Cable and Netflix serve the exact same purpose: they deliver the video content of their choice. With DVR and "On Demand" the temporal flexibility of cable is somewhat competitive but still lacking when compared to an anytime, any device set up. I think DirecTV is starting to foray into smartphone streaming, but they are a few years behind the curve.
It simply comes down to cost. Cable TV is around 40-100 dollars a month depending on how much content you want. The cable line does nothing else but get you a discount on internet and phone service. Netflix plus an internet connection is 40-60 dollars, and you get the entire internet to go along with it, as well as just about the entire library of movies and TV in existence on hard copy if you want it. Online content may be lacking, but it is available anytime on several devices.
Cable as you say provides a much better quality stream (as long as it's on a wire), but it is a closed system with low utility that costs far too much. Cable companies are firmly entrenched in the American market and they still have a nice ISP business that will be hard to knock out. Nevertheless, if they don't get their prices down they are going to start seeing their market share erode significantly in the entertainment sector.
Precisely! If I were the company demonstrating the mesh, I'd put it on the front side as well-- at least that way they would get a confinement effect and the wall wouldn't be as traumatized. Those bricks have no gravity capacity in the state they are shown, even though the mesh on the back is preventing them from falling.
This kind of material have been used in seismic retrofit for years, and if you, the audience, have enough idle time for a long story, you can read on to see why. For a long time, up until the 1994 Northridge earthquake, concrete columns in the US that were not part of a lateral force resisting system were designed to have just enough vertical and horizontal spiral steel (usually none at the beam-column joints) to resist their respective gravity demands. Look up 1994 Cal State Northridge Parking Garage on Google, and you'll see what happened to buildings with this kind of design.
What happens is when a building moves laterally, the columns have to move to even if they aren't designed to dissipate the forces resuting from the building's lateral movement. Without the horizontal steel, the columns are not adequately "confined." When concrete is compressed, just like any other material, it wants to expand outward (not a desirable option with a brittle solid like concrete). Confinement resists these expansive forces and thus increases the compressive capacity of the concrete. When the structure above or below moves laterally, the column bends, and bending puts part of the column in compression and another in tension. Concrete has negligible tensile capacity, so the vertical steel is used to resist the tensile stress. Without confinement, the column's compressive capacity is lower than the tensile capacity of the steel. Concrete is brittle, and thus fractures, losing all of its strength. This is what happened to the Cal State Northridge Parking Structure; with the gravity system destroyed, the decks collapsed, and the walls fell inward with no diaphragm to support them. Had the columns adequate confinement, the column's compressive capacity would have exceeded its tensile capacity. Steel is ductile, and thus will elongate instead of fracturing, which will only occur at a much higher demand. Even with the steel straining, the column moving back and forth, and the thin layer of surface concrete spalling off, the confined portion of concrete within the steel stays intact, thus preserving the gravity system well enough to prevent collapse.
Current design codes, inspired by the garage collapse as well as others throughout Los Angeles as a result of this event, require a certain amount of confining steel over the entire length of the column. With existing structures, this is not an option. Thin composite jackets, probably the same material as the product from the article, have been shown to be extremely effective when wrapped around unsatisfactory columns in providing confinement.
Games aren't the only applications that would benefit from what OnLive is researching and developing; as such, I imagine Autodesk is very interested in this kind of infrastructure. AutoCAD and Revit both demand a lot of computer resources, and since the licenses for these programs are relatively expensive, fronting both the cash for licenses and the high-end computers to run the programs may be prohibitive for some companies.
To parrot a tidbit I picked up off of Wikipedia and to reinforce the parent's point:
While the value of Ï has been computed to more than a trillion (10^12) digits, elementary applications, such as calculating the circumference of a circle, will rarely require more than a dozen decimal places. For example, a value truncated to 11 decimal places is accurate enough to calculate the circumference of a circle the size of the earth with a precision of a millimeter, and one truncated to 39 decimal places is sufficient to compute the circumference of any circle that fits in the observable universe to a precision comparable to the size of a hydrogen atom.
