This may be true for situations where the father has sole custody. The moms in those cases are typically basket cases or uninterested in being a parent, otherwise they'd have custody. Either way, they don't usually pay support. Because of misguided chivalry or just a desire to not have any further contact, custodial dads are a lot less likely to enforce child support orders than custodial moms are.
Double-precision linpack performance increase over a CPU-only system is ~288GFLOPS per Tesla M2050 card (up to 4 cards per system - adding more doesn't help without going to exotic motherboards. See news report of IBM study). Raw performance is 515GFLOPS/card (double precision), so you're looking at ~56% utilization. Others report 53% overall on a massively parallel setup ( See: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/freeabs_all.jsp?arnumber=5470353 )
A rough rule of thumb for linpack double-precision is 25% of the theoretical single-precision performance. The gain is 4-8x over a standard processor depending on whether the metric is peak performance, performance/$ or performance/W. If you can live with 1.5GB non-ECC (GTX480), then it's about 8-32x gain depending on what you're comparing it to. Some applications will see a smaller gain, some larger. If it's matrix math under the hood, then linpack should be in the ballpark.
See gpgpu.org for papers and news on different applications.
Tesla M2050 1030GFLOPS(32-bit), 515GFLOPS(64-bit) 3GB ECC (M2070 is same but 6GB ECC GDDR5) IBM linpack test May 2009: $7K Xeon, 48GB : 80.1 GFLOPS, 11GFLPOS/K$ adding $4K of Tesla M2050s (2 cards): 656.1GFLOPS (8.2x performance), 80GFLOPS/K$ (5.45x performance/price), (4.5x GFLOPS/W)
No, as an ex-employee of a southeastern US ILEC I can tell you that they were doing deep packet inspection (and alteration) on all DSL lines from 2003 at latest. The equipment used was the Lucent BSN5000 switches. We weren't supposed to know about the packet alterations, but they made some problems impossible to fix.
"And what is treason if it doesn't include releasing top secret military information in time of war?" Oh? Where is that declaration of war then? Not an "authorization for the use of military force", which isn't the same thing at all, and which is bootless anyway given past US Presidents' claims to be able to use the military in any way in any place without Congressional approval, and Bush's having all the assets in place for the planned Afghan invasion before 9/11. (For which there is no evidence of Taliban complicity - they offered to prosecute Osama bin Laden for 9/11 but the US refused to provide any evidence.) Nor does the government have the right to keep its crimes secret any more than do the people from which it derives all its rights.
U.S. Constitution, Article III, Section 3: Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort. No Person shall be convicted of Treason unless on the Testimony of two Witnesses to the same overt Act, or on Confession in open Court. The Congress shall have power to declare the Punishment of Treason, but no Attainder of Treason shall work Corruption of Blood, or Forfeiture except during the Life of the Person attainted.
First, obviously, treason against a country cannot be alleged against a citizen of another country. No loyalty = no treason. Since Wikileaks is not based in the US nor are its leaders or most of its contributors of the US, alleging treason becomes problematic. Since what it does cannot be considered "levying war" by any definition, the only potential loophole would be defining the Afghans or the Iraqis as enemies and asserting that US citizens have given aid to Wikileaks which in turn has given aid to them. But are the Afghans or the Iraqis enemies of the US? Is anyone an enemy of the US because they have been attacked by the US, or perhaps simply on declaration of the President? Neither the Afghans nor the Iraqis attacked the US, they were attacked an defended themselves within their borders. The US committed wars of aggression against these countries, the mother of all war crimes - are they then to be held out as enemies for being victims? If such a definition of "enemies" were to be adopted, any citizen could be convicted of treason merely by the President naming their associates as "enemies". This was clearly not the intent of the founders. It would be far more reasonable to name as "enemies" those who have held power ostensibly under the Constitution but have violated it (Bush, Obama etc.).
So has the testing process itself been tested with the same rigor and thoroughness as it wants to test paperclips? Is there any reason to think that testing common items actually makes them safer? If so, (and that's a big if) how much safer? What is the cost per injury averted? What are the severities of those injuries? Is this coming from actual data or bullshit "linear no-threshold" models of risk?
Most importantly, can the testing be done for less than the price of a handful of the kits? Otherwise fewer types of science kits will be produced, fewer kits will be sold, barriers to entry will rise, cottage industry will be wiped out. And the kits won't actually be any safer.
Not that safety should be the goal - riskier kits are better than perfectly safe kits if they are even more educational or useful. Kids should have access to surplus electronics equipment and parts with lead, cadmium, arsenic, high voltages, high currents, hot soldering irons, capacitors and batteries that might explode or catch on fire if miswired, chemistry sets with strong acids and flammable, volatile organic solvents and poisonous reagents that could be used to make explosives and drugs. If Americans weren't devolving into such servile, gutless, tube-fed pussies, any damned bureaucrat who tried to get in the way of real learning with such authoritarian "safety" edicts would be tarred and feathered and used for lawn-dart practice.
"...dual FO connections pointed at different NTU's on seperate networks."
