A billion new/saved people, not clearing one hectare, results in a billion hectares saved.
My distant rural ancestors thought little of clearing 40 acres by hand and growing a family. Figure, 10 acres per human being.
Figure in a 2.5 acres per hectare conversion, my ancestors typically did clear about 4 times as much forest per person as modern rural peasants did not need to clear due to better crop yields.
Further, many people in our world may not worship Darwin but they worship science and have science as their object of faith.
.jpg or it didn't happen... I've never even heard of anyone participating in the following "science faith" activities:
1) Interpretive dance in the full moon-light at the solstice in hope that my copy of "science news" magazine will be delivered.
2) Sacrificed a goat or chicken before organic chemisty lab in hopes of my grignard reagent not having moisture contamination.
3) Prayed to the "pharmo-industrial complex" to cure an illness. (their only god is money, anyway)
4) Sing hymns of praise for the AAVSO website having an easily downloadable light curve for a star I'm interested in.
Now there are borderline activites, that I think still do not qualify based on intent.
1) Meditation before a test, doesn't count because its purely for anti-anxiety effects not supernatural communion.
2) Worshiping the ground the professor walks on doesn't count, although it is treating him as a diety, it is done with the full knowledge he is merely a powerful human.
3) Reading from scientific "holy books", or even worse, reading the literal word of a powerpoint presentation, is not worshiping the book or its author or even the content, but is merely a (poor) teaching technique. Although people whom read powerpoint presentations to their audience should be burned at the stake, but not for religious reasons.
I find that figure a little difficult to believe, but I don't know that much about agriculture or what kind of impact deforestation for agriculture has.
I suspect you've never chopped down a tree or pulled a stump? Logging is hard work with western mechanization, but in third world conditions, doing it by hand must be unbelievably difficult.
For some background, check out the wikipedia link "In Pakistan, wheat yields nearly doubled, from 4.6 million tons in 1965 to 7.3 million tons in 1970"
If you want to double your production (and who doesn't?) its pretty hard to justify the immense effort of clearing land, when you can simply import genetically superior seeds...
Radar guided cruise control and braking will save a lot of lives and a lot of money by almost eliminating rear end collisions.
How it will detect ice, snow, standing water/hydroplaning, and sand/gravel on the road is a mystery. Road conditions account for all my past close calls, especially unknown / unpredictable conditions. I know there are people whom don't pay attention to their driving, but I'm guessing that is an extremely small fraction of the overall driving population... I would suspect it'll save approximately zero lives and cause a net loss of money.
Genetic and antigenic analyses of influenza A (H1N1) viruses, 1986-1991
Xu Xiyana, Elisabet P. Rocha, Helen L. Regenery, Alan P. Kendal, and Nancy J. Cox
Influenza Branch, Division of Viral and Rickettsial Diseases, National Center for Infectious Diseases, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Atlanta, GA, USA
"(4) Although there has been little detectable antigenic variability, the HA genes of human epidemic influenza A (H1N1) viruses have continued to evolve at an evolutionary rate similar to that for the H1N1 and H3N2 viruses analyzed previously."
So, nothing interesting about H1N1's mutation rate in the recent past... I can find plenty of fear mongering of "what if it mutates, it'll destroy us all", of course so could a mutation of any virus...
Yeah, and have fun copying a ~600 page book by hand (you can't exactly cut and manually feed in the pages on a library book), especially with most libraries costing tons of money per copy.
That's why you go to the copy shop.
Based on extensive (legal) book photocopying experience, it is very hard to take more than 6 seconds per page, even including coffee breaks, bathroom breaks, and gossip time. At that rate, its going to take 3600 seconds to photocopy a 600 page book. Which is a mere single hour. To save perhaps $100. Or, in other words $100/hr, which is pretty respectable pay rate for a college student, even for illegal activities. Note that you can make multiple copies for very little extra time, most time is spent flipping pages.
Seriously people, what do we have to do to legally destroy these people and their businesses? LEGALLY DESTROY. I kinda like the sound of that...
I think this stupid DRM idea might help with your goal.
As the summary states: anyone who can view your content can also "steal" it irrevocably
So, I guess download their legal incorporation papers, tax papers, payroll records, etc, from bittorrent or whatever, look at them (thus stealing them) and then delete them so no one has them anymore. All done!
Because I had an expert in RF build my prototype and those were his measurements.
Most of the posts are about "MBA business plan" type stuff, I'll try to go another direction. You need to get many hours of engineer time via consultation or hire, a RF EE and a machine designer or line designer ME or industrial engineer.