For the sake of argument, suppose that the method employed by the student to cover the distance in a short amount of time was itself illegal (surpassing posted speed limits). The student has himself on tape breaking said speed limits. Are contracts that implicitly prescribe illegal actions such as the contract in question enforceable? Even if not implicitly prescribed, could the student's fulfillment of the contract be voided since he broke the speed limit to do so?
What this may look like is me trying to get free legal advice. It is actually my curiosity lazily attempting to sate itself.
I was listening to NPR's All Things Considered yesterday (7/15/09) and they had a profile on a California start-up developing algae-sourced fuel in partnership with Exxon-Mobil.
Oil companies aren't stupid. They invest heavily in all of the R&D for these alternative sources of fuel so they can oligopolize it when any of the research produces something practical.
The government is accountable to the people, but only insofar as the Constitution allows. What I say is beside the point that the coloring book was a pretty bad idea.
Is it censorship? I don't know, and I don't care if it is in this particular case. I just know that the book was available on FEMA's site for SIX YEARS. I wonder how many kids' minds it put at ease in that time.
Recent events have led me to believe that the ToS was changed because Facebook is beginning to delve into TV promotion. I think it was during the NBA All-Star Game that I saw a Facebook plug in one of the overlays that came up. If they are going to be putting up any user-generated content in their ads (which to me seems wholly unnecessary), they'll need to cover their backs by claiming free use of all submitted content as a term of service.
Of course very few if any people like the idea that they can't opt out of being data mined and sub-licensed once they've signed up, and thus the backlash.
The article summary mentions building codes, which is an industry standard. I have knowledge of building codes being a structural engineer so I use them as an example to help frame my arguments.
The 2007 California Building Code is not copyrighted. However, it draws almost exclusively from the International Building Code (IBC), which is copyrighted and published by the International Code Council (ICC). ICC is a non-profit organization dedicated to the development of model building codes as well as the testing and approval of construction products. The ICC has no financial interest in what it does (in principle), and makes legitimate use of copyright to continue its work.
Should government should be allowed to adopt and enforce copyrighted works as law? If so, who should be responsible for the costs of distributing the law to the citizens? I do not believe that a work should lose the property of being copyrighted when entered into the law; however, it could easily be argued as legally allowable under the guise of eminent domain. The state, and thus its citizens, should realize the fact that adopting copyrighted material as law requires them paying for it. The ICC and all other organizations that develop industry standards should reevaluate whether it is ethical and/or reasonable to create and copyright material which is intended to be adopted into law.
In the end, it is what Weaselmancer brought up in a sibling post: a "broken business model." I believe the state should budget and pay the code councils to do the work and get it distributed rather than indirectly and unequally tax their constituency by making them pay for the published materials (I disclose that I am one of those being disproportionately taxed).
My dorm-mates and I played a couple rounds of Assassin at university too. It was a lot of fun, so we were very disappointed when the university banned the rolled up socks we used as weapons because they looked too much like hand grenades.
The difference becomes even larger when one considers how much work that extra money can do when invested coming right out of college.
I'll illustrate with personal experience. I did five years of college total for a B.S and M.S. in structural engineering (in my estimation the least compensated of all engineering fields). Now in my first job, I have the luxury of not living paycheck to paycheck and I can invest 10% of my gross pay into retirement. I'm 23 years old, and barring a market crash, economy collapse, major medical expense, or the bearing of 17 children (Though based on current trends I don't even project to having 1), I already feel confident I have the financial means I require now and for the future.
It is unfortunate that the official investigation was so rushed. People wanted answers, they were given them, and they were not correct, as the story has been revised multiple times. It should be noted however, that the quick disposal of the steel is not out of the ordinary. When the I-880 connector collapsed last month in the Bay Area, the steel was very quickly disposed of, and the professor who got the grant to study the collapse only had a small number of days to go to the steel recycler and actually reclaim the larger steel elements essential to the investigation. This however, does not excuse how poorly the aftermath was handled at Ground Zero.