Um, actually that basic idea of redundant paths is exactly how the carriers do high availability in the core network. The double loop arrangement in SONET amounts to the same thing but with less flexibility than in general networks (which can be a good thing - less to think through) Also, everybody agrees that unless you get your switches from the bottom of a Cracker Jack box, fiber is way, way more reliable than copper. Any fiber system that only manages two or three nines reliability is broken.
It's a tried-and-true way to generate buzz, and it's been around a lot longer than Twitter and Facebook.
So has this idea of using two facing screens on a notebook computer. When I first read about the Xerox PARC Dynabook (the original GUI) project in BYTE in 1984, being a kid, I took the idea literally - wouldn't it be cool to have a computer like a book?
Notebook computers were far in the future at that point, so my design was modeled on regular books - two facing screens. I considered plasma screens - color would be nice, and that was the only color flat screen technology that had been demonstrated then - but also considered LCD for better battery life. (C or D cells in the fat hinge). Plasma would pretty much need a wall outlet, it seemed to me. The thing could be read like a book (portrait orientation) or you could type on one of the screens when it displayed the image of a keyboard, though how to make the screen touch sensitive was an open problem. It would have one of those new 32-bit processors, and maybe there could even be room for a floppy drive, though only one of the little new ones like on the newly announced Mac.
In a few years, I thought, one of the ultra-capacity storage formats might even fit, like a Winchester drive or even an optical disk that could store a whole library worth of text - and it could have hypertext jumps built in like that notecard program on the Xerox Dynabook, but better, and throughout the library! All knowledge would be linked together and you could add new links wherever your thoughts took you! Things were doubling every year, by the year 2000 such a "Superbook" could have hundreds of thousands of k of RAM and run hundreds of thousands of times faster than an Apple II ! Being 11, and not having a spare million or two, I wasn't in any position to do more than dream.
Nevertheless, you can still build airships without helium. See http://www.flyingkettle.com/outline.htm [flyingkettle.com] . Steam airships have some potential advantages such as being able to make more lift gas on their own, and can reduce lift by venting without losing a huge amount of valuable gas. The envelope can also act as the condenser for steam engines, thus making such engines light enough for use in the air.
The lifting body and wings allow the craft to operate under a much wider envelope of loads and buoyant lifts. A huge problem with airships is maintaining desired buoyancy despite variations in temperature, altitude, barometric pressure, fuel expenditure, and condensation or icing loading - helium is too expensive to vent when the airship is light and cannot be generated in filght as can hydrogen, hot air or steam*. Being able to descend or ascend without losing ballast or lift gas and to operate without massive ground crews and facilities should significantly reduce the operating expense associated with helium airships.
*Steam is potentially the most economical lift gas since it gives 60% of helium lift or 200% of hot air lift, is essentially free if generated as a by-product of a steam engine, and the airship envelope acts as a condenser for the engine, reducing weight. This makes both the lift gas and propulsion much more efficiently produced than helium bags or IC engines See www.flyingkettle.com for more details.
[Pasted together from my responses the last two times "new" airships were on Slashdot]
When you have spent decades teaching in a public school, won a statewide "best teacher of the year" award, and written a book on the history of education which required years of research, (or just support your points with better evidence) then perhaps your opinions might be given equal weight to those of Mr. Gatto on this subject. As it is, you are just some guy on the internet flinging accusations of crackpottery at a better man with a better argument and better evidence.
Mass dumbness is vital to modem society. The dumb person is wonderfully flexible clay for psychological shaping by market research, government policymakers; public-opinion leaders, and any other interest group. The more pre-thought thoughts a person has memorized, the easier it is to predict what choices he or she will make. What dumb people cannot do is think for themselves or ever be alone for very long without feeling crazy. That is the whole point of national forced schooling; we aren't supposed to be able to think for ourselves because independent thinking gets in the way of "professional" think-ing, which is believed to follow rules of scientific precision.
Modern scientific stupidity masquerades as intellectual knowledge - which it is not. Real knowledge has to be earned by hard and painful thinking; it can't be generated in group discussions or group therapies but only in lonely sessions with yourself. Real knowledge is earned only by ceaseless questioning of yourself and others, and by the labor of independent verification; you can't buy it from a government agent, a social worker, a psychologist, a licensed specialist, or a schoolteacher. There isn't a public school in this country set up to allow the discovery of real knowledge - not even the best ones - although here and there individual teachers, like guerrilla fighters, sabotage the system and work toward this ideal. But since schools are set up to classify people rather than to see them as unique, even the best schoolteachers are strictly limited in the amount of questioning they can tolerate.
The new dumbness - the non thought of received ideas - is much more dangerous than simple ignorance, because it's really about thought control. In school, a washing away of the innate power of individual mind takes place, a "cleansing" so comprehensive that original thinking becomes difficult. If you don't believe this development was part of the intentional design of schooling, you should read William Torrey Harris's The Philosophy of Education. Harris was the U.S. Commissioner of Education at the turn of the century and the man most influential in standardizing our schools. Listen to the man.
