You directed your essay at the wrong people. It's not slashdotters who think the UN is a world government. It's UN beaurocrats like Boutros Boutros Gali and Kofi Anan.
Ok some back of the envelope calculations for you. from edmunds.com Honda Accord Hybrid: Dealer Invoice: $27,115. mpg 29/37 Honda Accord: Dealer Invoice: $24,568. mpg 21/30
Hybrid warranty lists "hybrid component" as 80,000 mi or 8yr. whichever comes first, with a limitation on battery replacment. It does not specify what that limitation is, so I'll be generous and assume that the battery is replaced for free during the hybrid component period.
They do not however list the cost or mean time to replacement necessity of a battery. I will confine this analysis therefore to the warranty period and assume all other costs are equal.
over 80k miles, the accord uses 3810/2667 gallons and the hybrid uses only 2758/2162 gallons.
So, in order to break even, gas prices must be over $2.42/gal if driving is entirely city or $5.04/gal if driving is entirely highway.
Are you referring to our cities within earthquake zones like Los Angeles or San Fransisco? Public transportation becomes a lot more difficult when you have to put in ugly elevated tracks everywhere, and over hilly terrain, to do it. Do not underestimate geography as driving factor in driving habits.
No not good enough. you have no wa of knowing that the machine isn't tampered with later.
The only way to be sure is for each ballot to have a unique key that you tear off when you vote. Later you can use a database server of some kind (probably web based) to check that the vote stored is the vote you made. Obviously, people must also be able to consolodate their lookups by having the ability (but not the requirement) to inform political organizations what their key and votes were. Perhaps a unique subkey could be used to allow voters to give information about one particular vote only leaving all others unrevealed.
and by old, I mean not that old. We had a 'criminal investigation' policy during the Clinton administration and during the Bush administration right up until 9/11. We caught the oklahoma bomber, the unibomber, and the WTC bombers, but none of their networks if any existed. We did not catch the Cole bombers, but they were dead from the bomb.
All of these do very little to discourage future bombings, if we maybe catch the culprit sometime after the fact. an organization bent on sending suicide bombers has nothing to fear from such a system and neither do the suicide bombers themselves. Which is why the policy took such a radical shift following 9/11 in the US. afaik, GB, spain, et. al have yet to have a single attack of similar scale as that one and therefore can still operate under the paradigm of small individual crimes.
Yeah i never understood this: if people play have to play 10 hours a day just to get to the fun stuff they really want to, how does this keep them paying subscription fees as opposed to designing it so that a minimal amount of BS is needed for the fun stuff?
I should think that it wouldn't matter to sony whether you play 1 hour a week and pay $15 a month or 100 hour a month and pay $15 a month. In fact, the less time you actually play, the lower their server load.
Why is it that the fatwa's issued always used weasel words like "blindly" destroy property instead of "destroy any property" or "It's wrong to kill the innocent*"
Ahh.. I see the problem. You might not be the MSFTW group, but you're still committing a logical fallacy. A perfectly understandable one that almost everyone makes. the "is-ought" fallacy. You are describing the way things are as if that is the way things should always be. The parent was describing the way things ought to be (according to him). The mistake is in assuming that just because those are the conditions that exist now, that they are the best possible conditions.
Pragmatism is all right when you consider all the ramifications. There are certain possibilities which some might weight more heavily than others that lead to Open Document as soon as possible being the more practical and pragmatic solution.
Cracking it open is probably not an option either as unless there is enough energy in the nuke to overcome gravitational binding energy by a significant margin, the split pieces will come back together and still hit the earth. But the main point is that the "asteroid" might not be the classic big-heavy-rock that we're used to from movies. It might be a big-heavy-pile-of-dust or gravel, in which case landing is not really an option. A 'gravity tug' is like having a very weak thread attached to every particle in the dust pile. You are guaranteed to be able to move it, but you will have to be very gentle. This is not that big of a deal since whatever you did you'd have to be very gentle to avoid dispersing the cloud (and therefore making your landed thruster irrelevant). The proposed system also has the advantage that if the thrusters get stuck in the high position, it won't plow through the pile, but instead accelerate out of tug-range where we can either try to fix the tug and move it back into position or send a fresh tug to continue the process. In fact, i fail to see why only one tug need be pulling on the asteroid at all. I would think they could be stacked "vertically" or set up in some kind of constellation around axis of pulling.
