I built something like this for my own usage, and I'm unsure about all the people who are yelling about how the other server owners could be implicated for illegal data stored on their systems: it's all in how the program implements its algorithm. What I did, to sum up a lot of stuff, was wrote a program that'd take each individual byte from the input stream and split it into a bunch of output streams -- like 20, as I recall, each one bit wide. (Each bit stored in two streams, plus several parity bits.) Then those 20 resultant files got stored on a bunch of online storage places as data in jpegs(*) or whatever. It worked, it was tedious to use, blah blah blah. But the thing is: any of the individual sites where a chunk of this data was stored didn't have anything useful. There is no meaningful definition for a series of bits stripped sequentially out of another file: it's junk, if that's all you have. I can't claim that police would be *unable* to charge you for having secret bomb-making data on your hard drive, but it would be very difficult to support that argument when what you have is completely illegible. I used to listen to numbers stations when I was a kid, but that hardly makes me liable for the actions of people who are using those numbers for espionage.
(*) If you build a program to parse the data in jpg's, it's an easy matter to add a data stream into the color data rather than just into the metadata. You have what approximates a one-time pad: a stream of data (the picture) and another stream of data (the message) which are both close to random. Then you put the original picture somewhere else, and the recipient acquires both and strips out the message. Problem is you have to control the jpeg conversion process, you can't use flickr or the like, who do their own conversions. So it's not really super-useful. But you can't visually see the difference between the original picture and one that's had one bit added into each RGB value, especially if you do something like alternate adding or subtracting the bitstream, which itself has an average value of 0.5, so the pics come out looking no different. It was fun to write.
I entirely agree with your general argument. I'm incensed that oil companies are making enormous profits -- not because they're making a profit, per se, but because they're raping the environment, while being given enormous government grants, loans, and subsidies, *AND* making enormous profits. That's a place where regulation is called for. Likewise, automotive safety, for instance. I have no problem stating that companies exist only to make money, which places them generally in opposition to individual rights to health and happiness. I think companies are close to being inherently evil, since my definition of evil is, essentially, knowingly doing things that harm others just for your own gain.
But with text messaging, the companies aren't causing public harm, they're not getting *massive* subsidies -- all they're doing is raising prices until the market starts to shrink. People have options. They can stop using their cellphones, they can get cellphones that don't accept/send text messages (I think? I've never sent or received a text message on my phone...)
The feeling I get when I read things like this is that a politician is saying "LOOK! These people are making LOTS of MONEY! and it's costing all you little people LOTS of MONEY!" and holds a bunch of hearings. It's about making noise, being a populist for the sake of press and forming a good impression with people who don't think very deeply. It's not about making the world a better place. That's why it makes me crabby: he is misusing his power, he's picking a stupid fight when there are many more important issues to address (and yes, I know you can't fix all the problems right now and it's stupid to insist that we *only* fight the biggest problems, instead of addressing all of them, but I *still* think it's really asinine to spend Legislative time arguing about changing the state flower.) If he actually wants to make the world a better place, why doesn't he hold hearings about drilling in the ANR and get some economists who actually understand the global marketplace to talk about how much effect that would really have on the price of oil? rather than dinking about whining about the profit margins of companies whose customers are apparently happily paying for a voluntary service? grumble.
Yeah, that sucks. Text messaging should be dirt cheap. Yeah, they're making an enormous profit off it. But text messaging is voluntary. You can stop any time you want. They're clearly charging what the market will bear. Sure, it makes them look like scum when they're getting paid huge amounts for not doing very much... but c'mon, Senator Kohl, that's the American Dream! If y'all don't like it, get rid of your cellphones and use email.
>But how soon before people take advantage of viral networking to manipulate Google's algorithms for determining popular news, bring up old doom and gloom articles to intentionally tank a stock so they can buy while it's cheap?
>I've never understood these claims about Narnia being religious. I guess the last book in the series is a bit, but most of it is just a story.
I love the Narnia stories, and almost everything else C. S. Lewis wrote, and I think they're a valuable addition to English literature. But I think you'd be hard-pressed to defend Aslan being tied to a stone and killed in place of someone else's sin, then coming back to life a couple days later and bringing loads of other people back to life for an enormous final battle to overthrow Evil, as 'just a story.' I knew quite well what Lewis was writing about when I read The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe when I was seven years old.
The others -- Dawn Treader, Horse and His Boy, in particular -- are pretty easy to write off as just stories. But LWW and The Last Battle, which *were* the first and last books before idiots decided to start reordering the stories in their storyline order, seem to me to be pretty transparent in their re-presentation of Christianity. I don't think that's a bad thing, mind you: the vision Lewis had of how Christianity should be is a good, noble ideal. But it's never struck me or anyone I know as being particularly cryptic in its presentation.
The thing I found most interesting about the radiator thrust issue was that I've been reading about that for years and I've never found any good indication that the designers intended that to happen: everything I've read basically says they ducted it to make sure there was positive flow across the radiator at all times, and that's all, and once the plane was flying, they found it was going faster than they expected and tracked it down to that.