Back to the heat from collapse... I'm not arguing that the softening steel exposed to fire is contributing much heat to itself to melt, but rather that 80 stories of pancaking steel and concrete released enough energy and generated enough friction as well that there was sufficient heat to melt pockets of debris. As for experimenting, the event is non-repeatable, since no one is going to build a structure of this magnitude simply to collapse it, and high-rise collapses of this magnitude have never occurred before.
To address the fire, I would like to say that skyscrapers don't collapse from fire because none of them were under the same conditions, which included burning jet fuel and exposed, non-fireproofed steel. Bare structural steel is usually fireproofed; concrete-encased steel is considered adequately fireproofed just by being concrete-encased. In the case of the WTC, the planes crashed through the side of the building and cut out about roughly 1/4 of the columns, and shattered the core's concrete cover, typically 1.5 inches thick (probably more in this case), thus exposing the steel. Even further, the steel supporting the floor was fire-proofed, and since fireproofing is very brittle, it all got knocked off by the impact (The reason they don't fireproof steel bridges is that the vibrations in the bridge caused by traffic are enough to cause steel fireproofing to spall off). The World Trade Center buildings are truly exceptional cases.
WTC 7 is a complete mystery, so any theory is valid at this point. It's plausible that side impact significantly damaged the structure, as other WTC buildings suffered similar damage. I think the prevailing alternative explanation is that eutectic reactions, which means some sort of sulfites caused steel to vaporize in spots (so far as I understood it), as steel pulled from that building had vaporized pockets. The source of the sulfites is up for speculation; explosives (sounds ridiculous to me) or burning furniture (even more ridiculous to me) could be at fault. Sounds crazy to me.
You seem to give a lot of credence to the so-called fact that there was a pool of molten steel (pictures I have seen in scholars for truth articles do not convince me that there was all that much), so I thought I would provide an explanation that I have not seen anywhere. Thus do I now present to you the concept of strain energy. I will make this assumption assuming you have no experience in mechanics of materials, so forgive me any accidental condescension. If you do know about strain energy, skip to the bottom paragraph.
Steel is favored for building because its material behavior is relatively simple. Structural steel is classified most importantly by its yield and ultimate strengths. "Strength" of a material refers to the amount of pressure (force per area) that can be applied to it before it reaches a limit state, in this case either yield or ultimate. Pressure is referred to in engineering jargon as stress. Deformations caused by stress are usually measured as strain, defined as [length of deformation]/[original length of material]. For example, if a steel column were 120 inches long and were to shorten 0.12 inches under a stress (such as floor resting on it) the strain would be 0.001.
Now for the limit states I mentioned before: yield and ultimate. Up until yield stress, any deformation in the material will reverse when stress is removed from the material. In other words, that column I mentioned before that shortened 0.12 inches, if you removed the stress from it, assuming it hasn't yielded yet, it will return to its original length. The reason for this is because when a material is stressed, the deformation causes energy to be put into the system. If you know your classical physics, think of Work, which is equal to force times displacement. When the material is unstressed, the pent up energy dissipates itself as reverse Work; it reforms back to its original length. Steel is considered a simple material because before yield, a graph displaying stress plotted against strain would be a straight line. This linear stress-strain behavior is referred to as elastic behavior.
At yield stress, elastic behavior in a material ceases. The ratio of added strain to added stress increases about fivefold. Also, when the material is unstressed, it only recovers length equal to the strain at yield. The remaining deformation is permanent. This happens because the Work done by the stress is dissipated by other means, mainly as heat. Remember that, HEAT. If the stress is continually increased to ultimate stress, it will begin to weaken and then suddenly fracture. Ultimate stress is the maximum stress a material can ever undergo before it starts to weaken and fractures. All the while between yield and fracture, energy is being released from the material as heat.
A progressive collapse infers that structural components, in this case steel beams and columns, are deforming and fracturing at a very high rate. I propose that the countless steel components, deforming and fracturing in a matter of seconds, released enough energy in the form of heat to melt a portion of the debris, thus causing the pools of molten steel at the bottom. Any discussion is welcomed, especially considering that I am not sure how strain-rate effects would affect my supposition.