Indeed. and a very large part of that strength was sheer numbers. If you want to have an idea of what happens to a society that fails to produce enough new people and instead relies on foreign workers to maintain their standard of living, take a look at france these past few weeks. The US is surely not all that far behind.
no. you don't want the spacecraft to accelerate away from the asteroid. you want to maintain constant distance, so you maintain thrust exactly equal to the force between the two bodies and in the direction you want to go. Ok, you say, they're just balanced, right? Well, consider a control volume surrounding the combined asteroid-spacecraft system: There is propellant leaving that control volume on a constant vector, which by conservation of momentum means that the control volume must be accelerating in the opposite direction.
the larger the spacecraft or the closer it is to the asteroid, the more thrust you can use and therefore the faster you can move the asteroid somewhere.
There is quite a lot of energy found in uranium and the delta-v need not be all that great to avoid hitting the earth. I think the bigger problem would be finding enough reaction mass for a 20-year burn (assuming you try to do the whole thing with only one tug.)
It does not need to have a higher attraction than any body for any amount of time. as long as it maintains constant distance and thrusts at the desired angle, the asteroid-spacecraft system will acclerate ever so slightly in the proper direction.
This is a very clever idea. Not quite as clever as using a series of gravity-assists to siphon angular momentum from the asteroid, but it has the advantage of not requiring fancy orbits of dozens of spacecraft to achieve its goal and does it's work constantly, rather than during specific points in the asteroid's orbit.
I can honestly say that if i were in charge of pentagon security, it would have been possible to fly an airplane in it. I know of no system that could shoot down an airliner intent on a kamikaze flight that isn't already on an irrevocably fatal trajectory unless that system is also capable of shooting down airliners that aren't so intent. IOW, by the time the destination of the airliner is certain, it is too late do do anything but set it on fire. Prior to 9/11, my boss (the president i'll assume and by extension the american people) would not have the will to shoot down maybe-hostile airliners potentially containing hundreds of civilians. In fact, i find it easy to believe that such a hard decision would still not be made were similar events to occur today.
Can you say that you'd be willing to fire upon 200 civilians on the possibility that they might be headed for the pentagon? This is a difficult decision even if you are 100% certain of the intent of the hijackers.
Why can "reporters" say whatever they want 90 days before an election, but you or I can't buy advertising time on their shows to do the same thing?
On your income tax, where it says, "donate money to campaign funds" or somesuch, check no. send that money to the candidate you want to win. why would you want to send money to candidates you don't want to win?
Indeed. the parent seems to have confused communism with the only form of government that has shown any form of stable implementation. IMO, the two are really inseparable. Communism can't last without a totalitarian regime and a totalitarian regime can't last for much longer than (1) charismatic leader.
The non-directionality is as much a problem as it is a boon. A propeller driven turbine will turn if the wind speed is great enough. As long as it is pointing intow the wind and there is wind, it will do useful work. The typical design for a vertical wind turbine stalls if the wind falls below a minimum threshold and is not self-starting: the device must be spinning to recieve torque from the wind. In areas where there is a high, constant wind, this is not that much of a problem, but if the wind is highly variable or close to the threshold, it takes more energy to keep spinning them up than you will get out of it.
So the design requres not only the turbine itself, but also machinery to measure the wind speed at all times and decide whether or not to kick-start the device and the starter-motor and whatever power supply that thing has. as opposed to to a conventional turbine which needs only to be mounted on bearings and have a tail to maintain its profile into the wind.
