No, it's more of a retrospective must-have option. If they decide they have to abandon the shuttle due to re-entry risk, they'd like to be able to make some attempt to recover it rather than just let it smack into the ground if it does survive an unmanned re-entry.
Computer control is still avoided for some things. NASA is also currently looking at adding a manual power disconnect for the manuevering thrusters on the shuttle. Although the shuttle's code is often touted as the best ever written, they are still concerned about interference or a short or whatever either directly causing the thrusters to fire, or causing the computer to think it's supposed to fire them (for the record, I think they already disable the computer from being able to control them when docked). The concern is that the thrusters could accidentally fire while docked and twist the airlock off the ISS by loading it at an angle it's not designed to deal with, destroying the ISS and the shuttle. A more down-to-earth example is the extremely rare cases of a car's cruise control going on the fritz and maxing out the throttle, taking the drive for an unexpected joy-ride. The controllers have been tested on millions of vehicles, but they still aren't 100% reliable.
The contention (made by a couple other posters) that the manual landing gear is just an excuse to give astronaut's a job is ridiculous. No one has ever said "we need astronauts on this flight to lower the landing gear." We need astronauts on the flight because the flight is intended to take astronauts into space, where they'll conduct experiments, build stuff, or go to the space station.
To add to your points, Buran was designed to loft other payloads than just a shuttle, which was another factor in the decision to place the engines on the tank. They could strap a huge "dumb" payload onto it and launch the entire thing into orbit.
It's also worth mentioning that The New American ran a story a few years back about a KGB agent who came over after the breakup of the USSR to seek a law enforcement job in the US (for real), and says he organized a successful operation to steal prototypes of NASA's TPS tiles. I think the Buran material was supposedly the same, but the Energia engineers claim the geometry is slightly better at dissipating heat.
Another point of respect for the Russians is that their shuttle looked ever so slightly cooler than ours, with the 4 strap-on boosters. And it's pretty amazing to the see the pictures of it riding piggy back on the AN-225, which is even bigger than Airbus' A380.
Well, that's your opinion and that's fine and peachy. It's something to be considered for sure, but it remains an opinion and may be wrong. Bear in mind, I'm not saying you are wrong (I think you are, but there's already 300 other comments arguing both sides and counting). My point is that I don't think you're recognizing that's there more to the argument than the fact that guns are designed specifically to kill, while croquet mallets are designed with other purposes in mind but can kill, because the threat of guns (and these other objects, too) in the hands of those who use them for harm is reduced by the presence of people who use guns for good (self-defence, policing, whatever).
The critical question is whether having guns available to those who use them for good (good not being limited to stopping gun-related crimes) offsets the resulting increase in their availability to those who use them for bad (including governments...an armed citizenry restricts the degree to which its government can get out of control). Bad things will happen, guns or no guns. The answer to this critical question has not been determined, despite many attempts to and claims that is has. It's a tough question.
Just for fun, let's consider more fundamentally the idea that we should not have guns simply based on their purpose. On one hand we have guns, which are designed specifically to kill people and, in fact, can be used to do so. On the other hand we have croquet mallets, which are not designed to kill people, yet can be used to do so. Suppose no one commits crimes with guns, but people commit some number of murders in an average year with croquet mallets. Is a gun still worse than a croquet mallet merely because of purpose? What if a man with a gun can prevent a man with a croquet mallet from murdering someone? More to the point, is society better off banning either guns or croquet mallets? Note that the purpose of the implement has not affected its impact on society, it is only the way it is used.
presumably the bullet is fired by a combination of the firing pin (so, the holder of the weapon still has control) plus the radio signal
Naturally, the article doesn't say. Of course, this would not be a traditional primer ignition. The chemical inside the primers are somewhat unstable, so the high pressures induced by the firing pin collapsing the primer cause them to react exothermically, igniting the powder. Obviously, you wouldn't want to ignite a primer, then find out that the microchip isn't cleared to fire. Sorry, the bullet already left. However, it may be desireable to continue including a firing pin in the gun for backwards compatibility with traditional ammunition (use regular cheap stuff for target practice and secure rounds for concealed carry, for example). In that case, the pin could be a useful means for the cartridge to confirm that the trigger had been pulled, in addition to the key being sent to the bullet. BTW, yes it sounds like this is intended to be integrated with biometrics.
The system would undoubtedly cost more than a conventional gun, but many firearm enthusiasts would surely pay a premium for such added security. (~from the article)
I wouldn't. Like many other shooters, reliability is critical for me and increasing the complexity of a system seldom improves reliability. I have a bad feeling about electric ignition in such a small package to begin with, but the idea of a computer preventing firing is unnerving. Even a 1 in 10000 chance of a misfire is considered unnacceptable by most self-defense trainers. If a person is truly in a life-or-death situation where they deem that use of a firearm is their best option, if the gun fails to fire, you're better off not having it at all. Current work on biometrically controlling firing at the gun (instead of the cartridge) hasn't gone over very well with shooters, partially because the reliability is so low. Of course, what if someone had a way to maliciously interfere with the signal? That's another new failure mode.
Then there's power. Batteries built into the cartridge would discharge over time and the bullets would be useless. Regular primers, on the other hand, have a pretty good shelf life. Batteries in the gun wouldn't be that attractive either. I suppose the firing pin could be used to compress a small piezo, but I'm not sure how effectively those devices can be miniaturized and convert a sufficient amount of mechanical energy into electrical energy and then into heat in order to start an ignition.
