I beg to differ with your statement-
"It wasn't Microsoft that killed SGI, it was Linux."
SGI embraced Linux wholeheartedly. They created a new high-speed low-latency interconnect technology to enhance beowulf clusters. They developed improved fail-over clustering and SAN servers for Linux. SGI LOVED linux. And they tried very hard to sell into the Linux market.
But in the 1999 timeframe, SGI temporarily teamed with the MicroBorg and got suckered in much the same way that Apple did.
SGI had a bundle of scene-generating software that was heavily used in the movie industry. MS apparently influenced SGI to create an intel-based NT/2000 workstation that had high-end proprietary SGI graphics in it. Then MS got SGI to "share" the code for their graphics software with MS on the premise that MS would do the grunt work of porting the graphics code to the Windulls environment and the two companies would then jointly market it.
In an AMAZING bout of naivete, SGI assumed that MS would only port the SGI graphics code to run on proprietary SGI graphics hardware. Imagine SGI's dismay when the code showed up running on generic NT boxes with Nvidia and ATI graphics cards. Now animation houses could render art work on $1000 PCs with the same software they used to use on $10,000 Octane workstations.
It was a fiasco. SGI quickly dropped their intel workstation line, but it was too late. MS was able to market the code as a generic product.
You would think that companies would learn that sharing anything proprietary with the erstwhile pirates from Redmond is tantamount to asking Jeffrey Dahmer to babysit for you.
I think what you observed was part of the death-spiral.
A shrinking customer based caused SGI to "eat its own children" so to speak. They raised prices on parts and support to try to squeeze more revenue out of existing customers, which only caused them to have fewer existing customers.
That was, as you have observed, mostly the fault of cocaine-snorting marketing types.
After all, if you don't admit that negative things are happening, you can keep ignoring them until disaster strikes.
I used to teach system admin and hardware repair courses for the Origin2000 and Onyx2 at SGI, and when the class was in Mountain View one module was to visit the "Reality Wall". That screen had only 24 Megapixels projected onto a 120 degree wrap around screen, but even at that the flight simulator was so realistic that students would fall out of their chairs when the plane took a curve. Poor old SGI. They built amazingly excellent hardware, bleeding edge software, paid their workers well, treated employees like kings and customers like emporers, and donated heavily to the open source movement. So, of course they went bankrupt. Done in by the Microslop-ization of technology. We who were once the high preists of the cult of technology, wizards of electronic wonder, have become the janitors of the Microsoft plumbing, fit only to plunge out the cr@p that clogs the email pipes. By allowing slackers in our ranks to use shrink-wrap scumware to badly execute business functions cheaply, we have fallen from grace.
One big difference between mainframes and UNIX or Windulls boxes is the way that resources were allocated.
IBM allowed fine-grained control of CPU time, IO bandwidth, RAM, and disk storage. And this control was not a weighted-selection algorithm, it was WYSIWYG deteministic control.
In mainframe shops, there were well defined workloads, often represented by a batch of transactions needing to be run against a database. These "batch jobs" would run on predictable intervals, daily, weekly, monthly. They could be scheduled to run at fixed times for known durations.
This made the whole mainframe environment very easy to manage. Instead of having to guesstimate workloads, and install CPU and I/O capacity to match unexpected peak demands ruled by chaos theory, mainframes were safe and predictable. The need for CPU MIPS and RAM was clearly visible and easily monitored and planned.
So when people say that mainframes were "more reliable", they don't just mean the MTBF numbers of the hardware.
They mean that when you ran work on a mainframe, you knew exactly what programs were using what resources at what times. And when something screwed up, you could very simply back up to the previous version of the affected files and re-run the batch job.
Life with mainframes was safe, logical, and predictable.
Introducing some of that into UNIX or Linux would not be a bad thing. Not every problem has to run in real-time with dynamic adjustment of resources. Deterministic, static allocations of memory, CPU, and I/O can work very well for predicatable workloads.
