Well, that is certainly cryptic enough to drive off most non-nerds. On windows, you right-click the screen and obvious menus take you from there.
I've been using Unix since the early 80s (and all sort of things most readers wont recognize for 15 years before that), but I'll take Windows any time for ease of setup (at least a single windows, not an office full of them). Also, as has been pointed out, it has a lot more applications that Linux - AND those applications just plug in and work without a bunch of install fuss and library hunting.
I run Windows2000 as my primary machine, with, of course, unix shells, etc (MKS Tool Kit and Cygwin). My video capture box is WindowsXP. My Linux box mostly acts as a file backup. Requires too much "magic" to set up to do much else with, and it doesn't do anything I am interested in that I can't do with my Windows machine.
I figure I would rather have the trivia section of my brain filled up with more useful stuff than cryptic unix commands. If I can't find what I need by clicking through some menu's, then IMHO the user interface sucks.
OTOH I detest Microsofts' monopolistic practices even more than I detest silly linux nerd arguments about how I would be better off if I had Linux for a desktop.
Oh, and for production, Unix and Linux rule! I would never consider setting up mission critical high performancce apps on Windows.
Generally, a field of study ending in the word "Science" is not a science, but rather a field desiring the status accorded a science.
Examples: Social Science, Political Science. Note that although some refer to Physics as "Physical Science" - the real term is Physics. Same in other areas.
In computers, the term Computer Science is truly bizarre, because there is no natural phenomenon to study. More suitable names might be:
Computational Mathematics (for those who want the pure math approach)
Computer Engineering (for those who want to learn how to do something real with computers, and understand what they are doing).
Computer Programming (for those who want to learn how to program computers without understanding what is going one behind the covers).
When I first started in computers, there was no such field as "Computer Science." There were three departments in the typical university that were teaching computer related classes:
Math - generally taught a lot of obscure stuff such as formal linguistic theory (useful if you are devising a new computer language - for all three people who do that), computability theory, and other interesting theories that very rarely are used by those who actually work with computers (although some of the results may be very important).
Engineering - Two variants - typically with many courses in common: Those that focused on building computers, and those that focused on using computers- typically in Fortran.
Business - generally taught with the computer as a black box that could do things if programmed in Cobol.
I do not mean to sparage any of the the above ways of studying computers. All have their place. But to give them all a name ending in Science - or to even give them all the same name - is nonsense! To this day, Computer Science suffers from the problem of definition.
You seem to have misread my comment. I am against the magical theory land. I have been a professional programmer since before there *was* a discipline called computer science. Please read more closely!
This programming contest looks much more like an odd math contest and one that measures skill in computer programming.
Almost all of it is about optimization problems. I see little place for real-world issues like abstraction, concurrency, standardization, business problems (i.e. unstructured complexity).
I am sure it is good fun, and is a good predictor of math intelligence, but I would not call it a programming contest.
Then again, Computer "Science" has all too frequently been treated and taught as a wierd form of math, when almost all uses of it are in engineering. This may be one reason for the embarassingly slow progress in the field.
In keeping with Microsoft's tradition of rarely doing its own innovation...
Many years ago somebody was selling Automatic Teller Machines that used this approach instead of numeric PINs. I wish I had a reference but this was way pre-Web (1970s).
So if NASA is so wonderful IRG the shuttle, why did they destroy ALL of the plans to the Saturn V?
And yes, congress is no better.
But, NASA is not just an R&D organization, it is a government bureaucracy. That means it has a big interest in justifying itself to the public, it has a big PR operation, and it works very hard at justifying itself. If you don't think government agencies have to justify themselves in order to get funding, you are extremely naive. And if you don't think that doesn't skew their behavior, often is screwy ways, you are also naive.
After all, the public interest (or, more accurately, a weighted sum of the polls and the lobbyists) is what drives the congress. NASA has always known that. Look at the games they played in the early '60s with the Astronaut PR tours. That was NASA, not congress, doing that.
As far as Nasa quashing private business... they held a total monopoly on space launches until the Challenger disaster woke everyone up to how dependent the country was on one bureaucracy. You seem to have forgotten that. So private industry has only had 15 years to even get going, and it still has to compete with NASA and other government funded space launch outfits (Arianne, China, Russia).