This country the article speaks of was the United States' bitter rival for over 50 years, and between the two, the shape of politics throughout the entire world was molded. Russia was supposedly won over by our plan for government, was supposedly no longer a threat to us, but when we look over there now, we see a country that is falling into the same millenia-old habits and a country that probably deep down still holds a lot of resentment of the United States of America.
How does this not effect our foreign policy and our politics?
I also think it's interesting that GM and Daimler were mentioned considering that the only reason they got into this area of research is because they have lost considerable market share to Honda and Toyota, major automakers that preceded them in focusing on making more environmentally friendly vehicles.
What if we solved global warming a few hundred years from now, reversed a lot of the temperature increases we found we are directly responsible for, and over that time the Earth's orbit/rotation changed such that an Ice Age was triggered? Oh noes! Suddenly global warming doesn't seem all that bad, does it?
Suppose again someone in charge actually accepted my supposition and decided global warming research was pointless.
IANAL, so someone please clarify:
Can the **AAs also sue the Youtube creators who now own 1.65 billion in Google stock, or is their a statute of limitations on copyright infringement? Can they be held liable since they did not directly control what users uploaded?
That doesn't change the fact that people will have positive expectations for a company only because they associate that company with the "good old days" of gaming. That's the only reason I'm pulling for them.
The truth is, Nintendo is only a possible frontrunner; all prior indications would suggest that they will be in second place at best throughout this generation. We have to go with facts from the past and not speculation about the future, and in the past, Nintendo has been the company doing everything wrong, including their licensing practices (read: alienation of third parties), to their abandonment of the CD format (read: creation of the Playstation monster). Also, saying the Nintendo DS's success is an indication of rosy prospects for the Wii is akin to saying that the GBA's success would help move Gamecube to the top of the home console hill.
Actually let's assume this logic. Let's assume that for every PS2 sold, a PS3 would be purchased and that for every GBA, DS, and Gamecube sold, a Wii would be purchased. In this case, the PS3 would outsell the Wii.
All this muck is tough to sift through, and what's going to happen is far from known. Just look at what happened in the PS1/N64/Saturn generation. That's the generation that I had to turn to two different consoles to get what I got from my beloved Super Nintendo, the generation that Japan's once most profitable corporation took a backseat to the new guys without any indication that it was going to happen.
I have a question about Wikipedia's numbers. What is the definition (as in word meaning) of HDTV the article assumes? Do they mean full, true HD, 1080p? Or do they mean a resolution below 1080p that under FCC rules can still be called HD even though it isn't by definition? My family just bought a 1366x768 LCD from Polaroid for 900 US. It has an HDMI port, but does it count as HD? It's only 768p.
Another question that popped into my mind as I was typing this; how many households have multiple HDTVs? In other words, how many households have multiple TVs, but only one HDTV as their main TV. That's how my house is under the assumption that the 768p LCD is considered an HDTV. What if the Wikipedia stat meant 10% of every televisions ever purchased in the US was an HDTV?
In any case, what my argument would be is that there is no good way to correlate the possible market the PS3 has based on how many households in the US have HDTVs. There are way too many variables.
I would argue that this "art and culture" you speak did develop through evolution.
The whole paradigm of art evolves with the tastes of those in power. When someone in power develops taste for some form of expression, like say Queen Elizabeth for the works of Shakespeare, all those around that person will develop a taste for this "art" in order to climb the ladder themselves. No painting becomes widely appreciated as art until some millionaire decides to drop a fat wad of cash to hang it in his home...and why do they bother? Because millionaires are expected to like art.
Human societies are extremely complex beings. Culture and art develops because many individuals are making decisions consciously and subconsciously to adopt the tastes of the many in order to survive in their societies. Say what you will, but if you look on the 100th floor of skyscrapers around the world, everyone you see is wearing a business suit (unless they are the janitor). That's no coincidence.
