"The ammonia does not boil.... Ammonia and water are boiled in the boiler..."
You might want to be a little more careful not to contradict yourself when "correcting" somebody.
The total system pressure sets the temperature at which the boiler will have to run to boil the ammonia/water solution - so to use a low grade heat source you would have to run a lower system pressure in order to allow the low grade heat to boil the mix and run the cycle.
What I've often wondered about adsorption cooling is if you can make it work with a lower-grade heat source - specifically, could you make an ammonia based adsorption cooler run from a water-antifreeze mix heated by a normal solar collector like you would use for hot water and heating?
I am not a chemist, mechanical engineer, or refrigeration engineer, and my Thermodynamics courses were twenty years ago, but as I understand it by varying the pressure within the closed-loop ammonia tubes you can vary the boiling point of the ammonia, and thus the temperature needed to run the regenerator. I would think you could set it so that the ammonia boiled at the 60 degree Celsius that you can get out of a normal solar array - it might not be very efficient, but so what - the energy you are getting is pretty much free.
Removing the complexity of solar tracking (needed for the concentrators required to get really high temperatures for things like molten salt solar power systems) and reducing the power needs to a simple recirculating pump and you could possible set such a system up for anybody in a climate where the sun shines a fair amount.
Thermal radiated power goes as the fourth power of the absolute temperature of the object. So an object at blood temperature (about 310 Kelvin or so) will radiate about 70% more power than an object at freezing (273 Kelvin or thereabouts).
However, the other factor is the emissivity of the object - a black object has a higher emissivity than a white object, and a silver object has less emissivity than a white object.
Of course, an object is also absorbing radiated energy, as well as conducted and convected heat.
The idea is that you prevent conduction and convection (by insulating the object in an IR transparent container), and then surround the object with an environment that is NOT radiating much heat power. The clear sky at night is such an object, but the earth below is not - so you reflect the sky with a low-emissivity reflector, and shield the object from the warm earth.
Technically, you don't need a perfect parabolic reflector to pull this trick off - unlike concentrating sunlight (which can be modeled as a point source with little error), space can be modeled as a planar source (actually, sink) without much error. So in reality all you would need would be a large flat-ish mirror, rather than a parabolic mirror, to cool an object. However, if you are going to give somebody a mirror, you might as well give them one that can be used as a cooker as well as a cooler.
This effect is also one of the reasons why the desert gets so damn cold at night. Sand has lots of surface area, and so can radiate its heat fairly effectively. The desert has little water vapor in the air, and without that dastardly greenhouse gas dihydrogen monoxide in the way, the heat can go right into space. So, shortly after the sun goes down, so does the temperature.
Gabe Newell - the guy who's company has chosen to make their games NOT portable to any thing other than Windows, is criticizing Sony for making their games hard to port?
The same Gabe Newell who took a relatively portable game framework (Quake) and made it NOT portable (Half-Life)?
The same Gabe Newell who chose to use a non-portable graphics framework (Direct-3D) rather than a portable graphics framework (OpenGL) for Half-Life II?
Well, I guess he is an expert in non-portable - we'll allow his testimony.
I was just thinking of that very thing, and was going to make a comment anyway.
Consider the old Motion Pixels MovieCD codec. By today's standards the codec isn't much, and yes, if you happen to own any of the old MovieCDs you would be better served just buying the DVD of the movie.
However, precisely because the MovieCD format was killed deader than hell by the DVD, Motion Pixels went out of business, and the codec source, if it even still exists, is probably in some bankruptcy liquidator's sock drawer - I doubt that short of hiring a private investigator that you could even FIND the person with the source - and even if you did, you would be unlikely to be able to get the code released so that anybody could do anything with it.
Well, then do it - the test for No Code Tech is not very hard, and then you can start getting practice operating, and start studying for the Extra when the FCC removes the 5 words per minute Morse requirement (any day now).
Go to http://www.arrl.org/ - download the question pools (they are about to change - so get the correct ones), go by a shi^H^H^HRadio Shack and get the Tech, General, and Extra study guides, and spend a few minutes a night studying.
The ARRL should have a list of testing sessions and locations - failing that, let me know where you are and I'll see what I can find out.