"Ninety-nine [students] out of a hundred," writes Harris, "are automata, careful to walk in prescribed paths, careful to follow the prescribed custom." This is not all accident, Harris explains, but the "result of substantial education, which, scientifically defined, is the subsumption of the individual." Scientific education subsumes the individual until his or her behavior becomes robotic. Those are the thoughts of the most influential U.S. Commissioner of Education we've had so far.
The great theological scholar Dietrich Bonhoeffer raised this issue of the new dumbness in his brilliant analysis of Nazism, in which he sought to comprehend how the best-schooled nation in the world, Germany, could fall unde
(i)Student visiting the library during excess, unallocated (college study in high school) hours is told by the librarian that he shouldn't be doing research and tells her: "if I gave half a syphilis-infected tampon what you think, I'd be as stupid as you are"
You are utterly illiterate "school principle" -> principal "Both are authority figures one to our children one to everybody." -> say what?![?!] [The]"Core issue is a principle abusing there" power" - principle -> principal; there -> their "if he had issue" -> "if he had [an] issue"
oh, fuck it, I quit. There are 3 egregious errors on every god-damned line. Please kill yourself. No, really - die. Die. Die.
He got the year wrong - 1980 was the high. The peak was Jan. 18- 20 1980, $830-$850 = $2146 - $2184 in 2009 CPI- adjusted dollars.
Last 6 months gold has been $1100 - $1200. In highly understated 1980 CPI adjustments, that is about $430 - $470 in 1980 dollars. The price of gold was nearly always higher in real terms from about 12/79 to 6/81. See kitco.com and http://www.westegg.com/inflation/infl.cgi for documentation.
As you said: "What would prompt you to make up other numbers?"
You are thinking of Jorj X. McKie, saboteur extraordinary (not usually an assassin) of the Bureau of Sabotage (motto: "In Lieu of Red Tape") in the ConSentiency universe stories:
"A Matter of Traces" (short story) , 1958 "The Tactful Saboteur" (short story), 1964 Whipping Star (novel), 1970 The Dosadi Experiment (novel), 1977
>1) Are they really more efficient? >...2) What gas to use though?
Airships can be very efficient, but only when they are gargantuan. The lift goes with the volume while the cost and drag goes with the surface area, so the $/ton efficiency goes up linearly with size. Given some internal structural rigidity, airships can be reasonably fast without giant engines (roughly 100-200 km/hr for on the order of 100W / kg payload.) The problem is that you have to have someplace big enough to land and store them and some way of dealing with them on the ground when the wind kicks up. A lifting-body partially buoyant airship relaxes the need for extreme size, allows easier ground handling, and makes flying easier by allowing altitude changes to be less dependent on managing buoyant lift.
Helium is not an economical choice of lift gas - it is too expensive to vent yet will leak out slowly through any light-weight material, it is nonrenewable and far more useful for cryogenics than lifting. Hydrogen is dangerous if pure - it can safely soup-up a lift gas mixture, though. Hot air is low performance in every possible way. Ammonia is poisonous and some what flammable. Methane is flammable and does not perform as well as hydrogen.
Steam is actually the best lift gas from many points of view, giving 60% of helium's lift and being non-toxic, cheaply produced from water ballast and engine waste heat and is easily ventable for buoyancy control, but steam airship design does require some envelope insulation and provision for condensation collection.
The lifting body and wings allow the craft to operate under a much wider envelope of loads and buoyant lifts. A huge problem with airships is maintaining desired buoyancy despite variations in temperature, altitude, barometric pressure, fuel expenditure, and condensation or icing loading - helium is too expensive to vent when the airship is light and cannot be generated in flight as can hydrogen, hot air or steam*. Being able to descend or ascend without losing ballast or lift gas and to operate without massive ground crews and facilities should significantly reduce the operating expense associated with helium airships. The Ohio Airships people have gotten an amazing amount done with very little money, and they seem to be selling their idea effectively to US government buyers, so it seems possible that this design will avoid the fate of all the other large airship projects of the past 60 years.
The main innovation in the Ohio Airships design is in the novel rigid internal structure which uses a keel beam supported by stays (cables) from a tower in the manner of a suspension bridge. This should allow greater loads relative to the airframe mass, including positive or negative loads from the wings.
*Steam is potentially the most economical lift gas since it gives 60% of helium lift or 200% of hot air lift, is essentially free if generated as a by-product of a steam engine, and the airship envelope acts as a condenser for the engine, reducing weight. This makes both the lift gas and propulsion much more efficiently produced than helium bags or IC engines See www.flyingkettle.com for more details.
Your sources just underline how badly US workers get screwed. Productivity 2007 - 63K$/ worker - Median personal income 2006- 32K$ - after tax ~24K$ Who gets the excess? Those with personal incomes over 100K$, both directly in wages and indirectly in corporate profits, also government employees and contractors in taxes and deficit spending (mostly war, oppression, corporate welfare, and interest on the same). European countries have higher taxes, but the median standard of living is almost as high in monetary terms, and counting in the much lower risk of poverty, financial ruin from medical or educational expenses, and the far greater amount of time available to enjoy ones earnings both during the workweek and on vacation, the European standard of living is much higher than in the US. Given the lower numbers of hours worked and the greater value received the real productivity is higher in Europe.
