Wel, the 'solution' for government is to give up on regulating homemade firearms, and regulate ammo. for instance, powder.
Compressed air? A.22 sized air rifle has just as many ft-lb of muzzle energy as a powder one. Back in ye olden days the europeans actually led the way in pneumatic rifles. Some very powerful indeed.
That's the problem with govt... smart good people can always find a way around it, so why bother making life tough for them?
I've found over a couple decades that no one really knows what to get me, but me. Maybe your best bet is wake him up early on saturday, feed him lots of pancakes, stuff $200 in his wallet, drive him to the ham fest flea market in your area, and see what he finds for himself?
Everything's a cost benefit ratio. Whats the cost of a POS handgun on the streets vs how long would it take to mfgr something?
You still need ammo. Weirdly enough if ammo is scarce/expensive you want a real good gun not a POS, to get best advantage of the limited resource.
I've heard in Europe the law really comes down hard on homemade firearms... like the only punishment worse than homemade firearm possession is premeditated murder. Not being complete idiots the criminals react appropriately and use knifes and clubs on each other and on the non-criminals.
Frankly given a piece of pipe, you're better off using it as a club in europe than sticking a cap on one end and a shotgun shell and some other stuff.
It is only a matter of time before someone offers a printable design which requires nothing more than a pre-fab pipe and a few springs from Home Depot...and everything else is printed.
The "everything else" does not exist, if you're willing to settle for a pretty crude zip gun or a pretty crude single shot shotgun.
It doesn't require skills in operating a lathe, mill, grinder or other machine or hand tools. Anyone that can download a 3D file can then just press print and they will have an object.
I remember reading the same kind of stuff about CNC milling machines, desktop publishing, desktop music production, desktop video production, about 50 bazillion iterations from COBOL to the latest CMS of art history majors claiming that now, those icky computer nerds will no longer be necessary to kept around to write business software...
Its important, it will have an effect, but its not a miracle Star Trek transporter. Hmm maybe thats not so bad of an analogy after all, the best engineer in the fleet was constantly Fing around with the transporter yet it broke ALL THE TIME. Maybe it will be like the transporter after all... It should "just work" every time you push the button, but its never that simple in reality.
Doing it with a machine shop requires time, skill, and more importantly a machine shop.
As a guy with a machine shop, rest assured it doesn't require much of the above.
If you want minimum weight, maximum reliability, all kinds of nifty features including safeties and such, OR if you want to make a precise exact working replica of a historical piece accurate to the tiniest detail, then it takes huge time, skill, and tools.
But if you're just trying to make what amounts to a short range inaccurate "zip gun" or little more than a shotgun, its trivial, you don't need a "shop". An imaginative plumber can figure something out without a "shop" or gunsmithing skills.
The AR-15 aspect is important to those who know anything about the law or gunsmithing (I know just enough about both to be dangerous). There is no single part of a gun that screams "gun" so the legal types selected the receiver, which in most guns is a great decision, HOWEVER the AR-15 lower receiver is a not terribly difficult part to make.
Making a AR-15 lower is pretty easy (well, compared to making a upper, or a barrel). Making a lower is, legally, making a gun. The hard parts to make are everything that bolts onto a lower. Therefore its really easy to "make a AR-15".
I'm just a hack of a machinist but if I wanted I could easily make a lower on my CNC mill. There is no way in hell, no way, not gonna happen that I could make a barrel from scratch, thats basically impossible for a guy at home. Making a bolt, bolt carrier or chamber would be right around the absolute peak of my skill on my best day in the shop ever.
"The news" is no longer relevant culturally anymore. Even among the luddites. What is a great news show rating, like 1% of the population?
surprisingly little in even tech websites like this one. I don't get it.
Too many recent lithobraking outcomes. Combined with the usual data silence period for a year (or so) all we'll know is pretty much binary, did it land or crash. Boring. It would like like if superbowel football coverage was minimized to one binary bit of which team won.
Now on the other hand if I had a live telemetry data feed to watch and we could all gather around the/. campfire (virtually, or real, if the/, effect smoked the servers) and debate NMR spectra and gas chromatagraph peaks live with each other... and the odds were better than 50% that it would not crater...
I think the greatest PR thing NASA could do would be to say "F all this data blackout shite, taxpayers get a live "CBS big brother" feed of whatever we download, as it arrives". Of course that would result in their webservers melting, and a lot of idiotic comments, but it would also result in explosive interest levels.
If Iran got their hands on this technology, it'd be a lot more fun to make it run incorrectly than some dumb centrifuge. We could blow a hole right through their building with the laser lol.
