I didn't mean to imply that people in the military are bound to be conservative.
What I mean is that because you require politicians to be part of a certain group of people you limit the voters choice. The "certain kinds" phrase wasn't meant to allude to anything.
In this particular case you would force the politicians to go through an institution which is made up of people which didn't get there through a democratic process (a meritocratic one certainly, but that is not sufficient). If you aren't fit for the army you can't be a politician either even though you might otherwise qualify. You would give the armed forces way too much power over your lawmakers or over who becomes one.
After all, I don't mind politicians mentioning their military service, you just can't make a law out of it.
BTW, you will have to have a whole bunch of wars to properly train your politicians, I'm not sure this is what you wan't.
>I really wished that there was a mandatory requirement for politicians to serve a tour of duty on the front line.
Sounds like Heinlein but isn't a good idea. It allows only certain kinds of people to become the leader of a country. I think this is not democratic at all. I think one of the ideas behind a democratic society is that every citizen has a say in the political process and no one can take that right away. Allowing only certain kinds of politicians limits the options a voter has to vote for his representative.
There are limits in place of course but even those are debated (see Mr. Schwarzenegger), so I doubt you would ever get lucky with your idea.
In this case you would basically allow the military to run the country and have a monopoly on power. As much as Heinlein was a cheerleader for the US I think puting this idea to work would do your country a disservice.
The political process doesn't exist for itself and shouldn't be abolished just because it would give you the leader you would like to see in power (John McCain?, he would probably object). It is a safeguard against people monopolizing power. As it is with all safety measures they are cumbersome but it is pointless to have them afterwards.
You might be well aware of all this but sometimes the obvious needs to be spelt out.
I had a look what might happen and found the following ingredients:
"THE WORKS" TOILET BOWL CLEANER *32 oz. *Eliminates stains *Active ingredients: Hydrocloric Acid 20% Rodine 50.1%,Perfumes.1%
Ok, so you make hydrogen and don't even ignite it.
Interestingly the Rodine should block the corrosion of the metal but it doesn't do so sufficiently to prevent your experiment.
Here is an example by Henkel:
"Rodine® 213â is an organic, liquid, cationic corrosion inhibitor especially designed to inhibit the attack of hydrochloric acid on iron and steel during industrial cleaning operations. It also inhibits acid attack on copper and brass. It does not contain arsenic, chlorinated hydrocarbons, or lead compounds. The addition of Rodine 213 inhibitor to hydrochloric acid solution provides maximum protection for equipment during: a. The removal of lime deposits or water scale from power plant boilers and piping systems and from evaporating equipment. b. The removal of scale and deposits from equipment in refineries, utility companies, paper mills, chemical plants and other industries. Rodine 213 meets the requirements of Military Specification Nos. MIL-I-17433 and MIL-C-17434."
Funny I just made two comments which could be construed as being pro Russian. Maybe I should check for which side I'm writing.
I wouldn't go as far as accusing foreign governments of messing with Slashdot. I suspect its just the usual patriots. This would be entirely sufficient for what you are seeing.
I'm sprinkling more articles in than some Russian posters but it might easily happen, that I take a not entirely western position just because I want to play the devils advocate and because there might be hypocrisy in our claims to moral superiority.
Let me remind you that you might easily get diverging opinions on an international site like Slashdot. I find it helpful in combating excessive black and white painting by our own PR. Whether it helps to get the truth out is another issue entirely.
For your entertainment here is a link about articles:
If you want to achieve a goal other than total annihilation of an opponent (glass parking lot) you leave open the possibility of a conventional war or limited nuclear war. Especially geographical closeness could enforce a conventional war.
Notice that in the second world war Germany didn't use Chemical weapons because it didn't want to bring them into the game for fear of retaliation and reduced usefulness. The same thing might apply in future conflicts, you can't nuke the territory you want to occupy.
Just face it, in the end even bad guys want to live.
Also notice that we might find attacking states like North Korea or Iran unpleasant right now because our highly developed (I have no better words) societies have too much to loose from a couple of stray nukes or terror attacks. But just imagine we were more like China or Russia, whole new possibilities for engagement with erratic neighbors would emerge.
The question is whether they use guided bombs. I would think though that guided bombs are far more efficient. You would need far less bombs to achieve a certain goal, this could reduce the number of planes to use in a mission and who knows what kind of infrastructure is necessary to run the whole effort. Given that Russia is also running a PR war the added benefit of only hitting what they want may factor into their considerations as well.
Here is a link claiming that their ground weapons used are inaccurate:
So and what are you doing about a bunch of drunk guys peeing into the corners? Certainly we would have to do a study who adds more nitrogen to the environment.
This kind of thinking turns up way too often. The titanium oxide exists in nature as such and as a catalyst remains unchanged for ever. You can't beat that.
The same silly thinking comes up with power plants. Oh but it takes a lot of energy to mine such and such. BS! You can read:
They have nice tables on how much energy you invest into most technologies to get another amount of energy out, and guess what you always get more out. Just some look worse than others like biofuels and nuclear energy (sniff, my nuclear fanboyism just got demolished)
Just as a side note if you can't quantify your gut feel read up on it and prevent yourself from sounding silly.
This is remarkable, Larrabee is a fairly low resolution area, what are you guys trying to hide? Also notice the rectangular street patterns, uncanny how it resembles a chip layout.