See, there is this really neat invention called a toothbrush, and this really cool chemical composition called toothpaste that, when used twice daily, will prevent the yellow staining of your teeth. It also will improve your breath.
Perhaps that, rather than the yellow teeth, is why you are unable to get anyone to be near you.
Getting and IBM ID is only slightly harder than getting a/. ID - fill in a form, click submit.
I registered last week at work to get the documentation, though I have not yet had a chance to even take a quick look at it.
But for what I do (communications and signal processing) the Cell looks really good - I think I could replace several DSPs and protocol processors with one Cell.
OK, so - let's see if I can take some of the backspin off the article, and demonstrate how it might have been phrased to be USEFUL yet not bash Microsoft:
Everybody: If you have been to the Microsoft campus in Redmond between August 16 and August 19, YOU NEED TO GO TO YOUR DOCTOR NOW! - it turns out that somebody there had been exposed to Measles while overseas, and subsequently contracted the disease. Especially if you had been in the cafeteria, you need to be checked out, especially if your immunizations are not up to date. While this has all the makings of a sick joke (no pun intended) this is deadly serious. More information at the King County Health Department's website
I leave it as an exercise to the reader as to whether the less-spun article would have been accepted.
You might let those of us in professions other than medicine know what/who JCAHO is and what role they play.
"Yes. It's Wonderful. Isn't It?"
on
Video Tombstones
·
· Score: 1
"Yes. It's Wonderful. Isn't It?"
Welcome to twenty minutes into the future....
(Now, for all you mods where were in diapers in the 1980's - This is a reference to an episode of Max Headroom, specifically one in which people were paying a company to "scan" their soon-to-be dearly departed and hold their engram patterns until such time as their bodies could be cloned - in the meanwhile their "scan" was put onto a video screen in a mausoleum where their loved once could visit. The "scan" was a scam, and one such scammed women's dead husband responded to all inquiries with "Yes. It's Wonderful. Isn't It?")
A LASER is a device operating in either the infrared band, or the visible band - say wavelengths shorter than 11 um.
A MASER is a device operating at microwave frequencies - roughly 1GHz to 1 THz.
First of all - for ANY EM radiation - RF, light, X-rays, you name it - the shorter the wavelength, the smaller a focusing setup you will need for a give divergence angle. That is why you can focus light with a very small (to us) lens and get a good collimation, but it takes a BIG dish to focus 460 MHz RF that the radio astronomers use. Double the frequency, halve the wavelength, half the size of the antenna needed.
Now, if you are talking about using a laser for WiFi - first, you have a LOT of absorption in the atmosphere. You have scattering. You have rain. You have safety issues. You have the fact that with a narrow divergence angle, the slightest movement of the laser will place the beam off the receiver. You have the fact (as others have noted) that the earth is round, so unless you have a great deal of height the horizon is too close to be worth worrying about.
OK, now on to masers and RF. Let me further split the field into above 10GHz, and below 10GHz.
Above 10GHz (3 cm wavelength), signals "act like light" - they get blocked by small things in the beam. They go in straight lines (remember the bit about the earth being curved?). Also, as the frequency goes up, the absorption of the atmosphere goes up - so either your power goes up, or your signal level goes down.
At these frequencies, a maser can generate a "long needle" of signal - but then you have the problem of alignment, and of things blocking the beam, and of atmospheric attenuation. You can also get the same level of collimation using a small (30 cm) dish. You also don't have to worry about pumping a maser and losing 80%-90% of your input power. There simply is no advantage to using a maser over using a Gunn diode and a dish.
OK, now to the 1GHz to 5GHz range. In this range, the signals "act like radio" - they are large enough that the signal will diffract around small objects in the beam. There is less atmospheric attenuation. The beam width will be wider, which while it costs you gain makes aiming much easier. To an extent, you get "knife-edge" diffraction over the horizon, extending your range somewhat.