Boring. Not enough power anyway. Much funnier to PWM the computer controlled water cooling pump to create hot spots in the laser tube and let the laser blow itself to pieces while the pump "appears to be working" so they replace the expensive tube a couple times, then the expensive pump, then replace the controller which promptly gets reinfected, etc etc. Its absolutely inevitable that we'll see warfare like that as 3-d printing and laser cutters get cheaper, some chinese mfgr or american retailer will release a virus that sets 3d printheads on fire or burns out laser cutter tubes. Maybe.gov will release it as a "war on copyright infringement" weapon.
WRT to this laser, an absolutely Fing hilarious virus/worm would mess with the system to de-enrich the supposedly enriched product. Assuming they're stupid enough not to analyze each batch, you can just picture some dude just like the famous Iraqi Information Minister of a decade or so ago holding a press conference explaining how they're about to wipe Israel off the map... and cut to the webcam from a suburb in.il pointing downtown... and absolutely nothing happens. Hilarious.
Another funny would be to mess with the laser such that it encodes "something" into each batch. So the precise ratio of 235/238 to a zillion decimal places or maybe the ratios of some weird contaminant encodes the mac address of the laser's microcontroller's ethernet interface or the first public ip addrs it sees on a traceroute back to cia.gov such that you can simply look up who enriched what chunk, etc.
As GWB said, if your not with us, you're against us, axis of evil and all that stuff. Since they're already doing laser enrichment I don't think us doing it is going to have much effect on them...
Traveled down the road and back again
Obviously a reference to laser enrichment requiring fewer stages to reach the same enrichment
Your heart is true you're a pal and a cosmonaut.
Some of the research was sent to.ru by "fellow travelers". BTW I think its confidant, but cosmonaut sounds cooler so we'll stick with that.
And if you threw a party
Aka an enrichment plant
Invited everyone you ever knew
Aka a really Fing big enrichment plant, after all nothing ever goes wrong when you put all your eggs in one optimized basket. Stuxnet? Whats that?
You would see the biggest gift would be from me
20KT in a standard shipping container, no problemo. Only need 1 way shipping on this one, obviously. Um, try not to drop it enroute, ok?
And the card attached would say thank you for being a friend.
The usual "obvious" sarcasm where if we didn't expend amazing resources fighting the world, we wouldn't need to fight the world. But that would reduce wartime profits so thats never gonna happen. If only there were a way to make "wartime profits" in peacetime. I don't think facebook IPOs are going to do it.
Gaming on PCs will likely consist of two main markets: console ports and indie titles
Maybe a 3rd market of obscure genres. May want to separate that from "indie titles". On my PC I like flight sims (think, like x-plane) and hex-based military sims (think, like almost anything matrixgames sells) and single player RPGs (think, like anything spiderweb/Jeff Vogel sells). Both are pretty much indie but they're not indie as in yet another "indie fps" or "indie car race game". It would be hard to kill off indie gaming on desktops/laptops without creating a walled garden.
Some other unkillable obscure genres include text adventures and naval simulations (Harpoon, etc)
Home consoles will stick around because there's a substantial market that wants them.
Ah but my $100 roku does angry birds... give it another decade and the concept of stream appliances and consoles being separate will likely disappear.
The next step after that would be you'll just plug your HDMI cable into your phone and play FPS. At that point the "home console hardware market" will be a really long HDMI cable or equivalent.
OK so am I correct in stating the TLDR version is Census dept doesn't release data containing logical AND statements? Or in SQL we'll let you have exactly one "GROUP BY" clause, sorta?
So in an example above, the census will release the number of native americans on a block and a separate table of number of renters, but would never respond to a query of "NAs AND renters" because that might get a response table of single digit rows etc. That Seems reasonable.
Its a PR campaign disaster to describe that as "a" data source and list dozens of columns when it turns out to actually be dozens of data sources each with "a" column.
It doesn't help the PR thing in that few people use these datasets while probably 100 times as many people do genealogy and are VERY familiar with the full data dump after 70 years or whatever (most recently, the complete 1940 dataset has just been released for my state... many hours recently burned on ancestry.com).
I feel the pain of those census dept guys because journalists and PR people also completely F up everything I'm into that requires more than a 3rd grade education... I should have guessed it was something like this...
My employer broke the "no ANDs" rule because every dataset they released from our morale survey was "department" AND "title" AND "hire year" AND "approx age" which makes it trivial to identify individuals. But if these census guys don't do "ANDs" then its not an issue.