No mention at all of any work on a prototype, or even attempts at getting venture capital. The patent didn't convey a sense that much work had been done on this, either, and the images don't seem to be working, so I couldn't view their drawings.
No surgery really sounds attractive to me. I'll never get over the fact that so many women get plastic bags of saline stuffed into cuts filleted between their pectoral muscles and their mammary glands. Plus some people get chunks of bone ground off, have fat carved or literally sucked out, or have sheets of plastic placed subcutaneously under their cheekbones.
All that said, I really would love to fly. The biggest reason besides the length of the committment that I didn't join ROTC in college is because an opthomologist had recently told me I had cataracts and that neither the Air Force or Navy would train pilots with cataracts. Had I known about the eye surgery option, I can't say for sure I wouldn't have gone for it, especially as I got to senior year and saw a lot of my friends getting pilot assignments.
They spend it showing the same amount of ads as the broadcast stations do. Unfortunately, the ads tend to be more entertaining than a lot of the programming you get for that $60/mo. Thank goodness it's not my money paying for it.
Not your fault so much as the person who designed the site. Part of accessibility, in my opinion, is making persistent data bookmarkable. Funny that the link worked on other computers for a time, though.
The link to the SBIR page appears to be defunct due to bookmarking data called from a session. I wasn't about to ask the submitter to give me his cookie and I tried finding info about the Dalsa project on the SBIR site, but wasn't having any luck, so here's a press release from the company that built it.
It sounds like the interest for the navy is along the lines of astro-navigation, but I'm not really sure. It's definitely not something general photographers need or even want. It's kind of pointless if your lenses aren't comparably impressive, or if you're not printing it out at a couple feet in size and to be displayed in a way that someone would get close enough to appreciate the quality. Plus once you take all that data, then you have to store it. I'm not sure how RAW images are stored, but if my math serves, a 24 bit BMP at that size would take about 300 MB per image.
Note - since the rise of cameras at intersections accidents have nearly doubled in some cases as people slam on the brakes in time for the person behind them to collide with them. But remember - it's safety - not revenue.
Got a source for that one?
I'd like to point out that there is a reason the light turns yellow for several seconds before it turns red. Sure, you can always speed up when it would be better to stop so you can make it through the intersection before it technically becomes illegal, but if the guy in front of you doesn't do the same, don't expect blame to fall on him.
It turns out that the original poster's threats were serious, and the above two punsters found they were in quite a mash upon clicking the "submit" button.
Mac: Hey Farva, what's the name of the websites you like where they take $hit from other sites to make something new, like geo-caching with Google Maps?
Toxins usually interfere with the normal operation of enzymes or signaling mechanisms. The toads probably don't have the vulnerable enzymes or signaling methods, or they have their own method of dealing with it. For example, the hydrochloric acid in your stomach has a pH around 1 and would eat through your stomach lining except it's neutralized near the lining and in the intestines. As another example, vipers secrete their toxin into sacs in their jaw, and from there into channels in their fangs when they bite. It doesn't enter their blood stream where it could kill them. I think vipers are susceptible to their own toxins, so this isolation is important.
Of course, the article is rather tabloid-ish, and the statement "strong enough to kill crocodiles" doesn't mean much without a dose. Lipid-based vitamins like A will kill a croc in the right dose, but I doubt they'll survive without them either. Is licking the toad enough, or does it take eating one or perhaps a lot of them to get a lethal dose? Do crocodiles even like to eat these toads or is that statement irrelevant to the article? Does licking a toad send the croc on an acid trip, and if so, is a croc on acid more or less freaky than Mic Jaeger? Can a croc on acid be a judge on American Idol?
So you're suggesting the space shuttle is about 10 times as dangerous per mile as a car, 20 times if you factor out alcohol.
Considering the fact that it starts out as a couple million pounds of explosives, operates in an environment hostile to both man and machine, and survives high accelerations, ridiculously high temperatures, and debris and micrometeors traveling over 10 times as fast as a bullet, that sounds awesome. When cars become able to do that and deliver 50,000 pounds of cargo to orbit, and support science, and dock with a space station, and recover cargo from orbit (something no other spacecraft can currently do) then miles per death will have meaning when comparing cars to space shuttles.
There is no longer any real doubt that the side-by-side stack and the overall complexity of the STS architecture add unnecessary risks compared to other designs. Some sort of ejection system like a launch escape motor is now considered a must-have. Combining crew and cargo on a single launch is also rather frowned upon. These were lessons driven home at a high cost, but that doesn't change the fact that the space shuttle has flown more than any other manned spacecraft, including Soyuz, which has also suffered loss of crew on two missions, had a couple more close calls, and represents multiple generations of design.
I did some research on this a while back. First off, the gas in fluorescents is not a problem. It's a mixture of noble gasses so it's non-reactive. The only issue is that in really high concentrations it will displace oxygen in your lungs so you suffocate (Trivia: the cure is to hang upside down, since argon is heavier than air and can settle in the lungs). Some lamps may contain PCB's or other nasty toxins in the ballasts, but not in the bulbs, and not in compact fluorescent lamps. The primary chemical of concern in fluorescent lamps is mercury.
According to the EPA, the amount of mercury in one compact fluorescent bulb is less than the amount released as an impurity in the coal burned to provide the extra power for the equivalent amount of lighting (brightness and life) from incandescent bulbs. In Oregon, for example, this means that household users are allowed to dispose of fluorescents in the trash, although I believe large-scale users are legally required to send them to disposal centers.