Now, you could build a maser for a fixed frequency carrier in these frequency ranges. But again, WHY? Instead of wasting 80% to 90% of the energy, you can run a simple amplifier and get at least 50% of the input energy into the beam. A simple vacuum tube amp will do nicely for the lower range, and for the higher ranges a magnetron or traveling wave tube amplifier will do the job much easier than a maser. Again, the collimation of a maser can be matched by a dish of a couple of feet diamater - and a maser for these frequencies isn't going to be much smaller.
The simple fact it there is no advantage to using a maser for this job - it's like saying "but why not use an air powered nailer to staple these papers together?" The air nailer may be great at nailing boards together, but it sucks as a stapler.
There are places masers are useful - generating very narrow bandwidth signals for timing purposes, acting as very high gain very narrowband amplifiers for deep space telemetry. But as a means of generating a carrier for a wideband signal like 802.11 they just aren't the right tool for the job. I don't expect my Grand Marquis to be good on the lake, and I don't expect my toaster oven to heat my house.
I never said that LASERS were not useful. MASERS - i.e. devices operating at microwave frequencies - were what I was talking about.
And I never even said that masers were never useful - just not useful for what you are talking about.
And I never said that modulating a maser was not possible - I said that *tuning* a maser - i.e. changing the frequency, say from 802.11 channel 1 to 802.11 channel 10 - was difficult.
And a laser diode, like the.5 milliwatt laser in your CD player, is a far cry, in terms of beam power, frequency, and total input power, from a maser running several watts - which is what a maser used for RF communications would have to be.
BTW: The lasers used in telecomms, over the tens to hundreds (NOT thousands) of kilometers of fiber, run about 10 watts of output power, with about a hundred watts of input power - not a low power at all. They are used not because of beam collimation, but because of their narrowness of bandwidth and their ability to be switched at very high frequencies - the actual divergence angle on these devices is rather large.
Lastly, you are confusing "voltage" with "power" - they are not the same. Your 100 watt CPU is drawing the bulk of its power from a 1.8 volt (or less) power supply - at many tens of amps of current.
First of all: the term you are looking for is MASER - Microwave Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation. Masers were actually developed before lasers.
Second of all - the difference between a high gain (and thus very directional) antenna and a maser is nil - in both cases you have a narrow beam with a small beam spread (angle of divergence). No laser, no maser, no signal source of any type has an angle of divergence of zero - they ALL spread. This "long needle" of RF from a maser is no different than a good RF amp into a good antenna system - they will be the same width (due to diffraction limits) and have the same divergence angle.
Third of all - in order to make a maser work, you need a material which has an energy state transition corresponding to your desired frequency and that you can create a metastable population inversion in. Now, what that means is that if you want to make a 2.6 GHz maser, you have to find some material which has 2 energy states that are separated by the energy of a 2.6 GHz photon, and in which you can pump a significant portion of the material into the higher energy state and have it stay there until it is hit by a 2.6 GHz photon to stimulate the emission of radiation.
Fourth of all, creating such a maser, and having it be at all tunable in frequency (in other words, you have to be able to tune the energy states of the material) is not easy. There are some tricks, like free electron (l|m)asers, that can do this, but they are VERY complicated.
Fifth of all, (l|m)asers are very inefficient at converting input energy into output energy - you have to throw a LOT of watts in to get a watt out. Normal RF circuits are a great deal more efficient (better than 70% for a class C amplifier) than a maser.
Overall, it is a LOT easier to get the same beamwidth with a good antenna system than with a maser.
Vegans are not rational people (IMHO) - they do not subject their belief structure to any kind of real scrutiny - they will not eat unfertilized hen's eggs which had no chance of being life, but will kill a carrot plant to eat it. Life is life, and life is also death.
But OK, so vegans won't eat any meat that came from "exploiting" an animal - even a simple hypodermic prick is too much for them.
OK, so what if we use meat that can convey, clearly and distinctly, its desire to be eaten? Barring a Milliway's moment - what if the meat cells came from a human volunteer? Would that be cannibalism? There would not be the normal risks of disease from this, as the meat would be vat grown.
Would that satisfy the vegans?
(On a more serious note - what if the meat cells came from an animal killed by natural causes - say, a cow killed by wolves? Or a deer killed by a bumper?)
And somewhere in Hollyweird^H^H^H^Hood, there is one scum-sucking producer looking at this and saying to another "Well, I think we have found our next reality TV show!"