Ah, so a prototype was built and it worked. That is only about 1/10 of the EEs job. Actually that sounds like something an EE would delegate to a tech. Now you need an RF guy whom can deal with UL listing, modern FCC regulation (if he says "type acceptance", find another guy because that is obsolete), EMC compatibility, and environmental issues (environment as in waterproof encapsulation and corrosion prevention, not environment as in save the whales). I assume you're going FCC Part 15? Or FCC Part 18? What other FCC Part do you intend to list under? Of course if you're going to sell in China they are not so interested in USA FCC rules as they are in their own rules. Which lab are you working w/ for an FCC acceptable "declaration of conformity"? Did you do an error analysis to figure out the required tolerance for each component and how out of tolerance components affect the overall device performance (and fcc rule conformity?) (like, if C5 is 5% low while R65 is 2% high, will it catch fire or merely interfere with airport radars?) Do you have your production line testing gear set up to verify how the devices meet their tolerances? Begun thinking about ISO9000 paperwork yet?
As for the industrial / mechanical engineers job, you need to figure out who the competition sells to, and how you'll sell it as a better product. Frankly, a millimeter is not terribly accurate for a contact microswitch, of course your device is non-contact, and possibly (possibly!) more reliable, or at least probably has fewer moving parts than a microswitch. Then again, IR beams are non-contact too. On the other hand, a machine vision rig is pretty accurate and expensive and can do stuff an IR beam system never could do, and prices are dropping. So you've got a sort of narrow window to market in, between the $2 microswitch and the $300 webcam plus single board computer, and its gotta be something the IR beam interrupters can't do. That market isn't too big, probably because no off the shelf device exists to work in it, or maybe because no one needs it, but either way, no one currently designs machinery that would need it. So, you need some kind of machine designer whom has designed things who can explain how they could have used your sensor device in a past assembly line or whatever, and could intelligently describe what your data sheets need for him to use your device, what the page in the "mouser inc." catalog needs to look like, etc.
The ENIAC is an amusing electrical design in that its an electronic implementation of each part of an adding machines wheels, each digit of the ALU has ten states from 0 to 9 in a ring counter arrangement, its like an EE was given a ME's mechanical geared adding machine and told, make one of these out of vacuum tubes. Maybe some EE got a full set of mechanical adding machine blueprints and was told that he would make an electrical schematic of a circuit to emulate each part. Essentially, the "first electronic computer" or whatever ENIAC really is, was just an emulator. The much more modern 1620 did all its internal stuff in BCD-binary but the "user interface" machine language (and assembly language), so to speak, was pure decimal, although doing addition in binary was considered too complicated so it used memory tables to look up addition results. IBM's 1401 was even stranger, I don't really know what to say about it at this early hour of the day, but it was vaguely decimal, sort of.
The benefit of a wide ranging C.S. education including lots of history is that despite marketing's best efforts to the contrary, nothing is really new, thus you get lots of insight about "new" or "unusual" ideas, such as a "decimal computer".
For a good time, read wikipedias entries on trinary and negative bases
OK, let me get this straight --- your reasoning is basically "I was taught some skills in school that are now obsolete, therefore touch-typing is obsolete"?
No, the purpose of a modern American school, at least in part, is to teach obsolete middle class skills as rich peoples hobbies, so a school teaching touch typing would be a strong indicator that most computer usage is or soon will be obsolete.
The educational theory is for the middle class, based on worship of the upper class lifestyle, while confusing cause and effect. A quick summary of the theory would be that only rich people can afford to learn "useless" skills for fun, therefore if you learn useless skills, you'll become rich.
Example of typical middle class education primary revolving around obsolete skills that are only useful for rich people's hobbies, thus if you have the time to waste to learn them, you must be rich, aspirational, etc:
1) Music classes - Musician used to be a middle class lifestyle, before the recording cartel/industry/complex took it over. Now only rich people can afford to focus on music.
2) Art classes - See all that "decorative americana junk" at the walmart, craft store, etc, made in China, to decorate our walls? Middle class people in the USA used to make "decorative artistic americana junk" and sell it to each other but now its all imported from China.
3) Wood shop classes - Furniture carpenter used to be a middle class american job, before it went to China and/or Amish.
4) The whole concept of the steam whistle coordinating the middle class worker at the factory assembly line. All that has gone to China except for their kids responding to bells/buzzers at school.
5) Political Science / Government used to be something middle class folks needed to know, but now the TV tells them all they need to know about politics, or at least the last TV commercial they saw is the only thing that affects them. The only reason for middle class folks to learn about it is to participate (if you are in the oligarchy and have a last name like Kennedy or Bush or Clinton) or as an idle hobby in your spare time.
I don't get why we're not planning to dock the shuttles to the ISS and leave them up there, too, with their useful engines, robotic arms, and so forth.
Duct taping the remaining shuttles to the ISS, arkansas style up on concrete blocks, has the following problems:
1) There's not enough space on the truss to leave them bolted on and still have space for resupply missions to dock.
2) They will rapidly permanently break down and become more or less useless. Either leave the fuel cells running, in which case they run out of H2 in about a month with no was in space to refuel and no in-orbit liquid H2 transport available (at least they "could" refill the O2 tanks, in theory), or shut them off and let the electrolyte and water exhaust freeze in place, cracking the lines. When the freon leaks out of the coolant system, no way to refill... Most of the onboard systems are like that, limited on-orbit lifetime and no on-orbit maintainability, at all.
