Well, bureaucratic idiocy ignored, there is another small wart on this process.
Catalysts are very sensitive to "poisons" - chemicals that stop their catalytic activity. Sodium amide used as a catalyst has a vulnerability to a potent catalytic poison - that being water. A little moisture in the fuel tank, a little moisture in the fuel lines, and presto. No catalyst.
I'm not saying it's not possible, I just don't know how one would keep that pestilential dihydrogen monoxide carefully excluded from the process. It's cumulative, every tiny scrap of moisture kills off some of the catalyst.
There's an alternative explanation. Space-Time could have non-zero viscosity, and slow down photons.
There are a lot of reasons to consider that space might have a viscosity. For one thing, it would neatly explain the expansion of the universe, without the necessity of invoking dark matter and dark energy.
Unpatchable systems are a problem, but if you view them as a black box, they are no different than non-logical systems that break.
I'm rather fervently against systems that cannot be upgraded on the fly, but I understand why manufacturers might not like this.
Consider, if you buy a traffic light controller that can be improved and modified, then where is the motivation for a second round of purchases when "upgrade" becomes necssary. After all, I certainly want the person who sold me a refrigerator to be able to brick it when they want, or on a certain date. I can't understand those Commie Sympathizers who think that a sale means that you actually -own- the product, and can use it as long as you see fit.
Since Truecrypt has decided to drop their project, and the project has been opensourced from day one, I'm going to suggest this is a good time for a fork.
It would (will) be educational to see who goes to court to stop it.
Of course it uses carbon (and nitrogen, and a raft of other things) from the soil. However, unless you're planting that corn on a tar pit, the carbon in the soil isn't fossil carbon that's been in the soil for a million years. You might make the case that plants use marine carbonates dissolved in water, but that amount is very small compared to the mail building block of plants, and for photosynthetic plants, that's carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
I may not be a botanist, but I can work the numbers.
The thing is, ethanol has a lower energy density per litre (or gallon, if you are metrically challanged) than does gasoline, just as gasoline has a lower energy density than diesel fuel.
You get better mileage out of diesel than gasoline, and better mileage out of gasoline than ethanol, all things being equal. Laws of thermodynamics aren't to be bypassed. No amount of "clever" can change the basic fact that gasoline holds more energy than ethanol.
However, and this may count for something for you, as it does for me, ethanol releases carbon dioxide into the atmosphere that was taken out of the atmosphere to grow the crop that led to the ethanol. There is no net increase of CO2, as there is with fossil fuels. Of course, a cynic might point out (and I might be one) that the carbon in the fossil fuel was also in the atmosphere at one time, to the tune of no less than 1500 ppm in the Carboniferous period.
Using ethanol isn't for getting better mileage, it's for reducing carbon footprint, the amount of carbon added to the atmosphere when you go down to the corner store to buy a six-pack of beer. The beer, btw, doesn't add carbon to the atmosphere, because like the ethanol that's in it, that carbon came -out- of the atmosphere when the crops to make it were grown.
Does anyone remember the history of the space station?
NASA spent billions (with a B) of dollars, and for a decade we had not one bolt flying in orbit. I used to call the project the Origami space station, made out of paper. It wasn't until the Russians went ahead and launched the first module that NASA got around to giving up on Powerpoint and Viewgraphs and meetings, and actually -did- something.
I just love it when people proudly proclaim that something isn't possible.
History shows that such pronouncements have a very poor track record.
In times of past, when it took weeks and months to communicate between far away places (New York, Chicago, Los Angeles) it made sense to structure the political organization of this country as a railroad organization. Today, it does not.
What we need to do is simple: We need to define, in simple print, that corporate fictions are not in fact citizens, and as such, do not have political freedoms or civil rights as such.
The concept if a corporate fiction as a person is a bit ridiculous anyway. A corporation can engage in activities that kill people (against the law) but they cannot be imprisoned. Finding General Motors (say) criminally liable for something that they have done corporately is a joke. They are already immune from such prosecution and bringing criminal charges that stick against board members or management is a very difficult thing.