No, I don't delete cookies - because they never get created in the first place. I have Moz+Multizilla set to ask me before creating a cookie, and unless *I* decide it is needed, the cookie is never created AND the site gets added to my "never accept cookies from this site" list.
So the sites that get hit the hardest by this are the sites that, by default, attempt to set a cookie whenever you visit the site. I take the attitude of "You shouldn't need a cookie for routine viewing, so buh-bye!".
Now, sites like/., or news.google.com, or any discussion forum into which I log in, or any e-commerce site - they get allowed to set cookies, because the cookie is of benefit to me.
Oh, and by the way: I use the same rule for Javascript and plug-ins - if the first thing some site insists upon doing is wanting to run Javascript or Flash I block it. JS and Flash are fine where appropriate, but as a routine item they are not needed.
I also don't allow third-party sites to set cookies - if I am visiting example.com, there is no reason that adserver.scumsuckers.com needs to set a cookie, run Javascript, load Flash, or anything else - serve up your ad image and be done with it.
And if some site rams an annoying animated GIF down my throat - they go on my image blacklist.
*AND*, if they annoy me enough, they go on my personal firewall/proxy blacklist and then they CANNOT bother me no matter WHAT they try to do.
It amazes me when I go to a friend's house and see the crap they put up with - my browsing experience is sooooo much nicer.
Advertisers: despite what you were taught in school, I am not a pair of eyeballs to view ads, a pair of ears to hear ads, a gullet to swallow crappy product, and an anus that craps cash for you. I am a person, and you abuse me at your peril.
So, if I configure my mail server to send, as a part of the EHLO sequence, a message to the effect of:
EHLO foo by completing this transaction you agree to pay one thousand dollars United States currency for every commercial email transacted, payable within thirty days of transmission
Would that not be just as valid as most spammers.1 point microfont "by clicking on accept you agree to let us spam the shit out of you"?
Slashdot Mirror
"The ammonia does not boil.... Ammonia and water are boiled in the boiler ..."
You might want to be a little more careful not to contradict yourself when "correcting" somebody.
The total system pressure sets the temperature at which the boiler will have to run to boil the ammonia/water solution - so to use a low grade heat source you would have to run a lower system pressure in order to allow the low grade heat to boil the mix and run the cycle.
What I've often wondered about adsorption cooling is if you can make it work with a lower-grade heat source - specifically, could you make an ammonia based adsorption cooler run from a water-antifreeze mix heated by a normal solar collector like you would use for hot water and heating?
I am not a chemist, mechanical engineer, or refrigeration engineer, and my Thermodynamics courses were twenty years ago, but as I understand it by varying the pressure within the closed-loop ammonia tubes you can vary the boiling point of the ammonia, and thus the temperature needed to run the regenerator. I would think you could set it so that the ammonia boiled at the 60 degree Celsius that you can get out of a normal solar array - it might not be very efficient, but so what - the energy you are getting is pretty much free.
Removing the complexity of solar tracking (needed for the concentrators required to get really high temperatures for things like molten salt solar power systems) and reducing the power needs to a simple recirculating pump and you could possible set such a system up for anybody in a climate where the sun shines a fair amount.
Thermal radiated power goes as the fourth power of the absolute temperature of the object. So an object at blood temperature (about 310 Kelvin or so) will radiate about 70% more power than an object at freezing (273 Kelvin or thereabouts).
However, the other factor is the emissivity of the object - a black object has a higher emissivity than a white object, and a silver object has less emissivity than a white object.
Of course, an object is also absorbing radiated energy, as well as conducted and convected heat.
The idea is that you prevent conduction and convection (by insulating the object in an IR transparent container), and then surround the object with an environment that is NOT radiating much heat power. The clear sky at night is such an object, but the earth below is not - so you reflect the sky with a low-emissivity reflector, and shield the object from the warm earth.
Technically, you don't need a perfect parabolic reflector to pull this trick off - unlike concentrating sunlight (which can be modeled as a point source with little error), space can be modeled as a planar source (actually, sink) without much error. So in reality all you would need would be a large flat-ish mirror, rather than a parabolic mirror, to cool an object. However, if you are going to give somebody a mirror, you might as well give them one that can be used as a cooker as well as a cooler.