3) So, they're deadweight, whats the loss? Well, they need to boost the station so it doesn't reenter, and boosts are expensive. Plus it adds surface area to speed reentry so you need MORE reboosts but just BIGGER reboosts.
Why NASA is completely dug in on Ares is mind boggling.
Also, the contractors won't really be affected: ATK would still make the SRBs
Think about how those two quotes, apparently intended to be in opposition to each other, yet strangely similar.
Senator Frank Moss has been out of office since before the first battlestar galactica series in the late 70s, and dead for six years. Its time to let the SRBs die, please. They've killed enough people.
In a similar manner, why keep all the same contractors doing the same old, same old, if all that changes is the project name?
Then use that data for: insider trading, marketing things to them, competitive advantages, and a bunch of thing that can be gained with confidential and insider information.
Don't forget intentionally uploading fake information, hoping it will be leaked.
Did you know our future acquisition target is going bankrupt and their shares can't be worth $1 each? And our lab tests show our main competitors primary profit generating product causes cancer in cute fuzzy bunnies?
Its entertaining enough between cutthroat "commodity" competitors. Imagine the fun "market leaders" could have at their copycats loss by uploading the "iLoo" plumbing installation diagram.
They're turning their business over to the mercy of the cloud provider, and should it go down, the entire business may go with it.
Don't forget massive asymmetry problems. At a past job I helped "support" outsourced email for small businesses. Basically, the same thing as gmail but more expensive, yet not expensive enough to drive them away to gmail, in retrospect a fairly pointless line of business.
In one memorable unhappy situation, a customers email access from China, in a very email centric line of business, was worth "thousands of dollars per day of revenue" to them, and it was down, and they were very unhappy. They were worth "approx fifty cents per day of revenue" to us. Guess what happened due to that massive asymmetry? I think they eventually went out of business.
What are they doing in their homes to use 3.4 KW average? An individual house could easily peak at that, but averaged together? In the midwest that would be at least a $200 electric bill, or more like $600+ in coastie-land. I usually pay like $50 to $75, and I have plenty of electronic hardware. Do they each have a home aluminum refinery in every basement, like the Chinese tried to have a steel mill in every backyard during the great leap forward? Charge batteries for giant robots?
I understand they don't have mcmansions over there, so even a grow operation would be too small to use that much electricity...
Was a simple metal hat with a (fiberglass?) liner. The current helmet provides far more protection than the previous model. Keep that in mind in the context of this criticism.
Nahhh. Its more complicated than that. Its lighter and covers less than the previous model. What it does improve is making heavy NVGs more bearable, and you can fire a rifle from a prone position (laying down) while wearing body armor much easier. But "far more protection", Nahh.
My grandfather wore the M1 in WWII. They stopped using those in the 80s. I think that is what you're talking about.
I wore the PASGT in the 90s. No one called is a PASGT, always called it "your kevlar". Heavy, with a crazy looking, yet remarkably comfortable headband and strap suspension system. Very much like wearing a 3-D suspension bridge on your head. Big air gap between helmet and scalp was comfortable in the heat. Not terribly robust, I'd say a typical basic training company destroyed about one a week by ripping out straps, rivets, etc.
They replaced the PASGT with the MICH in the early 00s. Much lighter, which is good since they now hang heavy night vision goggles off them, for no net weight change. However I don't think NVGs protect against shrapnel as well as kevlar. Instead of a suspension system, I hear its more like a bike helmet. To better fit body armor when shooting prone, it has about 10% less coverage in the back.
The article describes sound waves bouncing around like I'd expect in the PASGT helmet, not like I'd expect in the MICH. Maybe the PASGT would have been even worse than the new MICH helmets.
I think that a scientific study for determining just how much military helmets actually contribute to brain damage when the soldier is exposed to an explosion would start by base-lining the brain conditions of 50 or so soldiers. Then, expose them all to the same explosion at the same stand-off orientation, half of them wearing helmets and half without. Then, re-test.
In summary, run them thru the ASVAB after the incident and compare the before and after scores.
The main problem is the ASVAB was redesigned in '02 and rescored in '04. If it were not for that, you could just run them thru the full battery of MEPS tests (Military Enlistment Processing Station).
One problem is the soldiers not wearing helmets are more likely to be inside the vehicle, so you're measuring truck drivers vs infantry instead of helmet vs non-helmet. Even if you correct for MOS (military occupational specialty, essentially your military job title), that still does not compare wearing helmet vs not wearing helmet, but merely means comparing lazyness stupidity or likelihood of disobeying orders vs not.
Running a real world experiment is complicated enough, that you're better off modeling brain hydrodynamics.
Whether the cost is $0.6 or $600 - the point is that it was his mistake, and so he pays the price.
Disagree. Major manufacturer design failure. The game publisher and retailer knew what they were getting into when they decided to sell it. They should eat the cost of a very poor design.