If corporate entities cannot participate in the democratic process; there is no proxy for voting in a general election. We should formalize this and extend it so that corporate fictions simply cannot make political contributions of any size whatsoever. If management has strong political feelings, let the members make a personal contribution in their own name and not from corporate funds. If a CEO wants to contribute millions to a political candidate, well, they're paid enough to write the check. If a corporation feels strongly about a political issue, they can encourage (but not require) that their employees write their own checks to whatever political cause is extant. A vote, and a political contribution, should only be permitted to come from someone who can be demonstrated to be a living, breathing person and not some vacuous entity dreamed up by invisible attorneys.
This moves us back to the "one man, one vote" ideal our forefathers envisioned. Right now, we're moving ever closer to merchantilism and "One Dollar, One Vote" -- which, in my humble opinion, is not a good thing at all.
Are you kidding? They ordered meters from a Chinese company. Let's see, what kind of plastic did the Chinese company have laying around in their regrind bin, maybe from injection molding a lot of those "F" meters...
I think the Chainsaw option mentioned above is the best option. Don't buy Fluke. Ever.
Are you kidding? The reason that "native americans" lived "in harmony" with nature is because they had no horses. They were hunter-gatherers, and would move into an area and kill and eat every single thing that they could reach by walking a few days. Then, when the game was gone, they picked up stakes and moved to their next place.
Now, lest one think I'm attacking an ethnic group, let me point out that non-humans do the same thing. A species will move into an area, and eat everything they can catch or reach. It has - for eons - been a war between those that eat, and those that get eaten, and I'll include plants in this war, also.
A few seasons of excellent rains and growth in a deciduous forest holding ungulates will result in extensive damage to underbrush, to the point where the next generation of animals is put under population control by that oldest of birth control methods: starvation. One of the reasons that the US states have licensed hunting seasons is to manage such populations of not-humans that can and do destroy their environment. In point of fact, humans are the very first animal who have the option to make a choice to not damage their environment.
So for those who feel all puffy and bad about evil humans, you've missed the boat. You are sporting a ludicrous level of ignorance. Animals survive in the presence of humans only to the extent that they evolve to become stealthy enough, dangerous enough, or manage to breed even more wantonly than the humans who hunt them. The most common form of death, from time immemorial, is assassination with intent to ingest.
If the area is going to end up paved, without wells or agriculture, then low level cesium contamination is beside the point.
When Los Alamos (of Plutonium era) was refurbished for civilian use, the walls were painted over with bright red paint, followed by white paint. The paint was adequate to block plutonium alphas and daughter betas. The rule for the buildings was "if you see red, call maintenance."
Nissan might have more luck selling their expensive electric if the darn thing weren't sprung like an overstuffed haywagon. The suspension is so soft there is not a trace of road feel, and the power steering is so squishy it's like driving a virtual reality vehicle in a bang-em-up game.
Not everybody who wants an electric wants it to feel like a Ford Explorer.
So, General Mills is switching the cornstarch and sugar, so that they don't come from GMO'd crops. Great.
There is noi DNA, nor protein, nor anything that might be GMOed in either cornstarch or sugar. So much for the big change; it's an absolute unevent.
Heck, you'd think some other company, like Ralston for example, would switch to non-gluten cereals in their Rice Chex or Corn Chex.
I'd say that they are idiots, except that clearly they are not. They've changed the labels for the idiots that buy this stuff. Don't actual facts mean -anything- to our brain dead consumer population any more?
Yep, NASA is all for a return to the 1960's. The Glory Days.
Spent money like water, came up with the shortest path to "beating them Ruskies"
They never learned to build infrastructure. They never wanted to launch a mission that had any risk. They apparently never read the proverb, "Those who refuse to face failure, need never worry about success."
C'mon, guys. Let's go back to a capsule, water landings, Big Disposable Boosters.
Maybe you should consider trying to reengineer an actual practical shuttle, and not let the military in to make it bigger-by-the-month, until it was just barely able to do it's thing. How about taking it in small steps, learn something at every step, and go on from there? Do you really have to make a Giant Pert Chart that lists the entire future of the NASA space mission, and then try to keep everything on schedule? Perhaps you should consider having pilots and scientists, instead of bureaucrats and accountants.
When companies (Microsoft?) get into the business of doing business by hiring lawyers to hobble their competition, we all lose. Those companies spend a lot of money that could to go R&D (remember that?) on lawyers, instead, which benefits no one but said lawyers.