I've worked on a Mooney. Those things are crazy, like a Corvette of the sky: the entire engine compartment is formed around the constraints of the cowl. You'd have trouble putting a different make of alternator in one. No way a radiator would fit. The WWII Mosquito had radiators in the leading edges of the wings, with the intake at the stagnation point -- an interesting idea as long as you make sure you're rarely operating at unusual attitudes, but boy you have to make sure you don't ever pick up LE icing. I suppose if it were flush or in thermal contact it might reduce icing a bit, though.
Some serious Googling shows I was wrong: I thought that the water-cooled Lyc was a production item, but it was a one-off, uncertified engine. So for mass-production liquid-cooled aircraft engines, it's just the Rotax 912/914's and the non-VW auto conversion crowd. There are a fair number of people running Subaru's and Mazda's out there, but I've never heard anyone who is using one make the claim that it's particularly spectacular. The RX7 conversions have a great power-to-weight ratio but they're fuel hogs and run blisteringly hot.
>The mad deer in Colorado also occupy a site with extensive radiologic environmental poisoning.
The first CWD deer in Colorado were noticed at/near Fort Collins, which has little or no radiologic environmental poisoning. There aren't any uranium mines in the area and the nearest nuclear power plant was 60 miles away and never had a significant leak during its operational life. It's a pretty pristine area. CWD was probably noticed there because it's one of the foremost agricultural-focussed colleges in the West, so people are on the lookout for odd behavior in wildlife. (Although some people have claimed that prions actually made a species jump from animals at CSU's research farms/herds to deer.) But the idea that CWD is linked to radiation poisoning, while interesting, is not supported by any data from the discovery of CWD in Colorado.
Well, to some extent, that's like saying that Indium showed up in 1863 and Francium in 1939 -- it's likely that many of those diseases have existed forever and we didn't know enough or have enough observational data to give them specific names. CJD is known to occur spontaneously in about 1 in a million people and probably has been doing so for thousands of years, but previously looked like other senile dementias. The issue is that until the advent of large-scale agricultural farming of animals, there wasn't a lot of used animal brain tissue going into food stock. To really get a good amplification of CJD-like diseases, you need to be consistently acting like zombies and dumping lots of brain tissue from each generation into the next generation.
There were some amazing engines, and amazing engineers, involved in the last-generation WWII fighters. The F8F was cranking out 2100 horsepower on an aircooled engine, without a problem; the Wasp Major used in the B-36 was doing 4300 HP on air-cooling. It was still competitive on both the fighter and bomber sides: it was just *big*.
Water cooling sucked for battle damage, which hopefully isn't a factor in general aviation. But with better engine design -- lighter heads because they don't need all the fins, no need for air ducting -- you can minimize the added weight of a water-cooled system. Plus, if you're really clever, you can derive thrust from your cooling system giving you negative drag from your radiator, making your Mustang go faster than a Spitfire. I don't think I'll ever fly something that's fast enough to take advantage of this, but it's an interesting thought.
The conclusion I draw from planes like the F8F and the Skyraider (2700HP from an air-cooled piston engine, useful career 1950-1970's) and the Mustang is that either air-cooled or water-cooled can work, given enough engineering, but it seems to me that water-cooling has an awful lot of ancillary advantages for GA that probably outweigh the weight penalties.
>A 40+ year old Conty design can run for 2000 hours while A modern automotive engine can run for 10,000 or so with very poor maintenance and in harder conditions.
In part that's because of the air cooling. LyConti's have a 400F range of operation, requiring much looser tolerances/clearances throughout the engine, meaning it wears faster. (And hot metal suffers more from creep and other failure.) But it's really difficult to convince people to move to liquid cooling because air-cooling is a demon they know. Liquid cooling means you're relying on a water pump, it adds weight, blah blah blah. It's not that it isn't better technology -- it IS, obviously. That's why the top-line WWII aircraft had mostly gone to liquid-cooled engines. But people won't buy them. Both Lycoming and Continental have made liquid-cooled engines, as I recall. I think the Rutan Voyager had a Lyc 360 with a water-cooled top end, in fact. (I'm wrong: the water-cooled one was a Lycoming IOL-200.) But nobody bought them, just like nobody bought the geared Continental IO-470's that had vastly better specific power than our typical direct-drive LyConti's. When you could very well die if anything goes wrong with the engine, you live *incredibly* conservatively, and sometimes that means you end up in more danger than you would if you updated things.
By the way, I'm not sure about the 'harder conditions' claim. Auto engines do operate over a wider RPM range, but they're not generally built to run at near-full-power for 95% of their operational life. I have a friend who used to use near-stock 1800CC VW engines running at full power. He said after 200 hours you could crack the block and see the serial numbers on the crank bearings hammered into the block bearing face. He got about 500 hours out of a block before having to throw it away. I've read about O360's that have 20,000 hours on the block, after 10 rebuilds.