BTW... I have worked as a NASA consultant, my father has worked as a scientist with NASA for almost 40 years, and we both can tell you lots of experiences with their internal bureaucracy and how "wonderful" it is.
Private business *could* do it better, if there were suitable incentives. Private business, today, is doing a lot of the work for NASA today, and always has been.
I agree there are difficulties, but NASA sure isn't going anywhere fast.
Issues: short sightedness of corporations. This is true and not true - it depends on how the accounting works. If you make an investment that is written off over many years, its impact on any current year isn't as much. For example, big logging companies plant huge forests that will not be harvestable for decades. That is hardly short-sighted.
It doesn't have to be one corporation. Subcontracting is how you do it. After all, NASA doesn't have the expertise and resources either - it subcontracts most of it.
The risk is an interesting issue. There may be better ways of incentivization.
Actually, we should put more money into NASA and all other kinds of science, and ALSO incentivize the private industry. Take the money from the bloated welfare and farm support programs. It would hardly make a dent! In the US, the department of HHS has almost twice the budget of the Defense Department, and over 30 times the budget of NASA (more or less - this is from memory).
Darn, I just can't win. I was born in the US and lived all my life here except a few weeks in Europe from time to time and a few months in Paris.
I must have gotten linguistically contaminated in my travels. Sigh.
NASA is a classic government bureaucracy (see Laws of Bureaucracy ). As such, it is spending way more money than required to achieve the wrong goals.
The decline of NASA started with the moon landings. After that, NASA could not justify itself to the public, because the Russians had been beaten, and the race was over.
Thus NASA had to become more "cost effective" (the moon landing was done by crash-program techniques such as paying for several alternatives and selecting the best one after it is developed). So NASA sold the concept of the Space Shuttle as an inexpensive way to get mass into orbit. In order to justify it, they also had to make it the launcher for military payloads, so they connived to force the military into fitting their payloads into the shuttle, and defunding their own launch capabilities.
The problem with the shuttle is that is far more expensive that projected (big surprise). A primary reasonis that it is man-rated, which greatly adds to cost.
In order to continue to justify their existence, NASA needed a mission. The environmental movement came along just in time for them - they could devote their resources to studying the environment, and get government bucks to put up space-borne systems to do that. But, to justify continuing the shuttle, they needed a big, manned project... and thus was born the International Space Station.
But the ISS caused NASA to put almost all of their money into one bucket, leaving little else for other research. And ISS is not a particularly good way of doing most things - because most things don't need a manned space station, they can get by with a much less expensive non-manned launch.
Furthermore, NASA did its best to quash competition in the space launch business - again to keep justifying the money for the shuttle. After the Challenger disaster and subsequent grounding, NASA had to allow the military to use its own launchers for critical payloads, but they still have not been nice to little guys.
As a result, we have a small fleet of aging shuttles, that launch at an average cost of $500,000 per mission, at a mission rate a fraction of what they were supposed to be able to do.
One solution is not to give more money to NASA. It is to create incentives for private enterprise to get into the game.
As an example, what would happen if there was a $30 billion prize to the first company to land humans on mars and bring them back successfully? Hopefully, it would lead to some pretty innovative work.
Another approach that might work is to stimulate the public with some historic vision (like Kennedy did with the moon landing) and get public support for a truly imaginative leap.
" You can't be put in jail for writing good software. You can be put in jail for writing intentionally destructive software. If their server has a terrible bug, it's not your fault that it just happens to be exposed by a correctly functioning program that performs a useful task.."
Dude, you need to get educated before you program on your Dell! The legal systems could care less whether your program is well written, well intentioned or performing a useful task. If you cross arbitrary lines, you can be prosecuted, and jailed for a *long time!*
At least in the US, the jail time for doing this to TWO sites (2 counts) is more than the average murderer gets! Is this dumb? You bet, but it is real.
The asbestos suits alone are big enough to significantly reduce the GDP as a result of their impact on companies.
PCB's are the levels anyone flaps about are harmless.
