But I imagine one could design an LCD that projected a different image depending on the angle you viewed it from.
The problem with that type of system is that dust, dirt, mud, snow, perhaps even just rain could render it useless. Keeping soldiers and/or vehicles completely clean and dust-free doesn't sound very likely. And if you use it in a uniform, it would have to be virtually immune to scuffing, scratching, and wear damage. It might be practical for a simple shield for a small unit to hide behind, or as a vehicle cover, though.
Shit. Maybe if you could spell, type, and use proper grammar and punctuation, your resume wouldn't go straight to the trash.
Now your [sic] telling me that the whole thing is in our heads. That 53 BSC with a specialization in computers, graduates can't find a programming job and are all stuck in dead end "help desk" or "Repair" jobs is just the boogey man.
A tight labor market doesn't mean all I.T. jobs have been outsourced. Over the last couple of years, lots of people with more than just a computer degree (i.e. valuable and relevant experience) lost their jobs. Those are the people getting hired right now, moreso than new grads with little or no experience.
I hope the baby boomers die quickly. The generations below you really need your jobs.
That's a pretty selfish, shortsighted view. Baby boomers collectively have lots and lots of money; and they spend it. If that spending suddenly dried up, we'd have such a depression that you'd be crying for your mommy (who you probably just wished dead).
Even if you provide workable solar power to every single home in the world, you still haven't gotten rid of fossil fuels.
Ah, the old "all or nothing" argument. The grandparent post claimed only that the only real barrier to using solar (Note: not converting all energy sources to solar to the exclusion of any other source).
We need a completely new source of energy, period.
So we should scrap working technologies that are continuing to improve both in cost and efficiency that are already very close to cost competitive for wide use, and try something new?
And nobody's going to buy a car that they have to spend eight hours recharging in order to drive another 100 miles.
Actually, many people have and do. There are also a number of places you can buy parts or kits to convert a standard car.
It is interesting that so many people see something proposed as one possible alternative, and read it as an all or nothing proposition (i.e. it has to replace all fuel -- or even all energy -- usage). Biodiesel is already in commercial production. For a modestly able hobbyist, it can provide a significantly cheaper alternative in the short term, for a time investment that is probably pretty small. On a larger scale, it is a good use of something that is otherwise just waste (or at best of limited value). And it will help temper the price increases of regular diesel.
There is a big difference between understanding what is right and wrong and the difference between fantasy and reality; and picking up simple facts within a game context. But mainly, it seems to be intended to get kids more interested in the various topics at hand rather than actually teach them the events and surrounding cause and effect.
Collecting muck from big tanks is not something an American will be doing, because there are a whole lot of people who are willing to do it cheaper.
And they'll ship it here by the tanker load for free? There are advantages to local production. And let's not forget that we don't import gasoline. We import crude oil and refine it here. Harvesting and refining vegetable oil from algae would probably be easy for refinery workers to transition to (although crude oil refining might still be used/needed for other products).
Did you ever see footage of the Hindenburg disaster? It did not "go boom" (explode) at all. It burned very quickly, but the current thinking is that the cotton skin, doped with iron oxide and cellulose acetate butyrate impregnated with aluminium powder, making the fabric quite flammable(iron oxide and aluminium can be used as components of solid rocket fuel). Don't you people even read your own links?
Sounds to me like he's been there, done that; and quit after a couple days each time. You make a good point in that overplanning is a way of stalling. But starting with the right tools (bike, treadmill, weight machine, or in this can DDR gear) can also be the difference between sticking with an exercise program vs. adding it to the list of things that didn't work.
Do you really think you (and all the rest here) berating this guy is going to motivate him? He will find his own motivation, or he won't. I've heard many stories about what motivated people to get in better shape, and I can't recall a single one of them that involved "some guy on a message board told me off".
Howewver[sic], what I can tell you is:
1. change your diet.
What do you know about the OP's diet? The only thing I saw mentioned was beer. Hmmm. I'll look again... nope, nothing about "double bacon cheeseburgers 3 times a day" nor anything about soda.
Your advice isn't bad. But it is unfortunate that you couldn't offer it without the "I'm so much smarter than you, fatass" attitude.
That said, it is a myth that calories you eat before bed get stored as fat. There are numerous studies which indicate that the time of day that you consume calories has little impact on fat loss or gain overall.
I recently read something that contradicts the above. IIRC, it was a clinical study in which identical diets were fed to the subjects in a single meal per day either in the morning, at midday or in the evening. The morning group lost weight, the evening group gained, and the midday group maintained their weight. This was reported in a fitness magazine, but I couldn't find a reference online.