There are people doing EFI, variable ignition, and the like, especially on Subaru conversions. Eggenfelter (spelling?) and a couple others have been cranking out engines based on older Soob blocks with a new camshaft, and modern injectors, electronic ignition, the works. They seem to work pretty well, but in the end they're neither much cheaper nor lighter than a LyConti of the same horsepower. However, they're *much* cheaper after the first rebuild, they get better fuel consumption, and you get a cabin heater that has almost no danger of killing you silently from CO poisoning.
Eight years ago, I was working for Celestica, a Canadian company, building Dell servers. They were outsourcing heavily even then. Interestingly, given the slant of the above article, we were also building HP servers. A little observation about the difference in the two companies and their style (or, more to the point, what they were willing to pay for): HP servers were shorts-tested, power-up functional tested, built into boxes, temporary HD's installed, a full OS install done, the boxes run for 2 hours, turned off, the OS *reinstalled* and a complete functional test done, and shipped out. In contrast, the Dells were shorts-tested, and 1 out of 3 were power-up functional tested, and after that they were shipped out to the company that turned them into complete systems. It's possible that the next company down the line did a full burn-in functional test. But HP did that, too, in addition to the burn-in functional test we did.
>all publicity is good publicity, which seems to be a popular idea these days, but always seemed kinda dubious to me.
Consider: if you don't hear about something you're not going to buy it. If you DO hear about something, you *might* buy it. Any coverage whatsoever increases the probability of a purchase.
Now, the question is: what happens when people have, in fact, heard of something already, and see an ad campaign about it -- then it is possible to lose sales from a bad ad campaign. However, with something like Windows, the chances are that 95% of the people who see the ad already have Windows. In that case, it might just be reinforcement of an already-made decision, to keep people from looking around. There have been many ad campaigns, particularly for expensive cars, that are only intended to make people who already have one feel good about their purchase (reduce buyer's remorse, in other words) so they'll buy again later.
The TI 99/4a was selling for under $100 in 1983. Of course, that's like $1200 now, but still, that price point has definitely been beaten by several other computer systems.
I've had the same experience, both with general anaesthesia and with two serious head injuries that left me unconscious for a while. In all cases I was talking intelligently to people afterwards, hours before I have any memories whatsoever. In one case I apparently was able to give the EMT's phone numbers for me, my next of kin, and my workplace while they were loading me in the helicopter, and three months later I found out that I'd been in the hospital for three days after the accident, not two days. In none of the cases do I remember recovering consciousness.
My sis-in-law has epilepsy but doesn't have grand mal seizures, just petit mal, and they're so small that she has trouble recognizing she's having them, as do people who are around her. She just starts slowing down, is the only way you really notice: she pauses more while talking and doesn't always finish her sentences, even though she maintains the thread of the conversation. It's a completely different kind of break in consciousness, and it doesn't affect her memory of what's happening, just her perception of how quickly time is passing. She loses all those little slices, so time seems to speed up: things move too quickly and people talk too fast for her.
>attempt to fly the same path as pentagon plane (Including being in ground effect for 1km before hitting the building),
Gotta say, when you're in ground effect, the problem isn't the flying, but the opposite: you can't get the dumb plane on the ground. It just floats merrily along. But if there's something that sticks up in your way, boy howdy there's no problem running into it (like, say, the runway edge lights.)
>most modern research (3 decades or more) indicates that at least the majority of dinosaurs were warm blooded.
I hadn't read about that, and I'd be interested in seeing more. My understanding, based on what I have read, is that many dinosaurs were essentially non-homeostatic and may have used feather-like body coverings to vary their insulation to regulate their body temperatures, rather than using metabolism and feedback systems for thermoregulation.
Reptiles have perfectly good immune systems: in the case of alligators, they're better than human ones. However, since reptiles are cold-blooded, the seasonal temperature variation means reptiles have suppressed immune function during cold periods, so they'd be predisposed to higher mortality from disease after a meteorite strike or extensive volcanic activity puts enough debris in the atmosphere to reduce the Earth's temperature. The Black Death spread across Europe and the Mideast in less than 4 years -- individual diseases can move very quickly. The idea that the rise of a class of disease vectors, biting insects, might've gradually led to higher mortality, is interesting, and something I'd never read about.
I agree with your statement entirely. However: who better to convince a kid to not try LSD than someone who has already tried it? The old dude who taught woodshop in high school and was missing a couple fingers was *way* more convincing when he talked about safety, than the safety movies.
I'm not defending being a hypocrite. I'm just saying that if people learn from their mistakes, they're good teachers with respect to those mistakes. To be a hypocrit is to *keep* doing something (like burning 1/4 the world's fossil fuels) while complaining about other people doing the same thing. Ex-hippie parents probably aren't being hypocrites about the LSD, while the USA being pissed about Chinese pollution, is indeed being a hypocrite.