The design in TFA appears to have solved the self-starting problem, but I find 40% efficiency claims to be a little incredible. The pictures they show look like a giant anemometer, which is a device that is not intended to be efficient so much as accurate. This may calls into question some of their patent claims, but we can't be sure since they're also keeping them secret.
How is this open source? Pictures are not shown because it is patent pending and every other paragraph mentions something about the patents, at one point proudly mentioning that they are sufficiently broad to make an attorney happy (because they'll mean lots of work for the attorney?).
But my question is, if it has a patent pending, why don't they publish? I thought that the whole reason for patents was to encourage people to publish their inventions. If the patent is pending, what's the risk?
1) if magnetic confinement fails, the plasma will disperse. There would no longer be enough compression for fusion to occur. Simply cutting power to the device is sufficient to turn it into a slowly leaking hydrogen can. 2) fuel is not ignited. Fusion is not like an oxidizing reaction. very high temperatures and pressures must be maintained to continue fusion. It simply will not occur outside of those conditions. A runaway reaction is extremely difficult to obtain in any fusion device, even if that is your objective. It simply cannot happen in magnetically confined plasma.
Meltdown occurs in fission devices. It is every bit as dramatic as the name implies, that is to say, not very. A melt down is less akin to a nuclear bomb than a self-warming plate of butter. hence the name. having critical mass of fission fuel in one place is not an explosion risk. it's a risk of slow, uncontrolled fission. In fact, you could say that a nuclear power plant is in a constant state of regulated meltdown. 3) the magnetic shielding could lose power*, a condition which in a properly designed system would trigger a freakin' relay cutting the power to the rest of the device causing it to fail into cooldown state. mass shielding will not suddenly lose mass. it could ablate over time maybe depending on the process, but that would be easily testable by measuring the thickness at regular intervals. Geiger counters would be more useful for analyzing the efficiency on a day-to-day basis than as a alarm system. 4)huh?
*this is the part i don't really understand. how does a magnetic field (which neither does work nor affects neutral particles) protect from fusion products?
Really you've just managed to spout off much of the eco-wacko-anti-nuke-but-anti-fossil-fuels-too fud about fission, but replaced the word fission with fusion.
History books claim that at the time of the revolution, only about 30% supported secession. about 30% opposed the revolution, and the rest simply didn't care. The torries apparantly supported the crown and believed in a patriarcal government. When the constitution was ratified, that entire population had the right to vote and one could expect them to vote for a patriarcal government. It is not unreasonable to expect that that population still exists to today, but that it has shifted across demographics and party lines. But they are not the problem. If an overarching almost feudal government is what the people of the united states want, then that's the system that we should eventually get.
The problem is the people that don't care. They also have the right to vote, but have no real opinion about the role of government should be. consequently, they fall for whoever "feels good" at the time either due a nice suit or character assanation or other personal reasons unrelated to governmental philosophy. The problem is not that politicians have figured out that campaining against people instead of ideas works. The problem is that it works at all. The problem is also not that politicians have figured out that pork works. The problem is that enough people fail to see it for what it is or think, 'yeah but it's my pork' without realizing who pays for it.
I urge all the vote-pushing organisations to simply quit. People that don't care enough to find out about the candidate and issues and don't know what direction they think government should take should not be voting. We should allow them to self-remove themselves from the voting pool. Polls advertisements shouldn't try to convince people of the importance of voting. They should simply state where the polls are should you choose to vote.
The earth is only ~1300 km in diameter. How do you propose building an interferometric device with a 30,000km baseline on it? unless i misunderstood and this is really some kind of SAR.
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If you resell it with any value at all above scrap, you haven't driven either car to its full potential.
You directed your essay at the wrong people. It's not slashdotters who think the UN is a world government. It's UN beaurocrats like Boutros Boutros Gali and Kofi Anan.