"Electricity" conflates several different concepts as Bill Beatty points out in the link I gave above. _Charge_ flows like water in a circuit, pumped by the battery (or other voltage or current source). It does not flow from positive to negative, it flows through the battery. When teaching the water analogy it is crucial to point out that a circuit is a closed loop, and that conductors are like pipes pre-filled with water. It is crucial to point out the differences, too, such as the great difficulty in getting any of the "water" out of the "pipes", and the difference between inductance (which has an extended magnetic field associated) and the inertia of the water in a pipe.
Students who don't know anything about the behavior of water in pipes need to learn that too. It's not hard for most kids to imagine the simple behaviors that are important in the analogy to electric circuits - there is no complicated hydrodynamics involved, but demonstrations are helpful for those who haven't played with hoses, water balloons, straws and squirt guns. If students can't visualize or learn to visualize everyday physical situations such as slow-flow plumbing, I can't imagine how they can understand physics on any level, let alone the Bohr model's application to electric circuits. Teaching about notional valence bands right off the bat will confuse nearly all of the students, while properly teaching the water analogy will confuse only those students who would be counfused no matter what the method of teaching.
I agree - the Mimms books are the place to look for basic, cheap yet informative and interesting projects. I used his "Getting started in Electronics" to teach ages 9-12. To make this learning physics rather than just a craft project, it's crucial to teach the basics before doing projects with complicated circuits or chips. I mean at least voltage, current, serial resistance and parallel conductance using the water-flow analogies, and preferably the divided-pressure tank model of the capacitor as well (see Bill Beatty's "Capacitor Complaints" Also read all his articles about "Electricity" or you will be guaranteed to perpetuate misconceptions. Great teaching ideas there.) This is about as much as you are likely to have time for, but very little interesting happens in circuits without semiconductors, so if you can work in the fluid analogies for diodes (check valves) and transistors the kids will benefit.
My personal choice for an educational medium-basic circuit project would be a high-pass and a low-pass single-pole filter (both just a capacitor and a resistor). Use a computer sound card as a signal generator and spectrum analyzer using a free program such as OscilloMeter.
Other good projects would be an H-bridge motor controller (6 transistors) or for something more ambitious a Tilden "nervous net" / BEAM robotic circuit such as a light-tracking head.
You have the wrong end of it - why does the National Gallery see a need to prevent the spread of the very art which it is publicly chartered and funded to make available to the public? Why do they need to stretch the law beyond recognition to keep the public from viewing these public-domain pictures? Why are they trying to keep the public's patrimony out of the most comprehensive reference work of all time? The National Gallery may "own" the physical paintings, but only in trust - the information itself, the essence of the works belongs in a literal and legal sense to all humankind. The Gallery is violating its charter and attempting to steal humanity's legacy, "respect for others" such as that be damned, they deserve no respect when they attempt such brazen usurpation.
But the NG's servers give those images to anybody who asks, knowing that they'll ordinarily be cached on the disks of all those website visitors. The NGs servers didn't do anything more for this guy than they do for any other visitor. All the differences which could be alleged to be infringing occurred outside the UK.
Power decides. That is why the soldier in the US piloting a UAV that blows up a wedding party in Pakistan has nothing to worry about, while a hypothetical Pakistani soldier in Pakistan doing the same thing to a wedding in California is a very bad insurance risk.
That might be contributory infringement in the UK, but the fact remains that those pictures are not copyrightable in the US and making them available in the US, even to people in countries where they are copyrightable, is not actionable since the UK has no jurisdiction over the action, the person or the server. The people in the UK downloading the pictures from the US might be in trouble if they upload them again to a website, but the NG cannot get around the lack of UK jurisdiction and US copyright.
Slashdot Mirror
This may be true for situations where the father has sole custody. The moms in those cases are typically basket cases or uninterested in being a parent, otherwise they'd have custody. Either way, they don't usually pay support. Because of misguided chivalry or just a desire to not have any further contact, custodial dads are a lot less likely to enforce child support orders than custodial moms are.
Double-precision linpack performance increase over a CPU-only system is ~288GFLOPS per Tesla M2050 card (up to 4 cards per system - adding more doesn't help without going to exotic motherboards. See news report of IBM study). Raw performance is 515GFLOPS/card (double precision), so you're looking at ~56% utilization. Others report 53% overall on a massively parallel setup ( See: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/freeabs_all.jsp?arnumber=5470353 )
A rough rule of thumb for linpack double-precision is 25% of the theoretical single-precision performance. The gain is 4-8x over a standard processor depending on whether the metric is peak performance, performance/$ or performance/W. If you can live with 1.5GB non-ECC (GTX480), then it's about 8-32x gain depending on what you're comparing it to. Some applications will see a smaller gain, some larger. If it's matrix math under the hood, then linpack should be in the ballpark.