Thank you AC you should post under your name to get credit for a good ref link like that.
Some highlights: 1) Cooler oxidizer rich gas has the same turbine power as warmer fuel rich gas. So you're comparing cool oxy rich vs hot fuel rich, so its not as much of an issue as you'd guess since chemical reactivity scales pretty strongly with temperature. Product gas is denser and cooler, the machinery is smaller and lighter, meaning you need less miracle coating or miracle high temp alloy for an overall net gain anyway. Or in summary the pumps and stuff end up lighter, always good. 2) There's some systems issues where if you generate tank pressurization using engine heat to vaporize the liquids, a small oxy rich leak is somewhat safer than a small fuel leak. Which makes sense looking at explosive safety limits of most fuel oxidizer pairs. A tiny bit of O2 in the H2 tank is safer than a equal tiny bit of H2 in the O2 tank. Partially ratios, but I'd imagine or guess that a slow leak of gas O2 into the liq H2 tank means frozen O2 sinks to the bottom rather than ready to combust H2 gas in the top of the O2 tank. 3) gas/gas injectors have acoustic/stability profiles easier to stabilize than gas/liq O2. Intuitively you'd think gas/gas injectors would mix better so I guess I'm not totally surprised, and some acoustic/stability fixes are heavy so anything to make smoother more stable combustion is a win, even if its a probably very small effect. 4) Apparently the Germans in the 60s began experiments with film cooling using oxidizer... I'd be shitting bricks if I was the chamber engineer or the machinist who fabricated the chamber, but apparently the performance gains etc outweighed the risks of leaks, or at least nothing awful happened at the time. 5) The russians have been fooling around with oxy rich ratios since the late 60s... so its not new, older than I thought. Not mainstream, by any means, but becoming more popular since then. 6) My concerns about ignition stability at strange ratios is verified to not be an issue at high enough chamber pressure/temp. GOOG books cut me off as they were discussing that topic. My gut level guess is that moves ratio problems, if any, to a startup/shutdown timeframe. Hard starts have always been pretty messy regardless of ratio.
Maybe the really REALLY short summary is, oxy rich is, in fact, more of a PITA than fuel rich, but its not as bad as could be pessimistically thought, and the performance gains seem worth it. Essentially its the typical "more advanced" design... harder to plan, harder to make, tougher material limits, yet slightly better performance. Overall, impressive. I would expect to see more oxy rich designs in the future. It might take a very long time to take over the whole industry.
Doesn't that kinda incorrectly assume the days of consoles haven't already ended? I suppose homebrewers can release long after industry support goes away.
Its getting kind of bad in console land. My son's favorite game to play on the big screen is angry birds on the roku, when he's not playing on his ipod touch. At his age I was a little atari 2600 / Coleco monster. He does occasionally play some wii games, but the streamers and the app developers will eventually figure out multiplayer and then its bye bye consoles.
(statistics include population, age, sex, and race)
(offers information on education, income, occupation, commuting, and more).
Treat is as a multidimensional data source. So you figure out who someone is using perhaps 6 factors, then you've got the unknown data for the other 1315 data points.
I almost got in quite a bit of trouble at a previous employer by pointing out a public distributed incredibly detailed analysis of an "anonymous" corporate employee attitude survey mean it was completely 100% non anonymous. So... 100% of 25 year old engineers who are white single males who drive a red car and have an Irish girlfriend and live in an apartment and commute to work between 4 and 8 miles and have a five digit/. UID responded that their boss was a 5/10 at leadership, or whatever. Sure... that's perfectly anonymous.
It wasn't quite that ridiculous but pretty darn close. As I recall they "de-anonymized" it by providing 5 year age brackets and 1 year (yikes) hiring date brackets, and job titles. It was enough to quite sufficient to identify the exact responses of each person. The funny part was once the word got out employees would read the responses of other people... oh so Rachel in purchasing said that her boss was a complete... You get the idea.
Frankly I was more insulted that they thought we were stupid enough not to understand they were lying despite giving us complete evidence, than I was insulted that they lied to us by calling it anonymous. They had no shortage of suckiness.
They were even stupid enough to pretend it was anonymous and run it year after year, at least until I left. Needless to say everyone lied like a carpet after the first debacle.
affirmed the right of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to regulate therapies made from a patient's own processed stem cells. The case hinged on whether the court agreed with the FDA that such stem cells are drugs.
One interesting side effect is that dialysis treatment is now a drug.