Ok some back of the envelope calculations for you.
from edmunds.com
Honda Accord Hybrid: Dealer Invoice: $27,115. mpg 29/37
Honda Accord: Dealer Invoice: $24,568. mpg 21/30
Hybrid warranty lists "hybrid component" as 80,000 mi or 8yr. whichever comes first, with a limitation on battery replacment. It does not specify what that limitation is, so I'll be generous and assume that the battery is replaced for free during the hybrid component period.
They do not however list the cost or mean time to replacement necessity of a battery. I will confine this analysis therefore to the warranty period and assume all other costs are equal.
over 80k miles, the accord uses 3810/2667 gallons and the hybrid uses only 2758/2162 gallons.
So, in order to break even, gas prices must be over $2.42/gal if driving is entirely city or $5.04/gal if driving is entirely highway.
Are you referring to our cities within earthquake zones like Los Angeles or San Fransisco? Public transportation becomes a lot more difficult when you have to put in ugly elevated tracks everywhere, and over hilly terrain, to do it. Do not underestimate geography as driving factor in driving habits.
Indeed. But if we did put hussein in power, wouldn't that make it our responsibily to remove him when we're cleaning house?
No not good enough. you have no wa of knowing that the machine isn't tampered with later.
The only way to be sure is for each ballot to have a unique key that you tear off when you vote. Later you can use a database server of some kind (probably web based) to check that the vote stored is the vote you made. Obviously, people must also be able to consolodate their lookups by having the ability (but not the requirement) to inform political organizations what their key and votes were. Perhaps a unique subkey could be used to allow voters to give information about one particular vote only leaving all others unrevealed.
and by old, I mean not that old. We had a 'criminal investigation' policy during the Clinton administration and during the Bush administration right up until 9/11. We caught the oklahoma bomber, the unibomber, and the WTC bombers, but none of their networks if any existed. We did not catch the Cole bombers, but they were dead from the bomb.
All of these do very little to discourage future bombings, if we maybe catch the culprit sometime after the fact. an organization bent on sending suicide bombers has nothing to fear from such a system and neither do the suicide bombers themselves. Which is why the policy took such a radical shift following 9/11 in the US. afaik, GB, spain, et. al have yet to have a single attack of similar scale as that one and therefore can still operate under the paradigm of small individual crimes.
Wow. that's not even wrong.
A solar day is 24 hours. A sidereal day (period of one complete rotation) is somwhat shorter due to the earth's advancement around the sun.
Yeah i never understood this: if people play have to play 10 hours a day just to get to the fun stuff they really want to, how does this keep them paying subscription fees as opposed to designing it so that a minimal amount of BS is needed for the fun stuff?
I should think that it wouldn't matter to sony whether you play 1 hour a week and pay $15 a month or 100 hour a month and pay $15 a month. In fact, the less time you actually play, the lower their server load.
Why is it that the fatwa's issued always used weasel words like "blindly" destroy property instead of "destroy any property" or "It's wrong to kill the innocent*"
*where innocent is defined as muslim.
Ahh.. I see the problem. You might not be the MSFTW group, but you're still committing a logical fallacy. A perfectly understandable one that almost everyone makes. the "is-ought" fallacy. You are describing the way things are as if that is the way things should always be. The parent was describing the way things ought to be (according to him). The mistake is in assuming that just because those are the conditions that exist now, that they are the best possible conditions.
Pragmatism is all right when you consider all the ramifications. There are certain possibilities which some might weight more heavily than others that lead to Open Document as soon as possible being the more practical and pragmatic solution.
Based on the numbers, I think we can expect Rhode MexiIsland before either of those.
Cracking it open is probably not an option either as unless there is enough energy in the nuke to overcome gravitational binding energy by a significant margin, the split pieces will come back together and still hit the earth. But the main point is that the "asteroid" might not be the classic big-heavy-rock that we're used to from movies. It might be a big-heavy-pile-of-dust or gravel, in which case landing is not really an option. A 'gravity tug' is like having a very weak thread attached to every particle in the dust pile. You are guaranteed to be able to move it, but you will have to be very gentle. This is not that big of a deal since whatever you did you'd have to be very gentle to avoid dispersing the cloud (and therefore making your landed thruster irrelevant). The proposed system also has the advantage that if the thrusters get stuck in the high position, it won't plow through the pile, but instead accelerate out of tug-range where we can either try to fix the tug and move it back into position or send a fresh tug to continue the process. In fact, i fail to see why only one tug need be pulling on the asteroid at all. I would think they could be stacked "vertically" or set up in some kind of constellation around axis of pulling.