In the Gospel of John, (not Dvorak) the devil takes Jesus up onto a hillside and shows him the "kingdoms of the world" and offers it to Jesus as a reward if he will fall down and worship the devil. Jesus said no, but clearly Mr. William G the 3rd said yes. So the ninth reason Microsoft is dead and doomed to burn for all eternity is... oh, wait, that's not what Dvorak was saying, was it? Sorry, my bad...
You're just taking too much of a short term view. All greate empires in history have ended with a profound collapse. Either from foreign incursion or internal decay. The US is overdue. We've got 8 trillion or so in federal debt, and the Gov't is borrowing the money it is using to pay the interest on its current debt. As a nation we are paying our VISA with our Mastrercard. On the commercial side, we go $300Bn a year deeper in debt to China alone. We are the world's largest debtor nation. Other countries continue to lend us money because the dollar is the price standard fo rtheir goods, but as Europe with it's 50% larger economy is replacing the the dollar with the Euro as the worldwide standard, the incentive to prop us up is dwindling. Other nations have gone through this in recent history. Germany, Argentina, Brazil. They tried to fuel unsustainable lifestyles with massive debt, and ended up in collapse. Live it up now, your children will grow up to live in cardboard boxes by the side of the road, and when the dollar goes into hyperinflation and ends up $100 to the Euro, they will line up at the Mexican border to try to get to the good paying jobs in Tiajuana.
It is the pyramid scheme that is called the stock market that is the core of what ails the US economy.
Large investors believe they have a right to be paid for doing nothing. But that money comes out of the pockets of small investors like you and me.
Do you seriously think the money you have put into the stock market will still be there when you retire? Think again. In order for a stock to hold it's value someone has to be able to buy it for the price you want.
But this can't keep happening. American's aren't having enough children to replace themselves, the average couple is having only 1.3 children.
Which is why Social Security will collapse, and why the stock market will fail. But not before the big investors have fleeced you of your savings. They've got everyone in the country conned into believing that the pyramid can keep growing forever, but it can't.
Google for the term "Ponzi scheme".
For the sake of the common man, we have got to deflate the stock market, before it causes another 1920's style depression.
Phasing in huge capital gains tax increases will take the profitability out of conning other people out of their money.
It will crush the investment pyramid schemes, and force investors to return to sound long-term investments that grow by building infrastructure that has intrinsic value, instead of growing through rampant speculation and confidence schemes.
Lets do the math, Crude Oil is $70/barrel or about $1.40/gallon. 18 cents of the price at the pump is federal taxes about 10-20 cents is state tax depending on your state about 2-5cents/gal goes to the local station owner
That leaves $1.17 for the oil companies. Exxon's profits last year were $36Bn, the largest of any corporation in human history. And that was with gas at $2.30/gal This is just obscene. It's time to nationalize the Oil industry in the name of national security. Not to mention common decency.
Actually, you're barking up the wrong tree.
I'm neither EU nor a Democrat.
I'm a fundamentalist Christian Republican who voted Republican since Reagan, *but* has finally realized that he has been conned with -family values- rhetoric while the robber barons on the right-wing fringe of the Republican party have raped the country blind.
That 32% and falling rating that Bush is getting is the fundamentalists realizing that they have been hoodwinked, and abandoning the party.
Hopefully the Democrats will have the common sense ( a risky hope admittedly) to use this as a mandate to fix the *right* things. Put the Capital Gains tax up to 60% where it belongs, cut the parasitical military-industrial corporate welfare system in half, fix our schools, and socialize the medical system so everyone gets care. Of course it goes without saying that we should disband the comically incompetent Department of Good-ole-boy Security and open our borders.
Say good bye to facism folks, we're about to clean out its last stronghold in the next couple of elections.
The US is getting a similar national ID card, by stealth. No one is paying attention because it is being sold as a Federal Employee ID card. http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/egov/b-1-information .html#is But it will be required to "do business with" the US Government. Like say, file taxes electronically, apply for research grants, get college loans, etc. The laughable thing is that although it is billed as a way to *stop terrorists*, the morally corrupt Bush administration is going to let *banks* issue them - the same people who send credit cards pre-approved to your dog. So clearly this card isn't meant to -secure- anything, it is mean to montior and control the actions of citizens....