Slashdot Mirror
Cable and Netflix serve the exact same purpose: they deliver the video content of their choice. With DVR and "On Demand" the temporal flexibility of cable is somewhat competitive but still lacking when compared to an anytime, any device set up. I think DirecTV is starting to foray into smartphone streaming, but they are a few years behind the curve.
It simply comes down to cost. Cable TV is around 40-100 dollars a month depending on how much content you want. The cable line does nothing else but get you a discount on internet and phone service. Netflix plus an internet connection is 40-60 dollars, and you get the entire internet to go along with it, as well as just about the entire library of movies and TV in existence on hard copy if you want it. Online content may be lacking, but it is available anytime on several devices.
Cable as you say provides a much better quality stream (as long as it's on a wire), but it is a closed system with low utility that costs far too much. Cable companies are firmly entrenched in the American market and they still have a nice ISP business that will be hard to knock out. Nevertheless, if they don't get their prices down they are going to start seeing their market share erode significantly in the entertainment sector.
Precisely! If I were the company demonstrating the mesh, I'd put it on the front side as well-- at least that way they would get a confinement effect and the wall wouldn't be as traumatized. Those bricks have no gravity capacity in the state they are shown, even though the mesh on the back is preventing them from falling.
This kind of material have been used in seismic retrofit for years, and if you, the audience, have enough idle time for a long story, you can read on to see why. For a long time, up until the 1994 Northridge earthquake, concrete columns in the US that were not part of a lateral force resisting system were designed to have just enough vertical and horizontal spiral steel (usually none at the beam-column joints) to resist their respective gravity demands. Look up 1994 Cal State Northridge Parking Garage on Google, and you'll see what happened to buildings with this kind of design.
What happens is when a building moves laterally, the columns have to move to even if they aren't designed to dissipate the forces resuting from the building's lateral movement. Without the horizontal steel, the columns are not adequately "confined." When concrete is compressed, just like any other material, it wants to expand outward (not a desirable option with a brittle solid like concrete). Confinement resists these expansive forces and thus increases the compressive capacity of the concrete. When the structure above or below moves laterally, the column bends, and bending puts part of the column in compression and another in tension. Concrete has negligible tensile capacity, so the vertical steel is used to resist the tensile stress. Without confinement, the column's compressive capacity is lower than the tensile capacity of the steel. Concrete is brittle, and thus fractures, losing all of its strength. This is what happened to the Cal State Northridge Parking Structure; with the gravity system destroyed, the decks collapsed, and the walls fell inward with no diaphragm to support them. Had the columns adequate confinement, the column's compressive capacity would have exceeded its tensile capacity. Steel is ductile, and thus will elongate instead of fracturing, which will only occur at a much higher demand. Even with the steel straining, the column moving back and forth, and the thin layer of surface concrete spalling off, the confined portion of concrete within the steel stays intact, thus preserving the gravity system well enough to prevent collapse.
Current design codes, inspired by the garage collapse as well as others throughout Los Angeles as a result of this event, require a certain amount of confining steel over the entire length of the column. With existing structures, this is not an option. Thin composite jackets, probably the same material as the product from the article, have been shown to be extremely effective when wrapped around unsatisfactory columns in providing confinement.
Games aren't the only applications that would benefit from what OnLive is researching and developing; as such, I imagine Autodesk is very interested in this kind of infrastructure. AutoCAD and Revit both demand a lot of computer resources, and since the licenses for these programs are relatively expensive, fronting both the cash for licenses and the high-end computers to run the programs may be prohibitive for some companies.
To parrot a tidbit I picked up off of Wikipedia and to reinforce the parent's point:
While the value of Ï has been computed to more than a trillion (10^12) digits, elementary applications, such as calculating the circumference of a circle, will rarely require more than a dozen decimal places. For example, a value truncated to 11 decimal places is accurate enough to calculate the circumference of a circle the size of the earth with a precision of a millimeter, and one truncated to 39 decimal places is sufficient to compute the circumference of any circle that fits in the observable universe to a precision comparable to the size of a hydrogen atom.
From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pi#Numerical_value with footnote markers removed.