Denver, Salt Lake City, Boise, Alburquerque, Phoenix, Cheyenne, Reno, all come to mind. No fault lines, no tidal waves, no hurricanes, little risk of forest fire or serious floods. Maybe tornadoes in a couple cases, but those are two orders of magnitude smaller.
Don't mess about with neon or helium. The only reasonable contenders are nitrogen and argon, because they're both dirt-cheap. Little-known fact is that argon is the third most common gas in the atmosphere, even more prevalent than CO2, while neon is 1000 times as rare and helium lower yet (although that's not how we get helium.) Argon's perfect: completely inert (unless you have fluorine or chlorine gas and open sparks in your container, in which case you have bigger problems) and really inexpensive. Filling your entire bathroom with argon would cost like $5.
You've hit the problem precisely. Companies evolve, in competition with each other. The measure of their success is the profits they return to their investors. As such, the companies that can return the highest profits per unit time outcompete the companies that take the long-term view. It's as simple as that. There is an active reason for companies to not think long-term: it will strangle them. Under free market conditions, assuming basically rational investors, the best company is the one that has the shortest-term thinking. That's a really unfortunate effect of our market system, especially because a long-term view of the market can bring greater 'good' (by which I mean physical well-being *and* profit) to the community. Hence the need for occasional government regulation: because intelligent governmental regulation can get everyone to a situation that's better than they can get to individually. Known as the crab bucket mentality in social situations, but really no different than companies desperately competing to stay alive as they all cut their own throats.
I'm surprised to hear that -- that says to me that someone hasn't done a very good job with the electronics. A MIG is pure DC, at low voltage, and that's largely what people use for bodywork. A TIG has a big burst of high-frequency AC to get the arc started, and I can see how that'd be a problem.
Electromagnetic radiation protection is a two-pronged problem: you try and limit the source emission and the target reception. The thing about car ECM's is they're A: wired into the car, and B: wired into a couple km of antenna, consisting of the car's wiring harness. In this case, you're welding on the outside of a faraday cage, and (one presumes) any electronics on the inside are electrically insulated from the cage, so, as I understand it, the only thing that's going to be able to affect electronics inside there is going to be the magnetic field component. Makes me wonder if having the ground clamp right near where the weld is going on, would be sufficient to limit the magnetic field sufficiently to protect whatever's inside, although, again, if you're really concerned, use a rectified MIG and then you know it's just low-voltage DC. Although, hm, now I have to try and remember my Maxwell equations... the induced magnetic field is a function of the quantity of electrons, isn't it, so the low voltage might not save you.
Yeah, when I'm rewelding frames that are painted, I wrap the adjacent tubes in wet towels. That helps a lot. *I*, personally, would use as thin a metal as possible for this time capsule: cheaper, easier to work with, and easier for the people on the other end to open again. It's not like it has to get run over by trucks. It'd be interesting to see how people open time capsules now. Thing about cutting torches is: you *know* you're going to be burning anything flammable inside. When you're welding something closed, at least you don't have the flame shooting inside the cavity (if you know how to weld...) but with a cutting torch, that's the whole *point*. However, I think it's unlikely they'll use a cutting torch: my welding buddies have told me that there is no safe way to cut open a sealed container with a torch because of the risk of explosion from unburned gases being trapped. They've claimed that a gasoline tank is really not much more dangerous than a barrel that's only ever contained water, if both are empty.
As for the electrical component, I suppose that's a possibility, but it's in a faraday cage to start out with, and with an arc or mig welder all you have is a low-voltage, high-amperage source, and with a mig it's DC. That's like the least RFI source in the universe. My TIG does start each weld with a burst of high-frequency AC, but after that I'm welding pure DC. I can see issues with using a spotwelder, with big sporadic pulses of AC, but if you're worried about EMF damage, a mig would solve most all your problems.
Speaking as someone who welds bike frames, I don't think this is too much of an issue. I can reweld a cracked frame without burning the paint 3 cm away, if I'm using a TIG and doing short welds. Anything they put in there, wrapped in a layer of aluminum foil, should be fine.
Now if someone insists on using an oxyacetylene torch to weld it shut, you have more of a problem, but using a gas torch to weld up a time capsule in 2008 is like using punch tape to store your data in the capsule.
He's a computer tech, and bought 3 systems at an auction, to fix up and resell. Every one of them booted up to Win2K, every one of them had enormous amounts of customer data for a local branch of a large stock/securities brokerage -- people's names, social security numbers, account numbers, account contents, you name it. The mother lode of high-$ personal information. He said that what really worried him was that his sample size was 3 out of 3 computers he'd purchased, all loaded with personal information, but there were over 100 other computers being sold at the same time.
My company doesn't let an old computer leave the building with its hard drive. The hard drives are taken out and a hole is drilled through them, then they sit in the IT guy's office until there are enough for a shipment back to corporate headquarters, where they're all melted down.