When the Bush administration took over here in the US, a wave of corruption swept through this country like sugar through a diabetic, stunning our enforcement agencies and causing public insitutions like the Patent Office to roll over and play dead. The Justice Department, which had already won and had Microsoft on the ropes, dropped the anti-trust suit like a hot potato, settling for a useless slap-on-the wrist penalty. Thankfully the EU has some *balls*, and is not emasculated by the cult-of-monoplists that has shredded the integrity of the US government. Hopefully, the massive inflation that is snowballing due to price-gouging in the oil industry and the resulting collapse of the real-estate balloon market will shock the US populace into sweeping the Republicans out of both houses of Congress while they clean out the White House. Then there will be a chance that the US Dept. of Justice will get back into the business of enforcing the law. It is my dearest fantasy to believe that I will someday see "Ballmer and Butthead" being led off to jail in handcuffs.
During the 1980's the US federal government made itself odious to every small business by forcing them to spend thousands of dollars installing wheelchair ramps regardless of whether they had any customers who used wheelchairs or not. In a decade or so, when robo-trousers replace wheelchairs, that will at last put an end to all those plywood ramps sticking out to the side of resturaunt and bar entrances. Equality through technology.
Ahem -
"Finally, since this is a discussion about biodiesel, I'll remind you that, in a diesel engine, there are no sparkplugs. The combustion in a diesel engine happens spontaneously due to the compression in the cylinder."
THATS MY WHOLE POINT. I am *advocating* the use of biodiesel. Is everyone who reads this site incapable of following a logical argument???
Risk from spark plugs implies diesel is safer which in turn makes biodiesel more valuable.
As for science - one chest Xray uses about 35Kv at 1amp (35KVA) to produce about 2 milirads of Xrays - about one of which penetrates the body, and the absorbtion of the rest forms the dark and light regions of the image.
A spark plug fires at 35KV but about 2 miliamps (.002 amps) lets be generous and say that igniting the gas and air absorbs 3/4 the sparks energy. So the effective rediation from each firing of a spark plug would be.0005 x 2 milirads.
That means each thousand firings of a spark plug produce a cummulative dose of about 1 milirad. With four spark plugs and an engine running at 3000 rpm on the highway, a typical engine will generate a raw 12 milirads of X-rays per minute.
Now let us estimate that each mm of aluminum attentuates 90% of a given burst of X-rays. The Spark plug is located in the CYLINDER HEAD - which has walls about.8cm thick. So passing through the cylinder head would attentuate the Xrays to.00000001 of their original strength. SO you're going to get about 1.2 milirads of X-rays out every 10 ^7 minutes.
Or something approximating a chest X-ray every 20 years of total driving time. Give or take a factor of two or three for variables like number of spark plugs.
OK, OK so we're not all going to die. From this anyway. Crap.
No, simpleton, diesels do in fact not use spark plugs.
They use a much higher compression ratio to cause the compressed fuel and air to reach a temperature where the fuel ignites spontaneously.
They are assisted by *glow* plugs - which are wires heated by electrical resistance that use no spark whatsoever.
For all of your wordiness, your answer is nonsensical.
X-ray tubes generate X-rays by "accelerating" electrons using the potential gap between an anode and a cathode. This is exactly , precisely, identically how a spark plug acclerates electrons to jump its gap.
The energy of the electrons when they reach their destination is determined by...the voltage potential between the electrodes. Which is exactly, precisely the same in a spark plug as it is in an X-ray tube.
Your description of orbital shells is, well, mistaken. Flourescent lights may work that way.
Xrays are ionizing radiation. Producing them requires an electron to be knocked free of its atom, and then return, emitting X-ray photons when returning to the orbital shell.
While a few of the electrons in a spark plug may be absorbed by the gas an air mixture that is ignited in turn, most of them pass through to the anode. If they didn't the spark plug wouldn't fire at all because of the resistance (Like what happens when your spark plug is fouled with carbon build-up)
As for the distance squared factor - there is also several feet between you and the Xray tube at the hospital - there has to be in order to allow the X-rays to spread sufficiently so that their angle of incidence with the film produces a reasonable image instead of a fish-eye view.