Not necessarily true. If one enjoys DDR (or any other game or sport involving physical activity), exercise becomes recreation rather than work. The key is finding something that motivates you enough to exercise regularly, whether that is making the exercise more enjoyable or getting a kick in the ass from something (someone) else.
The reason gyms work at all for weight loss is that once someone has paid for something, they feel compelled to use it, which forms a simple but effective motivation.
Effective for some people. But many people have plenty of other sources of motivation, and work out in a gym for other reasons (more/better equipment, availability of trainers and/or spotters, etc....)
People can be amazingly blind to the fact that the first three movies were not stunning pieces of filmmaking in the first place...
Perhaps, but the first (episode IV) was a good, if oft-repeated, story with all the best cliches(brash young orphaned hero on a quest to save the fiesty damsel in distress with the help of a wise old guy and a colorful but good-hearted rogue with a checkered past. Hero discovers that he's inherited a secret legacy... We could go on and on), plus robots, aliens and spaceships. And the other two built on this fairly well.
...Lucas really hasn't changed the formula for the prequels.
Except for the good storytelling. Admittedly, that can be challenging when you also have to provide backstory that doesn't clash with known future events. But he doesn't always suceed with that.
I think a big factor is compatability with PS2. I never had a PS1, but I've bought numerous PS1 games to play on the PS2. Even if a title is offered for both PS1 and PS2, they may be completely different games. For example, Monsters, Inc. for PS2 was completely different from the game for PS1.
Re:you won't have any choice, you'll pay it
on
Out of Gas
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the "gloom and doomers" are only saying what will happen if we don't change. they're right, it will be bad... if we dont do anything to change energy sources.
Well, I'm only pointing out the irrelevance of such statements since there are a great many efforts underway to find new alternatives and make existing alternatives better.
Is it so much to ask for people to not depend completely on "Mad Max" (and maybe a few extreme Y2K scenarios) as their only source of information/inspiration on this?
Maybe you can explain how making sure they are carried all over the place so they can be burned, if they are THAT hard to destroy, is justifiable then, considering that if the "transform-to-fuel" parts miss some prions, we have an infection agent being carried all over the place.
I'm not certain I understand what you're asking, but I'll try to make things clearer. First, if unprocessed waste is transported, I believe is would be subject to whatever controls similar potentially dangerous wastes are subject to. If you're asking "what if some prions survive?", I think the answer is that for a process to meet the criteria, it must be proven to destroy all prions.
Regarding methane from cows, I think the problem is collecting it cost effectively, and in a manner that isn't abusive to the cow. Yeah, we're going to kill them anyway, but it is still wrong and illegal to abuse them prior to slaughter. If you can come up with a way to do that, more power to ya (pun intended).
Is the western corporate world so desperate about industrial "clean up bills" as that?
In a word, yes. I'm not certain what the real risk of infection is when the parts are not ingested, rather just left lying around but it is a good bet there is risk. So, the waste in question has to be disposed of one way or another. The goal here is to do it in a cost effective way with a useful byproduct. To answer your prior question, BSE is caused by prions, a protein particle that is similar to, but not quite a virus. They are also notoriously hard to destroy or denature(I don't think they are properly classed as alive).
Don't you mean "demeaning to animal byproducts"? That's what we're really talking about here. Parts of slaughtered cattle that were previously used or disposed of in other ways now must be processed in a way that accounts for the risk of BSE. This is a program aimed at making that less of a cost burden to beef producers.
Cattle are (and have been for quite some time) systematically raised and slaughtered for meat. This project by the FDA doesn't change that one whit. It simply addresses how to deal with waste material that could be hazardous. If the former (slaughtering cattle in general) bothers you, that's fine. But the latter (waste disposal) should reduce the risk of mad cow type infections in cattle and humans. That's a good thing.
If you really want flavorful, tender meat, you want to look to the lineage of the beef, to control fat to muscle ratio, etc., and to the animals' diet -- what do you think "corned beef" is...
Beef that is cured or pickled in brine. Not to be confused with corn fed beef, which is generally considered to be of high quality (the meat is more marbled with fat, and thus usually more tender and flavorful).
Well, no. Not that way. But thermal deploymerization seems likely to work rather well. It uses significantly higher temperatures plus high pressure to break down almost anything into short chain hydrocarbons useful for fuel, plus minerals (useful for fertilizer) and water. Here's an example. I believe it has not been specifically tested for destroying prions, but the chemistry indicates that it will.
