When I saw the photo, I immediately thought of my local library's copy of a hippy-era how-to on building a vertical-axis wind generator out of 55-gallon drums, plywood and junkyard auto parts like axle bearings and alternators. It's called "Wind and Windspinners: A Nuts and Bolts Approach to Wind-Electric Systems" by Michael Hackleman.
Basically, you cut the drum in half longways, and then offset the halves from each other to form an "S" shape with the two halves overlapping slightly, so that wind enters the open side, follows its contour into the closed side and exits out the back. The book recommended stacking 3 such drums, offset 60 degrees from each other and with plywood circles between the drums to prevent spilled wind. If you want to get fancy, you build sprung gates into the backs of the drums so they can dump excess wind in a storm. There are some drawings and photos of the design here.
I think Hackleman's reason for championing the Savonius design had nothing to do with efficiency - instead, it was all about cost, simplicity and durability. Fits right into the microgrid idea - a small village in the third world could assemble a few of the cheap homemade versions of these and link them to a battery bank to get themselves some simple, reliable electricity for whatever they needed to power.
Is it really possible to scoot a spare over to the geosynchronous orbit of the one that needs replacing? I mean, if there are 24, they'd be placed every 15 degrees around the globe - but optimal placement of the three spares would be every 120 degrees (90 for four spares). A failure could occur up to 60 degrees away from an available spare (45 for four spares). How easy is it to move a satellite out of geosynch and then back in, 60 degrees from its original position? Especially when you consider the available fuel?
I guess you could brake/accelerate to a slightly faster/slower orbit and allow the spare to slowly catch/be caught over many, many orbits until it was positioned, then return to geosynch. But the military would probably need any gap fixed ASAP, requiring a less efficient pair of burns, requiring more fuel and shorter satellite lifespans.
I dunno, I think the grandparent is on to something. I'm not vegetarian, but I'm a vegetarian sympathizer. As it is, I eat a lot less meat than most Americans, but way more than folks in the third world.
I have always wished that there was a more humane way to produce the meat that I eat. Factory-farmed animals really turn me off.
I'd be a little skeptical of something like this, but if it passed the taste test and didn't have any obvious health problems, I'd welcome it as the end of the ethical dilemma I described above.
My grandfather used to watch baseball on TV with the sound turned off and the local AM radio commentary on instead. For some reason, TV sports announcers are stoopid with two o's, but the radio broadcast was enjoyable. You should try it whenever the game you're watching is on both TV and radio.
Agreed. I was initially very excited about this - but when I got there, I found it wouldn't even allow me to zoom out enough to indicate where the Mare Tranquilitatis is on the visible disc of the moon, much less can I view any sites other than the Apollo landing sites.
I know all this is probably available elsewhere... but I thought I was going to get the convenient and familiar Google Maps interface to the whole visible disc of the moon. Poor expectation management leads to disappointment.
That's an inflammatory title, I know, but bear with me.
Right now, schools are slanted heavily towards those who underperform, at the expense especially of the smarter kids. The reasons for this are:
Class size and other resource limitations prevent teaching to students at levels appropriate to their individual needs.
Punitive performance standards like No Child Left Behind mean that the anyone who is going to score badly on the standardized tests is a liability.
NEA clout means that teachers aren't held accountable for their performance, but with NCLB schools are.
So schools are forced to protect themselves by shifting a disproportionate share of resources to the underperformers, leaving smart kids to doodle in their textbooks. Meanwhile, the bad teachers end up threatening the whole school rather than just their own careers.
Fix this by getting rid of NCLB and hiring enough teachers that kids can get instruction appropriate to their needs. (Doing this would go a long way toward dismantling the culture of persecuting intelligent kids.) Return more local control to schools and their communities, including the ability to implement performance assessment for teachers if they feel the need to do so.
In case anyone's still stuck on the title, I'm not saying that we should abandon the dumb ones in the tundra. Just stop giving them more than the rest of the kids, especially the smart ones, who are arguably the best investments in the bunch.
In both home and work purchasing decisions, I've been refusing to buy Intel machines for years now because I felt Intel processors were overpriced and was hearing rumours of anticompetitive practices like this. It has gotten easier to justify this prejudice as mobo support improved and AMD increasingly kicked Intel's ass over the last five years or so.
I read somewhere (Sci. Am.?) about someone trying to teach primates flint-knapping and throwing skills. Turns out that they understand the usefulness of the blade fine and try to create them when they need one, but they're hampered by the skeletal structure of the wrist, which is much stouter because of the need to support body weight while walking. They can't get the little wrist flick that we can that ads so much to throwing. The best an ape can hope for is chucking a rock hard against another one, and looking for sharp edges in the resulting random fragments.
So our ability to walk upright gave us the ability to use projectile weapons (i.e., hunt things faster than we are) AND create edged tools/weapons AND spark fires. Not a bad deal, IMO.