'Member 3 years old? "Now, Elton, it's better to share."
The point is, if we were actually going to attack the Russians (or anyone else) there would be a lot of chatter between stations, a lot of evidence of setting up the logistics of such an attack. Plans, per se, don't bother me, as you point out, we play those games every day, as do the Russians, and the Chinese, and the Brits. I'm not sure what the French do.
If we were about to realize a plan to attack Russia, there would be ample evidence of doing so. If we're not about to attack Russia, there ought to be pretty good evidence of that, also.
Let them listen. This country shouldn't be thinking "First Strike" at all.
So, the Russians want to monitor stuff inside the US borders. Ok, so what?
To flip what we've heard from the NSA around, "If we're not doing anything wrong, we don't have to worry."
In point of fact, letting the Russians monitor internal military chatter sounds like a good idea to me. That way, they -know- we aren't planning on attacking them. And.. by the way, we -aren't- planning on attacking the Russians, are we? If we are, _I_ would like to know about it, forget what the Russians know.
The days of Red Baiting should be over. We should have an open society, and if the Russians want to eavesdrop, more power to them. Truthfully, I'm a lot more worried about what our own government wants to keep track of than I am about what any Russians (or Chinese) want to track. And if it improves the accuracy of their weapons, does that mean that they're more likely to blow up a military base than the local YMCA? That's good, isn't it?
Slashdot Mirror
Well, bureaucratic idiocy ignored, there is another small wart on this process.
Catalysts are very sensitive to "poisons" - chemicals that stop their catalytic activity. Sodium amide used as a catalyst has a vulnerability to a potent catalytic poison - that being water. A little moisture in the fuel tank, a little moisture in the fuel lines, and presto. No catalyst.
I'm not saying it's not possible, I just don't know how one would keep that pestilential dihydrogen monoxide carefully excluded from the process. It's cumulative, every tiny scrap of moisture kills off some of the catalyst.
There's an alternative explanation. Space-Time could have non-zero viscosity, and slow down photons.
There are a lot of reasons to consider that space might have a viscosity. For one thing, it would neatly explain the expansion of the universe, without the necessity of invoking dark matter and dark energy.
We live in interesting times!
-- Norm Reitzel
Nice comment, until the end when you found it mandatory to take a shot at Slashdot's reporting as anti-Truecrypt advocacy.
Giveth us all a break.
Gosh, the West went and hacked industrial infrastructure, where? The Middle East? Omigawsh.
Turnabout is fair play, guys. You started the fight, now don't weep that it's come home.
Unpatchable systems are a problem, but if you view them as a black box, they are no different than non-logical systems that break.
I'm rather fervently against systems that cannot be upgraded on the fly, but I understand why manufacturers might not like this.
Consider, if you buy a traffic light controller that can be improved and modified, then where is the motivation for a second round of purchases when "upgrade" becomes necssary. After all, I certainly want the person who sold me a refrigerator to be able to brick it when they want, or on a certain date. I can't understand those Commie Sympathizers who think that a sale means that you actually -own- the product, and can use it as long as you see fit.
Well,
Since Truecrypt has decided to drop their project, and the project has been opensourced from day one, I'm going to suggest this is a good time for a fork.
It would (will) be educational to see who goes to court to stop it.
Let me guess. The New B-52 IT upgrades feature a raft of combat-certified computers, all running Windows XP.
That thought makes me smile. Can you plan Hack-a-Bomber ?
I'm not serious, but the Pentagon and USAF have done dumber things.
Of course it uses carbon (and nitrogen, and a raft of other things) from the soil. However, unless you're planting that corn on a tar pit, the carbon in the soil isn't fossil carbon that's been in the soil for a million years. You might make the case that plants use marine carbonates dissolved in water, but that amount is very small compared to the mail building block of plants, and for photosynthetic plants, that's carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
I may not be a botanist, but I can work the numbers.
The thing is, ethanol has a lower energy density per litre (or gallon, if you are metrically challanged) than does gasoline, just as gasoline has a lower energy density than diesel fuel.