The real advantages of LED's over compacts are potentially longer life, incrementally better efficiency, and the fact that they are really tough to break. The current problem that I'm aware of is that large enough LED's to replace fluorescents actually have really poor efficiencies and tend to burn themselves up. That's part of why you typically see them clustered.
I probably should have read the article before posting my above comment (so I wouldn't need to post twice), but doing so just furthered my lack of intellectual respect for the study. As I suspected, their test simply took a bunch of largely arbitrary keywords coupled with an arbitrary definition of "pro-Bejing," and apparently made no attempt (like, you know, maybe a control group of "non-subversive" words) to determine if their methods might be flawed. Of course it's hard to tell how they really went about it, because their "full results" is just the same percentage values they list in the article.
Also, it should definitely be mentioned that they only considered 10 samples from each test, and they don't appear to have actually compared yahoo.cn to yahoo.com. They compared everything to google.com, which is pretty blatantly ignoring differences in algorithms. Furthermore, I have no idea how they calculated those percentage numbers. They say google.cn had 5 unauthorized and 3 authorized sites in the top 10 (5+3=10?) and somehow that equates to 83% pro-Bejing.
To further trash the article, I want to point out that Google has already admitted to censorship so the "study" is a moot point in their case, and Microsoft (who admittedly may be bending the truth) says they don't censor, which contradicts their conclusions and should therefore be discussed further.
This is the kind of report you write in high school, when the goal isn't as much learning how to analyze data properly as it is to learn how to use Excel as something other than a fake database. Well, at least the authors figured out how to make pie charts.
I went to yahoo.cn, which redirected me to cn.yahoo.com, and typed in "tibet independence" and it gave me a 7,690 hits. There were a lot of.cn domains and also some.orgs and.coms, but nothing seemed particularly "pro-Bejing." It certainly didn't block the site.
Meanwhile, a search on yahoo.com for the same term yielded 877,000 hits. I guess I don't understand how they qualified what's pro-Bejing or quantified their censorship rate, but I would tend to think my own query was affected by possible differences in their search algorithm based on language and my use of english characters on the chinese site more than by censorship.
Note that I'm not saying Yahoo isn't censoring searches, and perhaps they're treating IP's registered in the US different than Chinese addresses, but something about this study doesn't seem right.
I'd be in favor of sticking with the jewel cases and just replacing them as they break. It's not like they're expensive and having the label in the spine does make them easy to scan when they're stored on a shelf.
Of course, I personally listen to most of my music from my hard drive, so I just keep the discs safely out of the light in a box as backups and proof that I legally own it (or at least stole it old school). I also make copies of most of my discs to play in my car (cursing the fact that my head unit won't play MP3's so I can condense things further), so I don't have to sweat wearing out the original or getting it stolen.
The ultimate solution: stash the originals someplace safe and have a central media server on your home network. Then work out a way to seamlessly access sound files on your stereo and video on the TV via ethernet.
I don't know why we can't just clean up our acts just for the sake of the health of those living today.
1.) Because it's expensive and the benefits/costs are hard to quantify.
Obviously we have limited resources but much less limited ambitions. We want to clean things up, but we also don't want to lost the benefits of some of the dirtier things. We know how much the status quo costs, but it's hard to project what cleaner replacements will cost, and much harder to figure out how much benefit we'll actually get. Purely for argument's sake, say we want to cut annual C02 emissions by a billion tons a year, and we can estimate that it will cost $10 billion. We still have no clue aside from some very, very clumsy climate models what that correllates to as far as temperature change, species saved from extinction, or storm damage prevented 100 years down the line. The same thing for the 2007 diesel emissions regulations, an example more relevant to your comment about particulate pollution. In the meantime, that's $10 billion less that we have to spend on poverty, hunger, disease, infrastructure, technology, security, and even luxury (obviously, some are more important than others).
2.) We already are. Increasingly so, in fact. Not as much as some people would like, but that's due to #1. Actually, more so than a lot of other people would like to see. Oil companies are an obvious opponent, but also family farms and small business who have to deal with increasing regulations. Cleaning the house is not all lemon scents and sparkling countertops. Somebody's got to actually roll up their sleaves and scrub up the rotten slime. No, our global house isn't shining like new, but we're hardly letting it turn completely into a complete pig sty, either.
3.) People don't think. Not many people actually seem to give a first, much less a second thought to the way dropping a cigarette butt on the ground instead of the ashtray or dumping their trash out in the woods on a logging road instead of at the dump contributes to the mess in some places. Nor do they think about how driving to the video store to home to the grocery store to home to the kid's soccer practice to home, etc. increases smog and traffic congestion compared to planning it out and hitting all three on a single trip.
I don't think it was that bad. It was just typical Crichton formula science fiction, which is something he's very good at. I find most of his books very engaging despite that fact that having read one, I've essentially read all of them. Same plots, different "bad guys."
The key value of the book is not any sort of rebuttal against global warming, since that is not what it tries to do (read the endnotes if you didn't). It's the argument that most of global warming fuss is FUD founded on really heavy rhetoric like "our children won't have Florida because it will be underwater" as opposed to the actual science (which in general is supportive of the theory) looking at the increase in CO2 and methane concentrations, computer modeling, long term temperature trends (both on modern and geological time-scales), solar activity, ocean level changes, etc.
I think the book is really quite amusing in how he attempts to bring all these little elements of the debate into play: lawyers, eco-terrorists, movie star run-ins with cannibals, and that crazy professor with his idea that we always we need some big thing to be afraid of and global warming was a good substitute for communism after the end of the cold war.