I have a theory that for years we have all been dosing ourselves to death slowly with X-rays produced by the firing of our spark plugs. The 35-40Kv used to force a spark across a spark plug is about the same as the voltage used to produce medical diagnostic X-rays. The lower amperage just means that the dosage is lower. But the effects of X-rays are cummulative over a fairly large span of time, so thousands of micro-bursts per minute for years is likely the equivalent of a few hundred chest X-rays. Old style cast-iron cylinder heads blocked a lot of the emission, but modern aluminum heads are virtually transparent to X-Rays. SO call me a paranoid nut, but I am convinved that thousands of cancers per year that are being blamed on second hand smoke or UV exposure are really due to spark plug radiation. Ergo, cheap environmentally friendly renewable diesel fuel could be an amazing blessing, in unanticipated ways.
The problem in Iraq isn't politics, it's obsolete weaponry. Our troops wouldn't be dying in roadside bombings if they were replaced with robots. And we won't even have to send in ground troops once we can target and kill individuals from the air. Missiles are only the initial target of an airborn laser. In the long run, we can use it to surgically remove the leadership of terrorist states without risking a ground invasion. Snap-crackle-pop Al-queda crispies! And unlike nukes, we can actually USE it! Nuts, if you use an X-ray laser, you can even use it to change the leadership of "friendly" countries without getting caught.
There is probably no more useless and self-indulgent class of people on the planet than so-called "scientists" working on the federal payroll. I have had the miserable and thankless job of providing IT support to these clowns at several federal agencies for the last 20 years. Ask them to give up a sun workstation for a Linux box to save cost - and it's a conspiracy to deny them their freedom to conduct research. Ask them to use the enterprise email system instead of sendmail from their workstation so that their email can be screened for viruses and spam, and you're accused of censoring their communications and cutting them off from peer review. Ask them to store their researech on a central database so that they can share results - and they REALLY panic because it might be discovered that 75% of their work is repetetive and redundant - and get their budgets cut.
Just for the education of the audience, ALL federal employees have to ask for permission before talking to the press about their jobs. This has been the case for decades. The problem isn't censorship, its that "scientists" consider themselves to be an elite race of superhuman enlightened beings for whom rules and laws don't apply.
At our agency we can't even get them to give up FTP to use SFTP to secure their file transfers. If we even make the suggestion we are the subject of complaints to the agency head for "interfering with their ability to conduct research".
If you had ever worked around federal scientists, you would very rapidly lose all respect due to their lack of integrity, and you would never take any of their claims seriously.
The real question is, just how hot was the cup of tea that Douglas Atoms used to power the brownian motion function of his improbability drive when he arrived at the number "42"?
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I beg to differ with your statement- "It wasn't Microsoft that killed SGI, it was Linux." SGI embraced Linux wholeheartedly. They created a new high-speed low-latency interconnect technology to enhance beowulf clusters. They developed improved fail-over clustering and SAN servers for Linux. SGI LOVED linux. And they tried very hard to sell into the Linux market. But in the 1999 timeframe, SGI temporarily teamed with the MicroBorg and got suckered in much the same way that Apple did. SGI had a bundle of scene-generating software that was heavily used in the movie industry. MS apparently influenced SGI to create an intel-based NT/2000 workstation that had high-end proprietary SGI graphics in it. Then MS got SGI to "share" the code for their graphics software with MS on the premise that MS would do the grunt work of porting the graphics code to the Windulls environment and the two companies would then jointly market it. In an AMAZING bout of naivete, SGI assumed that MS would only port the SGI graphics code to run on proprietary SGI graphics hardware. Imagine SGI's dismay when the code showed up running on generic NT boxes with Nvidia and ATI graphics cards. Now animation houses could render art work on $1000 PCs with the same software they used to use on $10,000 Octane workstations. It was a fiasco. SGI quickly dropped their intel workstation line, but it was too late. MS was able to market the code as a generic product. You would think that companies would learn that sharing anything proprietary with the erstwhile pirates from Redmond is tantamount to asking Jeffrey Dahmer to babysit for you.