Imagine that the free internet has died (which I don't believe would happen, but we'll stipulate that it does anyway...) What's next?
Well, it's a PITA to have to manage 15-cent subscriptions to a hundred different sites. So companies start popping up that offer subscriptions grouped by interest. They even get you a little bit of a discount. You subscribe to OSDG, O'Reilly, and a few other FOSS news & info sites all in one bundle, and it costs $15 per year.
All those unemployed advertising folks will get jobs doing market research to determine the optimum mix of site subscriptions for particular target groups.
And then, you see some tasteful, very nicely targeted ads creeping back into some of the content, where the ad is served to you based on your interest in this particular page and your membership in this particular subscription service. Membership in these subscription services is cheaper than in other, ad-free ones, of course. Any punch-the-monkey ads get pulled because the paying subscribers demand their removal - or they only get served to the super-cheap subscribers.
So, what grows out of the death of the free internet? A user-driven internet where there is still advertising, but only the acceptable sort. We end up with a few annual subscriptions to pay for, but there are cheaper options if you're strapped for cash. Does this sound like Hell? No, it sounds practically utopian by today's standards.
Now all we need is a mobile phone adapter for the Cue Cat!
Unseen urban artist people will stencil bar codes on bridges and railroad cars. Then you'll walk along with your CueCat Mobile and scan the bar code, and your phone will load a fabulous [multimedia advertisement | ameteur pr0n video featuring his estranged ex-girlfriend | virus] authored by the stencil-wielding Pop Artist.
The distinction between one calculator which is acceptable and another which is not is a very arbitrary one. Really, all calculators make the solutions to problems too easy and, when used in education, prevent one from learning the whole lesson. For any type of problem you're likely to need to solve without your crutch handy, becoming dependent on said crutch to solve the problem is a Bad Idea (tm).
Something like the slide rule, on the other hand, requires some understanding of the problem to get the right answer. It's an augmentative device that, in aiding you, also trains you to better handle situations without it.
I like to think slide rules are to calculators as bikes are to cars: calcs and autos do it for you, thus atrophying your ability to do it yourself. Slipsticks and bikes require something of you to get the job done, thus exercising your capacities. So you use the calc when you have to, and the slide rule when you can. Drive when you have to, ride when you can.
There are probably lots of other examples of this, not all of them technological: speed dial versus address book, lawsuits versus negotiation, war versus diplomacy, you name it.
At our company, we use Movable Type to give non-IT folk the ability to put stuff on the web site more easily. There seems to be a lot of activity in this front - understaffed small businesses using blogging software to create normal, non-blog content pages. (I'm not a big fan, personally. I think blogging software makes a poor CMS.)
As for actual corporate blogging, we're not doing it. We talked about it, but decided we didn't really have that many pressing things to say, and couldn't imagine that people would actually want to read a company blog.
But if you want a positive example of a corporate blog, look no further than Google Blog.
Sounds like the John Varley novel "Red Thunder", in which a magic power source removes any weight concerns WRT spaceflight payloads, and the first people on Mars are able to take along an actual hopped-up pickup truck to cruise around the dunes of mars.
he's widened his scope, showing how much of a joke is any attempt at precise counting of so many people.
I've just been reading "Stars in My Pockets Like Grains of Sand" and there's a relevant concept there. There's this group known as "the Web" who know pretty much everything that is knowable; somebody's asking a Web agent about survivors of a planetary destruction, and the agent's reply is that in any system as large as a global population, there is an unavoidable fuzziness about exact numbers.
BTW, the book was written in 1983 or 4, IIRC. It's pretty impressive what it has to say about information flow, given that it was so long ago
The large sums the RIAA is suing for are not necessarily supposed to be compensation for the actual value of the goods "stolen" in P2P trading. As I understand it, copyright law allows for punitive damages as well. (IIRC, punitive damages are capped but on a per-infringement basis.)
After all, CD's only cost $12-15 each. It would take a lot of CD's to add up to the $100K these folks are supposedly asking for in their suits.
When you say "I wish they did" about something that hasn't may or may not willen have happened, it's like fingernails on a chalk board. Please, learn to use the retro-temporal subjunctive correctly.
Am I missing something? As I understand it, RSS is fundamentally immune to phishing-type attacks because it must be requested from the server, ("pull") rather than being passively received like email ("push"). AFAICT, the only ways to receive fraudulent RSS feed items are to a) sign up for a fraudulent RSS feed, or b) receive feeds from a server that gets cracked. If this is true, then it seems that the need for signed RSS is pretty minimal.
Wouldn't it just destroy the portion of the human race (and other species) on the half of the globe facing the burst source? An entire planet's worth of soil, rock, magma, etc. makes a pretty good shield.
Humanity is certainly positioned to survive such an event, though many wild species lack our enviable dispersion and would not.