I've been told many times that the following is flamebait, but I've never once heard a decent reason why, so I'm gonna risk my karma and say it*:
Ubuntu has more working out of the box than Windows. When I install XP very little works
That's because for Microsoft to include things like a media player with the basic install is "anti-competitive." Ok, actually the EU decision was that they had to also offer an non-WMP version of windows, but it's still kind of a lose-lose thing - get labeled anti-competitive or get criticized for not including simple tools that they offer for free.
That little bit aside though, what are you referring to that doesn't work on windows upon install? A productivity suite like Office? Well, it is a seperately marketed product, after all. Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't OpenOffice or whatever is included actually a feature of the EasyUbuntu package, not the basic Ubuntu install itself? Your drivers point is granted, but those aren't exactly hard to install on Windows, either.
* (anti-flame disclaimer) - Please note that I never said anything to suggest that linux is hard to use or in any way limiting, nor did I attempt to imply that Microsoft is not evil or that Bill Gates is not the spawn of satan. I just asked a question, and I'd much prefer a coherent answer rather than a "you suck noob" or a "-10: Windows User" mod.
Is the lag in receiving the new really a bad thing? You can get the headlines from the New York Times, BBC, or whatever, but magazines like Time are very popular for providing longer, focused articles. The problem I've found is that Time tends to be ridiculously sensational and painfully short on hard facts because flashy graphics, rhetoric, and sob stories are more exciting.
I'd noticed that the CSM articles linked off of Slashdot in the past have been very good, but I never thought too much about the publication before. After reading all the positive comments of subscribers, I went ahead and ordered a trial issue. If I like what I see, I'll definitely buy a paper subscription.
On a serious vein, it shouldn't even be necessary to point out that this is hardly free license from a health standpoint to hit the bottle hard every night, then clear up the headache and the liver the next morning with a triple frapa-mocha-something-or-another the next morning, but I'm going to say it anyway.
This would be like a condensed version of the running joke with modern pharmeceutical products: Take one of pill A before bed to cure your insomnia. Then take one of pill B to prevent indigestion caused by pill A. Take one pill C and one pill D to respectively eliminate the dizziness and chills caused by pill B. Take one pill E to ward off persistant low energy in the morning from pill C and two pill F's plus one pill G to reduce the hypertension caused by pill D. Finally take one pill A to help with insomnia caused by pill G...
Heck...a little bit more and you've got a Simon and Garfunkel song. Perhaps you could even explain why the words of the prophets are written on the subway wall. But I digress.
The summary is completely useless, and the article isn't much better. After reading the description 3 times, I figured out the graph, at least. X-axis is time, Y-axis is frequency, and color is amplitude, so it's essentially a time dependent power spectrum density (PSD) with anything above a cutoff amplitude shown in black. I believe the Navy uses a variation of this called a waterfall to help interpret sonar sounds. I got stuck again, though, reading their description of the sample.
The two researchers used white noise -- hissing similar to what you might hear on an un-tuned FM radio -- because it's the most complex sound available, with exactly the same amount of energy at all frequency levels.
Aside from the apparent infinite-energy contradiction if this were true, the graph clearly shows that the signal is both frequency and time dependendent. Obviously, that's the case they ultimately have to deal with to apply this method, but the article suggests otherwise.
As for what they're actually doing, presumably, instead of operating on a set of data that includes time, frequency, and amplitude, they are cutting it down to time, frequency, and sound/no sound. This would cut the data size by the amplitude resolution (eg, 1/16th for a 16 bit amplitude sampling). This must assume that amplitude is irrelevant to the sound, which based on my (limited) experience working with PSD's, I'm skeptical of. Perhaps the odds of getting the same digital time/frequency data for two different sources is low enough that this can be ignored, much like the likelihood of two data sets yielding the same MD5 sum is non-zero but insignificant.
The premise behind and wording of the three laws implies that anything bound by them should be able to understand them and interpret their applicability to a given situation. It's got be AI. Machines like this aren't even close. Their logic complexity is not much more advanced than a sheet metal press. On the one, you have a button connected to a solenoid that opens a hydraulic valve to lower the head. On the other you usually have a PLC reading inputs from HMI's, switches, transducers, etc and providing outputs to relays, actuators, or HMI's based on control logic that seldom exceeds if/thens and arithmatic. They don't interpret anything beyond what the situations the engineer who programs them can think of, and they don't understand situations beyond what their limited sensors can detect (like "if overtravel switch == true then piston valve = false").
People always think of C3PO or the Terminator when they hear robot, but almost all robots are currently nothing more than an automated way of handling repeatable processes. Safety is the responsibility of the programmer and, to a much greater degree, the people who work with them.
I worked at Sears while I was going to school and constantly heard how gloomy things were. Strangely enough, one year they credited the Sears credit card for their managing to be profitable for the year, so it was by branching out rather than focusing on their main business that held them up. Of course, the next year I was told that the credit division had been sold to Mastercard or Citibank or some such credit related group, furthering my suspiscions that nobody in business really knows what's going on.
Sears has faced increasing competition in all of its offerings lately. They celebrated when Montgomery Ward closed down because they thought it meant they were being more successful and drawing in and satisfying the target customers, but really it reflected an increasingly crowded market, with home improvement warehouses and x-mart type stores drawing away a lot of customers, and disposable goods hurting their service division. I don't think their housewares and softlines departments ever were very strong, but now their staples of Kenmore home appliances and Crafstman hand tools, which formerly competed with specialty vendors like the Maytag dealers or the Snap-on man, have to hold up against the volume of Husky and Frigidaire items that Home Depot has managed to sell as the "one-stop" home improvement store. Lawn and garden suffers, too. Few homeowners need a mower any better than a Craftsman, but Home Depot and Lowes have managed to secure brand exclusivity on names associated with professional products like John Deere and Cub Cadet. They're no better (I don't think they're even actually made by the respective companies), but the name sells them.