I think what you observed was part of the death-spiral.
A shrinking customer based caused SGI to "eat its own children" so to speak. They raised prices on parts and support to try to squeeze more revenue out of existing customers, which only caused them to have fewer existing customers.
That was, as you have observed, mostly the fault of cocaine-snorting marketing types.
After all, if you don't admit that negative things are happening, you can keep ignoring them until disaster strikes.
I used to teach system admin and hardware repair courses for the Origin2000 and Onyx2 at SGI, and when the class was in Mountain View one module was to visit the "Reality Wall". That screen had only 24 Megapixels projected onto a 120 degree wrap around screen, but even at that the flight simulator was so realistic that students would fall out of their chairs when the plane took a curve.
Poor old SGI. They built amazingly excellent hardware, bleeding edge software, paid their workers well, treated employees like kings and customers like emporers, and donated heavily to the open source movement.
So, of course they went bankrupt.
Done in by the Microslop-ization of technology.
We who were once the high preists of the cult of technology, wizards of electronic wonder, have become the janitors of the Microsoft plumbing, fit only to plunge out the cr@p that clogs the email pipes.
By allowing slackers in our ranks to use shrink-wrap scumware to badly execute business functions cheaply, we have fallen from grace.
One big difference between mainframes and UNIX or Windulls boxes is the way that resources were allocated.
IBM allowed fine-grained control of CPU time, IO bandwidth, RAM, and disk storage. And this control was not a weighted-selection algorithm, it was WYSIWYG deteministic control.
In mainframe shops, there were well defined workloads, often represented by a batch of transactions needing to be run against a database. These "batch jobs" would run on predictable intervals, daily, weekly, monthly. They could be scheduled to run at fixed times for known durations.
This made the whole mainframe environment very easy to manage. Instead of having to guesstimate workloads, and install CPU and I/O capacity to match unexpected peak demands ruled by chaos theory, mainframes were safe and predictable. The need for CPU MIPS and RAM was clearly visible and easily monitored and planned.
So when people say that mainframes were "more reliable", they don't just mean the MTBF numbers of the hardware.
They mean that when you ran work on a mainframe, you knew exactly what programs were using what resources at what times. And when something screwed up, you could very simply back up to the previous version of the affected files and re-run the batch job.
Life with mainframes was safe, logical, and predictable.
Introducing some of that into UNIX or Linux would not be a bad thing. Not every problem has to run in real-time with dynamic adjustment of resources. Deterministic, static allocations of memory, CPU, and I/O can work very well for predicatable workloads.
Linux needs a good Batch Spooling manager system.
Being a paranoid type, I tend to overreact to things, but consider the following-n .html#iss /2005/11/PostMortem/default.aspxp r fi.doc
Given the US Governments current plans to consolidate all the data they hold about you into ginormous centralized multi-agency databases-
http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/egov/c-6-9-ioi.html
They then intend to secure this data with biometric-containing RFID equipped tokens-
http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/egov/b-1-informatio
But they intend to use Microsoft MIIS as the security engine-
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/technetmag/issue
And to save cost they are going to let BANKS issue the RFIDs (the same places that routinely send pre-approved credit cards to your dog)
http://www.bankrate.com/brm/news/cc/20040420a1.as
http://www.thriftyfun.com/tf209806.tip.html
Put all this together and it becomes frighteningly plausible that the government has little interest in securing citizen data, and a lot of interest in assembling data it can use to control its citizens.
http://www.rense.com/general15/happy.htm
But nobody will complain, becuase totalitarian control of our lives will be, like having a chip implanted, *just so convenient*.
However, for those who are still conscientious, it is possible to comment on the government's plans. But please be restrained and responsible in doing so, ranting and raving will just discredit opposing viewpoints.
http://www.estrategy.gov/lineofbusiness/docs/ioi_
In the Gospel of John, (not Dvorak) the devil takes Jesus up onto a hillside and shows him the "kingdoms of the world" and offers it to Jesus as a reward if he will fall down and worship the devil.
Jesus said no, but clearly Mr. William G the 3rd said yes.