Law isn't logical, you can't p0wn it and get root permissions (unless you're a 1%er, in which case you are the law). But it is none the less weird that if dialysis was invented today, it would be considered a drug under than doctrine.
there is no Space Race worth devoting billions to.
Comsats and weather sats and geolocation. If things got really "rough" we'd use military force and crypto and who knows what to prevent "them" from using "our" sats and vice versa.
Those fields are so incredibly profitable that people almost forget them when thinking about non-profit space exploration, R+D, etc.
The amount of money and lives saved just by satellite based hurricane tracking must be almost incalculable, certainly extremely large. Not every nation has hurricanes, but they've all got "something" where billions annually rely on wx prediction, like harvest-time weather or sea fishing wx forecasts.
Can anyone elaborate on why the US doesn't want to work with China at this point in time and how that's different from Russia in the past?
You must be young. Thats OK. Just saying. The market is much free-er now. In ye olden days high tech stuff simply did not cross the iron curtain. Occasionally you'd get a client state who couldn't seem to decide which side to ally with. But the idea of Japan or England or France or Australia or pretty much any country with no.ru military base on its soil buying a russian engine in 1970 for a commercial launch is pretty laughable for political considerations, so there were no large scale economic impacts from high level design cooperation.
Sure,.ru (or.ussr at the time, it was the kremvax era I guess), here's the plans to our F-1 engine, for national pride reasons you'll never build and fire one, and again for national pride reasons your client states will never be permitted to build or buy one, so just have fun admiring the plans you have no direct use for. And vice versa. May as well officially trade data because spies would get it anyway at immense waste of money, so its a prisoners dilemma game to agree to trade for free.
OK a coating makes sense in all regards. Analogy is its one thing to know a machine tool/drill bit has a thin anti-wear coating made out of a certain peculiar ratio of titanium and nitrogen, but its an immensely bigger problem to figure out how to make it and stick it to the underlying material.
Since its topical, and in "space articles" we often get real rocket scientists reading, how does the oxygen rich preburner in the RD-180 work? I don't mean the "duh" stuff like how do you adjust the mixture, but what in the world are these guys doing for metalurgy such that you can basically pipe a metal cutting torch's flame around the innards of an engine? Or is it something totally bonkers like they use nozzle style film cooling inside the pipes and stuff (which doesn't help with the turbopumps, but...)
I would assume if the russians ship working hardware to the DoD that whatever the answer is, its probably not classified.
Also I might be dense here but isn't it harder to maintain stable combustion when oxidizer rich rather than fuel rich? Or maybe its just "different" for an industry used to running fuel rich?
Do they use oxidizer rich preburner gas to cool the nozzle? I'm guessing they aren't that crazy and use the traditional nozzle coolant of fuel. Now a oxidizer regeneratively cooled nozzle would be bonkers, I don't recall anything that crazy. Maybe one of those weird solid fuel/liquid ox hybrids used liq O2 to cool the nozzle. I would imagine a pinhole leak in a oxy cooled nozzle would be a pretty spectacular failure whereas a pinhole in a fuel cooled nozzle is pretty much irrelevant until its a big enough leak to affect flow rates...
The background is that the 170/180 are the only engines I can think of off the top of my head that run oxidizer rich... every one else preburns fuel rich because a traditional welder's cutting torch is an oxidizer rich flame and putting what amounts to a cutting torch inside a engine seems a recipe for disaster. On the other hand oxidizer rich would seem to eliminate carbon/tar/gunk buildup issues. Maybe if you're stuck using heavy tarry parafiny filthy liquid fuels, like cruise ship heavy bunker oil as a fuel, the oxidizer problems are easier solved than creating a whole new fuel refining infrastructure... Would be interesting to know the design tradeoff, assuming its not just "too many bottles of vodka"
Slashdot Mirror
Take your coastal elitism and shove it up your hindside.
but... but... but... coastal elitism is the only advantage the coasts have !
Wel, the 'solution' for government is to give up on regulating homemade firearms, and regulate ammo. for instance, powder.
Compressed air? A .22 sized air rifle has just as many ft-lb of muzzle energy as a powder one. Back in ye olden days the europeans actually led the way in pneumatic rifles. Some very powerful indeed.
That's the problem with govt... smart good people can always find a way around it, so why bother making life tough for them?
I want to get him a gift that will either broaden his horizons or deepen his understanding in these fields.
If he's a reader: the ARRL handbook, the Art of Electronics, if radio shack still sells the Forrest Mims books get those...