Slashdot Mirror
No, it's more of a retrospective must-have option. If they decide they have to abandon the shuttle due to re-entry risk, they'd like to be able to make some attempt to recover it rather than just let it smack into the ground if it does survive an unmanned re-entry.
Computer control is still avoided for some things. NASA is also currently looking at adding a manual power disconnect for the manuevering thrusters on the shuttle. Although the shuttle's code is often touted as the best ever written, they are still concerned about interference or a short or whatever either directly causing the thrusters to fire, or causing the computer to think it's supposed to fire them (for the record, I think they already disable the computer from being able to control them when docked). The concern is that the thrusters could accidentally fire while docked and twist the airlock off the ISS by loading it at an angle it's not designed to deal with, destroying the ISS and the shuttle. A more down-to-earth example is the extremely rare cases of a car's cruise control going on the fritz and maxing out the throttle, taking the drive for an unexpected joy-ride. The controllers have been tested on millions of vehicles, but they still aren't 100% reliable.
The contention (made by a couple other posters) that the manual landing gear is just an excuse to give astronaut's a job is ridiculous. No one has ever said "we need astronauts on this flight to lower the landing gear." We need astronauts on the flight because the flight is intended to take astronauts into space, where they'll conduct experiments, build stuff, or go to the space station.
To add to your points, Buran was designed to loft other payloads than just a shuttle, which was another factor in the decision to place the engines on the tank. They could strap a huge "dumb" payload onto it and launch the entire thing into orbit.
It's also worth mentioning that The New American ran a story a few years back about a KGB agent who came over after the breakup of the USSR to seek a law enforcement job in the US (for real), and says he organized a successful operation to steal prototypes of NASA's TPS tiles. I think the Buran material was supposedly the same, but the Energia engineers claim the geometry is slightly better at dissipating heat.
Another point of respect for the Russians is that their shuttle looked ever so slightly cooler than ours, with the 4 strap-on boosters. And it's pretty amazing to the see the pictures of it riding piggy back on the AN-225, which is even bigger than Airbus' A380.
Well, that's your opinion and that's fine and peachy. It's something to be considered for sure, but it remains an opinion and may be wrong. Bear in mind, I'm not saying you are wrong (I think you are, but there's already 300 other comments arguing both sides and counting). My point is that I don't think you're recognizing that's there more to the argument than the fact that guns are designed specifically to kill, while croquet mallets are designed with other purposes in mind but can kill, because the threat of guns (and these other objects, too) in the hands of those who use them for harm is reduced by the presence of people who use guns for good (self-defence, policing, whatever).
The critical question is whether having guns available to those who use them for good (good not being limited to stopping gun-related crimes) offsets the resulting increase in their availability to those who use them for bad (including governments...an armed citizenry restricts the degree to which its government can get out of control). Bad things will happen, guns or no guns. The answer to this critical question has not been determined, despite many attempts to and claims that is has. It's a tough question.
Just for fun, let's consider more fundamentally the idea that we should not have guns simply based on their purpose. On one hand we have guns, which are designed specifically to kill people and, in fact, can be used to do so. On the other hand we have croquet mallets, which are not designed to kill people, yet can be used to do so. Suppose no one commits crimes with guns, but people commit some number of murders in an average year with croquet mallets. Is a gun still worse than a croquet mallet merely because of purpose? What if a man with a gun can prevent a man with a croquet mallet from murdering someone? More to the point, is society better off banning either guns or croquet mallets? Note that the purpose of the implement has not affected its impact on society, it is only the way it is used.
Naturally, the article doesn't say. Of course, this would not be a traditional primer ignition. The chemical inside the primers are somewhat unstable, so the high pressures induced by the firing pin collapsing the primer cause them to react exothermically, igniting the powder. Obviously, you wouldn't want to ignite a primer, then find out that the microchip isn't cleared to fire. Sorry, the bullet already left. However, it may be desireable to continue including a firing pin in the gun for backwards compatibility with traditional ammunition (use regular cheap stuff for target practice and secure rounds for concealed carry, for example). In that case, the pin could be a useful means for the cartridge to confirm that the trigger had been pulled, in addition to the key being sent to the bullet. BTW, yes it sounds like this is intended to be integrated with biometrics.
I wouldn't. Like many other shooters, reliability is critical for me and increasing the complexity of a system seldom improves reliability. I have a bad feeling about electric ignition in such a small package to begin with, but the idea of a computer preventing firing is unnerving. Even a 1 in 10000 chance of a misfire is considered unnacceptable by most self-defense trainers. If a person is truly in a life-or-death situation where they deem that use of a firearm is their best option, if the gun fails to fire, you're better off not having it at all. Current work on biometrically controlling firing at the gun (instead of the cartridge) hasn't gone over very well with shooters, partially because the reliability is so low. Of course, what if someone had a way to maliciously interfere with the signal? That's another new failure mode.
Then there's power. Batteries built into the cartridge would discharge over time and the bullets would be useless. Regular primers, on the other hand, have a pretty good shelf life. Batteries in the gun wouldn't be that attractive either. I suppose the firing pin could be used to compress a small piezo, but I'm not sure how effectively those devices can be miniaturized and convert a sufficient amount of mechanical energy into electrical energy and then into heat in order to start an ignition.