See gpgpu.org for papers and news on different applications.
Nvidia Fermi (GTX 400 series)
GTX 470: 1088.64GFLOPS (32-bit) (215W(mfg. claim) $350; 3e9 transistors; 1280MB GDDR5; 448 Unified Shaders:56 Texture mapping units:40 Render Output units);
GTX 480:1344.96GFLOPS (32-bit) (250W(mfg. claim)-(500W tested max.) $500;3e9 transistors; 1536MB GDDR5; 480 Unified Shaders:60 Texture mapping units: 48Render Output units).
Tesla M2050 1030GFLOPS(32-bit), 515GFLOPS(64-bit) 3GB ECC (M2070 is same but 6GB ECC GDDR5)
IBM linpack test May 2009: $7K Xeon, 48GB : 80.1 GFLOPS, 11GFLPOS/K$
adding $4K of Tesla M2050s (2 cards): 656.1GFLOPS (8.2x performance), 80GFLOPS/K$ (5.45x performance/price), (4.5x GFLOPS/W)
So you're off by quite a bit.
No, as an ex-employee of a southeastern US ILEC I can tell you that they were doing deep packet inspection (and alteration) on all DSL lines from 2003 at latest. The equipment used was the Lucent BSN5000 switches. We weren't supposed to know about the packet alterations, but they made some problems impossible to fix.
"And what is treason if it doesn't include releasing top secret military information in time of war?"
Oh? Where is that declaration of war then? Not an "authorization for the use of military force", which isn't the same thing at all, and which is bootless anyway given past US Presidents' claims to be able to use the military in any way in any place without Congressional approval, and Bush's having all the assets in place for the planned Afghan invasion before 9/11. (For which there is no evidence of Taliban complicity - they offered to prosecute Osama bin Laden for 9/11 but the US refused to provide any evidence.) Nor does the government have the right to keep its crimes secret any more than do the people from which it derives all its rights.
U.S. Constitution, Article III, Section 3: Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort. No Person shall be convicted of Treason unless on the Testimony of two Witnesses to the same overt Act, or on Confession in open Court. The Congress shall have power to declare the Punishment of Treason, but no Attainder of Treason shall work Corruption of Blood, or Forfeiture except during the Life of the Person attainted.
First, obviously, treason against a country cannot be alleged against a citizen of another country. No loyalty = no treason.
Since Wikileaks is not based in the US nor are its leaders or most of its contributors of the US, alleging treason becomes problematic. Since what it does cannot be considered "levying war" by any definition, the only potential loophole would be defining the Afghans or the Iraqis as enemies and asserting that US citizens have given aid to Wikileaks which in turn has given aid to them. But are the Afghans or the Iraqis enemies of the US? Is anyone an enemy of the US because they have been attacked by the US, or perhaps simply on declaration of the President? Neither the Afghans nor the Iraqis attacked the US, they were attacked an defended themselves within their borders. The US committed wars of aggression against these countries, the mother of all war crimes - are they then to be held out as enemies for being victims? If such a definition of "enemies" were to be adopted, any citizen could be convicted of treason merely by the President naming their associates as "enemies". This was clearly not the intent of the founders. It would be far more reasonable to name as "enemies" those who have held power ostensibly under the Constitution but have violated it (Bush, Obama etc.).
My shay gets a half-dozen leagues to the peck, and that's the way I like it.
So has the testing process itself been tested with the same rigor and thoroughness as it wants to test paperclips? Is there any reason to think that testing common items actually makes them safer? If so, (and that's a big if) how much safer? What is the cost per injury averted? What are the severities of those injuries? Is this coming from actual data or bullshit "linear no-threshold" models of risk?
Most importantly, can the testing be done for less than the price of a handful of the kits? Otherwise fewer types of science kits will be produced, fewer kits will be sold, barriers to entry will rise, cottage industry will be wiped out. And the kits won't actually be any safer.
Not that safety should be the goal - riskier kits are better than perfectly safe kits if they are even more educational or useful. Kids should have access to surplus electronics equipment and parts with lead, cadmium, arsenic, high voltages, high currents, hot soldering irons, capacitors and batteries that might explode or catch on fire if miswired, chemistry sets with strong acids and flammable, volatile organic solvents and poisonous reagents that could be used to make explosives and drugs. If Americans weren't devolving into such servile, gutless, tube-fed pussies, any damned bureaucrat who tried to get in the way of real learning with such authoritarian "safety" edicts would be tarred and feathered and used for lawn-dart practice.
"...dual FO connections pointed at different NTU's on seperate networks."
Um, actually that basic idea of redundant paths is exactly how the carriers do high availability in the core network. The double loop arrangement in SONET amounts to the same thing but with less flexibility than in general networks (which can be a good thing - less to think through) Also, everybody agrees that unless you get your switches from the bottom of a Cracker Jack box, fiber is way, way more reliable than copper. Any fiber system that only manages two or three nines reliability is broken.