If he just wants to mess with ckts you could do worse than the 200 in 1 lab kits etc. "Snap circuits" are a bit expensive but a lot of fun.
His programming experience is with a wide variety of scripting languages.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programming_paradigm
The little schemer book/series as appropriate
I've found over a couple decades that no one really knows what to get me, but me. Maybe your best bet is wake him up early on saturday, feed him lots of pancakes, stuff $200 in his wallet, drive him to the ham fest flea market in your area, and see what he finds for himself?
Everything's a cost benefit ratio. Whats the cost of a POS handgun on the streets vs how long would it take to mfgr something?
You still need ammo. Weirdly enough if ammo is scarce/expensive you want a real good gun not a POS, to get best advantage of the limited resource.
I've heard in Europe the law really comes down hard on homemade firearms... like the only punishment worse than homemade firearm possession is premeditated murder. Not being complete idiots the criminals react appropriately and use knifes and clubs on each other and on the non-criminals.
Frankly given a piece of pipe, you're better off using it as a club in europe than sticking a cap on one end and a shotgun shell and some other stuff.
It is only a matter of time before someone offers a printable design which requires nothing more than a pre-fab pipe and a few springs from Home Depot...and everything else is printed.
The "everything else" does not exist, if you're willing to settle for a pretty crude zip gun or a pretty crude single shot shotgun.
It doesn't require skills in operating a lathe, mill, grinder or other machine or hand tools. Anyone that can download a 3D file can then just press print and they will have an object.
I remember reading the same kind of stuff about CNC milling machines, desktop publishing, desktop music production, desktop video production, about 50 bazillion iterations from COBOL to the latest CMS of art history majors claiming that now, those icky computer nerds will no longer be necessary to kept around to write business software...
Its important, it will have an effect, but its not a miracle Star Trek transporter. Hmm maybe thats not so bad of an analogy after all, the best engineer in the fleet was constantly Fing around with the transporter yet it broke ALL THE TIME. Maybe it will be like the transporter after all... It should "just work" every time you push the button, but its never that simple in reality.
Doing it with a machine shop requires time, skill, and more importantly a machine shop.
As a guy with a machine shop, rest assured it doesn't require much of the above.
If you want minimum weight, maximum reliability, all kinds of nifty features including safeties and such, OR if you want to make a precise exact working replica of a historical piece accurate to the tiniest detail, then it takes huge time, skill, and tools.
But if you're just trying to make what amounts to a short range inaccurate "zip gun" or little more than a shotgun, its trivial, you don't need a "shop". An imaginative plumber can figure something out without a "shop" or gunsmithing skills.
The AR-15 aspect is important to those who know anything about the law or gunsmithing (I know just enough about both to be dangerous). There is no single part of a gun that screams "gun" so the legal types selected the receiver, which in most guns is a great decision, HOWEVER the AR-15 lower receiver is a not terribly difficult part to make.
Making a AR-15 lower is pretty easy (well, compared to making a upper, or a barrel). Making a lower is, legally, making a gun. The hard parts to make are everything that bolts onto a lower. Therefore its really easy to "make a AR-15".
I'm just a hack of a machinist but if I wanted I could easily make a lower on my CNC mill. There is no way in hell, no way, not gonna happen that I could make a barrel from scratch, thats basically impossible for a guy at home. Making a bolt, bolt carrier or chamber would be right around the absolute peak of my skill on my best day in the shop ever.
Yet I hear very little about it on the news
"The news" is no longer relevant culturally anymore. Even among the luddites. What is a great news show rating, like 1% of the population?
surprisingly little in even tech websites like this one. I don't get it.
Too many recent lithobraking outcomes. Combined with the usual data silence period for a year (or so) all we'll know is pretty much binary, did it land or crash. Boring. It would like like if superbowel football coverage was minimized to one binary bit of which team won.
Now on the other hand if I had a live telemetry data feed to watch and we could all gather around the /. campfire (virtually, or real, if the /, effect smoked the servers) and debate NMR spectra and gas chromatagraph peaks live with each other... and the odds were better than 50% that it would not crater...
I think the greatest PR thing NASA could do would be to say "F all this data blackout shite, taxpayers get a live "CBS big brother" feed of whatever we download, as it arrives". Of course that would result in their webservers melting, and a lot of idiotic comments, but it would also result in explosive interest levels.
Is anyone else having a Mars lander party? It's like a geek sporting event
More like gladiatorial combat, at least if Mars wins this battle in the lithobraking round. Those who are about to re-enter salute you, Caesar!
As for BYOB are the guests supposed to bring liter or quart booze bottles? Don't want to mix up imperial and metric again.