So the ninth reason Microsoft is dead and doomed to burn for all eternity is... oh, wait, that's not what Dvorak was saying, was it?
Sorry, my bad...
You're just taking too much of a short term view. All greate empires in history have ended with a profound collapse. Either from foreign incursion or internal decay. The US is overdue. We've got 8 trillion or so in federal debt, and the Gov't is borrowing the money it is using to pay the interest on its current debt. As a nation we are paying our VISA with our Mastrercard. On the commercial side, we go $300Bn a year deeper in debt to China alone. We are the world's largest debtor nation. Other countries continue to lend us money because the dollar is the price standard fo rtheir goods, but as Europe with it's 50% larger economy is replacing the the dollar with the Euro as the worldwide standard, the incentive to prop us up is dwindling. Other nations have gone through this in recent history. Germany, Argentina, Brazil. They tried to fuel unsustainable lifestyles with massive debt, and ended up in collapse. Live it up now, your children will grow up to live in cardboard boxes by the side of the road, and when the dollar goes into hyperinflation and ends up $100 to the Euro, they will line up at the Mexican border to try to get to the good paying jobs in Tiajuana.
You're reading the WRONG economists... http://www.rense.com/general26/ftw.htm http://bellaciao.org/en/article.php3?id_article=99 95
http://economicapocalypse.blogspot.com/
http://in.rediff.com/money/2006/mar/20asoc.htm
http://www.michaelmandeville.com/collapse2006/inde x.htm
It is the pyramid scheme that is called the stock market that is the core of what ails the US economy. Large investors believe they have a right to be paid for doing nothing. But that money comes out of the pockets of small investors like you and me. Do you seriously think the money you have put into the stock market will still be there when you retire? Think again. In order for a stock to hold it's value someone has to be able to buy it for the price you want. But this can't keep happening. American's aren't having enough children to replace themselves, the average couple is having only 1.3 children. Which is why Social Security will collapse, and why the stock market will fail. But not before the big investors have fleeced you of your savings. They've got everyone in the country conned into believing that the pyramid can keep growing forever, but it can't. Google for the term "Ponzi scheme". For the sake of the common man, we have got to deflate the stock market, before it causes another 1920's style depression. Phasing in huge capital gains tax increases will take the profitability out of conning other people out of their money. It will crush the investment pyramid schemes, and force investors to return to sound long-term investments that grow by building infrastructure that has intrinsic value, instead of growing through rampant speculation and confidence schemes.
Lets do the math,
Crude Oil is $70/barrel or about $1.40/gallon.
18 cents of the price at the pump is federal taxes
about 10-20 cents is state tax depending on your state
about 2-5cents/gal goes to the local station owner
That leaves $1.17 for the oil companies.
Exxon's profits last year were $36Bn, the largest of any corporation in human history. And that was with gas at $2.30/gal
This is just obscene. It's time to nationalize the Oil industry in the name of national security. Not to mention common decency.
Actually, you're barking up the wrong tree. I'm neither EU nor a Democrat. I'm a fundamentalist Christian Republican who voted Republican since Reagan, *but* has finally realized that he has been conned with -family values- rhetoric while the robber barons on the right-wing fringe of the Republican party have raped the country blind. That 32% and falling rating that Bush is getting is the fundamentalists realizing that they have been hoodwinked, and abandoning the party. Hopefully the Democrats will have the common sense ( a risky hope admittedly) to use this as a mandate to fix the *right* things. Put the Capital Gains tax up to 60% where it belongs, cut the parasitical military-industrial corporate welfare system in half, fix our schools, and socialize the medical system so everyone gets care. Of course it goes without saying that we should disband the comically incompetent Department of Good-ole-boy Security and open our borders. Say good bye to facism folks, we're about to clean out its last stronghold in the next couple of elections.
The US is getting a similar national ID card, by stealth.n .html#is
No one is paying attention because it is being sold as a Federal Employee ID card.
http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/egov/b-1-informatio
But it will be required to "do business with" the US Government. Like say, file taxes electronically, apply for research grants, get college loans, etc.