Most legal definitions of spam make it clear that a company has a right to contact individuals with whom it already has a business relationship with. So technically, it's impossible to spam your own customers.
And as a previous reply mentioned, you can always vote with your feet and stop being their customer if it's too much to bear. If more people did that, maybe companies would get the idea that it's stupid to spa^H^H^H annoy one's customers.
IANAL, of course, nor should you construe any positive moderation of this comment as legal advice from the moderator;^)
No doubt, there's nothing inherently wimpy about being 17 and female. Many Olympic swimmers aren't any older than she is, and just as female, and they carry around a pretty impressive amount of muscle. Now, if they'd find an 80-year-old woman who could beat the robots arm wrestling, that would be more impressive. But then there would be far fewer posts in the slashdot article on the match....
Slashdot Mirror
When I saw the photo, I immediately thought of my local library's copy of a hippy-era how-to on building a vertical-axis wind generator out of 55-gallon drums, plywood and junkyard auto parts like axle bearings and alternators. It's called "Wind and Windspinners: A Nuts and Bolts Approach to Wind-Electric Systems" by Michael Hackleman.
Basically, you cut the drum in half longways, and then offset the halves from each other to form an "S" shape with the two halves overlapping slightly, so that wind enters the open side, follows its contour into the closed side and exits out the back. The book recommended stacking 3 such drums, offset 60 degrees from each other and with plywood circles between the drums to prevent spilled wind. If you want to get fancy, you build sprung gates into the backs of the drums so they can dump excess wind in a storm. There are some drawings and photos of the design here.
I think Hackleman's reason for championing the Savonius design had nothing to do with efficiency - instead, it was all about cost, simplicity and durability. Fits right into the microgrid idea - a small village in the third world could assemble a few of the cheap homemade versions of these and link them to a battery bank to get themselves some simple, reliable electricity for whatever they needed to power.
I guess you could brake/accelerate to a slightly faster/slower orbit and allow the spare to slowly catch/be caught over many, many orbits until it was positioned, then return to geosynch. But the military would probably need any gap fixed ASAP, requiring a less efficient pair of burns, requiring more fuel and shorter satellite lifespans.
I dunno, I think the grandparent is on to something. I'm not vegetarian, but I'm a vegetarian sympathizer. As it is, I eat a lot less meat than most Americans, but way more than folks in the third world.
I have always wished that there was a more humane way to produce the meat that I eat. Factory-farmed animals really turn me off.
I'd be a little skeptical of something like this, but if it passed the taste test and didn't have any obvious health problems, I'd welcome it as the end of the ethical dilemma I described above.
My grandfather used to watch baseball on TV with the sound turned off and the local AM radio commentary on instead. For some reason, TV sports announcers are stoopid with two o's, but the radio broadcast was enjoyable. You should try it whenever the game you're watching is on both TV and radio.
I know all this is probably available elsewhere... but I thought I was going to get the convenient and familiar Google Maps interface to the whole visible disc of the moon. Poor expectation management leads to disappointment.
Right now, schools are slanted heavily towards those who underperform, at the expense especially of the smarter kids. The reasons for this are:
So schools are forced to protect themselves by shifting a disproportionate share of resources to the underperformers, leaving smart kids to doodle in their textbooks. Meanwhile, the bad teachers end up threatening the whole school rather than just their own careers.
Fix this by getting rid of NCLB and hiring enough teachers that kids can get instruction appropriate to their needs. (Doing this would go a long way toward dismantling the culture of persecuting intelligent kids.) Return more local control to schools and their communities, including the ability to implement performance assessment for teachers if they feel the need to do so.
In case anyone's still stuck on the title, I'm not saying that we should abandon the dumb ones in the tundra. Just stop giving them more than the rest of the kids, especially the smart ones, who are arguably the best investments in the bunch.
In both home and work purchasing decisions, I've been refusing to buy Intel machines for years now because I felt Intel processors were overpriced and was hearing rumours of anticompetitive practices like this. It has gotten easier to justify this prejudice as mobo support improved and AMD increasingly kicked Intel's ass over the last five years or so.
I read somewhere (Sci. Am.?) about someone trying to teach primates flint-knapping and throwing skills. Turns out that they understand the usefulness of the blade fine and try to create them when they need one, but they're hampered by the skeletal structure of the wrist, which is much stouter because of the need to support body weight while walking. They can't get the little wrist flick that we can that ads so much to throwing. The best an ape can hope for is chucking a rock hard against another one, and looking for sharp edges in the resulting random fragments.
So our ability to walk upright gave us the ability to use projectile weapons (i.e., hunt things faster than we are) AND create edged tools/weapons AND spark fires. Not a bad deal, IMO.
No, I think he already finished it himself ;^)
Imagine that the free internet has died (which I don't believe would happen, but we'll stipulate that it does anyway...) What's next?