Agent Orange has had OODLES of clear studies. I have read some. But there wen't enough at the time that the lawyers plundered Dow Chemical over the alleged damage it caused.
And remember, when companies are victimized, so are consumers and stockholders (mostly middle class people through their pension funds and 401Ks).
My argument is not to do away with the tort system. It is to fix it! It used to work. Now it doesn't. For one thing, the lawyers have *bought* the Democratic Party (the lawyers got many billions from the smoking settlement alone) and use it to prevent any meaningful reform.
An efficient market economy requires a well functioning justice system, among other things. Bad guys need to be detered by tort law (and government action if they are very, very bad). But our current system too often benefits NOBODY but the lawyers (as you have demonstrated by your Iomega example).
In addition to making a mockery of science, the system is basically a big lottery. If a lawyer wins a big class action suit, he/she makes hundreds of millions of dollars. If an individual wins a big suit (say, the McDonalds suit), he or she gets a big windfall. This is just plain wrong, and damaging.
Furthermore, a system rendering judgements in science related areas (health torts are where the really, really big money is at) needs to use valid science. The Supreme Court has finally recognized this, and has instituted measures to at least partly correct it (fought down the line by tort lawyers, of course).
All you have to do is look at the impact of this on medical economics (drug prices, physician malpractice costs) to understand the huge tax that we all pay, to the lawyers, for the poor job they are doing of keeping companies honest!
You ask why market proponents hate the tort system so much.
The reason is that the tort system is malfunctioning. You need a reasonably functioning tort system for a market to even work well. If you have one, business that operate as you imagine all businesses operate would be stopped.
The current system is used to extort billions of dollars from companies on junk science claims (look at the breast implant shakedown...err well whatever). Those lawsuits generated lots of money for lawyers, a little money for some "victims", put companies out of business that had done something wrong, and caused companies to stop making important medical supplies (and I don't mean implants) because they were afraid the same junk science attack would be used on them! And yet the National Research Council (research arm of National Academies) found that there was *no* scientific evidence of harm. There are many, many examples of these. Another example is the shareholder class action suit.
Junk science suits have been used in the areas of Agent Orange (harmless as far as anyone can tell, but as a Vietnam Vet I qualify for all sorts of free medical care as a result), asbestos (harm exaggerated - only people with large exposures to a certain kind suffer), PCB's (harmless), etc. The ones currently reaping the biggest rewards are in the area of asbestos - with many companies with only the most indirect responsibility to the most implausible harm are being driven bankrupt daily.
The next target is GEEK FOOD! These same class action lawyers are going to sue (name your favorite fast food place) on your behalf. You will get a dollar (if you fill out enough paperwork) and they will get a billion.
Yeah.... I know... sort of off topic... but the poster *did* ask.
The old General Electric 635 (mainframe - late '60s) had an analog MIPS meter for each CPU. It was great fun to watch... and ohh so exciting when it got up near 1 MIP (the maximum it could read).
BTW... each processor was the size of a bunch of concatenated refrigerators. Memory, in 64MW chunks was in separate similar sized boxes.
Hey... mod me up... us ancient fogies need all the help we can get:-)
#1... the bullet has a velocity at least twice that of the highest winds in the tornado. Plus it has a very high density... so it would be somewhat deflected, but that's all.
#2... actually, that is for going out in the wilderness here in Arizona. Not as important for storm chasing.
Re:Totally tech ignorant yet "brave" stupod people
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How to Film a Tornado
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· Score: 2
Lots of tornados don't have much a debris field. In fact, a lot of them have no visible funnel or very little funnel (hence no debris or water condensation) for much of their length - see this page for an example.
I think the hard part would be the wind shear near the wall of the vortex. It could be very extreme. And of course, if you flew in too low you could hit debris.
I've considered doing such a thing, but it would take a lot of time, have low probability of getting good stuff, and the odds of finding the plane intact are low (even though I would put an ELT-like device on it - I have found LOTS of those by RDF).
Yes, there are a few "yahoos" who don't know what they are doing and cause trouble. These are usually local folks who hear about a tornado and drive around looking for it.
Serious storm chasers stay out of the way of emergency vehicles, and out of the way of tornados. We study the severe weather and know a lot about it, even those of use who are not meteorologists.