Indeed. and a very large part of that strength was sheer numbers. If you want to have an idea of what happens to a society that fails to produce enough new people and instead relies on foreign workers to maintain their standard of living, take a look at france these past few weeks. The US is surely not all that far behind.
no. you don't want the spacecraft to accelerate away from the asteroid. you want to maintain constant distance, so you maintain thrust exactly equal to the force between the two bodies and in the direction you want to go. Ok, you say, they're just balanced, right?
Well, consider a control volume surrounding the combined asteroid-spacecraft system: There is propellant leaving that control volume on a constant vector, which by conservation of momentum means that the control volume must be accelerating in the opposite direction.
the larger the spacecraft or the closer it is to the asteroid, the more thrust you can use and therefore the faster you can move the asteroid somewhere.
There is quite a lot of energy found in uranium and the delta-v need not be all that great to avoid hitting the earth. I think the bigger problem would be finding enough reaction mass for a 20-year burn (assuming you try to do the whole thing with only one tug.)
It does not need to have a higher attraction than any body for any amount of time. as long as it maintains constant distance and thrusts at the desired angle, the asteroid-spacecraft system will acclerate ever so slightly in the proper direction.
This is a very clever idea. Not quite as clever as using a series of gravity-assists to siphon angular momentum from the asteroid, but it has the advantage of not requiring fancy orbits of dozens of spacecraft to achieve its goal and does it's work constantly, rather than during specific points in the asteroid's orbit.
I can honestly say that if i were in charge of pentagon security, it would have been possible to fly an airplane in it. I know of no system that could shoot down an airliner intent on a kamikaze flight that isn't already on an irrevocably fatal trajectory unless that system is also capable of shooting down airliners that aren't so intent. IOW, by the time the destination of the airliner is certain, it is too late do do anything but set it on fire. Prior to 9/11, my boss (the president i'll assume and by extension the american people) would not have the will to shoot down maybe-hostile airliners potentially containing hundreds of civilians. In fact, i find it easy to believe that such a hard decision would still not be made were similar events to occur today.
Can you say that you'd be willing to fire upon 200 civilians on the possibility that they might be headed for the pentagon? This is a difficult decision even if you are 100% certain of the intent of the hijackers.
So.. you're saying, there must be some kind of intelligent design because the plot is too complicated to have occured on its own?
well stop voting for campaign finance "reform."
Why can "reporters" say whatever they want 90 days before an election, but you or I can't buy advertising time on their shows to do the same thing?
On your income tax, where it says, "donate money to campaign funds" or somesuch, check no. send that money to the candidate you want to win. why would you want to send money to candidates you don't want to win?
Indeed. the parent seems to have confused communism with the only form of government that has shown any form of stable implementation. IMO, the two are really inseparable. Communism can't last without a totalitarian regime and a totalitarian regime can't last for much longer than (1) charismatic leader.
The non-directionality is as much a problem as it is a boon. A propeller driven turbine will turn if the wind speed is great enough. As long as it is pointing intow the wind and there is wind, it will do useful work. The typical design for a vertical wind turbine stalls if the wind falls below a minimum threshold and is not self-starting: the device must be spinning to recieve torque from the wind. In areas where there is a high, constant wind, this is not that much of a problem, but if the wind is highly variable or close to the threshold, it takes more energy to keep spinning them up than you will get out of it.
So the design requres not only the turbine itself, but also machinery to measure the wind speed at all times and decide whether or not to kick-start the device and the starter-motor and whatever power supply that thing has. as opposed to to a conventional turbine which needs only to be mounted on bearings and have a tail to maintain its profile into the wind.