Well, it's a PITA to have to manage 15-cent subscriptions to a hundred different sites. So companies start popping up that offer subscriptions grouped by interest. They even get you a little bit of a discount. You subscribe to OSDG, O'Reilly, and a few other FOSS news & info sites all in one bundle, and it costs $15 per year.
All those unemployed advertising folks will get jobs doing market research to determine the optimum mix of site subscriptions for particular target groups.
And then, you see some tasteful, very nicely targeted ads creeping back into some of the content, where the ad is served to you based on your interest in this particular page and your membership in this particular subscription service. Membership in these subscription services is cheaper than in other, ad-free ones, of course. Any punch-the-monkey ads get pulled because the paying subscribers demand their removal - or they only get served to the super-cheap subscribers.
So, what grows out of the death of the free internet? A user-driven internet where there is still advertising, but only the acceptable sort. We end up with a few annual subscriptions to pay for, but there are cheaper options if you're strapped for cash. Does this sound like Hell? No, it sounds practically utopian by today's standards.
Unseen urban artist people will stencil bar codes on bridges and railroad cars. Then you'll walk along with your CueCat Mobile and scan the bar code, and your phone will load a fabulous [multimedia advertisement | ameteur pr0n video featuring his estranged ex-girlfriend | virus] authored by the stencil-wielding Pop Artist.
The future is now!
The distinction between one calculator which is acceptable and another which is not is a very arbitrary one. Really, all calculators make the solutions to problems too easy and, when used in education, prevent one from learning the whole lesson. For any type of problem you're likely to need to solve without your crutch handy, becoming dependent on said crutch to solve the problem is a Bad Idea (tm).
Something like the slide rule, on the other hand, requires some understanding of the problem to get the right answer. It's an augmentative device that, in aiding you, also trains you to better handle situations without it.
I like to think slide rules are to calculators as bikes are to cars: calcs and autos do it for you, thus atrophying your ability to do it yourself. Slipsticks and bikes require something of you to get the job done, thus exercising your capacities. So you use the calc when you have to, and the slide rule when you can. Drive when you have to, ride when you can.
There are probably lots of other examples of this, not all of them technological: speed dial versus address book, lawsuits versus negotiation, war versus diplomacy, you name it.
Have they no pity? Who will stop these vigilantes?
As for actual corporate blogging, we're not doing it. We talked about it, but decided we didn't really have that many pressing things to say, and couldn't imagine that people would actually want to read a company blog.
But if you want a positive example of a corporate blog, look no further than Google Blog.
They gutted the drivetrain in favor of a fuel cell and four independent electric motors in the hubs. Then they went off-roadin'!
Sounds like the John Varley novel "Red Thunder", in which a magic power source removes any weight concerns WRT spaceflight payloads, and the first people on Mars are able to take along an actual hopped-up pickup truck to cruise around the dunes of mars.
BTW, the book was written in 1983 or 4, IIRC. It's pretty impressive what it has to say about information flow, given that it was so long ago
After all, CD's only cost $12-15 each. It would take a lot of CD's to add up to the $100K these folks are supposedly asking for in their suits.
(IANAL)
When you say "I wish they did" about something that hasn't may or may not willen have happened, it's like fingernails on a chalk board. Please, learn to use the retro-temporal subjunctive correctly.
Am I missing something? As I understand it, RSS is fundamentally immune to phishing-type attacks because it must be requested from the server, ("pull") rather than being passively received like email ("push"). AFAICT, the only ways to receive fraudulent RSS feed items are to a) sign up for a fraudulent RSS feed, or b) receive feeds from a server that gets cracked. If this is true, then it seems that the need for signed RSS is pretty minimal.
Right. But rebooting doesn't change that either. What parent is suggesting is that running
saves his friends/relatives the trouble of rebooting, not that it magically fixes the broken ISP DNS problem the poster is investigating.
Wouldn't it just destroy the portion of the human race (and other species) on the half of the globe facing the burst source? An entire planet's worth of soil, rock, magma, etc. makes a pretty good shield.
Humanity is certainly positioned to survive such an event, though many wild species lack our enviable dispersion and would not.
And as a previous reply mentioned, you can always vote with your feet and stop being their customer if it's too much to bear. If more people did that, maybe companies would get the idea that it's stupid to spa^H^H^H annoy one's customers.
IANAL, of course, nor should you construe any positive moderation of this comment as legal advice from the moderator ;^)
No doubt, there's nothing inherently wimpy about being 17 and female. Many Olympic swimmers aren't any older than she is, and just as female, and they carry around a pretty impressive amount of muscle.
Now, if they'd find an 80-year-old woman who could beat the robots arm wrestling, that would be more impressive. But then there would be far fewer posts in the slashdot article on the match....
There's a case of the pot calling the kettle black, eh?