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I built something like this for my own usage, and I'm unsure about all the people who are yelling about how the other server owners could be implicated for illegal data stored on their systems: it's all in how the program implements its algorithm.
What I did, to sum up a lot of stuff, was wrote a program that'd take each individual byte from the input stream and split it into a bunch of output streams -- like 20, as I recall, each one bit wide. (Each bit stored in two streams, plus several parity bits.) Then those 20 resultant files got stored on a bunch of online storage places as data in jpegs(*) or whatever.
It worked, it was tedious to use, blah blah blah. But the thing is: any of the individual sites where a chunk of this data was stored didn't have anything useful. There is no meaningful definition for a series of bits stripped sequentially out of another file: it's junk, if that's all you have. I can't claim that police would be *unable* to charge you for having secret bomb-making data on your hard drive, but it would be very difficult to support that argument when what you have is completely illegible. I used to listen to numbers stations when I was a kid, but that hardly makes me liable for the actions of people who are using those numbers for espionage.
(*) If you build a program to parse the data in jpg's, it's an easy matter to add a data stream into the color data rather than just into the metadata. You have what approximates a one-time pad: a stream of data (the picture) and another stream of data (the message) which are both close to random. Then you put the original picture somewhere else, and the recipient acquires both and strips out the message. Problem is you have to control the jpeg conversion process, you can't use flickr or the like, who do their own conversions. So it's not really super-useful. But you can't visually see the difference between the original picture and one that's had one bit added into each RGB value, especially if you do something like alternate adding or subtracting the bitstream, which itself has an average value of 0.5, so the pics come out looking no different. It was fun to write.
I entirely agree with your general argument. I'm incensed that oil companies are making enormous profits -- not because they're making a profit, per se, but because they're raping the environment, while being given enormous government grants, loans, and subsidies, *AND* making enormous profits. That's a place where regulation is called for. Likewise, automotive safety, for instance. I have no problem stating that companies exist only to make money, which places them generally in opposition to individual rights to health and happiness. I think companies are close to being inherently evil, since my definition of evil is, essentially, knowingly doing things that harm others just for your own gain.
But with text messaging, the companies aren't causing public harm, they're not getting *massive* subsidies -- all they're doing is raising prices until the market starts to shrink. People have options. They can stop using their cellphones, they can get cellphones that don't accept/send text messages (I think? I've never sent or received a text message on my phone...)
The feeling I get when I read things like this is that a politician is saying "LOOK! These people are making LOTS of MONEY! and it's costing all you little people LOTS of MONEY!" and holds a bunch of hearings. It's about making noise, being a populist for the sake of press and forming a good impression with people who don't think very deeply. It's not about making the world a better place. That's why it makes me crabby: he is misusing his power, he's picking a stupid fight when there are many more important issues to address (and yes, I know you can't fix all the problems right now and it's stupid to insist that we *only* fight the biggest problems, instead of addressing all of them, but I *still* think it's really asinine to spend Legislative time arguing about changing the state flower.) If he actually wants to make the world a better place, why doesn't he hold hearings about drilling in the ANR and get some economists who actually understand the global marketplace to talk about how much effect that would really have on the price of oil? rather than dinking about whining about the profit margins of companies whose customers are apparently happily paying for a voluntary service?
grumble.
Yeah, that sucks. Text messaging should be dirt cheap. Yeah, they're making an enormous profit off it.
But text messaging is voluntary. You can stop any time you want. They're clearly charging what the market will bear.
Sure, it makes them look like scum when they're getting paid huge amounts for not doing very much... but c'mon, Senator Kohl, that's the American Dream! If y'all don't like it, get rid of your cellphones and use email.
>But how soon before people take advantage of viral networking to manipulate Google's algorithms for determining popular news, bring up old doom and gloom articles to intentionally tank a stock so they can buy while it's cheap?
I predict they'll start... about four days ago.
>I've never understood these claims about Narnia being religious. I guess the last book in the series is a bit, but most of it is just a story.
I love the Narnia stories, and almost everything else C. S. Lewis wrote, and I think they're a valuable addition to English literature.
But I think you'd be hard-pressed to defend Aslan being tied to a stone and killed in place of someone else's sin, then coming back to life a couple days later and bringing loads of other people back to life for an enormous final battle to overthrow Evil, as 'just a story.' I knew quite well what Lewis was writing about when I read The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe when I was seven years old.
The others -- Dawn Treader, Horse and His Boy, in particular -- are pretty easy to write off as just stories. But LWW and The Last Battle, which *were* the first and last books before idiots decided to start reordering the stories in their storyline order, seem to me to be pretty transparent in their re-presentation of Christianity. I don't think that's a bad thing, mind you: the vision Lewis had of how Christianity should be is a good, noble ideal. But it's never struck me or anyone I know as being particularly cryptic in its presentation.
The thing I found most interesting about the radiator thrust issue was that I've been reading about that for years and I've never found any good indication that the designers intended that to happen: everything I've read basically says they ducted it to make sure there was positive flow across the radiator at all times, and that's all, and once the plane was flying, they found it was going faster than they expected and tracked it down to that.
