Prior to WWII the Soviets were second only the the Germans in rocket technology, while Goddard was stuck out in the desert begging rich New Yorkers for drips and drabs of funding.
Social Security and Medicare are not budget items, they're trust items. People have paid into them, and are allowed to take their portions back out. The Pentagram budget is the single largest discretionary budget item by far. Add in the alphabet soup of intel agencies and the utterly unconstitutional Black Budget and it's an even larger percentage. It's depressing that it is actually illegal for taxpayers to know how much of their money the military is wasting.
With eight motors, if the control software is done correctly they should be able to compensate for the failure/destruction of one or two as long as they aren't next to each other.
A bank account is an 'investment' vehicle? Perhaps that was true a couple of decades ago when a savings account could return 5% interest, but none of them pay more than 0.5% today and a lot (most?) don't give any interest at all. For a JP Morgan checking account at least the "return" is actually negative, as it pays no interest and there is a $5-10/month fee just for having the account. Not what I would call an "investment".
Until you get into the millions of dollars a stash of cash is probably safer than a collection of BitCoins, since it can't have a mechanical failure that makes the wallet unreadable, it will not be affected by any sort of EMP, water doesn't damage it at all, and as long as at least 50% of a damaged bill is readable it is still usable.
Concrete doesn't "dry", it hardens. It's a chemical process that happens naturally over the course of x-many hours after mixing (the 'x' will depend on the actual composition), doesn't require expose to air and in fact proceeds normally when poured under water or in vacuum. The majority of the hardening happens within a few hours, but the process doesn't actually complete until years have passed. Most concrete doesn't reach its full strength until months after pouring.
Dams and other large structures are poured in sections mostly because forms can only handle a certain amount of pressure before bursting. Heat from the curing/hardening process can also be an issue with large pours. I'm not an engineer, but my understanding is that multiple small pours are less brittle than a single large pour as well, so resist earthquakes better.
My grandfather used to tie hooks to mice that he caught in the barn and use them for bait for pike. My dad said that he watched a pike eat every duckling in a family when the mother decided to take them across the pond to escape a dog.
You're quite sure of this? Why, pray tell? Because they say so? Until very recently Israel made the same claim, though no one with a brain believed them. I doubt the Chinese are as trusting as you are, and a little more grounding in 'International Realities' might be good too.
If India, Pakistan, Israel or anyone else were so stupid as to want to nuke some city in the US an ICBM would be the worst possible method to use. It's really, really easy to see where it came from. Put the thing in a cargo container addressed to an anonymously-leased warehouse space in the target city, and as long as the paperwork is in order there is a 95% chance of it arriving unmolested. Even the dismal success rate of the Pentagon's ABM money pit is higher than 5% (may be as high as 20% now).
Who says that 70 years is the maximum average lifespan for sentient beings? We may be abnormally short-lived, and 3000 years might not be an unreasonable time for an explorer to spend on an epic voyage. Yeah, not really applicable here, but it's an objection that I always hear as to why interstellar flight is impossible.
Well, the Dekkan Traps are currently frozen, there isn't any other large-scale source of carbon dioxide currently active, volcanoes (the number two source of CO2) don't even come close to the annual human output. The concentrations of the gas has been rising since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, when we started the wholesale burning of fossil fuels, and has risen at almost the same rate of increase of our usage of those fuels. The discrepancy between the rise in concentration of atmospheric CO2 and our use of fossil fuels is almost completely compensated for by the increase in oceanic concentrations.
Oh, and for direct proof, the isotopic concentrations in the additional carbon dioxide match that of the CO2 emitted by burning fossil fuels.
Really? Where do I start? Does someone have a clue-stick I can whack the poster with?
Hospitals have areas that are off-limits to patients and public, for very, very good reasons. In most places that have a side staff entrance it opens into the off-limits area.
Doctors generally have plenty of cash and high-limit credit cards, tend to carry expensive toys around with them, and an awful lot of them also carry around drugs of various types. They don't need some random meth-head robbing them in their lounge.
Hospitals (and most other large facilities) need to be able to lock down all the exterior doors in case of an emergency, while still allowing access to staff. My customers have had to deal with situations like irate armed ex-husbands, influenza pandemics, a plane crash, and a bunch of gang-bangers who wanted to finish off they guy they had only wounded in the drive-by.
I'll stop here, have to go do something useful. There are plenty more reasons, like discounts from their insurance carriers, that could be added.
That sounds rather like how a real brain works. Very distributed, various bits and pieces do similar things in different ways, 'data' sloshes around from place to place until something coherent (such as the answer to the question your boss just asked) emerges.
Wonder how IBM is allocating those resources. If it's in typical American business fashion there will be $50 million going into actual research and development, $50 million into lawyers, and $900 million in marketing.