This effect is also one of the reasons why the desert gets so damn cold at night. Sand has lots of surface area, and so can radiate its heat fairly effectively. The desert has little water vapor in the air, and without that dastardly greenhouse gas dihydrogen monoxide in the way, the heat can go right into space. So, shortly after the sun goes down, so does the temperature.
Gabe Newell - the guy who's company has chosen to make their games NOT portable to any thing other than Windows, is criticizing Sony for making their games hard to port?
The same Gabe Newell who took a relatively portable game framework (Quake) and made it NOT portable (Half-Life)?
The same Gabe Newell who chose to use a non-portable graphics framework (Direct-3D) rather than a portable graphics framework (OpenGL) for Half-Life II?
Well, I guess he is an expert in non-portable - we'll allow his testimony.
I was just thinking of that very thing, and was going to make a comment anyway.
Consider the old Motion Pixels MovieCD codec. By today's standards the codec isn't much, and yes, if you happen to own any of the old MovieCDs you would be better served just buying the DVD of the movie.
However, precisely because the MovieCD format was killed deader than hell by the DVD, Motion Pixels went out of business, and the codec source, if it even still exists, is probably in some bankruptcy liquidator's sock drawer - I doubt that short of hiring a private investigator that you could even FIND the person with the source - and even if you did, you would be unlikely to be able to get the code released so that anybody could do anything with it.
Well, then do it - the test for No Code Tech is not very hard, and then you can start getting practice operating, and start studying for the Extra when the FCC removes the 5 words per minute Morse requirement (any day now).
Go to http://www.arrl.org/ - download the question pools (they are about to change - so get the correct ones), go by a shi^H^H^HRadio Shack and get the Tech, General, and Extra study guides, and spend a few minutes a night studying.
The ARRL should have a list of testing sessions and locations - failing that, let me know where you are and I'll see what I can find out.
See, there is this really neat invention called a toothbrush, and this really cool chemical composition called toothpaste that, when used twice daily, will prevent the yellow staining of your teeth. It also will improve your breath.
Perhaps that, rather than the yellow teeth, is why you are unable to get anyone to be near you.
Getting and IBM ID is only slightly harder than getting a /. ID - fill in a form, click submit.
I registered last week at work to get the documentation, though I have not yet had a chance to even take a quick look at it.
But for what I do (communications and signal processing) the Cell looks really good - I think I could replace several DSPs and protocol processors with one Cell.
I leave it as an exercise to the reader as to whether the less-spun article would have been accepted.
You might let those of us in professions other than medicine know what/who JCAHO is and what role they play.
"Yes. It's Wonderful. Isn't It?"
Welcome to twenty minutes into the future....
(Now, for all you mods where were in diapers in the 1980's - This is a reference to an episode of Max Headroom, specifically one in which people were paying a company to "scan" their soon-to-be dearly departed and hold their engram patterns until such time as their bodies could be cloned - in the meanwhile their "scan" was put onto a video screen in a mausoleum where their loved once could visit. The "scan" was a scam, and one such scammed women's dead husband responded to all inquiries with "Yes. It's Wonderful. Isn't It?")
You obviously need to replace that nasty transistor based output with a tube - that will improve the midrange as well as the spatial imaging.
You also need the oxygen-free copper, extra-virgin yak-wool insulated monster headphone cable to preserve the Mhz transients.
OK, let's be clear what we are talking about.
A LASER is a device operating in either the infrared band, or the visible band - say wavelengths shorter than 11 um.
A MASER is a device operating at microwave frequencies - roughly 1GHz to 1 THz.
First of all - for ANY EM radiation - RF, light, X-rays, you name it - the shorter the wavelength, the smaller a focusing setup you will need for a give divergence angle. That is why you can focus light with a very small (to us) lens and get a good collimation, but it takes a BIG dish to focus 460 MHz RF that the radio astronomers use. Double the frequency, halve the wavelength, half the size of the antenna needed.