I've worked on a Mooney. Those things are crazy, like a Corvette of the sky: the entire engine compartment is formed around the constraints of the cowl. You'd have trouble putting a different make of alternator in one. No way a radiator would fit. The WWII Mosquito had radiators in the leading edges of the wings, with the intake at the stagnation point -- an interesting idea as long as you make sure you're rarely operating at unusual attitudes, but boy you have to make sure you don't ever pick up LE icing. I suppose if it were flush or in thermal contact it might reduce icing a bit, though.
Some serious Googling shows I was wrong: I thought that the water-cooled Lyc was a production item, but it was a one-off, uncertified engine. So for mass-production liquid-cooled aircraft engines, it's just the Rotax 912/914's and the non-VW auto conversion crowd. There are a fair number of people running Subaru's and Mazda's out there, but I've never heard anyone who is using one make the claim that it's particularly spectacular. The RX7 conversions have a great power-to-weight ratio but they're fuel hogs and run blisteringly hot.
>The mad deer in Colorado also occupy a site with extensive radiologic environmental poisoning.
The first CWD deer in Colorado were noticed at/near Fort Collins, which has little or no radiologic environmental poisoning. There aren't any uranium mines in the area and the nearest nuclear power plant was 60 miles away and never had a significant leak during its operational life. It's a pretty pristine area. CWD was probably noticed there because it's one of the foremost agricultural-focussed colleges in the West, so people are on the lookout for odd behavior in wildlife. (Although some people have claimed that prions actually made a species jump from animals at CSU's research farms/herds to deer.)
But the idea that CWD is linked to radiation poisoning, while interesting, is not supported by any data from the discovery of CWD in Colorado.
Well, to some extent, that's like saying that Indium showed up in 1863 and Francium in 1939 -- it's likely that many of those diseases have existed forever and we didn't know enough or have enough observational data to give them specific names. CJD is known to occur spontaneously in about 1 in a million people and probably has been doing so for thousands of years, but previously looked like other senile dementias.
The issue is that until the advent of large-scale agricultural farming of animals, there wasn't a lot of used animal brain tissue going into food stock. To really get a good amplification of CJD-like diseases, you need to be consistently acting like zombies and dumping lots of brain tissue from each generation into the next generation.
There were some amazing engines, and amazing engineers, involved in the last-generation WWII fighters. The F8F was cranking out 2100 horsepower on an aircooled engine, without a problem; the Wasp Major used in the B-36 was doing 4300 HP on air-cooling. It was still competitive on both the fighter and bomber sides: it was just *big*.
Water cooling sucked for battle damage, which hopefully isn't a factor in general aviation. But with better engine design -- lighter heads because they don't need all the fins, no need for air ducting -- you can minimize the added weight of a water-cooled system. Plus, if you're really clever, you can derive thrust from your cooling system giving you negative drag from your radiator, making your Mustang go faster than a Spitfire. I don't think I'll ever fly something that's fast enough to take advantage of this, but it's an interesting thought.
The conclusion I draw from planes like the F8F and the Skyraider (2700HP from an air-cooled piston engine, useful career 1950-1970's) and the Mustang is that either air-cooled or water-cooled can work, given enough engineering, but it seems to me that water-cooling has an awful lot of ancillary advantages for GA that probably outweigh the weight penalties.
>A 40+ year old Conty design can run for 2000 hours while A modern automotive engine can run for 10,000 or so with very poor maintenance and in harder conditions.
In part that's because of the air cooling. LyConti's have a 400F range of operation, requiring much looser tolerances/clearances throughout the engine, meaning it wears faster. (And hot metal suffers more from creep and other failure.)
But it's really difficult to convince people to move to liquid cooling because air-cooling is a demon they know. Liquid cooling means you're relying on a water pump, it adds weight, blah blah blah. It's not that it isn't better technology -- it IS, obviously. That's why the top-line WWII aircraft had mostly gone to liquid-cooled engines. But people won't buy them. Both Lycoming and Continental have made liquid-cooled engines, as I recall. I think the Rutan Voyager had a Lyc 360 with a water-cooled top end, in fact. (I'm wrong: the water-cooled one was a Lycoming IOL-200.) But nobody bought them, just like nobody bought the geared Continental IO-470's that had vastly better specific power than our typical direct-drive LyConti's. When you could very well die if anything goes wrong with the engine, you live *incredibly* conservatively, and sometimes that means you end up in more danger than you would if you updated things.
By the way, I'm not sure about the 'harder conditions' claim. Auto engines do operate over a wider RPM range, but they're not generally built to run at near-full-power for 95% of their operational life. I have a friend who used to use near-stock 1800CC VW engines running at full power. He said after 200 hours you could crack the block and see the serial numbers on the crank bearings hammered into the block bearing face. He got about 500 hours out of a block before having to throw it away. I've read about O360's that have 20,000 hours on the block, after 10 rebuilds.