It's not the manufacturer's fault that he moved it while it was spinning - something common sense would say not to do.
My car CD/MP3 player has not scratched a disk in approx 8 years of driving over potholes.
My ancient sony disk-man CD player has never scratched a CD while in motion. Skipped while playing, yes, but no damage.
Apparently rotating a standard size optical disc without grinding it like a car disk brake rotor has been a solved problem, industry wide, for at least a decade, unless you're microsoft.
I'm glad all my laptops use NiMH, since it's been around quite a big longer (almost 20 years) and the bugs have been removed. I'm sure Lithium batteries will be a great product to own... circa 2020.
Naaaaaah. The main thing that limits the short circuit current of a battery is it's internal resistance. And different battery families have considerably different resistances. Check out the mighty wikipedia:
The lower the internal resistance, the higher the overall battery efficiency, especially at high currents, but the more dangerous a short circuit is.
So, as alot of automotive mechanics and UPS repairmen know, short out a lead acid cell, and you get a "glowing crowbar/screwdriver of doom".
As the R/C airplane guys know, short out a NiCad and it'll pop, quite violently. My father had a RC plane pack pepper a styrofoam ceiling with foil fragments in the 80s during fast charging (no one hurt, no serious property damage, but that was the end of that pack...)
wikipedia's mostly made up numbers show a lithium has about 1/2 the internal resistance of a NiMH. So, that would be twice the short circuit current. Thanks to P=I2R that would be four times the heat output. Lithiums have a much higher energy density, meaning the lithium either has more energy to convert into heat, or that its an equal amount of heat in a smaller volume.
I'd conservatively estimate a shorted Lithium will inherently make a bang thats about ten times bigger than the bang from a shorted NiMH. Plus or minus engineering design effects, like corroded emergency vents in a NiMH, flamability and boiling points of the different electrolytes, etc. This would make a highly entertaining mythbusters episode.
If only the wind turbines were on stationary towers, then they might be able to map them, and use such a map to inform their interpretation of the radar data.
If only the tip voitices stayed at the blades, rather than trailing for miles downwind.
If only "downwind" was always the same direction, rather than moving around when the wind changes - especially when it changes rapidly during a storm.
If only the vortices were reliably visible to the radar, rather than sending a variable strength return depending on how many raindrops are getting blown around by each section of it at any given moment.
You see the glass half empty, I see the glass half full. Someday, a PHD student is going to gather all that "useless interfering noisy junk data", filter it back into an extremely detailed physical wind model, to improve tornado formation detection and write their dissertation. I say someday, assuming that someone isn't already doing it. Possibly, in the future, it will be a marketing advantage to have a wind turbine generally upwind of a trailer park, because suitably advanced radar DSP technology makes it easier to detect tornadoes headed for the trailer park...
Re:Is really a bad, bad idea...
on
NASA May Outsource
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Well, for example: Forget hardware like the Spirit Mars Rover (build to last few months, but still working after two years) if you outsorce the manufacture.
Too late, spirit was an outsourced project. Oddly enough, the wikipedia page for Spirit/MER-A has no manufacturing details. But the main MER project page is believed accurate:
Nasa outsourced the whole project to JPL to manage and generally run. The Wikipedia page details whom JPL subcontracted to for various parts... for example, the aeroshell exterior capsule thingy was outsourced to Lockheed. IBM-Federal made the radiation hardened CPU chip, but their division got sold around and was part of Lockheed at one point.
Anyway, the whole point is that no spacecraft that I'm aware of, at least for the past 40 years, have any components made by NASA... NASA does not "do" anything, other than distribute budget to various contractors.
Those are the facts. As for opinion, I believe there are no personnel accepting paychecks from nasa that have ever touched a soldering iron, screwdriver, welding torch, or milling machine...
Slashdot Mirror
In the end (say 200 years from now), we'll all probably be using one standard OS (or at least hope to).
Just like standard thread sizes, standard units of measurement, standard building codes, standard laws, and standard currencies.
Only believe what you read, not what you see.
Dangerous thought citizen... you meant to say "... Only believe what we tell you is OK to read..."
A billion new/saved people, not clearing one hectare, results in a billion hectares saved.
My distant rural ancestors thought little of clearing 40 acres by hand and growing a family. Figure, 10 acres per human being.
Figure in a 2.5 acres per hectare conversion, my ancestors typically did clear about 4 times as much forest per person as modern rural peasants did not need to clear due to better crop yields.
Further, many people in our world may not worship Darwin but they worship science and have science as their object of faith.
.jpg or it didn't happen... I've never even heard of anyone participating in the following "science faith" activities:
1) Interpretive dance in the full moon-light at the solstice in hope that my copy of "science news" magazine will be delivered.
2) Sacrificed a goat or chicken before organic chemisty lab in hopes of my grignard reagent not having moisture contamination.
3) Prayed to the "pharmo-industrial complex" to cure an illness. (their only god is money, anyway)
4) Sing hymns of praise for the AAVSO website having an easily downloadable light curve for a star I'm interested in.