If Iran got their hands on this technology, it'd be a lot more fun to make it run incorrectly than some dumb centrifuge. We could blow a hole right through their building with the laser lol.
Boring. Not enough power anyway. Much funnier to PWM the computer controlled water cooling pump to create hot spots in the laser tube and let the laser blow itself to pieces while the pump "appears to be working" so they replace the expensive tube a couple times, then the expensive pump, then replace the controller which promptly gets reinfected, etc etc. Its absolutely inevitable that we'll see warfare like that as 3-d printing and laser cutters get cheaper, some chinese mfgr or american retailer will release a virus that sets 3d printheads on fire or burns out laser cutter tubes. Maybe .gov will release it as a "war on copyright infringement" weapon.
WRT to this laser, an absolutely Fing hilarious virus/worm would mess with the system to de-enrich the supposedly enriched product. Assuming they're stupid enough not to analyze each batch, you can just picture some dude just like the famous Iraqi Information Minister of a decade or so ago holding a press conference explaining how they're about to wipe Israel off the map ... and cut to the webcam from a suburb in .il pointing downtown ... and absolutely nothing happens. Hilarious.
Another funny would be to mess with the laser such that it encodes "something" into each batch. So the precise ratio of 235/238 to a zillion decimal places or maybe the ratios of some weird contaminant encodes the mac address of the laser's microcontroller's ethernet interface or the first public ip addrs it sees on a traceroute back to cia.gov such that you can simply look up who enriched what chunk, etc.
You're unusually on topic today. Really!
Thank you for being a friend
As GWB said, if your not with us, you're against us, axis of evil and all that stuff. Since they're already doing laser enrichment I don't think us doing it is going to have much effect on them...
Traveled down the road and back again
Obviously a reference to laser enrichment requiring fewer stages to reach the same enrichment
Your heart is true you're a pal and a cosmonaut.
Some of the research was sent to .ru by "fellow travelers". BTW I think its confidant, but cosmonaut sounds cooler so we'll stick with that.
And if you threw a party
Aka an enrichment plant
Invited everyone you ever knew
Aka a really Fing big enrichment plant, after all nothing ever goes wrong when you put all your eggs in one optimized basket. Stuxnet? Whats that?
You would see the biggest gift would be from me
20KT in a standard shipping container, no problemo. Only need 1 way shipping on this one, obviously. Um, try not to drop it enroute, ok?
And the card attached would say thank you for being a friend.
The usual "obvious" sarcasm where if we didn't expend amazing resources fighting the world, we wouldn't need to fight the world. But that would reduce wartime profits so thats never gonna happen. If only there were a way to make "wartime profits" in peacetime. I don't think facebook IPOs are going to do it.
Gaming on PCs will likely consist of two main markets: console ports and indie titles
Maybe a 3rd market of obscure genres. May want to separate that from "indie titles". On my PC I like flight sims (think, like x-plane) and hex-based military sims (think, like almost anything matrixgames sells) and single player RPGs (think, like anything spiderweb/Jeff Vogel sells). Both are pretty much indie but they're not indie as in yet another "indie fps" or "indie car race game". It would be hard to kill off indie gaming on desktops/laptops without creating a walled garden.
Some other unkillable obscure genres include text adventures and naval simulations (Harpoon, etc)
Home consoles will stick around because there's a substantial market that wants them.
Ah but my $100 roku does angry birds... give it another decade and the concept of stream appliances and consoles being separate will likely disappear.
The next step after that would be you'll just plug your HDMI cable into your phone and play FPS. At that point the "home console hardware market" will be a really long HDMI cable or equivalent.
OK so am I correct in stating the TLDR version is Census dept doesn't release data containing logical AND statements? Or in SQL we'll let you have exactly one "GROUP BY" clause, sorta?
So in an example above, the census will release the number of native americans on a block and a separate table of number of renters, but would never respond to a query of "NAs AND renters" because that might get a response table of single digit rows etc. That Seems reasonable.
Its a PR campaign disaster to describe that as "a" data source and list dozens of columns when it turns out to actually be dozens of data sources each with "a" column.
It doesn't help the PR thing in that few people use these datasets while probably 100 times as many people do genealogy and are VERY familiar with the full data dump after 70 years or whatever (most recently, the complete 1940 dataset has just been released for my state... many hours recently burned on ancestry.com).
I feel the pain of those census dept guys because journalists and PR people also completely F up everything I'm into that requires more than a 3rd grade education... I should have guessed it was something like this...