We also report our data to NWS or NSSL, and are respectful of their needs to get data.
Finally, I would estimate that half of the serious storm chasers ARE members of emergency services. Many are from NSSL, OU, NWS, and other professional meteorological organizations, out chasing on their own time.
Furthermore, many NWS offices have liason setups where they provide info to storm chasers when we drop in (time available - we don't interfere, and we provide ground truth to them when we are out on the road. Many hand out reporting forms.
Most of us have lists of phone numbers for reporting damage, and are trained spotters at the lest.
I do agree, though, that the chase trucks are cool. The neatest IMHO are the DOW's (Dopplers on Wheels). The NSSL chase vans are pretty neat, and the smaller chase vehicles are ordinary sedans tricked out with wierd looking meteorolical stuff on the roof (if you see a car going down the road with a bunch of white PVC pipe sticking up above the roof, with an anemometer attached to it, you are looking at an NSSL chase vehicle or copycat).
It isn't as easy as looking for the hook on the radar. In fact, by the time the hook has formed, you had better already be in the vicinity. Also, many tornados are not associated with hooks. Finally, dopplers have not made hooks easier to see - the dopplers provide a lot of *other* information (especially velocity data) that is useful.
A real tornado chase (as opposed to a lucky catch by someone who lives in the vicinity) involves making a forecast of a target area (not an easy thing to do), driving to that area (often 300 miles or more away), picking the right storm that goes up (most will not be tornadic even if conditions are right), and properly (and safely) positioning with regard to the moving storm.
Do all of that, and on the average of once out of 7-10 times, you might see some kind of tornado (but most tornadoes are weak and not spectacular - although all are beautiful to the storm chaser).
The most successful chasers are those who live in tornado alley, study meteorology seriously (whether or not they are meteorologists), spend a lot of time at chase forecasting and driving, and are lucky!
I know lots of chasers who sell video, but few who make any money at it. Jim Leonard (mentioned in the article) is one who does - but he specializes in hurricanes (which are easier to catch). In fact, one summer he moved to Guam to catch the violent typhoons that are so common there!
Most who make money do so from still pictures of post-card or publishing quality - mostly of non-tornadic phenomena.
Agree and disagree... The guy with the fortified SUV would be paste if he got into anything F2 and above.
Disagree... An M1A1 wouldn't have any trouble with an F-5.
Disagree... Tornados are hard to catch. I spend 2 weeks every year, driving 7000 miles each time, chasing them in the midwest. I know what I am doing, often travel with people who do this for a living, and I can tell you... they are HARD TO FIND. Some years we never see a single one.
When I lived in tornado alley, I saw a few (including the Topeka Tornado of 1966 - see my pictures), but don't count on finding one just on vacation.
There are also folks who run professional tornado chase safaris. These folks, for the most part, really know what they are doing, and provide a good value for the money. If you are really interested in chasing, a trip with them is a good way to get started.
There is also a tornado chase mailing list: WX-CHASE at LISTSERV@PO.UIUC.EDU or here in HTML. It has a lot of serious chasers and good information in it.
BTW... I do know a guy who has a fortified SUV. But his is fortified against hail - a real hazard on the chase. I have seen many folks have their cars trashed by 2"-5" hail on a chase.
Re:Step 1 to produce a good tornado video
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How to Film a Tornado
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· Score: 3, Funny
The trailer park trick works. I am one of the folks who chased tornadoes in the midwest each spring (see userid). In 1995, we waited in clear sky next to a trailer park, watched a storm go up and produce a tornado.
I also have a model trailer home that I have mounted to the dashmat in my car... as bait. The first day we used it, we saw a tornado. Prices available on request.
Well, obviously one doesn't use a PURE vacuum. In fact, you can make neutron generators with a vacuum tube, which instead of electrons releases deuterons from the cathode, and has deuterons in the anode.
Second, you are partly right. (my Bad).. it isn't 150eV unless the tube is accelerating electrons (in which case, they get 150 eV of energy crossing 150V of potential). But let us not get too confused... of course voltage energy - it is potential energy (like gravitational potential energy or any other kind of field potential energy).