The laughable thing is that although it is billed as a way to *stop terrorists*, the morally corrupt Bush administration is going to let *banks* issue them - the same people who send credit cards pre-approved to your dog.
So clearly this card isn't meant to -secure- anything, it is mean to montior and control the actions of citizens....
When the Bush administration took over here in the US, a wave of corruption swept through this country like sugar through a diabetic, stunning our enforcement agencies and causing public insitutions like the Patent Office to roll over and play dead. The Justice Department, which had already won and had Microsoft on the ropes, dropped the anti-trust suit like a hot potato, settling for a useless slap-on-the wrist penalty.
Thankfully the EU has some *balls*, and is not emasculated by the cult-of-monoplists that has shredded the integrity of the US government.
Hopefully, the massive inflation that is snowballing due to price-gouging in the oil industry and the resulting collapse of the real-estate balloon market will shock the US populace into sweeping the Republicans out of both houses of Congress while they clean out the White House.
Then there will be a chance that the US Dept. of Justice will get back into the business of enforcing the law.
It is my dearest fantasy to believe that I will someday see "Ballmer and Butthead" being led off to jail in handcuffs.
During the 1980's the US federal government made itself odious to every small business by forcing them to spend thousands of dollars installing wheelchair ramps regardless of whether they had any customers who used wheelchairs or not.
In a decade or so, when robo-trousers replace wheelchairs, that will at last put an end to all those plywood ramps sticking out to the side of resturaunt and bar entrances. Equality through technology.
Ahem - "Finally, since this is a discussion about biodiesel, I'll remind you that, in a diesel engine, there are no sparkplugs. The combustion in a diesel engine happens spontaneously due to the compression in the cylinder." THATS MY WHOLE POINT. I am *advocating* the use of biodiesel. Is everyone who reads this site incapable of following a logical argument??? Risk from spark plugs implies diesel is safer which in turn makes biodiesel more valuable. As for science - one chest Xray uses about 35Kv at 1amp (35KVA) to produce about 2 milirads of Xrays - about one of which penetrates the body, and the absorbtion of the rest forms the dark and light regions of the image. A spark plug fires at 35KV but about 2 miliamps (.002 amps) lets be generous and say that igniting the gas and air absorbs 3/4 the sparks energy. So the effective rediation from each firing of a spark plug would be .0005 x 2 milirads.
That means each thousand firings of a spark plug produce a cummulative dose of about 1 milirad. With four spark plugs and an engine running at 3000 rpm on the highway, a typical engine will generate a raw 12 milirads of X-rays per minute.
Now let us estimate that each mm of aluminum attentuates 90% of a given burst of X-rays. The Spark plug is located in the CYLINDER HEAD - which has walls about .8cm thick. So passing through the cylinder head would attentuate the Xrays to .00000001 of their original strength. SO you're going to get about 1.2 milirads of X-rays out every 10 ^7 minutes.
Or something approximating a chest X-ray every 20 years of total driving time. Give or take a factor of two or three for variables like number of spark plugs.
OK, OK so we're not all going to die. From this anyway. Crap.
I rememebr a joke in the old National Lampoon- What's round and hairy and glows in the dark? Your b@lls when you sit too close to the color TV.
But as the saying goes, "Just because you're paranoid, doesn't mean they're NOT all out to get you!"
Some, but not all. Steel is only a fair-to middlin Xray sheild.
No, simpleton, diesels do in fact not use spark plugs. They use a much higher compression ratio to cause the compressed fuel and air to reach a temperature where the fuel ignites spontaneously. They are assisted by *glow* plugs - which are wires heated by electrical resistance that use no spark whatsoever.
For those of you who were born stupid, the emission of radiation by spark gaps was first discovered by Heinrich Rudolf Hertz - the same one that the Hertz in megahertz is named after - back in 1887. It was Wilhelm Conrad Roentgen who discovered that this phenomenon could be used to produce X-rays in 1895 Here is a paper on building an Xray tube USING SPARK PLUGS. http://scitation.aip.org/getabs/servlet/GetabsServ let?prog=normal&id=RSINAK000072000010003983000001& idtype=cvips&gifs=yes
Here are several scientific papers on the production of X-rays by spark gaps in various gaseous media.
http://www.slac.stanford.edu/pubs/icfa/fall97/pape r2/paper2.pdf
http://www.webcom.com/sknkwrks/xray.htm
http://www.electrotherapymuseum.com/_PatentLibrary /_FischerXRaySparkGap/index.htm
Morons.