Now, if you are talking about using a laser for WiFi - first, you have a LOT of absorption in the atmosphere. You have scattering. You have rain. You have safety issues. You have the fact that with a narrow divergence angle, the slightest movement of the laser will place the beam off the receiver. You have the fact (as others have noted) that the earth is round, so unless you have a great deal of height the horizon is too close to be worth worrying about.
OK, now on to masers and RF. Let me further split the field into above 10GHz, and below 10GHz.
Above 10GHz (3 cm wavelength), signals "act like light" - they get blocked by small things in the beam. They go in straight lines (remember the bit about the earth being curved?). Also, as the frequency goes up, the absorption of the atmosphere goes up - so either your power goes up, or your signal level goes down.
At these frequencies, a maser can generate a "long needle" of signal - but then you have the problem of alignment, and of things blocking the beam, and of atmospheric attenuation. You can also get the same level of collimation using a small (30 cm) dish. You also don't have to worry about pumping a maser and losing 80%-90% of your input power. There simply is no advantage to using a maser over using a Gunn diode and a dish.
OK, now to the 1GHz to 5GHz range. In this range, the signals "act like radio" - they are large enough that the signal will diffract around small objects in the beam. There is less atmospheric attenuation. The beam width will be wider, which while it costs you gain makes aiming much easier. To an extent, you get "knife-edge" diffraction over the horizon, extending your range somewhat.
Now, you could build a maser for a fixed frequency carrier in these frequency ranges. But again, WHY? Instead of wasting 80% to 90% of the energy, you can run a simple amplifier and get at least 50% of the input energy into the beam. A simple vacuum tube amp will do nicely for the lower range, and for the higher ranges a magnetron or traveling wave tube amplifier will do the job much easier than a maser. Again, the collimation of a maser can be matched by a dish of a couple of feet diamater - and a maser for these frequencies isn't going to be much smaller.
The simple fact it there is no advantage to using a maser for this job - it's like saying "but why not use an air powered nailer to staple these papers together?" The air nailer may be great at nailing boards together, but it sucks as a stapler.
There are places masers are useful - generating very narrow bandwidth signals for timing purposes, acting as very high gain very narrowband amplifiers for deep space telemetry. But as a means of generating a carrier for a wideband signal like 802.11 they just aren't the right tool for the job. I don't expect my Grand Marquis to be good on the lake, and I don't expect my toaster oven to heat my house.
I never said that LASERS were not useful. MASERS - i.e. devices operating at microwave frequencies - were what I was talking about.
.5 milliwatt laser in your CD player, is a far cry, in terms of beam power, frequency, and total input power, from a maser running several watts - which is what a maser used for RF communications would have to be.
And I never even said that masers were never useful - just not useful for what you are talking about.
And I never said that modulating a maser was not possible - I said that *tuning* a maser - i.e. changing the frequency, say from 802.11 channel 1 to 802.11 channel 10 - was difficult.
And a laser diode, like the
BTW: The lasers used in telecomms, over the tens to hundreds (NOT thousands) of kilometers of fiber, run about 10 watts of output power, with about a hundred watts of input power - not a low power at all. They are used not because of beam collimation, but because of their narrowness of bandwidth and their ability to be switched at very high frequencies - the actual divergence angle on these devices is rather large.
Lastly, you are confusing "voltage" with "power" - they are not the same. Your 100 watt CPU is drawing the bulk of its power from a 1.8 volt (or less) power supply - at many tens of amps of current.
First of all: the term you are looking for is MASER - Microwave Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation. Masers were actually developed before lasers.
Second of all - the difference between a high gain (and thus very directional) antenna and a maser is nil - in both cases you have a narrow beam with a small beam spread (angle of divergence). No laser, no maser, no signal source of any type has an angle of divergence of zero - they ALL spread. This "long needle" of RF from a maser is no different than a good RF amp into a good antenna system - they will be the same width (due to diffraction limits) and have the same divergence angle.
Third of all - in order to make a maser work, you need a material which has an energy state transition corresponding to your desired frequency and that you can create a metastable population inversion in. Now, what that means is that if you want to make a 2.6 GHz maser, you have to find some material which has 2 energy states that are separated by the energy of a 2.6 GHz photon, and in which you can pump a significant portion of the material into the higher energy state and have it stay there until it is hit by a 2.6 GHz photon to stimulate the emission of radiation.