So has this idea of using two facing screens on a notebook computer. When I first read about the Xerox PARC Dynabook (the original GUI) project in BYTE in 1984, being a kid, I took the idea literally - wouldn't it be cool to have a computer like a book?
Notebook computers were far in the future at that point, so my design was modeled on regular books - two facing screens. I considered plasma screens - color would be nice, and that was the only color flat screen technology that had been demonstrated then - but also considered LCD for better battery life. (C or D cells in the fat hinge). Plasma would pretty much need a wall outlet, it seemed to me. The thing could be read like a book (portrait orientation) or you could type on one of the screens when it displayed the image of a keyboard, though how to make the screen touch sensitive was an open problem. It would have one of those new 32-bit processors, and maybe there could even be room for a floppy drive, though only one of the little new ones like on the newly announced Mac.
In a few years, I thought, one of the ultra-capacity storage formats might even fit, like a Winchester drive or even an optical disk that could store a whole library worth of text - and it could have hypertext jumps built in like that notecard program on the Xerox Dynabook, but better, and throughout the library! All knowledge would be linked together and you could add new links wherever your thoughts took you! Things were doubling every year, by the year 2000 such a "Superbook" could have hundreds of thousands of k of RAM and run hundreds of thousands of times faster than an Apple II ! Being 11, and not having a spare million or two, I wasn't in any position to do more than dream.
It was a pretty cool idea in 1984, though.
Nevertheless, you can still build airships without helium. See http://www.flyingkettle.com/outline.htm [flyingkettle.com] . Steam airships have some potential advantages such as being able to make more lift gas on their own, and can reduce lift by venting without losing a huge amount of valuable gas. The envelope can also act as the condenser for steam engines, thus making such engines light enough for use in the air.
The lifting body and wings allow the craft to operate under a much wider envelope of loads and buoyant lifts. A huge problem with airships is maintaining desired buoyancy despite variations in temperature, altitude, barometric pressure, fuel expenditure, and condensation or icing loading - helium is too expensive to vent when the airship is light and cannot be generated in filght as can hydrogen, hot air or steam*. Being able to descend or ascend without losing ballast or lift gas and to operate without massive ground crews and facilities should significantly reduce the operating expense associated with helium airships.
*Steam is potentially the most economical lift gas since it gives 60% of helium lift or 200% of hot air lift, is essentially free if generated as a by-product of a steam engine, and the airship envelope acts as a condenser for the engine, reducing weight. This makes both the lift gas and propulsion much more efficiently produced than helium bags or IC engines See www.flyingkettle.com for more details.
[Pasted together from my responses the last two times "new" airships were on Slashdot]
Your assertions are unsupported, and at odds with Mr. Gatto who has supported his views at length in his book: "The Underground History of American Education" (full text, site may be down). Your points also do not address his points in his essay "Nine Assumptions of Schooling (and Twenty-one Facts the Institution Would Rather Not Discuss)"
When you have spent decades teaching in a public school, won a statewide "best teacher of the year" award, and written a book on the history of education which required years of research, (or just support your points with better evidence) then perhaps your opinions might be given equal weight to those of Mr. Gatto on this subject. As it is, you are just some guy on the internet flinging accusations of crackpottery at a better man with a better argument and better evidence.
To get back to the topic at hand, here is a section from Gatto's article: "Confederacy of Dunces the Tyranny of Compulsory Schooling"
Mass dumbness is vital to modem society. The dumb person is wonderfully flexible clay for psychological shaping by market research, government policymakers; public-opinion leaders, and any other interest group. The more pre-thought thoughts a person has memorized, the easier it is to predict what choices he or she will make. What dumb people cannot do is think for themselves or ever be alone for very long without feeling crazy. That is the whole point of national forced schooling; we aren't supposed to be able to think for ourselves because independent thinking gets in the way of "professional" think-ing, which is believed to follow rules of scientific precision.
Modern scientific stupidity masquerades as intellectual knowledge - which it is not. Real knowledge has to be earned by hard and painful thinking; it can't be generated in group discussions or group therapies but only in lonely sessions with yourself. Real knowledge is earned only by ceaseless questioning of yourself and others, and by the labor of independent verification; you can't buy it from a government agent, a social worker, a psychologist, a licensed specialist, or a schoolteacher. There isn't a public school in this country set up to allow the discovery of real knowledge - not even the best ones - although here and there individual teachers, like guerrilla fighters, sabotage the system and work toward this ideal. But since schools are set up to classify people rather than to see them as unique, even the best schoolteachers are strictly limited in the amount of questioning they can tolerate.
The new dumbness - the non thought of received ideas - is much more dangerous than simple ignorance, because it's really about thought control. In school, a washing away of the innate power of individual mind takes place, a "cleansing" so comprehensive that original thinking becomes difficult. If you don't believe this development was part of the intentional design of schooling, you should read William Torrey Harris's The Philosophy of Education. Harris was the U.S. Commissioner of Education at the turn of the century and the man most influential in standardizing our schools. Listen to the man.