No mention at all of any work on a prototype, or even attempts at getting venture capital. The patent didn't convey a sense that much work had been done on this, either, and the images don't seem to be working, so I couldn't view their drawings.
No surgery really sounds attractive to me. I'll never get over the fact that so many women get plastic bags of saline stuffed into cuts filleted between their pectoral muscles and their mammary glands. Plus some people get chunks of bone ground off, have fat carved or literally sucked out, or have sheets of plastic placed subcutaneously under their cheekbones.
All that said, I really would love to fly. The biggest reason besides the length of the committment that I didn't join ROTC in college is because an opthomologist had recently told me I had cataracts and that neither the Air Force or Navy would train pilots with cataracts. Had I known about the eye surgery option, I can't say for sure I wouldn't have gone for it, especially as I got to senior year and saw a lot of my friends getting pilot assignments.
They spend it showing the same amount of ads as the broadcast stations do. Unfortunately, the ads tend to be more entertaining than a lot of the programming you get for that $60/mo. Thank goodness it's not my money paying for it.
Not your fault so much as the person who designed the site. Part of accessibility, in my opinion, is making persistent data bookmarkable. Funny that the link worked on other computers for a time, though.
The link to the SBIR page appears to be defunct due to bookmarking data called from a session. I wasn't about to ask the submitter to give me his cookie and I tried finding info about the Dalsa project on the SBIR site, but wasn't having any luck, so here's a press release from the company that built it.
It sounds like the interest for the navy is along the lines of astro-navigation, but I'm not really sure. It's definitely not something general photographers need or even want. It's kind of pointless if your lenses aren't comparably impressive, or if you're not printing it out at a couple feet in size and to be displayed in a way that someone would get close enough to appreciate the quality. Plus once you take all that data, then you have to store it. I'm not sure how RAW images are stored, but if my math serves, a 24 bit BMP at that size would take about 300 MB per image.
Got a source for that one?
I'd like to point out that there is a reason the light turns yellow for several seconds before it turns red. Sure, you can always speed up when it would be better to stop so you can make it through the intersection before it technically becomes illegal, but if the guy in front of you doesn't do the same, don't expect blame to fall on him.
It turns out that the original poster's threats were serious, and the above two punsters found they were in quite a mash upon clicking the "submit" button.
Mac: Hey Farva, what's the name of the websites you like where they take $hit from other sites to make something new, like geo-caching with Google Maps?
Farva: You mean a mashup?
Mac: *Offers gun to Anonymous Coward*
Toxins usually interfere with the normal operation of enzymes or signaling mechanisms. The toads probably don't have the vulnerable enzymes or signaling methods, or they have their own method of dealing with it. For example, the hydrochloric acid in your stomach has a pH around 1 and would eat through your stomach lining except it's neutralized near the lining and in the intestines. As another example, vipers secrete their toxin into sacs in their jaw, and from there into channels in their fangs when they bite. It doesn't enter their blood stream where it could kill them. I think vipers are susceptible to their own toxins, so this isolation is important.
Of course, the article is rather tabloid-ish, and the statement "strong enough to kill crocodiles" doesn't mean much without a dose. Lipid-based vitamins like A will kill a croc in the right dose, but I doubt they'll survive without them either. Is licking the toad enough, or does it take eating one or perhaps a lot of them to get a lethal dose? Do crocodiles even like to eat these toads or is that statement irrelevant to the article? Does licking a toad send the croc on an acid trip, and if so, is a croc on acid more or less freaky than Mic Jaeger? Can a croc on acid be a judge on American Idol?
So you're suggesting the space shuttle is about 10 times as dangerous per mile as a car, 20 times if you factor out alcohol.
Considering the fact that it starts out as a couple million pounds of explosives, operates in an environment hostile to both man and machine, and survives high accelerations, ridiculously high temperatures, and debris and micrometeors traveling over 10 times as fast as a bullet, that sounds awesome. When cars become able to do that and deliver 50,000 pounds of cargo to orbit, and support science, and dock with a space station, and recover cargo from orbit (something no other spacecraft can currently do) then miles per death will have meaning when comparing cars to space shuttles.
There is no longer any real doubt that the side-by-side stack and the overall complexity of the STS architecture add unnecessary risks compared to other designs. Some sort of ejection system like a launch escape motor is now considered a must-have. Combining crew and cargo on a single launch is also rather frowned upon. These were lessons driven home at a high cost, but that doesn't change the fact that the space shuttle has flown more than any other manned spacecraft, including Soyuz, which has also suffered loss of crew on two missions, had a couple more close calls, and represents multiple generations of design.
I did some research on this a while back. First off, the gas in fluorescents is not a problem. It's a mixture of noble gasses so it's non-reactive. The only issue is that in really high concentrations it will displace oxygen in your lungs so you suffocate (Trivia: the cure is to hang upside down, since argon is heavier than air and can settle in the lungs). Some lamps may contain PCB's or other nasty toxins in the ballasts, but not in the bulbs, and not in compact fluorescent lamps. The primary chemical of concern in fluorescent lamps is mercury.
According to the EPA, the amount of mercury in one compact fluorescent bulb is less than the amount released as an impurity in the coal burned to provide the extra power for the equivalent amount of lighting (brightness and life) from incandescent bulbs. In Oregon, for example, this means that household users are allowed to dispose of fluorescents in the trash, although I believe large-scale users are legally required to send them to disposal centers.