No one wants to take responsibility for approving a new design. Nuclear regulatory agencies and insurance companies in all the advanced countries are run by risk-adverse bureaucrats and (even worse) political appointees, not engineers. It's going to take someone building a reactor for free in the Third World to show the new designs work, hiding the whole process from the insurance companies. Or China could do it.
Having to unblock AOL so that the marketing exec could send/receive company documents to his personal email account was annoying. The subsequent flood of spam was the only thing that let my boss get away with blocking AOL again. The marketing exec was surprised at our reaction, he just thought that was the way email systems were supposed to be.
This was the same idiot who needed his laptop reinstalled three times in four months when he installed the latest version of AOL's client software the same day it was released.
I work in physical security. Executives are bad, but the absolute worst are doctors. There is a local hospital where the keypad code (1234) for the 'Doctors Entrance' hasn't changed in 23 years, because the doctors refuse to remember their own 4-digit code. Every attempt to change it has resulted in surgeons immediately marching into the executive offices and threatening to quit (really). Even an irate and armed ex-husband entering the hospital through that door didn't convince them. Getting them to use a key card is almost impossible unless they can have one card to leave in the Mercedes, another for the Porsche, and another in their desk that they can retrieve by tailgating into the building./rant
I just find it annoying that every time a non-First World country acquires some new tech a lot of people automatically assume it's a weapon. Thailand gets a bio-research lab, we hear, "They can make biological weapons!" A chemical plant is constructed in Morocco and the cry goes up, "They can make chemical weapons!" If Argentina were to attempt to refine its (rather abundant) uranium to fuel its "They're going to build a nuke!"
If any of these things happen in the US, Japan or Europe no one blinks an eye. There wasn't a peep when Japan started putting up its own satellites, not even China accused them of building an ICBM. It's nothing more than thinly-veiled racist bullshit.
There were very few societies in the world that didn't practice slavery at the time. I didn't mention that people believed the sun went around the Earth either, it was as unnecessary to the post as mention of slavery was.
Slashdot Mirror
By and large, they don't become gangbangers because they got bored being rocket scientists.
For some reason I thought it was closer to Cornwall than France. So, it's a monarchy?
Really? But Jersey is in England, so it should be!
Crap. How the heck did this post get up here? Meant to reply to someone lower in the thread.
Prior to WWII the Soviets were second only the the Germans in rocket technology, while Goddard was stuck out in the desert begging rich New Yorkers for drips and drabs of funding.
Social Security and Medicare are not budget items, they're trust items. People have paid into them, and are allowed to take their portions back out. The Pentagram budget is the single largest discretionary budget item by far. Add in the alphabet soup of intel agencies and the utterly unconstitutional Black Budget and it's an even larger percentage. It's depressing that it is actually illegal for taxpayers to know how much of their money the military is wasting.
With eight motors, if the control software is done correctly they should be able to compensate for the failure/destruction of one or two as long as they aren't next to each other.
The reason why most of the drones are multi-rotor is that it's easier to keep them stable.
A bank account is an 'investment' vehicle? Perhaps that was true a couple of decades ago when a savings account could return 5% interest, but none of them pay more than 0.5% today and a lot (most?) don't give any interest at all. For a JP Morgan checking account at least the "return" is actually negative, as it pays no interest and there is a $5-10/month fee just for having the account. Not what I would call an "investment".
Until you get into the millions of dollars a stash of cash is probably safer than a collection of BitCoins, since it can't have a mechanical failure that makes the wallet unreadable, it will not be affected by any sort of EMP, water doesn't damage it at all, and as long as at least 50% of a damaged bill is readable it is still usable.
Concrete doesn't "dry", it hardens. It's a chemical process that happens naturally over the course of x-many hours after mixing (the 'x' will depend on the actual composition), doesn't require expose to air and in fact proceeds normally when poured under water or in vacuum. The majority of the hardening happens within a few hours, but the process doesn't actually complete until years have passed. Most concrete doesn't reach its full strength until months after pouring.
Dams and other large structures are poured in sections mostly because forms can only handle a certain amount of pressure before bursting. Heat from the curing/hardening process can also be an issue with large pours. I'm not an engineer, but my understanding is that multiple small pours are less brittle than a single large pour as well, so resist earthquakes better.
My grandfather used to tie hooks to mice that he caught in the barn and use them for bait for pike. My dad said that he watched a pike eat every duckling in a family when the mother decided to take them across the pond to escape a dog.
Did you see the TEETH on that damn thing? Holy crap. I can certainly understand why the bird probably never gets away.
Japan does not have thermonuclear weapons.