Re:you won't have any choice, you'll pay it
on
Out of Gas
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· Score: 1
It's ALREADY a significant problem.
You could certainly make that case. I was referring to severe shortages and "Mad Max" scenarios others were suggesting.
For every person you can cite buying a hybrid or whatever, I'll show you 100 others buying the latest biggest H2 behemoth money can buy.
When things get as bad as the gloom and doomers say they will....
See my response to another poster for reasons it won't get that bad.
Re:you won't have any choice, you'll pay it
on
Out of Gas
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· Score: 1
I can tell you that the price of sugar will be, figuratively speaking, the limiting factor on the price of oil.
You didn't look too closesly at the links, did you? You could go the ethanol-ethylene-other products route, or you can go with thermal depolymerization (TDP) which gives you a much broader range of starting materials. And this isn't pie-in-the-sky stuff. There is a commercial scale operation currently in production (IIRC). Also, the other article linked describes using cellulose-rich waste to produce ethanol, which really should not depend on or impact the price of sugar.
Our apocalyptic friend is right about certain things though, the world population is WAY too high. We can synthesize the things we need from natural products, BUT, it requires lots of space to produce the raw materials, The kind of space otherwise needed to produce food.
Two things : One, I believe the entire world population could live in a couple of the larger U.S. states with population densities similar to NY city (which is less than many other cities), which leaves quite a lot of world to do other things. Of course, not all people want to live that close together, but hopefully you get the point. The other thing is, we should not even consider using "new" material until we have thoroughly leveraged the billions of tons of waste material we produce. TDP can use all kinds of things, including medical waste, sewage, food processing waste and other slightly to seriously hazardous materials. So you're killing two birds with one stone.
Nuclear power is a requirement. period.
I'm not as convinced as you, but I'm not afraid of nuclear, either.
Getting a watt here from a windmill, and a watt there from a solar panel ain't gonna cut it with 6+ billion people. We have got to have large, reliable sources of energy.
What is larger or more reliable than the sun? Seriously, we could handle quite a bit of our power needs with current solar technology. It just isn't cost effective right now in most markets. And as you can see, the technology is continuing to improve.
Re:you won't have any choice, you'll pay it
on
Out of Gas
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· Score: 2, Informative
you have two choices, live with technology and keep paying the price, or live completely raw native primitive.
Not really. The maximum price for oil is limited somewhat by the fact that renewables (solar, wind, biomass, etc...) will become more and more cost competitive as oil prices rise. If scarcity occurs too quickly, there will be some pain in the transition, but since people are already taking steps to reduce fuel costs (e.g. hybrids and other high mileage vehicles) I doubt that will be a significant problem.
what they always forget is that this oil stuff is a finite resource, we cannot make any more of it.
Isn't technology great? Another slashdot article recently described a new process for converting cellulose (e.g. straw, paper, wood chips, and all kinds of plant waste) to ethanol more efficiently. Things aren't as bad as the gloom and doomers want you to think.
Actually, a better solution would be to make it harder to use bots to grab up all the housing. I don't play the game, so I don't know how it works now. But having you type a word embedded in an image like some web registrations do would make it harder for bots.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem with that type of system is that dust, dirt, mud, snow, perhaps even just rain could render it useless. Keeping soldiers and/or vehicles completely clean and dust-free doesn't sound very likely. And if you use it in a uniform, it would have to be virtually immune to scuffing, scratching, and wear damage. It might be practical for a simple shield for a small unit to hide behind, or as a vehicle cover, though.
Now your [sic] telling me that the whole thing is in our heads. That 53 BSC with a specialization in computers, graduates can't find a programming job and are all stuck in dead end "help desk" or "Repair" jobs is just the boogey man.
A tight labor market doesn't mean all I.T. jobs have been outsourced. Over the last couple of years, lots of people with more than just a computer degree (i.e. valuable and relevant experience) lost their jobs. Those are the people getting hired right now, moreso than new grads with little or no experience.
I hope the baby boomers die quickly. The generations below you really need your jobs.
That's a pretty selfish, shortsighted view. Baby boomers collectively have lots and lots of money; and they spend it. If that spending suddenly dried up, we'd have such a depression that you'd be crying for your mommy (who you probably just wished dead).
Like Maine?
Even if you provide workable solar power to every single home in the world, you still haven't gotten rid of fossil fuels.
Ah, the old "all or nothing" argument. The grandparent post claimed only that the only real barrier to using solar (Note: not converting all energy sources to solar to the exclusion of any other source).