Now there are borderline activites, that I think still do not qualify based on intent.
1) Meditation before a test, doesn't count because its purely for anti-anxiety effects not supernatural communion.
2) Worshiping the ground the professor walks on doesn't count, although it is treating him as a diety, it is done with the full knowledge he is merely a powerful human.
3) Reading from scientific "holy books", or even worse, reading the literal word of a powerpoint presentation, is not worshiping the book or its author or even the content, but is merely a (poor) teaching technique. Although people whom read powerpoint presentations to their audience should be burned at the stake, but not for religious reasons.
I find that figure a little difficult to believe, but I don't know that much about agriculture or what kind of impact deforestation for agriculture has.
I suspect you've never chopped down a tree or pulled a stump? Logging is hard work with western mechanization, but in third world conditions, doing it by hand must be unbelievably difficult.
For some background, check out the wikipedia link "In Pakistan, wheat yields nearly doubled, from 4.6 million tons in 1965 to 7.3 million tons in 1970"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_Borlaug#Expansion_to_South_Asia:_The_Green_Revolution
If you want to double your production (and who doesn't?) its pretty hard to justify the immense effort of clearing land, when you can simply import genetically superior seeds...
Radar guided cruise control and braking will save a lot of lives and a lot of money by almost eliminating rear end collisions.
How it will detect ice, snow, standing water/hydroplaning, and sand/gravel on the road is a mystery. Road conditions account for all my past close calls, especially unknown / unpredictable conditions. I know there are people whom don't pay attention to their driving, but I'm guessing that is an extremely small fraction of the overall driving population... I would suspect it'll save approximately zero lives and cause a net loss of money.
Given that it can mutate that rapidly,
How rapidly? Got a cite? I can't find any citation that it mutates any faster or slower than any other influenza virus, or any other virus in general.
The best I can find was
http://linkinghub.elsevier.com/retrieve/pii/0168170293900885
Genetic and antigenic analyses of influenza A (H1N1) viruses, 1986-1991
Xu Xiyana, Elisabet P. Rocha, Helen L. Regenery, Alan P. Kendal, and Nancy J. Cox
Influenza Branch, Division of Viral and Rickettsial Diseases, National Center for Infectious Diseases, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Atlanta, GA, USA
"(4) Although there has been little detectable antigenic variability, the HA genes of human epidemic influenza A (H1N1) viruses have continued to evolve at an evolutionary rate similar to that for the H1N1 and H3N2 viruses analyzed previously."
So, nothing interesting about H1N1's mutation rate in the recent past... I can find plenty of fear mongering of "what if it mutates, it'll destroy us all", of course so could a mutation of any virus...
Yeah, and have fun copying a ~600 page book by hand (you can't exactly cut and manually feed in the pages on a library book), especially with most libraries costing tons of money per copy.
That's why you go to the copy shop.
Based on extensive (legal) book photocopying experience, it is very hard to take more than 6 seconds per page, even including coffee breaks, bathroom breaks, and gossip time. At that rate, its going to take 3600 seconds to photocopy a 600 page book. Which is a mere single hour. To save perhaps $100. Or, in other words $100/hr, which is pretty respectable pay rate for a college student, even for illegal activities. Note that you can make multiple copies for very little extra time, most time is spent flipping pages.
Consider it a college level arithmetic test...
Seriously people, what do we have to do to legally destroy these people and their businesses? LEGALLY DESTROY. I kinda like the sound of that...
I think this stupid DRM idea might help with your goal.
As the summary states: anyone who can view your content can also "steal" it irrevocably
So, I guess download their legal incorporation papers, tax papers, payroll records, etc, from bittorrent or whatever, look at them (thus stealing them) and then delete them so no one has them anymore. All done!
Wow, how is explaining the market dynamics of chip manufacturing a troll?!? Was it the use of the word capitalist?
Ahh you left out the rest of the phrase "capitalists favorite tool to extract the maximum profit".
Everyone knows the actual favorite capitalist tools to extract profit, in order, are:
1) Form a Monopoly (Microsoft)
2) Form an Oligopoly / Cartel (OPEC, to some extent Intel/AMD)
3) Form a confuse-opoly to eliminate the free market by making it incomprehensible (cell phone pricing, and to a lesser extent, CPU pricing)
4) Government intervention via patents, regulations, govt contracts, special taxes against your competitors
5) Marketing using sex appeal (well, maybe not the capitalists favorite tool, but it's my favorite)
6) Global movement of capital and jobs via world trade while preventing populations from moving along (due to culture / language / govt issues)
Blah blah blah, somewhere around favorite tool number 25796274 there is yours, "price discrimination"
So that is what made it vaguely "troll-y"
Because I had an expert in RF build my prototype and those were his measurements.
Most of the posts are about "MBA business plan" type stuff, I'll try to go another direction. You need to get many hours of engineer time via consultation or hire, a RF EE and a machine designer or line designer ME or industrial engineer.