"Ninety-nine [students] out of a hundred," writes Harris, "are automata, careful to walk in prescribed paths, careful to follow the prescribed custom." This is not all accident, Harris explains, but the "result of substantial education, which, scientifically defined, is the subsumption of the individual." Scientific education subsumes the individual until his or her behavior becomes robotic. Those are the thoughts of the most influential U.S. Commissioner of Education we've had so far.
The great theological scholar Dietrich Bonhoeffer raised this issue of the new dumbness in his brilliant analysis of Nazism, in which he sought to comprehend how the best-schooled nation in the world, Germany, could fall unde
(i)Student visiting the library during excess, unallocated (college study in high school) hours is told by the librarian that he shouldn't be doing research and tells her: "if I gave half a syphilis-infected tampon what you think, I'd be as stupid as you are"
(not a hypothetical)
You are utterly illiterate
"school principle" -> principal
"Both are authority figures one to our children one to everybody." -> say what?![?!]
[The]"Core issue is a principle abusing there" power" - principle -> principal; there -> their
"if he had issue" -> "if he had [an] issue"
oh, fuck it, I quit. There are 3 egregious errors on every god-damned line. Please kill yourself. No, really - die. Die. Die.
He got the year wrong - 1980 was the high. The peak was Jan. 18- 20 1980, $830-$850 = $2146 - $2184 in 2009 CPI- adjusted dollars.
Last 6 months gold has been $1100 - $1200. In highly understated 1980 CPI adjustments, that is about $430 - $470 in 1980 dollars. The price of gold was nearly always higher in real terms from about 12/79 to 6/81. See kitco.com and http://www.westegg.com/inflation/infl.cgi for documentation.
As you said: "What would prompt you to make up other numbers?"
You are thinking of Jorj X. McKie, saboteur extraordinary (not usually an assassin)
of the Bureau of Sabotage (motto: "In Lieu of Red Tape")
in the ConSentiency universe stories:
"A Matter of Traces" (short story) , 1958
"The Tactful Saboteur" (short story), 1964
Whipping Star (novel), 1970
The Dosadi Experiment (novel), 1977
Quick, to the Buttmobile!
>1) Are they really more efficient?
>...2) What gas to use though?
Airships can be very efficient, but only when they are gargantuan. The lift goes with the volume while the cost and drag goes with the surface area, so the $/ton efficiency goes up linearly with size. Given some internal structural rigidity, airships can be reasonably fast without giant engines (roughly 100-200 km/hr for on the order of 100W / kg payload.) The problem is that you have to have someplace big enough to land and store them and some way of dealing with them on the ground when the wind kicks up. A lifting-body partially buoyant airship relaxes the need for extreme size, allows easier ground handling, and makes flying easier by allowing altitude changes to be less dependent on managing buoyant lift.
Helium is not an economical choice of lift gas - it is too expensive to vent yet will leak out slowly through any light-weight material, it is nonrenewable and far more useful for cryogenics than lifting. Hydrogen is dangerous if pure - it can safely soup-up a lift gas mixture, though. Hot air is low performance in every possible way. Ammonia is poisonous and some what flammable. Methane is flammable and does not perform as well as hydrogen.
Steam is actually the best lift gas from many points of view, giving 60% of helium's lift and being non-toxic, cheaply produced from water ballast and engine waste heat and is easily ventable for buoyancy control, but steam airship design does require some envelope insulation and provision for condensation collection.
In 2006 Slashdot had an article on a similar lifting-body airship design: "New Aircraft is Part Blimp and Part Airplane" where I commented:
The lifting body and wings allow the craft to operate under a much wider envelope of loads and buoyant lifts. A huge problem with airships is maintaining desired buoyancy despite variations in temperature, altitude, barometric pressure, fuel expenditure, and condensation or icing loading - helium is too expensive to vent when the airship is light and cannot be generated in flight as can hydrogen, hot air or steam*. Being able to descend or ascend without losing ballast or lift gas and to operate without massive ground crews and facilities should significantly reduce the operating expense associated with helium airships. The Ohio Airships people have gotten an amazing amount done with very little money, and they seem to be selling their idea effectively to US government buyers, so it seems possible that this design will avoid the fate of all the other large airship projects of the past 60 years.
The main innovation in the Ohio Airships design is in the novel rigid internal structure which uses a keel beam supported by stays (cables) from a tower in the manner of a suspension bridge. This should allow greater loads relative to the airframe mass, including positive or negative loads from the wings.
*Steam is potentially the most economical lift gas since it gives 60% of helium lift or 200% of hot air lift, is essentially free if generated as a by-product of a steam engine, and the airship envelope acts as a condenser for the engine, reducing weight. This makes both the lift gas and propulsion much more efficiently produced than helium bags or IC engines See www.flyingkettle.com for more details.