There are people doing EFI, variable ignition, and the like, especially on Subaru conversions. Eggenfelter (spelling?) and a couple others have been cranking out engines based on older Soob blocks with a new camshaft, and modern injectors, electronic ignition, the works. They seem to work pretty well, but in the end they're neither much cheaper nor lighter than a LyConti of the same horsepower. However, they're *much* cheaper after the first rebuild, they get better fuel consumption, and you get a cabin heater that has almost no danger of killing you silently from CO poisoning.
Eight years ago, I was working for Celestica, a Canadian company, building Dell servers. They were outsourcing heavily even then.
Interestingly, given the slant of the above article, we were also building HP servers.
A little observation about the difference in the two companies and their style (or, more to the point, what they were willing to pay for): HP servers were shorts-tested, power-up functional tested, built into boxes, temporary HD's installed, a full OS install done, the boxes run for 2 hours, turned off, the OS *reinstalled* and a complete functional test done, and shipped out.
In contrast, the Dells were shorts-tested, and 1 out of 3 were power-up functional tested, and after that they were shipped out to the company that turned them into complete systems.
It's possible that the next company down the line did a full burn-in functional test. But HP did that, too, in addition to the burn-in functional test we did.
>all publicity is good publicity, which seems to be a popular idea these days, but always seemed kinda dubious to me.
Consider: if you don't hear about something you're not going to buy it. If you DO hear about something, you *might* buy it. Any coverage whatsoever increases the probability of a purchase.
Now, the question is: what happens when people have, in fact, heard of something already, and see an ad campaign about it -- then it is possible to lose sales from a bad ad campaign. However, with something like Windows, the chances are that 95% of the people who see the ad already have Windows. In that case, it might just be reinforcement of an already-made decision, to keep people from looking around. There have been many ad campaigns, particularly for expensive cars, that are only intended to make people who already have one feel good about their purchase (reduce buyer's remorse, in other words) so they'll buy again later.
The TI 99/4a was selling for under $100 in 1983. Of course, that's like $1200 now, but still, that price point has definitely been beaten by several other computer systems.
I've had the same experience, both with general anaesthesia and with two serious head injuries that left me unconscious for a while. In all cases I was talking intelligently to people afterwards, hours before I have any memories whatsoever. In one case I apparently was able to give the EMT's phone numbers for me, my next of kin, and my workplace while they were loading me in the helicopter, and three months later I found out that I'd been in the hospital for three days after the accident, not two days. In none of the cases do I remember recovering consciousness.
My sis-in-law has epilepsy but doesn't have grand mal seizures, just petit mal, and they're so small that she has trouble recognizing she's having them, as do people who are around her. She just starts slowing down, is the only way you really notice: she pauses more while talking and doesn't always finish her sentences, even though she maintains the thread of the conversation. It's a completely different kind of break in consciousness, and it doesn't affect her memory of what's happening, just her perception of how quickly time is passing. She loses all those little slices, so time seems to speed up: things move too quickly and people talk too fast for her.
>attempt to fly the same path as pentagon plane (Including being in ground effect for 1km before hitting the building),
Gotta say, when you're in ground effect, the problem isn't the flying, but the opposite: you can't get the dumb plane on the ground. It just floats merrily along. But if there's something that sticks up in your way, boy howdy there's no problem running into it (like, say, the runway edge lights.)
>most modern research (3 decades or more) indicates that at least the majority of dinosaurs were warm blooded.
I hadn't read about that, and I'd be interested in seeing more. My understanding, based on what I have read, is that many dinosaurs were essentially non-homeostatic and may have used feather-like body coverings to vary their insulation to regulate their body temperatures, rather than using metabolism and feedback systems for thermoregulation.
Reptiles have perfectly good immune systems: in the case of alligators, they're better than human ones. However, since reptiles are cold-blooded, the seasonal temperature variation means reptiles have suppressed immune function during cold periods, so they'd be predisposed to higher mortality from disease after a meteorite strike or extensive volcanic activity puts enough debris in the atmosphere to reduce the Earth's temperature.
The Black Death spread across Europe and the Mideast in less than 4 years -- individual diseases can move very quickly. The idea that the rise of a class of disease vectors, biting insects, might've gradually led to higher mortality, is interesting, and something I'd never read about.
I agree with your statement entirely. However: who better to convince a kid to not try LSD than someone who has already tried it? The old dude who taught woodshop in high school and was missing a couple fingers was *way* more convincing when he talked about safety, than the safety movies.
I'm not defending being a hypocrite. I'm just saying that if people learn from their mistakes, they're good teachers with respect to those mistakes. To be a hypocrit is to *keep* doing something (like burning 1/4 the world's fossil fuels) while complaining about other people doing the same thing. Ex-hippie parents probably aren't being hypocrites about the LSD, while the USA being pissed about Chinese pollution, is indeed being a hypocrite.