Ah, so a prototype was built and it worked. That is only about 1/10 of the EEs job. Actually that sounds like something an EE would delegate to a tech. Now you need an RF guy whom can deal with UL listing, modern FCC regulation (if he says "type acceptance", find another guy because that is obsolete), EMC compatibility, and environmental issues (environment as in waterproof encapsulation and corrosion prevention, not environment as in save the whales). I assume you're going FCC Part 15? Or FCC Part 18? What other FCC Part do you intend to list under? Of course if you're going to sell in China they are not so interested in USA FCC rules as they are in their own rules. Which lab are you working w/ for an FCC acceptable "declaration of conformity"? Did you do an error analysis to figure out the required tolerance for each component and how out of tolerance components affect the overall device performance (and fcc rule conformity?) (like, if C5 is 5% low while R65 is 2% high, will it catch fire or merely interfere with airport radars?) Do you have your production line testing gear set up to verify how the devices meet their tolerances? Begun thinking about ISO9000 paperwork yet?
As for the industrial / mechanical engineers job, you need to figure out who the competition sells to, and how you'll sell it as a better product. Frankly, a millimeter is not terribly accurate for a contact microswitch, of course your device is non-contact, and possibly (possibly!) more reliable, or at least probably has fewer moving parts than a microswitch. Then again, IR beams are non-contact too. On the other hand, a machine vision rig is pretty accurate and expensive and can do stuff an IR beam system never could do, and prices are dropping. So you've got a sort of narrow window to market in, between the $2 microswitch and the $300 webcam plus single board computer, and its gotta be something the IR beam interrupters can't do. That market isn't too big, probably because no off the shelf device exists to work in it, or maybe because no one needs it, but either way, no one currently designs machinery that would need it. So, you need some kind of machine designer whom has designed things who can explain how they could have used your sensor device in a past assembly line or whatever, and could intelligently describe what your data sheets need for him to use your device, what the page in the "mouser inc." catalog needs to look like, etc.
This is true today. When did computers start using decimal?
Very x86 centric. The answer is "about sixty three years ago".
How about the 1946 ENIAC, or the 1959 IBM 1620?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ENIAC
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_1620
The ENIAC is an amusing electrical design in that its an electronic implementation of each part of an adding machines wheels, each digit of the ALU has ten states from 0 to 9 in a ring counter arrangement, its like an EE was given a ME's mechanical geared adding machine and told, make one of these out of vacuum tubes. Maybe some EE got a full set of mechanical adding machine blueprints and was told that he would make an electrical schematic of a circuit to emulate each part. Essentially, the "first electronic computer" or whatever ENIAC really is, was just an emulator. The much more modern 1620 did all its internal stuff in BCD-binary but the "user interface" machine language (and assembly language), so to speak, was pure decimal, although doing addition in binary was considered too complicated so it used memory tables to look up addition results. IBM's 1401 was even stranger, I don't really know what to say about it at this early hour of the day, but it was vaguely decimal, sort of.
The benefit of a wide ranging C.S. education including lots of history is that despite marketing's best efforts to the contrary, nothing is really new, thus you get lots of insight about "new" or "unusual" ideas, such as a "decimal computer".
For a good time, read wikipedias entries on trinary and negative bases
OK, let me get this straight --- your reasoning is basically "I was taught some skills in school that are now obsolete, therefore touch-typing is obsolete"?
No, the purpose of a modern American school, at least in part, is to teach obsolete middle class skills as rich peoples hobbies, so a school teaching touch typing would be a strong indicator that most computer usage is or soon will be obsolete.
The educational theory is for the middle class, based on worship of the upper class lifestyle, while confusing cause and effect. A quick summary of the theory would be that only rich people can afford to learn "useless" skills for fun, therefore if you learn useless skills, you'll become rich.
Example of typical middle class education primary revolving around obsolete skills that are only useful for rich people's hobbies, thus if you have the time to waste to learn them, you must be rich, aspirational, etc:
1) Music classes - Musician used to be a middle class lifestyle, before the recording cartel/industry/complex took it over. Now only rich people can afford to focus on music.
2) Art classes - See all that "decorative americana junk" at the walmart, craft store, etc, made in China, to decorate our walls? Middle class people in the USA used to make "decorative artistic americana junk" and sell it to each other but now its all imported from China.
3) Wood shop classes - Furniture carpenter used to be a middle class american job, before it went to China and/or Amish.
4) The whole concept of the steam whistle coordinating the middle class worker at the factory assembly line. All that has gone to China except for their kids responding to bells/buzzers at school.
5) Political Science / Government used to be something middle class folks needed to know, but now the TV tells them all they need to know about politics, or at least the last TV commercial they saw is the only thing that affects them. The only reason for middle class folks to learn about it is to participate (if you are in the oligarchy and have a last name like Kennedy or Bush or Clinton) or as an idle hobby in your spare time.