My employer broke the "no ANDs" rule because every dataset they released from our morale survey was "department" AND "title" AND "hire year" AND "approx age" which makes it trivial to identify individuals. But if these census guys don't do "ANDs" then its not an issue.
What a relief!
Imagine having to go all the way back there and fix it.
Now that we've given up on technology in the US, maybe the plan would have been to pray that the Chinese would fix it for us.
Thank you AC you should post under your name to get credit for a good ref link like that.
Some highlights:
1) Cooler oxidizer rich gas has the same turbine power as warmer fuel rich gas. So you're comparing cool oxy rich vs hot fuel rich, so its not as much of an issue as you'd guess since chemical reactivity scales pretty strongly with temperature. Product gas is denser and cooler, the machinery is smaller and lighter, meaning you need less miracle coating or miracle high temp alloy for an overall net gain anyway. Or in summary the pumps and stuff end up lighter, always good.
2) There's some systems issues where if you generate tank pressurization using engine heat to vaporize the liquids, a small oxy rich leak is somewhat safer than a small fuel leak. Which makes sense looking at explosive safety limits of most fuel oxidizer pairs. A tiny bit of O2 in the H2 tank is safer than a equal tiny bit of H2 in the O2 tank. Partially ratios, but I'd imagine or guess that a slow leak of gas O2 into the liq H2 tank means frozen O2 sinks to the bottom rather than ready to combust H2 gas in the top of the O2 tank.
3) gas/gas injectors have acoustic/stability profiles easier to stabilize than gas/liq O2. Intuitively you'd think gas/gas injectors would mix better so I guess I'm not totally surprised, and some acoustic/stability fixes are heavy so anything to make smoother more stable combustion is a win, even if its a probably very small effect.
4) Apparently the Germans in the 60s began experiments with film cooling using oxidizer... I'd be shitting bricks if I was the chamber engineer or the machinist who fabricated the chamber, but apparently the performance gains etc outweighed the risks of leaks, or at least nothing awful happened at the time.
5) The russians have been fooling around with oxy rich ratios since the late 60s... so its not new, older than I thought. Not mainstream, by any means, but becoming more popular since then.
6) My concerns about ignition stability at strange ratios is verified to not be an issue at high enough chamber pressure/temp. GOOG books cut me off as they were discussing that topic. My gut level guess is that moves ratio problems, if any, to a startup/shutdown timeframe. Hard starts have always been pretty messy regardless of ratio.
Maybe the really REALLY short summary is, oxy rich is, in fact, more of a PITA than fuel rich, but its not as bad as could be pessimistically thought, and the performance gains seem worth it. Essentially its the typical "more advanced" design... harder to plan, harder to make, tougher material limits, yet slightly better performance. Overall, impressive. I would expect to see more oxy rich designs in the future. It might take a very long time to take over the whole industry.
Thanks for the link AC
That would be the "they have just made it easier for people to get at it" part
Making it easier to mush databases together to gather inappropriate levels of personal data.
Doesn't that kinda incorrectly assume the days of consoles haven't already ended?
I suppose homebrewers can release long after industry support goes away.
Its getting kind of bad in console land. My son's favorite game to play on the big screen is angry birds on the roku, when he's not playing on his ipod touch. At his age I was a little atari 2600 / Coleco monster. He does occasionally play some wii games, but the streamers and the app developers will eventually figure out multiplayer and then its bye bye consoles.
OK how about commentary on this accurate part:
become paranoid neurotic wrecks.
For those who don't get it,
(statistics include population, age, sex, and race)
(offers information on education, income, occupation, commuting, and more).
Treat is as a multidimensional data source. So you figure out who someone is using perhaps 6 factors, then you've got the unknown data for the other 1315 data points.
I almost got in quite a bit of trouble at a previous employer by pointing out a public distributed incredibly detailed analysis of an "anonymous" corporate employee attitude survey mean it was completely 100% non anonymous. So... 100% of 25 year old engineers who are white single males who drive a red car and have an Irish girlfriend and live in an apartment and commute to work between 4 and 8 miles and have a five digit /. UID responded that their boss was a 5/10 at leadership, or whatever. Sure... that's perfectly anonymous.
It wasn't quite that ridiculous but pretty darn close. As I recall they "de-anonymized" it by providing 5 year age brackets and 1 year (yikes) hiring date brackets, and job titles. It was enough to quite sufficient to identify the exact responses of each person. The funny part was once the word got out employees would read the responses of other people... oh so Rachel in purchasing said that her boss was a complete... You get the idea.