For the sake of argument, suppose that the method employed by the student to cover the distance in a short amount of time was itself illegal (surpassing posted speed limits). The student has himself on tape breaking said speed limits. Are contracts that implicitly prescribe illegal actions such as the contract in question enforceable? Even if not implicitly prescribed, could the student's fulfillment of the contract be voided since he broke the speed limit to do so?
What this may look like is me trying to get free legal advice. It is actually my curiosity lazily attempting to sate itself.
I was listening to NPR's All Things Considered yesterday (7/15/09) and they had a profile on a California start-up developing algae-sourced fuel in partnership with Exxon-Mobil.
Oil companies aren't stupid. They invest heavily in all of the R&D for these alternative sources of fuel so they can oligopolize it when any of the research produces something practical.
The government is accountable to the people, but only insofar as the Constitution allows. What I say is beside the point that the coloring book was a pretty bad idea.
Is it censorship? I don't know, and I don't care if it is in this particular case. I just know that the book was available on FEMA's site for SIX YEARS. I wonder how many kids' minds it put at ease in that time.
Recent events have led me to believe that the ToS was changed because Facebook is beginning to delve into TV promotion. I think it was during the NBA All-Star Game that I saw a Facebook plug in one of the overlays that came up. If they are going to be putting up any user-generated content in their ads (which to me seems wholly unnecessary), they'll need to cover their backs by claiming free use of all submitted content as a term of service.
Of course very few if any people like the idea that they can't opt out of being data mined and sub-licensed once they've signed up, and thus the backlash.
The article summary mentions building codes, which is an industry standard. I have knowledge of building codes being a structural engineer so I use them as an example to help frame my arguments.
The 2007 California Building Code is not copyrighted. However, it draws almost exclusively from the International Building Code (IBC), which is copyrighted and published by the International Code Council (ICC). ICC is a non-profit organization dedicated to the development of model building codes as well as the testing and approval of construction products. The ICC has no financial interest in what it does (in principle), and makes legitimate use of copyright to continue its work.
Should government should be allowed to adopt and enforce copyrighted works as law? If so, who should be responsible for the costs of distributing the law to the citizens? I do not believe that a work should lose the property of being copyrighted when entered into the law; however, it could easily be argued as legally allowable under the guise of eminent domain. The state, and thus its citizens, should realize the fact that adopting copyrighted material as law requires them paying for it. The ICC and all other organizations that develop industry standards should reevaluate whether it is ethical and/or reasonable to create and copyright material which is intended to be adopted into law.
In the end, it is what Weaselmancer brought up in a sibling post: a "broken business model." I believe the state should budget and pay the code councils to do the work and get it distributed rather than indirectly and unequally tax their constituency by making them pay for the published materials (I disclose that I am one of those being disproportionately taxed).
My dorm-mates and I played a couple rounds of Assassin at university too. It was a lot of fun, so we were very disappointed when the university banned the rolled up socks we used as weapons because they looked too much like hand grenades.
The difference becomes even larger when one considers how much work that extra money can do when invested coming right out of college.
I'll illustrate with personal experience. I did five years of college total for a B.S and M.S. in structural engineering (in my estimation the least compensated of all engineering fields). Now in my first job, I have the luxury of not living paycheck to paycheck and I can invest 10% of my gross pay into retirement. I'm 23 years old, and barring a market crash, economy collapse, major medical expense, or the bearing of 17 children (Though based on current trends I don't even project to having 1), I already feel confident I have the financial means I require now and for the future.
It is unfortunate that the official investigation was so rushed. People wanted answers, they were given them, and they were not correct, as the story has been revised multiple times. It should be noted however, that the quick disposal of the steel is not out of the ordinary. When the I-880 connector collapsed last month in the Bay Area, the steel was very quickly disposed of, and the professor who got the grant to study the collapse only had a small number of days to go to the steel recycler and actually reclaim the larger steel elements essential to the investigation. This however, does not excuse how poorly the aftermath was handled at Ground Zero.
Back to the heat from collapse...
