... why punish little sally for dropping the ipad just because you think she isn't being beaten? Are you sure? If she shows up dead tomorrow how will you live with yourself? Should "good" parents have to pay replacement money as a punishment for being "good"? If you determine it was an honest accident and "teachable moment" or whatever about responsibility, you just put it on your account instead of the kids account and move on.
All you're really proven is that about 90% of the time, damage is just an honest mistake / accident. Teachers can and do nail the kid to the wall if its blatant like smashing the device over another kids head, or intentional destruction, or hitting the teacher with it, or some kind of 3-strikes and you're out personal policy, but that kind of stuff is kinda rare.
I think we've finally seen a more reasonable price point out of the Kindle ($80) would be low enough that a large portion of the parental population wouldn't murder their child after just one being destroyed.
You're too optimistic. I have multiple teachers in my family and I watch the news and kids get beaten all the time for losing less money for cheaper textbooks and library books and hats and mittens and such. Think about it, $80 is a lot of crack or malt liquor, the kid just lost your high money, you've got a fist and you remember the pains of going thru withdrawal last time, in some inferior subcultures that kid is in serious physical danger...
Teachers love to teach the device not the concept.
I grew up in an era where you had to own THE TI-81 in school, and we were taught at the detail level of individual button press solely to use that calculator. not any other brand. not even any other model. Simply not allowed. In fact we were tested on exactly which keys on a TI-81 were required to graph a certain segment of a sine wave, for example.
I know it sounds insane, because it was, but since it was a stupid idea, I'm sure its being vigorously enforced to this day. Can anyone surprise me with a more modern anecdote? Perhaps with a different slightly newer TI model. But I guarantee it will be enforced that every single device on the desk will be identical, whatever it ends up being.
I am 100% certain that the math teacher will find some math related app and 100% of the kids will be required to use that exact app. I don't think the teacher is going to be amused at not only having to find a useful free app (good luck) but it has to run perfectly "keystroke" identical on ios, all android devices, and who knows what else (webos? somebody's laptop?)
...and they could have just have easily been using Netbooks or Laptops for this.
Perversely, the walled garden means management cant intentionally add spyware to them as easily as a PC. Laptops take 5+ minutes to boot and load all the inventory monitor, virus scanner and its updates, OS updates, keyloggers both management approved and downloaded accidentally off the internet, and the battery is dead by the end of the first class... then what?
If you go laptop, you need a AC power outlet at each desk, which is going to be expensive to wire, and the kids are going to stick wires in there to intentionally electrocute each other.
If you go tablet, the kid needs to carry... the tablet. Charge it at night, it'll run all day. If you forget, the old fashioned dunce chair in the corner becomes "the charger chair" to sit next to the teacher's charger and wall outlet. If you go laptop, the kid needs to carry the laptop, the power adapter which will get lost or forgotten, the power cable from outlet to adapter which will get lost, the inevitable ipod/phone USB charger cable (lets face it, its gonna happen) and probably an old fashioned ethernet cable for locations/times when wifi is not available, and probably a flash drive or two to trade music files with friends, and add a random USB cable or two to hook up to printers/scanners/etc that are not on the LAN (Printer on the lan at work is convenient, on the lan at school means the local 2600 readers are going to anonymously print goatse out on the principals office printer, therefore no printers allowed on the lan at school). The laptop PLUS accessories is going to be bulkier and heavier than all but the stoutest Calc or Physics books, negating most of the purpose.
Yes, I've read textbooks on a regular old fashioned desktop. I suppose I could on a laptop or netbook. It just makes more sense to use a tablet.
Anybody else want to imply hot design is just a cycle of fads?
Programmers... the women's fashion designers of the future
To see how bad things can get when you don't have them, try a vanilla Emacs. Emacs will by default scroll through text not per line and not per page, but per half-page, this makes it extremely easy to lose track in a document, as you have no real indication for how far it has scrolled. Proper smooth scrolling can easily fix that,
Isn't it much simpler, easier for the user, more intuitive, to simply "go one page down" when you press "page down"?
Slow animations would help if there was an emacs bug where it scrolled down a completely random number of lines each time.
However, that class of bug is best fixed at the cause rather than the effect stage. The bug is Page down should be page down, not "down a random number of lines".
I agree with you 100% that user interactivity and response time is critical and, of course, often ignored.
The most important effect to remember is that all "UI improvements" supposedly are the result of spending time/money/effort and seem to have no other justification, other than maybe a paid study proving that spending money is great. In ye olden days we blew lots of money to upgrade from 2400 baud RS-232 monitors and stat muxes to get nearly instant updates, low latency and speed was the ultimate (expensive) cure all... Now spending lots of money time and effort on making page changes ultra slow is supposedly the new ideal. I think not.
I think he made it up. I am not making up (but could be completely wrong) that coincidentally the difficulty of preventing decoherence scales exponentially. And that is the primary limiter to # of qubits and performance, more or less correct?
In the very long run, I think quantum computing is going to be very much like DSP, in that the "hard work" is handling the analog signals to get "the problem" in and out. Inside ye olde DSP processor, a couple gnomes magically make it work, and superficially seem to be the hard part, at least partially correctly as some of the math is hideous. But the real problem is the unavoidable analog/RF work.
Kind of like how supercomputing is defined as taking a CPU bound process and making it an IO bound process, more or less.