The real advantages of LED's over compacts are potentially longer life, incrementally better efficiency, and the fact that they are really tough to break. The current problem that I'm aware of is that large enough LED's to replace fluorescents actually have really poor efficiencies and tend to burn themselves up. That's part of why you typically see them clustered.
I probably should have read the article before posting my above comment (so I wouldn't need to post twice), but doing so just furthered my lack of intellectual respect for the study. As I suspected, their test simply took a bunch of largely arbitrary keywords coupled with an arbitrary definition of "pro-Bejing," and apparently made no attempt (like, you know, maybe a control group of "non-subversive" words) to determine if their methods might be flawed. Of course it's hard to tell how they really went about it, because their "full results" is just the same percentage values they list in the article.
Also, it should definitely be mentioned that they only considered 10 samples from each test, and they don't appear to have actually compared yahoo.cn to yahoo.com. They compared everything to google.com, which is pretty blatantly ignoring differences in algorithms. Furthermore, I have no idea how they calculated those percentage numbers. They say google.cn had 5 unauthorized and 3 authorized sites in the top 10 (5+3=10?) and somehow that equates to 83% pro-Bejing.
To further trash the article, I want to point out that Google has already admitted to censorship so the "study" is a moot point in their case, and Microsoft (who admittedly may be bending the truth) says they don't censor, which contradicts their conclusions and should therefore be discussed further.
This is the kind of report you write in high school, when the goal isn't as much learning how to analyze data properly as it is to learn how to use Excel as something other than a fake database. Well, at least the authors figured out how to make pie charts.
I went to yahoo.cn, which redirected me to cn.yahoo.com, and typed in "tibet independence" and it gave me a 7,690 hits. There were a lot of .cn domains and also some .orgs and .coms, but nothing seemed particularly "pro-Bejing." It certainly didn't block the site.
Meanwhile, a search on yahoo.com for the same term yielded 877,000 hits. I guess I don't understand how they qualified what's pro-Bejing or quantified their censorship rate, but I would tend to think my own query was affected by possible differences in their search algorithm based on language and my use of english characters on the chinese site more than by censorship.
Note that I'm not saying Yahoo isn't censoring searches, and perhaps they're treating IP's registered in the US different than Chinese addresses, but something about this study doesn't seem right.
I'd be in favor of sticking with the jewel cases and just replacing them as they break. It's not like they're expensive and having the label in the spine does make them easy to scan when they're stored on a shelf.
Of course, I personally listen to most of my music from my hard drive, so I just keep the discs safely out of the light in a box as backups and proof that I legally own it (or at least stole it old school). I also make copies of most of my discs to play in my car (cursing the fact that my head unit won't play MP3's so I can condense things further), so I don't have to sweat wearing out the original or getting it stolen.
The ultimate solution: stash the originals someplace safe and have a central media server on your home network. Then work out a way to seamlessly access sound files on your stereo and video on the TV via ethernet.
1.) Because it's expensive and the benefits/costs are hard to quantify.
Obviously we have limited resources but much less limited ambitions. We want to clean things up, but we also don't want to lost the benefits of some of the dirtier things. We know how much the status quo costs, but it's hard to project what cleaner replacements will cost, and much harder to figure out how much benefit we'll actually get. Purely for argument's sake, say we want to cut annual C02 emissions by a billion tons a year, and we can estimate that it will cost $10 billion. We still have no clue aside from some very, very clumsy climate models what that correllates to as far as temperature change, species saved from extinction, or storm damage prevented 100 years down the line. The same thing for the 2007 diesel emissions regulations, an example more relevant to your comment about particulate pollution. In the meantime, that's $10 billion less that we have to spend on poverty, hunger, disease, infrastructure, technology, security, and even luxury (obviously, some are more important than others).
2.) We already are. Increasingly so, in fact. Not as much as some people would like, but that's due to #1. Actually, more so than a lot of other people would like to see. Oil companies are an obvious opponent, but also family farms and small business who have to deal with increasing regulations. Cleaning the house is not all lemon scents and sparkling countertops. Somebody's got to actually roll up their sleaves and scrub up the rotten slime. No, our global house isn't shining like new, but we're hardly letting it turn completely into a complete pig sty, either.
3.) People don't think. Not many people actually seem to give a first, much less a second thought to the way dropping a cigarette butt on the ground instead of the ashtray or dumping their trash out in the woods on a logging road instead of at the dump contributes to the mess in some places. Nor do they think about how driving to the video store to home to the grocery store to home to the kid's soccer practice to home, etc. increases smog and traffic congestion compared to planning it out and hitting all three on a single trip.
I don't think it was that bad. It was just typical Crichton formula science fiction, which is something he's very good at. I find most of his books very engaging despite that fact that having read one, I've essentially read all of them. Same plots, different "bad guys."
The key value of the book is not any sort of rebuttal against global warming, since that is not what it tries to do (read the endnotes if you didn't). It's the argument that most of global warming fuss is FUD founded on really heavy rhetoric like "our children won't have Florida because it will be underwater" as opposed to the actual science (which in general is supportive of the theory) looking at the increase in CO2 and methane concentrations, computer modeling, long term temperature trends (both on modern and geological time-scales), solar activity, ocean level changes, etc.
I think the book is really quite amusing in how he attempts to bring all these little elements of the debate into play: lawyers, eco-terrorists, movie star run-ins with cannibals, and that crazy professor with his idea that we always we need some big thing to be afraid of and global warming was a good substitute for communism after the end of the cold war.