Slashdot Mirror
I've been using Unix since the early 80s (and all sort of things most readers wont recognize for 15 years before that), but I'll take Windows any time for ease of setup (at least a single windows, not an office full of them). Also, as has been pointed out, it has a lot more applications that Linux - AND those applications just plug in and work without a bunch of install fuss and library hunting.
I run Windows2000 as my primary machine, with, of course, unix shells, etc (MKS Tool Kit and Cygwin). My video capture box is WindowsXP. My Linux box mostly acts as a file backup. Requires too much "magic" to set up to do much else with, and it doesn't do anything I am interested in that I can't do with my Windows machine.
I figure I would rather have the trivia section of my brain filled up with more useful stuff than cryptic unix commands. If I can't find what I need by clicking through some menu's, then IMHO the user interface sucks.
OTOH I detest Microsofts' monopolistic practices even more than I detest silly linux nerd arguments about how I would be better off if I had Linux for a desktop.
Oh, and for production, Unix and Linux rule! I would never consider setting up mission critical high performancce apps on Windows.
Wrong. It is extremely difficult in many cases.
Generally, a field of study ending in the word "Science" is not a science, but rather a field desiring the status accorded a science.
Examples: Social Science, Political Science. Note that although some refer to Physics as "Physical Science" - the real term is Physics. Same in other areas.
In computers, the term Computer Science is truly bizarre, because there is no natural phenomenon to study. More suitable names might be:
Computational Mathematics (for those who want the pure math approach)
Computer Engineering (for those who want to learn how to do something real with computers, and understand what they are doing).
Computer Programming (for those who want to learn how to program computers without understanding what is going one behind the covers).
When I first started in computers, there was no such field as "Computer Science." There were three departments in the typical university that were teaching computer related classes:
Math - generally taught a lot of obscure stuff such as formal linguistic theory (useful if you are devising a new computer language - for all three people who do that), computability theory, and other interesting theories that very rarely are used by those who actually work with computers (although some of the results may be very important).
Engineering - Two variants - typically with many courses in common: Those that focused on building computers, and those that focused on using computers- typically in Fortran.
Business - generally taught with the computer as a black box that could do things if programmed in Cobol.
I do not mean to sparage any of the the above ways of studying computers. All have their place. But to give them all a name ending in Science - or to even give them all the same name - is nonsense!
To this day, Computer Science suffers from the problem of definition.
You seem to have misread my comment. I am against the magical theory land. I have been a professional programmer since before there *was* a discipline called computer science. Please read more closely!
Almost all of it is about optimization problems. I see little place for real-world issues like abstraction, concurrency, standardization, business problems (i.e. unstructured complexity).
I am sure it is good fun, and is a good predictor of math intelligence, but I would not call it a programming contest.
Then again, Computer "Science" has all too frequently been treated and taught as a wierd form of math, when almost all uses of it are in engineering. This may be one reason for the embarassingly slow progress in the field.
In keeping with Microsoft's tradition of rarely doing its own innovation...
l #DEJAVU
Many years ago somebody was selling Automatic Teller Machines that used this approach instead of numeric PINs. I wish I had a reference but this was way pre-Web (1970s).
Also, this was discussed at Usenix 2000 and CrypTec 99 - see:
http://paris.cs.berkeley.edu/~perrig/projects.htm
and on Slashdot on Dec 28, 2001
So if NASA is so wonderful IRG the shuttle, why did they destroy ALL of the plans to the Saturn V? And yes, congress is no better. But, NASA is not just an R&D organization, it is a government bureaucracy. That means it has a big interest in justifying itself to the public, it has a big PR operation, and it works very hard at justifying itself. If you don't think government agencies have to justify themselves in order to get funding, you are extremely naive. And if you don't think that doesn't skew their behavior, often is screwy ways, you are also naive. After all, the public interest (or, more accurately, a weighted sum of the polls and the lobbyists) is what drives the congress. NASA has always known that. Look at the games they played in the early '60s with the Astronaut PR tours. That was NASA, not congress, doing that. As far as Nasa quashing private business... they held a total monopoly on space launches until the Challenger disaster woke everyone up to how dependent the country was on one bureaucracy. You seem to have forgotten that. So private industry has only had 15 years to even get going, and it still has to compete with NASA and other government funded space launch outfits (Arianne, China, Russia). BTW... I have worked as a NASA consultant, my father has worked as a scientist with NASA for almost 40 years, and we both can tell you lots of experiences with their internal bureaucracy and how "wonderful" it is. Private business *could* do it better, if there were suitable incentives. Private business, today, is doing a lot of the work for NASA today, and always has been.