You get better mileage out of diesel than gasoline, and better mileage out of gasoline than ethanol, all things being equal. Laws of thermodynamics aren't to be bypassed. No amount of "clever" can change the basic fact that gasoline holds more energy than ethanol.
However, and this may count for something for you, as it does for me, ethanol releases carbon dioxide into the atmosphere that was taken out of the atmosphere to grow the crop that led to the ethanol. There is no net increase of CO2, as there is with fossil fuels. Of course, a cynic might point out (and I might be one) that the carbon in the fossil fuel was also in the atmosphere at one time, to the tune of no less than 1500 ppm in the Carboniferous period.
Using ethanol isn't for getting better mileage, it's for reducing carbon footprint, the amount of carbon added to the atmosphere when you go down to the corner store to buy a six-pack of beer. The beer, btw, doesn't add carbon to the atmosphere, because like the ethanol that's in it, that carbon came -out- of the atmosphere when the crops to make it were grown.
Does anyone remember the history of the space station?
NASA spent billions (with a B) of dollars, and for a decade we had not one bolt flying in orbit. I used to call the project the Origami space station, made out of paper. It wasn't until the Russians went ahead and launched the first module that NASA got around to giving up on Powerpoint and Viewgraphs and meetings, and actually -did- something.
I just love it when people proudly proclaim that something isn't possible.
History shows that such pronouncements have a very poor track record.
Good print media?
Really. Local newspaper provides enough to wrap up stuff to ship, and a few sheets to use to light charcoal.
Other than that, who cares?
Perhaps it's time for a constitutional amendment.
In times of past, when it took weeks and months to communicate between far away places (New York, Chicago, Los Angeles) it made sense to structure the political organization of this country as a railroad organization. Today, it does not.
What we need to do is simple: We need to define, in simple print, that corporate fictions are not in fact citizens, and as such, do not have political freedoms or civil rights as such.
The concept if a corporate fiction as a person is a bit ridiculous anyway. A corporation can engage in activities that kill people (against the law) but they cannot be imprisoned. Finding General Motors (say) criminally liable for something that they have done corporately is a joke. They are already immune from such prosecution and bringing criminal charges that stick against board members or management is a very difficult thing.
If corporate entities cannot participate in the democratic process; there is no proxy for voting in a general election. We should formalize this and extend it so that corporate fictions simply cannot make political contributions of any size whatsoever. If management has strong political feelings, let the members make a personal contribution in their own name and not from corporate funds. If a CEO wants to contribute millions to a political candidate, well, they're paid enough to write the check. If a corporation feels strongly about a political issue, they can encourage (but not require) that their employees write their own checks to whatever political cause is extant. A vote, and a political contribution, should only be permitted to come from someone who can be demonstrated to be a living, breathing person and not some vacuous entity dreamed up by invisible attorneys.
This moves us back to the "one man, one vote" ideal our forefathers envisioned. Right now, we're moving ever closer to merchantilism and "One Dollar, One Vote" -- which, in my humble opinion, is not a good thing at all.
I personally think the situation is -much- simpler.
Google just needs to not return anything with "Sony" in it, as a search result.
Are you kidding? They ordered meters from a Chinese company. Let's see, what kind of plastic did the Chinese company have laying around in their regrind bin, maybe from injection molding a lot of those "F" meters...
I think the Chainsaw option mentioned above is the best option. Don't buy Fluke. Ever.
Are you kidding? The reason that "native americans" lived "in harmony" with nature is because they had no horses. They were hunter-gatherers, and would move into an area and kill and eat every single thing that they could reach by walking a few days. Then, when the game was gone, they picked up stakes and moved to their next place.
Now, lest one think I'm attacking an ethnic group, let me point out that non-humans do the same thing. A species will move into an area, and eat everything they can catch or reach. It has - for eons - been a war between those that eat, and those that get eaten, and I'll include plants in this war, also.
A few seasons of excellent rains and growth in a deciduous forest holding ungulates will result in extensive damage to underbrush, to the point where the next generation of animals is put under population control by that oldest of birth control methods: starvation. One of the reasons that the US states have licensed hunting seasons is to manage such populations of not-humans that can and do destroy their environment. In point of fact, humans are the very first animal who have the option to make a choice to not damage their environment.