I've been told many times that the following is flamebait, but I've never once heard a decent reason why, so I'm gonna risk my karma and say it*:
That's because for Microsoft to include things like a media player with the basic install is "anti-competitive." Ok, actually the EU decision was that they had to also offer an non-WMP version of windows, but it's still kind of a lose-lose thing - get labeled anti-competitive or get criticized for not including simple tools that they offer for free.
That little bit aside though, what are you referring to that doesn't work on windows upon install? A productivity suite like Office? Well, it is a seperately marketed product, after all. Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't OpenOffice or whatever is included actually a feature of the EasyUbuntu package, not the basic Ubuntu install itself? Your drivers point is granted, but those aren't exactly hard to install on Windows, either.
* (anti-flame disclaimer) - Please note that I never said anything to suggest that linux is hard to use or in any way limiting, nor did I attempt to imply that Microsoft is not evil or that Bill Gates is not the spawn of satan. I just asked a question, and I'd much prefer a coherent answer rather than a "you suck noob" or a "-10: Windows User" mod.
Is the lag in receiving the new really a bad thing? You can get the headlines from the New York Times, BBC, or whatever, but magazines like Time are very popular for providing longer, focused articles. The problem I've found is that Time tends to be ridiculously sensational and painfully short on hard facts because flashy graphics, rhetoric, and sob stories are more exciting.
I'd noticed that the CSM articles linked off of Slashdot in the past have been very good, but I never thought too much about the publication before. After reading all the positive comments of subscribers, I went ahead and ordered a trial issue. If I like what I see, I'll definitely buy a paper subscription.
On a serious vein, it shouldn't even be necessary to point out that this is hardly free license from a health standpoint to hit the bottle hard every night, then clear up the headache and the liver the next morning with a triple frapa-mocha-something-or-another the next morning, but I'm going to say it anyway.
This would be like a condensed version of the running joke with modern pharmeceutical products: Take one of pill A before bed to cure your insomnia. Then take one of pill B to prevent indigestion caused by pill A. Take one pill C and one pill D to respectively eliminate the dizziness and chills caused by pill B. Take one pill E to ward off persistant low energy in the morning from pill C and two pill F's plus one pill G to reduce the hypertension caused by pill D. Finally take one pill A to help with insomnia caused by pill G...
Heck...a little bit more and you've got a Simon and Garfunkel song. Perhaps you could even explain why the words of the prophets are written on the subway wall. But I digress.
The summary is completely useless, and the article isn't much better. After reading the description 3 times, I figured out the graph, at least. X-axis is time, Y-axis is frequency, and color is amplitude, so it's essentially a time dependent power spectrum density (PSD) with anything above a cutoff amplitude shown in black. I believe the Navy uses a variation of this called a waterfall to help interpret sonar sounds. I got stuck again, though, reading their description of the sample.
Aside from the apparent infinite-energy contradiction if this were true, the graph clearly shows that the signal is both frequency and time dependendent. Obviously, that's the case they ultimately have to deal with to apply this method, but the article suggests otherwise.
As for what they're actually doing, presumably, instead of operating on a set of data that includes time, frequency, and amplitude, they are cutting it down to time, frequency, and sound/no sound. This would cut the data size by the amplitude resolution (eg, 1/16th for a 16 bit amplitude sampling). This must assume that amplitude is irrelevant to the sound, which based on my (limited) experience working with PSD's, I'm skeptical of. Perhaps the odds of getting the same digital time/frequency data for two different sources is low enough that this can be ignored, much like the likelihood of two data sets yielding the same MD5 sum is non-zero but insignificant.
The premise behind and wording of the three laws implies that anything bound by them should be able to understand them and interpret their applicability to a given situation. It's got be AI. Machines like this aren't even close. Their logic complexity is not much more advanced than a sheet metal press. On the one, you have a button connected to a solenoid that opens a hydraulic valve to lower the head. On the other you usually have a PLC reading inputs from HMI's, switches, transducers, etc and providing outputs to relays, actuators, or HMI's based on control logic that seldom exceeds if/thens and arithmatic. They don't interpret anything beyond what the situations the engineer who programs them can think of, and they don't understand situations beyond what their limited sensors can detect (like "if overtravel switch == true then piston valve = false").
People always think of C3PO or the Terminator when they hear robot, but almost all robots are currently nothing more than an automated way of handling repeatable processes. Safety is the responsibility of the programmer and, to a much greater degree, the people who work with them.
I worked at Sears while I was going to school and constantly heard how gloomy things were. Strangely enough, one year they credited the Sears credit card for their managing to be profitable for the year, so it was by branching out rather than focusing on their main business that held them up. Of course, the next year I was told that the credit division had been sold to Mastercard or Citibank or some such credit related group, furthering my suspiscions that nobody in business really knows what's going on.
Sears has faced increasing competition in all of its offerings lately. They celebrated when Montgomery Ward closed down because they thought it meant they were being more successful and drawing in and satisfying the target customers, but really it reflected an increasingly crowded market, with home improvement warehouses and x-mart type stores drawing away a lot of customers, and disposable goods hurting their service division. I don't think their housewares and softlines departments ever were very strong, but now their staples of Kenmore home appliances and Crafstman hand tools, which formerly competed with specialty vendors like the Maytag dealers or the Snap-on man, have to hold up against the volume of Husky and Frigidaire items that Home Depot has managed to sell as the "one-stop" home improvement store. Lawn and garden suffers, too. Few homeowners need a mower any better than a Craftsman, but Home Depot and Lowes have managed to secure brand exclusivity on names associated with professional products like John Deere and Cub Cadet. They're no better (I don't think they're even actually made by the respective companies), but the name sells them.