I'm not arguing that the softening steel exposed to fire is contributing much heat to itself to melt, but rather that 80 stories of pancaking steel and concrete released enough energy and generated enough friction as well that there was sufficient heat to melt pockets of debris. As for experimenting, the event is non-repeatable, since no one is going to build a structure of this magnitude simply to collapse it, and high-rise collapses of this magnitude have never occurred before.
To address the fire, I would like to say that skyscrapers don't collapse from fire because none of them were under the same conditions, which included burning jet fuel and exposed, non-fireproofed steel. Bare structural steel is usually fireproofed; concrete-encased steel is considered adequately fireproofed just by being concrete-encased. In the case of the WTC, the planes crashed through the side of the building and cut out about roughly 1/4 of the columns, and shattered the core's concrete cover, typically 1.5 inches thick (probably more in this case), thus exposing the steel. Even further, the steel supporting the floor was fire-proofed, and since fireproofing is very brittle, it all got knocked off by the impact (The reason they don't fireproof steel bridges is that the vibrations in the bridge caused by traffic are enough to cause steel fireproofing to spall off). The World Trade Center buildings are truly exceptional cases.
WTC 7 is a complete mystery, so any theory is valid at this point. It's plausible that side impact significantly damaged the structure, as other WTC buildings suffered similar damage. I think the prevailing alternative explanation is that eutectic reactions, which means some sort of sulfites caused steel to vaporize in spots (so far as I understood it), as steel pulled from that building had vaporized pockets. The source of the sulfites is up for speculation; explosives (sounds ridiculous to me) or burning furniture (even more ridiculous to me) could be at fault. Sounds crazy to me.
Steel is favored for building because its material behavior is relatively simple. Structural steel is classified most importantly by its yield and ultimate strengths. "Strength" of a material refers to the amount of pressure (force per area) that can be applied to it before it reaches a limit state, in this case either yield or ultimate. Pressure is referred to in engineering jargon as stress. Deformations caused by stress are usually measured as strain, defined as [length of deformation]/[original length of material]. For example, if a steel column were 120 inches long and were to shorten 0.12 inches under a stress (such as floor resting on it) the strain would be 0.001.
Now for the limit states I mentioned before: yield and ultimate. Up until yield stress, any deformation in the material will reverse when stress is removed from the material. In other words, that column I mentioned before that shortened 0.12 inches, if you removed the stress from it, assuming it hasn't yielded yet, it will return to its original length. The reason for this is because when a material is stressed, the deformation causes energy to be put into the system. If you know your classical physics, think of Work, which is equal to force times displacement. When the material is unstressed, the pent up energy dissipates itself as reverse Work; it reforms back to its original length. Steel is considered a simple material because before yield, a graph displaying stress plotted against strain would be a straight line. This linear stress-strain behavior is referred to as elastic behavior.
At yield stress, elastic behavior in a material ceases. The ratio of added strain to added stress increases about fivefold. Also, when the material is unstressed, it only recovers length equal to the strain at yield. The remaining deformation is permanent. This happens because the Work done by the stress is dissipated by other means, mainly as heat. Remember that, HEAT. If the stress is continually increased to ultimate stress, it will begin to weaken and then suddenly fracture. Ultimate stress is the maximum stress a material can ever undergo before it starts to weaken and fractures. All the while between yield and fracture, energy is being released from the material as heat.
A progressive collapse infers that structural components, in this case steel beams and columns, are deforming and fracturing at a very high rate. I propose that the countless steel components, deforming and fracturing in a matter of seconds, released enough energy in the form of heat to melt a portion of the debris, thus causing the pools of molten steel at the bottom. Any discussion is welcomed, especially considering that I am not sure how strain-rate effects would affect my supposition.
This country the article speaks of was the United States' bitter rival for over 50 years, and between the two, the shape of politics throughout the entire world was molded. Russia was supposedly won over by our plan for government, was supposedly no longer a threat to us, but when we look over there now, we see a country that is falling into the same millenia-old habits and a country that probably deep down still holds a lot of resentment of the United States of America.