Fourth of all, creating such a maser, and having it be at all tunable in frequency (in other words, you have to be able to tune the energy states of the material) is not easy. There are some tricks, like free electron (l|m)asers, that can do this, but they are VERY complicated.
Fifth of all, (l|m)asers are very inefficient at converting input energy into output energy - you have to throw a LOT of watts in to get a watt out. Normal RF circuits are a great deal more efficient (better than 70% for a class C amplifier) than a maser.
Overall, it is a LOT easier to get the same beamwidth with a good antenna system than with a maser.
Vegans are not rational people (IMHO) - they do not subject their belief structure to any kind of real scrutiny - they will not eat unfertilized hen's eggs which had no chance of being life, but will kill a carrot plant to eat it. Life is life, and life is also death.
But OK, so vegans won't eat any meat that came from "exploiting" an animal - even a simple hypodermic prick is too much for them.
OK, so what if we use meat that can convey, clearly and distinctly, its desire to be eaten? Barring a Milliway's moment - what if the meat cells came from a human volunteer? Would that be cannibalism? There would not be the normal risks of disease from this, as the meat would be vat grown.
Would that satisfy the vegans?
(On a more serious note - what if the meat cells came from an animal killed by natural causes - say, a cow killed by wolves? Or a deer killed by a bumper?)
I thought a big part of military training was the idea that no soldier is to obey an unlawful order, or a lawful order unlawfully given.
ESPECIALLY at the top military academies, such as, oh, say, West Point!
So these cadets are, in effect, saying "But I was Just Following Orders!" - which is NOT a valid excuse.
You forgot to tie another string onto the first, so that when you are done, you have both the new cable, and a string in the conduit.
ALWAYS pull a second string.
And somewhere in Hollyweird^H^H^H^Hood, there is one scum-sucking producer looking at this and saying to another "Well, I think we have found our next reality TV show!"
No, wear one of these.
Or just show up wearing nothing but a mailing tube and grease - people will leave you alone then.
So, we have a real live meatspace slashdotting.
Sigh.
No wonder everybody steers clear of this planet.
No, I don't delete cookies - because they never get created in the first place. I have Moz+Multizilla set to ask me before creating a cookie, and unless *I* decide it is needed, the cookie is never created AND the site gets added to my "never accept cookies from this site" list.
/., or news.google.com, or any discussion forum into which I log in, or any e-commerce site - they get allowed to set cookies, because the cookie is of benefit to me .
So the sites that get hit the hardest by this are the sites that, by default, attempt to set a cookie whenever you visit the site. I take the attitude of "You shouldn't need a cookie for routine viewing, so buh-bye!".
Now, sites like
Oh, and by the way: I use the same rule for Javascript and plug-ins - if the first thing some site insists upon doing is wanting to run Javascript or Flash I block it. JS and Flash are fine where appropriate, but as a routine item they are not needed.
I also don't allow third-party sites to set cookies - if I am visiting example.com, there is no reason that adserver.scumsuckers.com needs to set a cookie, run Javascript, load Flash, or anything else - serve up your ad image and be done with it.
And if some site rams an annoying animated GIF down my throat - they go on my image blacklist.
*AND*, if they annoy me enough, they go on my personal firewall/proxy blacklist and then they CANNOT bother me no matter WHAT they try to do.
It amazes me when I go to a friend's house and see the crap they put up with - my browsing experience is sooooo much nicer.
Advertisers: despite what you were taught in school, I am not a pair of eyeballs to view ads, a pair of ears to hear ads, a gullet to swallow crappy product, and an anus that craps cash for you. I am a person, and you abuse me at your peril.
"Silly gring he (Gates) always seems to have glued on...."
Would that not make The Joker a better fit?
He also forgot the big, chrome fart-pipe muffler, the Thunder-Thump 3000® subwoofer kit, and the Krylon Black windows.
And the spinner hubs. Gotta have the spinner hubs.
Would that not be just as valid as most spammers