We need a completely new source of energy, period.
So we should scrap working technologies that are continuing to improve both in cost and efficiency that are already very close to cost competitive for wide use, and try something new?
And nobody's going to buy a car that they have to spend eight hours recharging in order to drive another 100 miles.
Actually, many people have and do. There are also a number of places you can buy parts or kits to convert a standard car.
It is interesting that so many people see something proposed as one possible alternative, and read it as an all or nothing proposition (i.e. it has to replace all fuel -- or even all energy -- usage). Biodiesel is already in commercial production. For a modestly able hobbyist, it can provide a significantly cheaper alternative in the short term, for a time investment that is probably pretty small. On a larger scale, it is a good use of something that is otherwise just waste (or at best of limited value). And it will help temper the price increases of regular diesel.
There is a big difference between understanding what is right and wrong and the difference between fantasy and reality; and picking up simple facts within a game context. But mainly, it seems to be intended to get kids more interested in the various topics at hand rather than actually teach them the events and surrounding cause and effect.
Too bad he was playing with all guys...
And they'll ship it here by the tanker load for free? There are advantages to local production. And let's not forget that we don't import gasoline. We import crude oil and refine it here. Harvesting and refining vegetable oil from algae would probably be easy for refinery workers to transition to (although crude oil refining might still be used/needed for other products).
See also: other posts explaining the nature of the Hindenburg fire.
Did you ever see footage of the Hindenburg disaster? It did not "go boom" (explode) at all. It burned very quickly, but the current thinking is that the cotton skin, doped with iron oxide and cellulose acetate butyrate impregnated with aluminium powder, making the fabric quite flammable(iron oxide and aluminium can be used as components of solid rocket fuel). Don't you people even read your own links?
Do you really think you (and all the rest here) berating this guy is going to motivate him? He will find his own motivation, or he won't. I've heard many stories about what motivated people to get in better shape, and I can't recall a single one of them that involved "some guy on a message board told me off".
What do you know about the OP's diet? The only thing I saw mentioned was beer. Hmmm. I'll look again... nope, nothing about "double bacon cheeseburgers 3 times a day" nor anything about soda.
Your advice isn't bad. But it is unfortunate that you couldn't offer it without the "I'm so much smarter than you, fatass" attitude.
That said, it is a myth that calories you eat before bed get stored as fat. There are numerous studies which indicate that the time of day that you consume calories has little impact on fat loss or gain overall.
I recently read something that contradicts the above. IIRC, it was a clinical study in which identical diets were fed to the subjects in a single meal per day either in the morning, at midday or in the evening. The morning group lost weight, the evening group gained, and the midday group maintained their weight. This was reported in a fitness magazine, but I couldn't find a reference online.
True.
and this is why both running and DDR will fail.
Not necessarily true. If one enjoys DDR (or any other game or sport involving physical activity), exercise becomes recreation rather than work. The key is finding something that motivates you enough to exercise regularly, whether that is making the exercise more enjoyable or getting a kick in the ass from something (someone) else.
The reason gyms work at all for weight loss is that once someone has paid for something, they feel compelled to use it, which forms a simple but effective motivation.
Effective for some people. But many people have plenty of other sources of motivation, and work out in a gym for other reasons (more/better equipment, availability of trainers and/or spotters, etc....)
Perhaps, but the first (episode IV) was a good, if oft-repeated, story with all the best cliches(brash young orphaned hero on a quest to save the fiesty damsel in distress with the help of a wise old guy and a colorful but good-hearted rogue with a checkered past. Hero discovers that he's inherited a secret legacy ... We could go on and on), plus robots, aliens and spaceships. And the other two built on this fairly well.
Except for the good storytelling. Admittedly, that can be challenging when you also have to provide backstory that doesn't clash with known future events. But he doesn't always suceed with that.
I think a big factor is compatability with PS2. I never had a PS1, but I've bought numerous PS1 games to play on the PS2. Even if a title is offered for both PS1 and PS2, they may be completely different games. For example, Monsters, Inc. for PS2 was completely different from the game for PS1.
Well, I'm only pointing out the irrelevance of such statements since there are a great many efforts underway to find new alternatives and make existing alternatives better.
Is it so much to ask for people to not depend completely on "Mad Max" (and maybe a few extreme Y2K scenarios) as their only source of information/inspiration on this?
I'm not certain I understand what you're asking, but I'll try to make things clearer. First, if unprocessed waste is transported, I believe is would be subject to whatever controls similar potentially dangerous wastes are subject to. If you're asking "what if some prions survive?", I think the answer is that for a process to meet the criteria, it must be proven to destroy all prions.