Denver, Salt Lake City, Boise, Alburquerque, Phoenix, Cheyenne, Reno, all come to mind. No fault lines, no tidal waves, no hurricanes, little risk of forest fire or serious floods. Maybe tornadoes in a couple cases, but those are two orders of magnitude smaller.
Don't mess about with neon or helium. The only reasonable contenders are nitrogen and argon, because they're both dirt-cheap. Little-known fact is that argon is the third most common gas in the atmosphere, even more prevalent than CO2, while neon is 1000 times as rare and helium lower yet (although that's not how we get helium.) Argon's perfect: completely inert (unless you have fluorine or chlorine gas and open sparks in your container, in which case you have bigger problems) and really inexpensive. Filling your entire bathroom with argon would cost like $5.
You've hit the problem precisely.
Companies evolve, in competition with each other. The measure of their success is the profits they return to their investors. As such, the companies that can return the highest profits per unit time outcompete the companies that take the long-term view. It's as simple as that. There is an active reason for companies to not think long-term: it will strangle them. Under free market conditions, assuming basically rational investors, the best company is the one that has the shortest-term thinking. That's a really unfortunate effect of our market system, especially because a long-term view of the market can bring greater 'good' (by which I mean physical well-being *and* profit) to the community. Hence the need for occasional government regulation: because intelligent governmental regulation can get everyone to a situation that's better than they can get to individually. Known as the crab bucket mentality in social situations, but really no different than companies desperately competing to stay alive as they all cut their own throats.
I'm surprised to hear that -- that says to me that someone hasn't done a very good job with the electronics. A MIG is pure DC, at low voltage, and that's largely what people use for bodywork. A TIG has a big burst of high-frequency AC to get the arc started, and I can see how that'd be a problem.
Electromagnetic radiation protection is a two-pronged problem: you try and limit the source emission and the target reception. The thing about car ECM's is they're A: wired into the car, and B: wired into a couple km of antenna, consisting of the car's wiring harness. In this case, you're welding on the outside of a faraday cage, and (one presumes) any electronics on the inside are electrically insulated from the cage, so, as I understand it, the only thing that's going to be able to affect electronics inside there is going to be the magnetic field component. Makes me wonder if having the ground clamp right near where the weld is going on, would be sufficient to limit the magnetic field sufficiently to protect whatever's inside, although, again, if you're really concerned, use a rectified MIG and then you know it's just low-voltage DC. Although, hm, now I have to try and remember my Maxwell equations... the induced magnetic field is a function of the quantity of electrons, isn't it, so the low voltage might not save you.
Yeah, when I'm rewelding frames that are painted, I wrap the adjacent tubes in wet towels. That helps a lot.
*I*, personally, would use as thin a metal as possible for this time capsule: cheaper, easier to work with, and easier for the people on the other end to open again. It's not like it has to get run over by trucks.
It'd be interesting to see how people open time capsules now. Thing about cutting torches is: you *know* you're going to be burning anything flammable inside. When you're welding something closed, at least you don't have the flame shooting inside the cavity (if you know how to weld...) but with a cutting torch, that's the whole *point*. However, I think it's unlikely they'll use a cutting torch: my welding buddies have told me that there is no safe way to cut open a sealed container with a torch because of the risk of explosion from unburned gases being trapped. They've claimed that a gasoline tank is really not much more dangerous than a barrel that's only ever contained water, if both are empty.
As for the electrical component, I suppose that's a possibility, but it's in a faraday cage to start out with, and with an arc or mig welder all you have is a low-voltage, high-amperage source, and with a mig it's DC. That's like the least RFI source in the universe. My TIG does start each weld with a burst of high-frequency AC, but after that I'm welding pure DC. I can see issues with using a spotwelder, with big sporadic pulses of AC, but if you're worried about EMF damage, a mig would solve most all your problems.
Speaking as someone who welds bike frames, I don't think this is too much of an issue. I can reweld a cracked frame without burning the paint 3 cm away, if I'm using a TIG and doing short welds. Anything they put in there, wrapped in a layer of aluminum foil, should be fine.
Now if someone insists on using an oxyacetylene torch to weld it shut, you have more of a problem, but using a gas torch to weld up a time capsule in 2008 is like using punch tape to store your data in the capsule.
He's a computer tech, and bought 3 systems at an auction, to fix up and resell.
Every one of them booted up to Win2K, every one of them had enormous amounts of customer data for a local branch of a large stock/securities brokerage -- people's names, social security numbers, account numbers, account contents, you name it. The mother lode of high-$ personal information.
He said that what really worried him was that his sample size was 3 out of 3 computers he'd purchased, all loaded with personal information, but there were over 100 other computers being sold at the same time.
My company doesn't let an old computer leave the building with its hard drive. The hard drives are taken out and a hole is drilled through them, then they sit in the IT guy's office until there are enough for a shipment back to corporate headquarters, where they're all melted down.