So for those who feel all puffy and bad about evil humans, you've missed the boat. You are sporting a ludicrous level of ignorance. Animals survive in the presence of humans only to the extent that they evolve to become stealthy enough, dangerous enough, or manage to breed even more wantonly than the humans who hunt them. The most common form of death, from time immemorial, is assassination with intent to ingest.
If the area is going to end up paved, without wells or agriculture, then low level cesium contamination is beside the point.
When Los Alamos (of Plutonium era) was refurbished for civilian use, the walls were painted over with bright red paint, followed by white paint. The paint was adequate to block plutonium alphas and daughter betas. The rule for the buildings was "if you see red, call maintenance."
Nissan might have more luck selling their expensive electric if the darn thing weren't sprung like an overstuffed haywagon. The suspension is so soft there is not a trace of road feel, and the power steering is so squishy it's like driving a virtual reality vehicle in a bang-em-up game.
Not everybody who wants an electric wants it to feel like a Ford Explorer.
So, we unleashed stuxnet. Among other things, it came back and bit us on the ass, and now those against whom we sinned, have returned the favor.
"What a Shock!"
At mait lefitgam dekharev, at khai lefitgam dekharev.
So, General Mills is switching the cornstarch and sugar, so that they don't come from GMO'd crops. Great.
There is noi DNA, nor protein, nor anything that might be GMOed in either cornstarch or sugar. So much for the big change; it's an absolute unevent.
Heck, you'd think some other company, like Ralston for example, would switch to non-gluten cereals in their Rice Chex or Corn Chex.
I'd say that they are idiots, except that clearly they are not. They've changed the labels for the idiots that buy this stuff. Don't actual facts mean -anything- to our brain dead consumer population any more?
Yep, NASA is all for a return to the 1960's. The Glory Days.
Spent money like water, came up with the shortest path to "beating them Ruskies"
They never learned to build infrastructure. They never wanted to launch a mission that had any risk. They apparently never read the proverb, "Those who refuse to face failure, need never worry about success."
C'mon, guys. Let's go back to a capsule, water landings, Big Disposable Boosters.
Maybe you should consider trying to reengineer an actual practical shuttle, and not let the military in to make it bigger-by-the-month, until it was just barely able to do it's thing. How about taking it in small steps, learn something at every step, and go on from there? Do you really have to make a Giant Pert Chart that lists the entire future of the NASA space mission, and then try to keep everything on schedule? Perhaps you should consider having pilots and scientists, instead of bureaucrats and accountants.
When companies (Microsoft?) get into the business of doing business by hiring lawyers to hobble their competition, we all lose. Those companies spend a lot of money that could to go R&D (remember that?) on lawyers, instead, which benefits no one but said lawyers.
'Member 3 years old? "Now, Elton, it's better to share."
Not even the Chinese can claim a planet.
Well, consider that nowhere does the theory of evolution say that all of a species is identical.
Just consider that some humans have evolved, and others are fundamentalists.
The point is, if we were actually going to attack the Russians (or anyone else) there would be a lot of chatter between stations, a lot of evidence of setting up the logistics of such an attack. Plans, per se, don't bother me, as you point out, we play those games every day, as do the Russians, and the Chinese, and the Brits. I'm not sure what the French do.
If we were about to realize a plan to attack Russia, there would be ample evidence of doing so. If we're not about to attack Russia, there ought to be pretty good evidence of that, also.
Let them listen. This country shouldn't be thinking "First Strike" at all.
So, the Russians want to monitor stuff inside the US borders. Ok, so what?
To flip what we've heard from the NSA around, "If we're not doing anything wrong, we don't have to worry."
In point of fact, letting the Russians monitor internal military chatter sounds like a good idea to me. That way, they -know- we aren't planning on attacking them. And.. by the way, we -aren't- planning on attacking the Russians, are we? If we are, _I_ would like to know about it, forget what the Russians know.
The days of Red Baiting should be over. We should have an open society, and if the Russians want to eavesdrop, more power to them. Truthfully, I'm a lot more worried about what our own government wants to keep track of than I am about what any Russians (or Chinese) want to track. And if it improves the accuracy of their weapons, does that mean that they're more likely to blow up a military base than the local YMCA? That's good, isn't it?