Frankly I was more insulted that they thought we were stupid enough not to understand they were lying despite giving us complete evidence, than I was insulted that they lied to us by calling it anonymous. They had no shortage of suckiness.
They were even stupid enough to pretend it was anonymous and run it year after year, at least until I left. Needless to say everyone lied like a carpet after the first debacle.
affirmed the right of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to regulate therapies made from a patient's own processed stem cells. The case hinged on whether the court agreed with the FDA that such stem cells are drugs.
One interesting side effect is that dialysis treatment is now a drug.
Law isn't logical, you can't p0wn it and get root permissions (unless you're a 1%er, in which case you are the law). But it is none the less weird that if dialysis was invented today, it would be considered a drug under than doctrine.
If Microsoft's tablet has round corners, then we know they will be in serious legal trouble.
The MS tablet will be brown and it'll "squirt". Remember the Zune? Wasn't very ipod like.
there is no Space Race worth devoting billions to.
Comsats and weather sats and geolocation. If things got really "rough" we'd use military force and crypto and who knows what to prevent "them" from using "our" sats and vice versa.
Those fields are so incredibly profitable that people almost forget them when thinking about non-profit space exploration, R+D, etc.
The amount of money and lives saved just by satellite based hurricane tracking must be almost incalculable, certainly extremely large. Not every nation has hurricanes, but they've all got "something" where billions annually rely on wx prediction, like harvest-time weather or sea fishing wx forecasts.
Can anyone elaborate on why the US doesn't want to work with China at this point in time and how that's different from Russia in the past?
You must be young. Thats OK. Just saying. The market is much free-er now. In ye olden days high tech stuff simply did not cross the iron curtain. Occasionally you'd get a client state who couldn't seem to decide which side to ally with. But the idea of Japan or England or France or Australia or pretty much any country with no .ru military base on its soil buying a russian engine in 1970 for a commercial launch is pretty laughable for political considerations, so there were no large scale economic impacts from high level design cooperation.
Sure, .ru (or .ussr at the time, it was the kremvax era I guess), here's the plans to our F-1 engine, for national pride reasons you'll never build and fire one, and again for national pride reasons your client states will never be permitted to build or buy one, so just have fun admiring the plans you have no direct use for. And vice versa. May as well officially trade data because spies would get it anyway at immense waste of money, so its a prisoners dilemma game to agree to trade for free.
OK a coating makes sense in all regards. Analogy is its one thing to know a machine tool/drill bit has a thin anti-wear coating made out of a certain peculiar ratio of titanium and nitrogen, but its an immensely bigger problem to figure out how to make it and stick it to the underlying material.
Since its topical, and in "space articles" we often get real rocket scientists reading, how does the oxygen rich preburner in the RD-180 work? I don't mean the "duh" stuff like how do you adjust the mixture, but what in the world are these guys doing for metalurgy such that you can basically pipe a metal cutting torch's flame around the innards of an engine? Or is it something totally bonkers like they use nozzle style film cooling inside the pipes and stuff (which doesn't help with the turbopumps, but...)
I would assume if the russians ship working hardware to the DoD that whatever the answer is, its probably not classified.
Also I might be dense here but isn't it harder to maintain stable combustion when oxidizer rich rather than fuel rich? Or maybe its just "different" for an industry used to running fuel rich?
Do they use oxidizer rich preburner gas to cool the nozzle? I'm guessing they aren't that crazy and use the traditional nozzle coolant of fuel. Now a oxidizer regeneratively cooled nozzle would be bonkers, I don't recall anything that crazy. Maybe one of those weird solid fuel/liquid ox hybrids used liq O2 to cool the nozzle. I would imagine a pinhole leak in a oxy cooled nozzle would be a pretty spectacular failure whereas a pinhole in a fuel cooled nozzle is pretty much irrelevant until its a big enough leak to affect flow rates...
The background is that the 170/180 are the only engines I can think of off the top of my head that run oxidizer rich... every one else preburns fuel rich because a traditional welder's cutting torch is an oxidizer rich flame and putting what amounts to a cutting torch inside a engine seems a recipe for disaster. On the other hand oxidizer rich would seem to eliminate carbon/tar/gunk buildup issues. Maybe if you're stuck using heavy tarry parafiny filthy liquid fuels, like cruise ship heavy bunker oil as a fuel, the oxidizer problems are easier solved than creating a whole new fuel refining infrastructure... Would be interesting to know the design tradeoff, assuming its not just "too many bottles of vodka"