I don't get why we're not planning to dock the shuttles to the ISS and leave them up there, too, with their useful engines, robotic arms, and so forth.
Duct taping the remaining shuttles to the ISS, arkansas style up on concrete blocks, has the following problems:
1) There's not enough space on the truss to leave them bolted on and still have space for resupply missions to dock.
2) They will rapidly permanently break down and become more or less useless. Either leave the fuel cells running, in which case they run out of H2 in about a month with no was in space to refuel and no in-orbit liquid H2 transport available (at least they "could" refill the O2 tanks, in theory), or shut them off and let the electrolyte and water exhaust freeze in place, cracking the lines. When the freon leaks out of the coolant system, no way to refill... Most of the onboard systems are like that, limited on-orbit lifetime and no on-orbit maintainability, at all.
3) So, they're deadweight, whats the loss? Well, they need to boost the station so it doesn't reenter, and boosts are expensive. Plus it adds surface area to speed reentry so you need MORE reboosts but just BIGGER reboosts.
Why NASA is completely dug in on Ares is mind boggling.
Also, the contractors won't really be affected: ATK would still make the SRBs
Think about how those two quotes, apparently intended to be in opposition to each other, yet strangely similar.
Senator Frank Moss has been out of office since before the first battlestar galactica series in the late 70s, and dead for six years. Its time to let the SRBs die, please. They've killed enough people.
In a similar manner, why keep all the same contractors doing the same old, same old, if all that changes is the project name?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Moss_(politician)
"Senator Helped Thiokol Win Shuttle Contract ."
http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1367&dat=19860303&id=eM8VAAAAIBAJ&sjid=EhQEAAAAIBAJ&pg=5585,719942
Then use that data for: insider trading, marketing things to them, competitive advantages, and a bunch of thing that can be gained with confidential and insider information.
Don't forget intentionally uploading fake information, hoping it will be leaked.
Did you know our future acquisition target is going bankrupt and their shares can't be worth $1 each? And our lab tests show our main competitors primary profit generating product causes cancer in cute fuzzy bunnies?
Its entertaining enough between cutthroat "commodity" competitors. Imagine the fun "market leaders" could have at their copycats loss by uploading the "iLoo" plumbing installation diagram.
They're turning their business over to the mercy of the cloud provider, and should it go down, the entire business may go with it.
Don't forget massive asymmetry problems. At a past job I helped "support" outsourced email for small businesses. Basically, the same thing as gmail but more expensive, yet not expensive enough to drive them away to gmail, in retrospect a fairly pointless line of business.
In one memorable unhappy situation, a customers email access from China, in a very email centric line of business, was worth "thousands of dollars per day of revenue" to them, and it was down, and they were very unhappy. They were worth "approx fifty cents per day of revenue" to us. Guess what happened due to that massive asymmetry? I think they eventually went out of business.
What are they doing in their homes to use 3.4 KW average? An individual house could easily peak at that, but averaged together? In the midwest that would be at least a $200 electric bill, or more like $600+ in coastie-land. I usually pay like $50 to $75, and I have plenty of electronic hardware. Do they each have a home aluminum refinery in every basement, like the Chinese tried to have a steel mill in every backyard during the great leap forward? Charge batteries for giant robots?
I understand they don't have mcmansions over there, so even a grow operation would be too small to use that much electricity...
Was a simple metal hat with a (fiberglass?) liner. The current helmet provides far more protection than the previous model. Keep that in mind in the context of this criticism.
Nahhh. Its more complicated than that. Its lighter and covers less than the previous model. What it does improve is making heavy NVGs more bearable, and you can fire a rifle from a prone position (laying down) while wearing body armor much easier. But "far more protection", Nahh.
My grandfather wore the M1 in WWII. They stopped using those in the 80s. I think that is what you're talking about.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M1_Helmet
I wore the PASGT in the 90s. No one called is a PASGT, always called it "your kevlar". Heavy, with a crazy looking, yet remarkably comfortable headband and strap suspension system. Very much like wearing a 3-D suspension bridge on your head. Big air gap between helmet and scalp was comfortable in the heat. Not terribly robust, I'd say a typical basic training company destroyed about one a week by ripping out straps, rivets, etc.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personnel_Armor_System_for_Ground_Troops
They replaced the PASGT with the MICH in the early 00s. Much lighter, which is good since they now hang heavy night vision goggles off them, for no net weight change. However I don't think NVGs protect against shrapnel as well as kevlar. Instead of a suspension system, I hear its more like a bike helmet. To better fit body armor when shooting prone, it has about 10% less coverage in the back.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MICH_TC-2000_Combat_Helmet
The article describes sound waves bouncing around like I'd expect in the PASGT helmet, not like I'd expect in the MICH. Maybe the PASGT would have been even worse than the new MICH helmets.
I think that a scientific study for determining just how much military helmets actually contribute to brain damage when the soldier is exposed to an explosion would start by base-lining the brain conditions of 50 or so soldiers. Then, expose them all to the same explosion at the same stand-off orientation, half of them wearing helmets and half without. Then, re-test.