Your sources just underline how badly US workers get screwed. Productivity 2007 - 63K$/ worker - Median personal income 2006- 32K$ - after tax ~24K$
Who gets the excess? Those with personal incomes over 100K$, both directly in wages and indirectly in corporate profits, also government employees and contractors in taxes and deficit spending (mostly war, oppression, corporate welfare, and interest on the same). European countries have higher taxes, but the median standard of living is almost as high in monetary terms, and counting in the much lower risk of poverty, financial ruin from medical or educational expenses, and the far greater amount of time available to enjoy ones earnings both during the workweek and on vacation, the European standard of living is much higher than in the US. Given the lower numbers of hours worked and the greater value received the real productivity is higher in Europe.
"Electricity" conflates several different concepts as Bill Beatty points out in the link I gave above. _Charge_ flows like water in a circuit, pumped by the battery (or other voltage or current source). It does not flow from positive to negative, it flows through the battery. When teaching the water analogy it is crucial to point out that a circuit is a closed loop, and that conductors are like pipes pre-filled with water. It is crucial to point out the differences, too, such as the great difficulty in getting any of the "water" out of the "pipes", and the difference between inductance (which has an extended magnetic field associated) and the inertia of the water in a pipe.
Students who don't know anything about the behavior of water in pipes need to learn that too. It's not hard for most kids to imagine the simple behaviors that are important in the analogy to electric circuits - there is no complicated hydrodynamics involved, but demonstrations are helpful for those who haven't played with hoses, water balloons, straws and squirt guns. If students can't visualize or learn to visualize everyday physical situations such as slow-flow plumbing, I can't imagine how they can understand physics on any level, let alone the Bohr model's application to electric circuits. Teaching about notional valence bands right off the bat will confuse nearly all of the students, while properly teaching the water analogy will confuse only those students who would be counfused no matter what the method of teaching.
I agree - the Mimms books are the place to look for basic, cheap yet informative and interesting projects. I used his "Getting started in Electronics" to teach ages 9-12. To make this learning physics rather than just a craft project, it's crucial to teach the basics before doing projects with complicated circuits or chips. I mean at least voltage, current, serial resistance and parallel conductance using the water-flow analogies, and preferably the divided-pressure tank model of the capacitor as well (see Bill Beatty's "Capacitor Complaints" Also read all his articles about "Electricity" or you will be guaranteed to perpetuate misconceptions. Great teaching ideas there.) This is about as much as you are likely to have time for, but very little interesting happens in circuits without semiconductors, so if you can work in the fluid analogies for diodes (check valves) and transistors the kids will benefit.
My personal choice for an educational medium-basic circuit project would be a high-pass and a low-pass single-pole filter (both just a capacitor and a resistor). Use a computer sound card as a signal generator and spectrum analyzer using a free program such as OscilloMeter.
Other good projects would be an H-bridge motor controller (6 transistors) or for something more ambitious a Tilden "nervous net" / BEAM robotic circuit such as a light-tracking head.
That's as good an excuse as any to paste this here:
NNPI (No Nonsense Personality Inventory)
[Author unknown - see "The Best of the Journal of Irreproducible Results"]
1. At times I am afraid my toes will fall off.
2. As an infant, I had very few hobbies.
3. Some people look at me.
4. Spinach makes me feel alone.
5. Sometimes I think someone is trying to take over my stomach.
6. My teeth sometimes leave my body.
7. I think I would like the work of a hummingbird.
8. I have always been disturbed by the size of Lincoln's ears.
9. It makes me angry to have people bury me.
10. I believe I smell as good as most people.
11. Most people vomit out of spite.
12. Constantly losing my underwear doesn't bother me.
13. It is hard for me to find the right thing to say when I am in a room full of cockroaches.
14. I believe that halitosis is better than no breath at all.
15. Weeping brings tears to my eyes.
16. I believe in life after birth.
17. Some songs make me burp.
18. I never seem to finish whatever I
You have the wrong end of it - why does the National Gallery see a need to prevent the spread of the very art which it is publicly chartered and funded to make available to the public? Why do they need to stretch the law beyond recognition to keep the public from viewing these public-domain pictures? Why are they trying to keep the public's patrimony out of the most comprehensive reference work of all time? The National Gallery may "own" the physical paintings, but only in trust - the information itself, the essence of the works belongs in a literal and legal sense to all humankind. The Gallery is violating its charter and attempting to steal humanity's legacy, "respect for others" such as that be damned, they deserve no respect when they attempt such brazen usurpation.
But the NG's servers give those images to anybody who asks, knowing that they'll ordinarily be cached on the disks of all those website visitors. The NGs servers didn't do anything more for this guy than they do for any other visitor. All the differences which could be alleged to be infringing occurred outside the UK.
Power decides. That is why the soldier in the US piloting a UAV that blows up a wedding party in Pakistan has nothing to worry about, while a hypothetical Pakistani soldier in Pakistan doing the same thing to a wedding in California is a very bad insurance risk.
That might be contributory infringement in the UK, but the fact remains that those pictures are not copyrightable in the US and making them available in the US, even to people in countries where they are copyrightable, is not actionable since the UK has no jurisdiction over the action, the person or the server. The people in the UK downloading the pictures from the US might be in trouble if they upload them again to a website, but the NG cannot get around the lack of UK jurisdiction and US copyright.