Yep. I agree. And BTW... I am probably about the same age (graduated high school 1965).
Issues: short sightedness of corporations. This is true and not true - it depends on how the accounting works. If you make an investment that is written off over many years, its impact on any current year isn't as much. For example, big logging companies plant huge forests that will not be harvestable for decades. That is hardly short-sighted.
It doesn't have to be one corporation. Subcontracting is how you do it. After all, NASA doesn't have the expertise and resources either - it subcontracts most of it.
The risk is an interesting issue. There may be better ways of incentivization.
Actually, we should put more money into NASA and all other kinds of science, and ALSO incentivize the private industry. Take the money from the bloated welfare and farm support programs. It would hardly make a dent! In the US, the department of HHS has almost twice the budget of the Defense Department, and over 30 times the budget of NASA (more or less - this is from memory).
Darn, I just can't win. I was born in the US and lived all my life here except a few weeks in Europe from time to time and a few months in Paris. I must have gotten linguistically contaminated in my travels. Sigh.
Oops! MY BAD! Of course you are right. It is half a bill per mission. AT half-a-mill, it would be a good deal! Thanks
The decline of NASA started with the moon landings. After that, NASA could not justify itself to the public, because the Russians had been beaten, and the race was over.
Thus NASA had to become more "cost effective" (the moon landing was done by crash-program techniques such as paying for several alternatives and selecting the best one after it is developed). So NASA sold the concept of the Space Shuttle as an inexpensive way to get mass into orbit. In order to justify it, they also had to make it the launcher for military payloads, so they connived to force the military into fitting their payloads into the shuttle, and defunding their own launch capabilities.
The problem with the shuttle is that is far more expensive that projected (big surprise). A primary reasonis that it is man-rated, which greatly adds to cost.
In order to continue to justify their existence, NASA needed a mission. The environmental movement came along just in time for them - they could devote their resources to studying the environment, and get government bucks to put up space-borne systems to do that. But, to justify continuing the shuttle, they needed a big, manned project... and thus was born the International Space Station.
But the ISS caused NASA to put almost all of their money into one bucket, leaving little else for other research. And ISS is not a particularly good way of doing most things - because most things don't need a manned space station, they can get by with a much less expensive non-manned launch.
Furthermore, NASA did its best to quash competition in the space launch business - again to keep justifying the money for the shuttle. After the Challenger disaster and subsequent grounding, NASA had to allow the military to use its own launchers for critical payloads, but they still have not been nice to little guys.
As a result, we have a small fleet of aging shuttles, that launch at an average cost of $500,000 per mission, at a mission rate a fraction of what they were supposed to be able to do.
One solution is not to give more money to NASA. It is to create incentives for private enterprise to get into the game.
As an example, what would happen if there was a $30 billion prize to the first company to land humans on mars and bring them back successfully? Hopefully, it would lead to some pretty innovative work.
Another approach that might work is to stimulate the public with some historic vision (like Kennedy did with the moon landing) and get public support for a truly imaginative leap.
Dude, you need to get educated before you program on your Dell! The legal systems could care less whether your program is well written, well intentioned or performing a useful task. If you cross arbitrary lines, you can be prosecuted, and jailed for a *long time!*
At least in the US, the jail time for doing this to TWO sites (2 counts) is more than the average murderer gets! Is this dumb? You bet, but it is real.
PCB's are the levels anyone flaps about are harmless.
Agent Orange has had OODLES of clear studies. I have read some. But there wen't enough at the time that the lawyers plundered Dow Chemical over the alleged damage it caused.
And remember, when companies are victimized, so are consumers and stockholders (mostly middle class people through their pension funds and 401Ks).