For all of your wordiness, your answer is nonsensical. X-ray tubes generate X-rays by "accelerating" electrons using the potential gap between an anode and a cathode. This is exactly , precisely, identically how a spark plug acclerates electrons to jump its gap. The energy of the electrons when they reach their destination is determined by ...the voltage potential between the electrodes. Which is exactly, precisely the same in a spark plug as it is in an X-ray tube.
Your description of orbital shells is, well, mistaken. Flourescent lights may work that way.
Xrays are ionizing radiation. Producing them requires an electron to be knocked free of its atom, and then return, emitting X-ray photons when returning to the orbital shell.
While a few of the electrons in a spark plug may be absorbed by the gas an air mixture that is ignited in turn, most of them pass through to the anode. If they didn't the spark plug wouldn't fire at all because of the resistance (Like what happens when your spark plug is fouled with carbon build-up)
As for the distance squared factor - there is also several feet between you and the Xray tube at the hospital - there has to be in order to allow the X-rays to spread sufficiently so that their angle of incidence with the film produces a reasonable image instead of a fish-eye view.
I have a theory that for years we have all been dosing ourselves to death slowly with X-rays produced by the firing of our spark plugs. The 35-40Kv used to force a spark across a spark plug is about the same as the voltage used to produce medical diagnostic X-rays. The lower amperage just means that the dosage is lower. But the effects of X-rays are cummulative over a fairly large span of time, so thousands of micro-bursts per minute for years is likely the equivalent of a few hundred chest X-rays. Old style cast-iron cylinder heads blocked a lot of the emission, but modern aluminum heads are virtually transparent to X-Rays.
SO call me a paranoid nut, but I am convinved that thousands of cancers per year that are being blamed on second hand smoke or UV exposure are really due to spark plug radiation.
Ergo, cheap environmentally friendly renewable diesel fuel could be an amazing blessing, in unanticipated ways.
The problem in Iraq isn't politics, it's obsolete weaponry.
Our troops wouldn't be dying in roadside bombings if they were replaced with robots.
And we won't even have to send in ground troops once we can target and kill individuals from the air.
Missiles are only the initial target of an airborn laser. In the long run, we can use it to surgically remove the leadership of terrorist states without risking a ground invasion.
Snap-crackle-pop Al-queda crispies!
And unlike nukes, we can actually USE it!
Nuts, if you use an X-ray laser, you can even use it to change the leadership of "friendly" countries without getting caught.
There is probably no more useless and self-indulgent class of people on the planet than so-called "scientists" working on the federal payroll.
I have had the miserable and thankless job of providing IT support to these clowns at several federal agencies for the last 20 years.
Ask them to give up a sun workstation for a Linux box to save cost - and it's a conspiracy to deny them their freedom to conduct research. Ask them to use the enterprise email system instead of sendmail from their workstation so that their email can be screened for viruses and spam, and you're accused of censoring their communications and cutting them off from peer review. Ask them to store their researech on a central database so that they can share results - and they REALLY panic because it might be discovered that 75% of their work is repetetive and redundant - and get their budgets cut.
Just for the education of the audience, ALL federal employees have to ask for permission before talking to the press about their jobs. This has been the case for decades. The problem isn't censorship, its that "scientists" consider themselves to be an elite race of superhuman enlightened beings for whom rules and laws don't apply.
At our agency we can't even get them to give up FTP to use SFTP to secure their file transfers. If we even make the suggestion we are the subject of complaints to the agency head for "interfering with their ability to conduct research".
If you had ever worked around federal scientists, you would very rapidly lose all respect due to their lack of integrity, and you would never take any of their claims seriously.
The real question is, just how hot was the cup of tea that Douglas Atoms used to power the brownian motion function of his improbability drive when he arrived at the number "42"?