The design in TFA appears to have solved the self-starting problem, but I find 40% efficiency claims to be a little incredible. The pictures they show look like a giant anemometer, which is a device that is not intended to be efficient so much as accurate. This may calls into question some of their patent claims, but we can't be sure since they're also keeping them secret.
How is this open source? Pictures are not shown because it is patent pending and every other paragraph mentions something about the patents, at one point proudly mentioning that they are sufficiently broad to make an attorney happy (because they'll mean lots of work for the attorney?).
But my question is, if it has a patent pending, why don't they publish? I thought that the whole reason for patents was to encourage people to publish their inventions. If the patent is pending, what's the risk?
1) if magnetic confinement fails, the plasma will disperse. There would no longer be enough compression for fusion to occur. Simply cutting power to the device is sufficient to turn it into a slowly leaking hydrogen can.
2) fuel is not ignited. Fusion is not like an oxidizing reaction. very high temperatures and pressures must be maintained to continue fusion. It simply will not occur outside of those conditions. A runaway reaction is extremely difficult to obtain in any fusion device, even if that is your objective. It simply cannot happen in magnetically confined plasma.
Meltdown occurs in fission devices. It is every bit as dramatic as the name implies, that is to say, not very. A melt down is less akin to a nuclear bomb than a self-warming plate of butter. hence the name. having critical mass of fission fuel in one place is not an explosion risk. it's a risk of slow, uncontrolled fission. In fact, you could say that a nuclear power plant is in a constant state of regulated meltdown.
3) the magnetic shielding could lose power*, a condition which in a properly designed system would trigger a freakin' relay cutting the power to the rest of the device causing it to fail into cooldown state. mass shielding will not suddenly lose mass. it could ablate over time maybe depending on the process, but that would be easily testable by measuring the thickness at regular intervals. Geiger counters would be more useful for analyzing the efficiency on a day-to-day basis than as a alarm system.
4)huh?
*this is the part i don't really understand. how does a magnetic field (which neither does work nor affects neutral particles) protect from fusion products?
Really you've just managed to spout off much of the eco-wacko-anti-nuke-but-anti-fossil-fuels-too fud about fission, but replaced the word fission with fusion.
History books claim that at the time of the revolution, only about 30% supported secession. about 30% opposed the revolution, and the rest simply didn't care. The torries apparantly supported the crown and believed in a patriarcal government. When the constitution was ratified, that entire population had the right to vote and one could expect them to vote for a patriarcal government. It is not unreasonable to expect that that population still exists to today, but that it has shifted across demographics and party lines. But they are not the problem. If an overarching almost feudal government is what the people of the united states want, then that's the system that we should eventually get.
The problem is the people that don't care. They also have the right to vote, but have no real opinion about the role of government should be. consequently, they fall for whoever "feels good" at the time either due a nice suit or character assanation or other personal reasons unrelated to governmental philosophy. The problem is not that politicians have figured out that campaining against people instead of ideas works. The problem is that it works at all. The problem is also not that politicians have figured out that pork works. The problem is that enough people fail to see it for what it is or think, 'yeah but it's my pork' without realizing who pays for it.
I urge all the vote-pushing organisations to simply quit. People that don't care enough to find out about the candidate and issues and don't know what direction they think government should take should not be voting. We should allow them to self-remove themselves from the voting pool. Polls advertisements shouldn't try to convince people of the importance of voting. They should simply state where the polls are should you choose to vote.
The earth is only ~1300 km in diameter. How do you propose building an interferometric device with a 30,000km baseline on it? unless i misunderstood and this is really some kind of SAR.
I've read this before. Mr. plagiarizing karma farmer.
l l%20have%20said%20%22We%20choose%20to%20go%20to%20 the%20weather%20balloon.%22%20
In fact, a google search for some key text reveals two postings to slashdot alone. http://www.google.com/search?q=he%20may%20as%20we