My argument is not to do away with the tort system. It is to fix it! It used to work. Now it doesn't. For one thing, the lawyers have *bought* the Democratic Party (the lawyers got many billions from the smoking settlement alone) and use it to prevent any meaningful reform.
An efficient market economy requires a well functioning justice system, among other things. Bad guys need to be detered by tort law (and government action if they are very, very bad). But our current system too often benefits NOBODY but the lawyers (as you have demonstrated by your Iomega example).
In addition to making a mockery of science, the system is basically a big lottery. If a lawyer wins a big class action suit, he/she makes hundreds of millions of dollars. If an individual wins a big suit (say, the McDonalds suit), he or she gets a big windfall. This is just plain wrong, and damaging.
Furthermore, a system rendering judgements in science related areas (health torts are where the really, really big money is at) needs to use valid science. The Supreme Court has finally recognized this, and has instituted measures to at least partly correct it (fought down the line by tort lawyers, of course). All you have to do is look at the impact of this on medical economics (drug prices, physician malpractice costs) to understand the huge tax that we all pay, to the lawyers, for the poor job they are doing of keeping companies honest!
You ask why market proponents hate the tort system so much. The reason is that the tort system is malfunctioning. You need a reasonably functioning tort system for a market to even work well. If you have one, business that operate as you imagine all businesses operate would be stopped. The current system is used to extort billions of dollars from companies on junk science claims (look at the breast implant shakedown...err well whatever). Those lawsuits generated lots of money for lawyers, a little money for some "victims", put companies out of business that had done something wrong, and caused companies to stop making important medical supplies (and I don't mean implants) because they were afraid the same junk science attack would be used on them! And yet the National Research Council (research arm of National Academies) found that there was *no* scientific evidence of harm. There are many, many examples of these. Another example is the shareholder class action suit. Junk science suits have been used in the areas of Agent Orange (harmless as far as anyone can tell, but as a Vietnam Vet I qualify for all sorts of free medical care as a result), asbestos (harm exaggerated - only people with large exposures to a certain kind suffer), PCB's (harmless), etc. The ones currently reaping the biggest rewards are in the area of asbestos - with many companies with only the most indirect responsibility to the most implausible harm are being driven bankrupt daily. The next target is GEEK FOOD ! These same class action lawyers are going to sue (name your favorite fast food place) on your behalf. You will get a dollar (if you fill out enough paperwork) and they will get a billion. Yeah.... I know... sort of off topic... but the poster *did* ask.
The old General Electric 635 (mainframe - late '60s) had an analog MIPS meter for each CPU. It was great fun to watch... and ohh so exciting when it got up near 1 MIP (the maximum it could read).
:-)
BTW... each processor was the size of a bunch of concatenated refrigerators. Memory, in 64MW chunks was in separate similar sized boxes.
Hey... mod me up... us ancient fogies need all the help we can get
The Kyocera smartphone has a full pilot OS and functionality in it, so you can develop on your phone now!
I have one of these goodies and like it (only have to carry one widget instead of two) but the phone/pilot integration is not as good as it should be.
#1... the bullet has a velocity at least twice that of the highest winds in the tornado. Plus it has a very high density... so it would be somewhat deflected, but that's all.
#2... actually, that is for going out in the wilderness here in Arizona. Not as important for storm chasing.
Lots of tornados don't have much a debris field. In fact, a lot of them have no visible funnel or very little funnel (hence no debris or water condensation) for much of their length - see this page for an example.
I think the hard part would be the wind shear near the wall of the vortex. It could be very extreme. And of course, if you flew in too low you could hit debris.
I've considered doing such a thing, but it would take a lot of time, have low probability of getting good stuff, and the odds of finding the plane intact are low (even though I would put an ELT-like device on it - I have found LOTS of those by RDF).
yes, it is.
:-)
If the tornado get's too close, you have to shoot them
Sorry, but you don't understand storm chasing.
Yes, there are a few "yahoos" who don't know what they are doing and cause trouble. These are usually local folks who hear about a tornado and drive around looking for it.
Serious storm chasers stay out of the way of emergency vehicles, and out of the way of tornados. We study the severe weather and know a lot about it, even those of use who are not meteorologists.