You're quite sure of this? Why, pray tell? Because they say so? Until very recently Israel made the same claim, though no one with a brain believed them. I doubt the Chinese are as trusting as you are, and a little more grounding in 'International Realities' might be good too.
If India, Pakistan, Israel or anyone else were so stupid as to want to nuke some city in the US an ICBM would be the worst possible method to use. It's really, really easy to see where it came from. Put the thing in a cargo container addressed to an anonymously-leased warehouse space in the target city, and as long as the paperwork is in order there is a 95% chance of it arriving unmolested. Even the dismal success rate of the Pentagon's ABM money pit is higher than 5% (may be as high as 20% now).
Who says that 70 years is the maximum average lifespan for sentient beings? We may be abnormally short-lived, and 3000 years might not be an unreasonable time for an explorer to spend on an epic voyage. Yeah, not really applicable here, but it's an objection that I always hear as to why interstellar flight is impossible.
Well, the Dekkan Traps are currently frozen, there isn't any other large-scale source of carbon dioxide currently active, volcanoes (the number two source of CO2) don't even come close to the annual human output. The concentrations of the gas has been rising since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, when we started the wholesale burning of fossil fuels, and has risen at almost the same rate of increase of our usage of those fuels. The discrepancy between the rise in concentration of atmospheric CO2 and our use of fossil fuels is almost completely compensated for by the increase in oceanic concentrations.
Oh, and for direct proof, the isotopic concentrations in the additional carbon dioxide match that of the CO2 emitted by burning fossil fuels.
Really? Where do I start? Does someone have a clue-stick I can whack the poster with?
Hospitals have areas that are off-limits to patients and public, for very, very good reasons. In most places that have a side staff entrance it opens into the off-limits area.
Doctors generally have plenty of cash and high-limit credit cards, tend to carry expensive toys around with them, and an awful lot of them also carry around drugs of various types. They don't need some random meth-head robbing them in their lounge.
Hospitals (and most other large facilities) need to be able to lock down all the exterior doors in case of an emergency, while still allowing access to staff. My customers have had to deal with situations like irate armed ex-husbands, influenza pandemics, a plane crash, and a bunch of gang-bangers who wanted to finish off they guy they had only wounded in the drive-by.
I'll stop here, have to go do something useful. There are plenty more reasons, like discounts from their insurance carriers, that could be added.
That sounds rather like how a real brain works. Very distributed, various bits and pieces do similar things in different ways, 'data' sloshes around from place to place until something coherent (such as the answer to the question your boss just asked) emerges.
Wonder how IBM is allocating those resources. If it's in typical American business fashion there will be $50 million going into actual research and development, $50 million into lawyers, and $900 million in marketing.
No one wants to take responsibility for approving a new design. Nuclear regulatory agencies and insurance companies in all the advanced countries are run by risk-adverse bureaucrats and (even worse) political appointees, not engineers. It's going to take someone building a reactor for free in the Third World to show the new designs work, hiding the whole process from the insurance companies. Or China could do it.
Having to unblock AOL so that the marketing exec could send/receive company documents to his personal email account was annoying. The subsequent flood of spam was the only thing that let my boss get away with blocking AOL again. The marketing exec was surprised at our reaction, he just thought that was the way email systems were supposed to be.
This was the same idiot who needed his laptop reinstalled three times in four months when he installed the latest version of AOL's client software the same day it was released.
I work in physical security. Executives are bad, but the absolute worst are doctors. There is a local hospital where the keypad code (1234) for the 'Doctors Entrance' hasn't changed in 23 years, because the doctors refuse to remember their own 4-digit code. Every attempt to change it has resulted in surgeons immediately marching into the executive offices and threatening to quit (really). Even an irate and armed ex-husband entering the hospital through that door didn't convince them. Getting them to use a key card is almost impossible unless they can have one card to leave in the Mercedes, another for the Porsche, and another in their desk that they can retrieve by tailgating into the building. /rant
She was saving that for the unicorn farts.
Pigments break down in predictable ways. They probably aren't actually detecting melanin, but the breakdown products of melanin.
I just find it annoying that every time a non-First World country acquires some new tech a lot of people automatically assume it's a weapon. Thailand gets a bio-research lab, we hear, "They can make biological weapons!" A chemical plant is constructed in Morocco and the cry goes up, "They can make chemical weapons!" If Argentina were to attempt to refine its (rather abundant) uranium to fuel its "They're going to build a nuke!"
If any of these things happen in the US, Japan or Europe no one blinks an eye. There wasn't a peep when Japan started putting up its own satellites, not even China accused them of building an ICBM. It's nothing more than thinly-veiled racist bullshit.
There were very few societies in the world that didn't practice slavery at the time. I didn't mention that people believed the sun went around the Earth either, it was as unnecessary to the post as mention of slavery was.