In summary, run them thru the ASVAB after the incident and compare the before and after scores.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armed_Services_Vocational_Aptitude_Battery
The main problem is the ASVAB was redesigned in '02 and rescored in '04. If it were not for that, you could just run them thru the full battery of MEPS tests (Military Enlistment Processing Station).
One problem is the soldiers not wearing helmets are more likely to be inside the vehicle, so you're measuring truck drivers vs infantry instead of helmet vs non-helmet. Even if you correct for MOS (military occupational specialty, essentially your military job title), that still does not compare wearing helmet vs not wearing helmet, but merely means comparing lazyness stupidity or likelihood of disobeying orders vs not.
Running a real world experiment is complicated enough, that you're better off modeling brain hydrodynamics.
I even got them cell phones when they were 4
The same is the argument for texting. Dont text while driving,
As a parent, I send my six year old to his room when I catch him texting while driving.
Whether the cost is $0.6 or $600 - the point is that it was his mistake, and so he pays the price.
Disagree. Major manufacturer design failure. The game publisher and retailer knew what they were getting into when they decided to sell it. They should eat the cost of a very poor design.
It's not the manufacturer's fault that he moved it while it was spinning - something common sense would say not to do.
My car CD/MP3 player has not scratched a disk in approx 8 years of driving over potholes.
My ancient sony disk-man CD player has never scratched a CD while in motion. Skipped while playing, yes, but no damage.
Apparently rotating a standard size optical disc without grinding it like a car disk brake rotor has been a solved problem, industry wide, for at least a decade, unless you're microsoft.
I'm glad all my laptops use NiMH, since it's been around quite a big longer (almost 20 years) and the bugs have been removed. I'm sure Lithium batteries will be a great product to own... circa 2020.
Naaaaaah. The main thing that limits the short circuit current of a battery is it's internal resistance. And different battery families have considerably different resistances. Check out the mighty wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internal_resistance
The lower the internal resistance, the higher the overall battery efficiency, especially at high currents, but the more dangerous a short circuit is.
So, as alot of automotive mechanics and UPS repairmen know, short out a lead acid cell, and you get a "glowing crowbar/screwdriver of doom".
As the R/C airplane guys know, short out a NiCad and it'll pop, quite violently. My father had a RC plane pack pepper a styrofoam ceiling with foil fragments in the 80s during fast charging (no one hurt, no serious property damage, but that was the end of that pack...)
wikipedia's mostly made up numbers show a lithium has about 1/2 the internal resistance of a NiMH. So, that would be twice the short circuit current. Thanks to P=I2R that would be four times the heat output. Lithiums have a much higher energy density, meaning the lithium either has more energy to convert into heat, or that its an equal amount of heat in a smaller volume.
I'd conservatively estimate a shorted Lithium will inherently make a bang thats about ten times bigger than the bang from a shorted NiMH. Plus or minus engineering design effects, like corroded emergency vents in a NiMH, flamability and boiling points of the different electrolytes, etc. This would make a highly entertaining mythbusters episode.
If only the wind turbines were on stationary towers, then they might be able to map them, and use such a map to inform their interpretation of the radar data.
If only the tip voitices stayed at the blades, rather than trailing for miles downwind.
If only "downwind" was always the same direction, rather than moving around when the wind changes - especially when it changes rapidly during a storm.
If only the vortices were reliably visible to the radar, rather than sending a variable strength return depending on how many raindrops are getting blown around by each section of it at any given moment.
You see the glass half empty, I see the glass half full. Someday, a PHD student is going to gather all that "useless interfering noisy junk data", filter it back into an extremely detailed physical wind model, to improve tornado formation detection and write their dissertation. I say someday, assuming that someone isn't already doing it. Possibly, in the future, it will be a marketing advantage to have a wind turbine generally upwind of a trailer park, because suitably advanced radar DSP technology makes it easier to detect tornadoes headed for the trailer park...
Well, for example: Forget hardware like the Spirit Mars Rover (build to last few months, but still working after two years) if you outsorce the manufacture.
Too late, spirit was an outsourced project. Oddly enough, the wikipedia page for Spirit/MER-A has no manufacturing details. But the main MER project page is believed accurate:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Exploration_Rover
Nasa outsourced the whole project to JPL to manage and generally run. The Wikipedia page details whom JPL subcontracted to for various parts... for example, the aeroshell exterior capsule thingy was outsourced to Lockheed. IBM-Federal made the radiation hardened CPU chip, but their division got sold around and was part of Lockheed at one point.
Anyway, the whole point is that no spacecraft that I'm aware of, at least for the past 40 years, have any components made by NASA... NASA does not "do" anything, other than distribute budget to various contractors.
Those are the facts. As for opinion, I believe there are no personnel accepting paychecks from nasa that have ever touched a soldering iron, screwdriver, welding torch, or milling machine...