We also report our data to NWS or NSSL, and are respectful of their needs to get data.
Finally, I would estimate that half of the serious storm chasers ARE members of emergency services. Many are from NSSL, OU, NWS, and other professional meteorological organizations, out chasing on their own time.
Furthermore, many NWS offices have liason setups where they provide info to storm chasers when we drop in (time available - we don't interfere, and we provide ground truth to them when we are out on the road. Many hand out reporting forms.
Most of us have lists of phone numbers for reporting damage, and are trained spotters at the lest.
I do agree, though, that the chase trucks are cool. The neatest IMHO are the DOW's (Dopplers on Wheels). The NSSL chase vans are pretty neat, and the smaller chase vehicles are ordinary sedans tricked out with wierd looking meteorolical stuff on the roof (if you see a car going down the road with a bunch of white PVC pipe sticking up above the roof, with an anemometer attached to it, you are looking at an NSSL chase vehicle or copycat).
IANAM, but I am an experienced tornado chaser.
It isn't as easy as looking for the hook on the radar. In fact, by the time the hook has formed, you had better already be in the vicinity. Also, many tornados are not associated with hooks. Finally, dopplers have not made hooks easier to see - the dopplers provide a lot of *other* information (especially velocity data) that is useful.
A real tornado chase (as opposed to a lucky catch by someone who lives in the vicinity) involves making a forecast of a target area (not an easy thing to do), driving to that area (often 300 miles or more away), picking the right storm that goes up (most will not be tornadic even if conditions are right), and properly (and safely) positioning with regard to the moving storm.
Do all of that, and on the average of once out of 7-10 times, you might see some kind of tornado (but most tornadoes are weak and not spectacular - although all are beautiful to the storm chaser).
The most successful chasers are those who live in tornado alley, study meteorology seriously (whether or not they are meteorologists), spend a lot of time at chase forecasting and driving, and are lucky!
I know lots of chasers who sell video, but few who make any money at it. Jim Leonard (mentioned in the article) is one who does - but he specializes in hurricanes (which are easier to catch). In fact, one summer he moved to Guam to catch the violent typhoons that are so common there!
Most who make money do so from still pictures of post-card or publishing quality - mostly of non-tornadic phenomena.
Agree and disagree... The guy with the fortified SUV would be paste if he got into anything F2 and above.
Disagree... An M1A1 wouldn't have any trouble with an F-5.
Disagree... Tornados are hard to catch. I spend 2 weeks every year, driving 7000 miles each time, chasing them in the midwest. I know what I am doing, often travel with people who do this for a living, and I can tell you... they are HARD TO FIND. Some years we never see a single one.
When I lived in tornado alley, I saw a few (including the Topeka Tornado of 1966 - see my pictures), but don't count on finding one just on vacation.
There are also folks who run professional tornado chase safaris. These folks, for the most part, really know what they are doing, and provide a good value for the money. If you are really interested in chasing, a trip with them is a good way to get started.
There is also a tornado chase mailing list: WX-CHASE at LISTSERV@PO.UIUC.EDU or here in HTML. It has a lot of serious chasers and good information in it.
BTW... I do know a guy who has a fortified SUV. But his is fortified against hail - a real hazard on the chase. I have seen many folks have their cars trashed by 2"-5" hail on a chase.
My chase pages are here if anyone is interesting.
The trailer park trick works. I am one of the folks who chased tornadoes in the midwest each spring (see userid). In 1995, we waited in clear sky next to a trailer park, watched a storm go up and produce a tornado.
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I also have a model trailer home that I have mounted to the dashmat in my car... as bait. The first day we used it, we saw a tornado. Prices available on request.
See Storm Chase Vehicle - 3rd-5th pictures
Well, obviously one doesn't use a PURE vacuum. In fact, you can make neutron generators with a vacuum tube, which instead of electrons releases deuterons from the cathode, and has deuterons in the anode.
Second, you are partly right. (my Bad).. it isn't 150eV unless the tube is accelerating electrons (in which case, they get 150 eV of energy crossing 150V of potential). But let us not get too confused... of course voltage energy - it is potential energy (like gravitational potential energy or any other kind of field potential energy).