Regarding methane from cows, I think the problem is collecting it cost effectively, and in a manner that isn't abusive to the cow. Yeah, we're going to kill them anyway, but it is still wrong and illegal to abuse them prior to slaughter. If you can come up with a way to do that, more power to ya (pun intended).
In a word, yes. I'm not certain what the real risk of infection is when the parts are not ingested, rather just left lying around but it is a good bet there is risk. So, the waste in question has to be disposed of one way or another. The goal here is to do it in a cost effective way with a useful byproduct. To answer your prior question, BSE is caused by prions, a protein particle that is similar to, but not quite a virus. They are also notoriously hard to destroy or denature(I don't think they are properly classed as alive).
Cattle are (and have been for quite some time) systematically raised and slaughtered for meat. This project by the FDA doesn't change that one whit. It simply addresses how to deal with waste material that could be hazardous. If the former (slaughtering cattle in general) bothers you, that's fine. But the latter (waste disposal) should reduce the risk of mad cow type infections in cattle and humans. That's a good thing.
Beef that is cured or pickled in brine. Not to be confused with corn fed beef, which is generally considered to be of high quality (the meat is more marbled with fat, and thus usually more tender and flavorful).
Well, no. Not that way. But thermal deploymerization seems likely to work rather well. It uses significantly higher temperatures plus high pressure to break down almost anything into short chain hydrocarbons useful for fuel, plus minerals (useful for fertilizer) and water. Here's an example. I believe it has not been specifically tested for destroying prions, but the chemistry indicates that it will.
You could certainly make that case. I was referring to severe shortages and "Mad Max" scenarios others were suggesting.
For every person you can cite buying a hybrid or whatever, I'll show you 100 others buying the latest biggest H2 behemoth money can buy.
Nonsense. "Since the new 2004 model was introduced in the fall, the Prius has been stomping the Hummer. In November 2003, the Prius outsold the H2 by a 2-to-1 margin, according to Autodata." And that's just one model. Honda makes two hybrids, plus some of their standard drivetrain models get excellent gas mileage. I don't know if sales are up lately in conjunction with gas prices, but Accord and Civic have long been solid sellers in their respective classes.
When things get as bad as the gloom and doomers say they will....
See my response to another poster for reasons it won't get that bad.
You didn't look too closesly at the links, did you? You could go the ethanol-ethylene-other products route, or you can go with thermal depolymerization (TDP) which gives you a much broader range of starting materials. And this isn't pie-in-the-sky stuff. There is a commercial scale operation currently in production (IIRC). Also, the other article linked describes using cellulose-rich waste to produce ethanol, which really should not depend on or impact the price of sugar.
Our apocalyptic friend is right about certain things though, the world population is WAY too high. We can synthesize the things we need from natural products, BUT, it requires lots of space to produce the raw materials, The kind of space otherwise needed to produce food.
Two things : One, I believe the entire world population could live in a couple of the larger U.S. states with population densities similar to NY city (which is less than many other cities), which leaves quite a lot of world to do other things. Of course, not all people want to live that close together, but hopefully you get the point. The other thing is, we should not even consider using "new" material until we have thoroughly leveraged the billions of tons of waste material we produce. TDP can use all kinds of things, including medical waste, sewage, food processing waste and other slightly to seriously hazardous materials. So you're killing two birds with one stone.
Nuclear power is a requirement. period.
I'm not as convinced as you, but I'm not afraid of nuclear, either.
Getting a watt here from a windmill, and a watt there from a solar panel ain't gonna cut it with 6+ billion people. We have got to have large, reliable sources of energy.
What is larger or more reliable than the sun? Seriously, we could handle quite a bit of our power needs with current solar technology. It just isn't cost effective right now in most markets. And as you can see, the technology is continuing to improve.
Not really. The maximum price for oil is limited somewhat by the fact that renewables (solar, wind, biomass, etc...) will become more and more cost competitive as oil prices rise. If scarcity occurs too quickly, there will be some pain in the transition, but since people are already taking steps to reduce fuel costs (e.g. hybrids and other high mileage vehicles) I doubt that will be a significant problem.
what they always forget is that this oil stuff is a finite resource, we cannot make any more of it.
Isn't technology great? Another slashdot article recently described a new process for converting cellulose (e.g. straw, paper, wood chips, and all kinds of plant waste) to ethanol more efficiently. Things aren't as bad as the gloom and doomers want you to think.
Just my 2 cents