How does this not effect our foreign policy and our politics?
I also think it's interesting that GM and Daimler were mentioned considering that the only reason they got into this area of research is because they have lost considerable market share to Honda and Toyota, major automakers that preceded them in focusing on making more environmentally friendly vehicles.
What if we solved global warming a few hundred years from now, reversed a lot of the temperature increases we found we are directly responsible for, and over that time the Earth's orbit/rotation changed such that an Ice Age was triggered? Oh noes! Suddenly global warming doesn't seem all that bad, does it?
Suppose again someone in charge actually accepted my supposition and decided global warming research was pointless.
Ok, I'm done making improbable suppositions.
IANAL, so someone please clarify: Can the **AAs also sue the Youtube creators who now own 1.65 billion in Google stock, or is their a statute of limitations on copyright infringement? Can they be held liable since they did not directly control what users uploaded?
The Robber's Cave Study was performed by Muzafer and Carolyn Sharif, not the Iman Sharif who did this study.
(Warning: Offensive language)
http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/1999/04/14
That doesn't change the fact that people will have positive expectations for a company only because they associate that company with the "good old days" of gaming. That's the only reason I'm pulling for them.
The truth is, Nintendo is only a possible frontrunner; all prior indications would suggest that they will be in second place at best throughout this generation. We have to go with facts from the past and not speculation about the future, and in the past, Nintendo has been the company doing everything wrong, including their licensing practices (read: alienation of third parties), to their abandonment of the CD format (read: creation of the Playstation monster). Also, saying the Nintendo DS's success is an indication of rosy prospects for the Wii is akin to saying that the GBA's success would help move Gamecube to the top of the home console hill.
Actually let's assume this logic. Let's assume that for every PS2 sold, a PS3 would be purchased and that for every GBA, DS, and Gamecube sold, a Wii would be purchased. In this case, the PS3 would outsell the Wii.
All this muck is tough to sift through, and what's going to happen is far from known. Just look at what happened in the PS1/N64/Saturn generation. That's the generation that I had to turn to two different consoles to get what I got from my beloved Super Nintendo, the generation that Japan's once most profitable corporation took a backseat to the new guys without any indication that it was going to happen.
10% of every televisions... was an HDTV = 10% of all televisions... were HDTVs.
I have a question about Wikipedia's numbers. What is the definition (as in word meaning) of HDTV the article assumes? Do they mean full, true HD, 1080p? Or do they mean a resolution below 1080p that under FCC rules can still be called HD even though it isn't by definition? My family just bought a 1366x768 LCD from Polaroid for 900 US. It has an HDMI port, but does it count as HD? It's only 768p.
Another question that popped into my mind as I was typing this; how many households have multiple HDTVs? In other words, how many households have multiple TVs, but only one HDTV as their main TV. That's how my house is under the assumption that the 768p LCD is considered an HDTV. What if the Wikipedia stat meant 10% of every televisions ever purchased in the US was an HDTV?
In any case, what my argument would be is that there is no good way to correlate the possible market the PS3 has based on how many households in the US have HDTVs. There are way too many variables.
Yes, because they are actually patenting and charging almost the entire human race royalties to conjugate verbs.
Read it again.
http://wii.ign.com/articles/711/711629p1.html
There's no confirmation yet as to prices of classic titles.
I would argue that this "art and culture" you speak did develop through evolution.
The whole paradigm of art evolves with the tastes of those in power. When someone in power develops taste for some form of expression, like say Queen Elizabeth for the works of Shakespeare, all those around that person will develop a taste for this "art" in order to climb the ladder themselves. No painting becomes widely appreciated as art until some millionaire decides to drop a fat wad of cash to hang it in his home...and why do they bother? Because millionaires are expected to like art.
Human societies are extremely complex beings. Culture and art develops because many individuals are making decisions consciously and subconsciously to adopt the tastes of the many in order to survive in their societies. Say what you will, but if you look on the 100th floor of skyscrapers around the world, everyone you see is wearing a business suit (unless they are the janitor). That's no coincidence.