So are you renaming one of those streets into memory lane, the parking lot in front of the bank into Cache Plaza maybe...
Thanks, you just made me have a look at Almasi and Gottlieb (1994) again, where else would I need it than on slashdot. Chapter 10 Section 3 and following is good to have a look at.
Your last statement leaves me puzzled. It seems that you must have something to connect caches and memory with so we could be content with a simple bus which A&G describes as existing in Sequents cost effective machines.
When you read further you come across the KSR1 which uses a hierarchical ring architecture, sporting large cashes which connect straight to disk through a second level cache. So there is no memory in our sense. Well I mean a ring is better than a bus, it gives the end nodes the same connectivity as all the other ones.
The Networking chapter in A&G mentions other networks with much stronger connectedness than a ring but never mind CELL proves it right it seems also from their performance prediction shown on their wiki page.
Anyway, I think that the difference between CELL and Larrabie is that Intel is pandering heavily to the slowest element in the computing environment - the programmer/user. Same old instruction set, simpler memory architecture (I'm not sure about your DMA only comment), lots of vague information about a product which is at least two years out while trying to keep up with the other guys, sounds like Intel. Funny enough they have 45nm now, and also with IA64 they tried to offer something with entertainment value to assembly programmers, so I can't even be angry.
I must get some sleep now. Wake me up when something surprisingly new in CS comes up.
>I think that the Germans [wikipedia.org] would have something to say about that:)
Thanks for reminding me to hide my thumbs.
But independently of that I never heard much about Fahrenheit when I was young. Instead my grandfather had a thermometer with Celsius and Reaumur scale on it. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R%C3%A9aumur_scale
This is probably because France was all the rage over here before the US became the new kid on the block. How you guys got stuck with Fahrenheit is beyond me though.
All nationalist instincts aside, he still broke into other peoples computers. That should be punished somehow.
You would ask now which countries law should apply. Did he enter the other through the internet or did he remain in Britain?
I could understand that a sovereign UK would want to protect its people for all sorts of reasons, but so does the US.
For something as international as the internet there should be an international law too and believe me it will come somehow if the world stays as interconnected as it is right now (and not just through the internet).
In case you are worried about the extradition treaty, there are people in the US who think they got short changed, so it seems fairly symmetric.
After all, if the US one day gets more civilized I expect you guys to become some sort of early adopters of international law unless the US loses its influence in some drastic way, which I doubt that it will.
>Secondly, it's unlikely that if 20g to orbit is $2000, 200g to orbit will be $20000.
My assumption was that this rocket is either your only means to space and you have to assemble in orbit (I don't know how), or that for comparison you hitch a ride and pay by weight. Then having the Kg to orbit price helps comparing your options. However I doubt that you can get away with only paying for the weight, probably they let you pay for a part of the launch service and that won't be cheap.
Also I just read somewhere (not just your comment) that hitching a ride is difficult and only infrequently an option.
The reason this might not be entirely illegitimate a comparison is that the N-Prize doesn't require you to put the licensing and other non-technical stuff on the budget to win the prize, so in our wonderful world of engineering we only pay for the price to put a kilogram into orbit.
Just as a side note regarding the non-technical aspect, if you plan to go into orbit you are most probably exceeding the amateur rocket class and you need a license from the FAA for an ELV:
I don't know how much this costs but I fear you are going to lose as a hobbyist just because of the requirements. The guys from Cambridge may have a better chance to pull this off I guess.
Also notice that the US is said to have the least complex regulations for you to reach space as a commercial enterprise for instance, so I wonder whether you will find an easier country to deal with.
I agree with your third point but it holds some promise. Spaceflight has driven miniaturization and it will continue to do so unless some drastically cheaper way to orbit comes along. Also the N-Prize requirement says that your payload should not weigh more than 19.99g.
This wouldn't even make too much sense since with that kind of money a kilogram in orbit would cost around 50000 pound. There are much cheaper means of getting to orbit:
I agree with this a lot. Nowadays the connectivity of a micro controller is much better than my C64 ever had. All those ad converter and GPIO pins just beat those pathetic game controller ports. Also they are easily extensible through ports like I2C which is pretty much kid friendly with its four lines, nothing like this C64 extension port.
Just make sure that uC doesn't have banked register files, switching register banks is a pain you needn't inflict upon your kid.
I mean there are always alternatives, you could even use MacOS. (not windows though)
I do have a bit of an issue with some developments. Some supposedly user friendly Linux installations think they should also be fool proof. Like certain NAS solutions, or maybe even Ubuntu which I'm using right now. There really are machine generated and machine controlled config files in/etc. To control the config file control process you have to edit certain configuration files in a hard to find location.
People, this is counterintuitive! Call me old fashioned but if I change a config file in/etc I mean it. I don't need some clippy like demon thingy to tell me that I can only edit its own configuration. It should be able to read the darn/etc file if it is that smart. If/etc isn't expressive enough invent something else and don't leave old stuff around.
Honestly I appreciate kdawsons positive attitude toward us and our progressive ways of putting benefits for society before potential downsides only a tree hugging hippie could worry about. (I'm liberally reading his mind here.)
I would like to remind you though that at least one of us treasures his individualism even more, and to think that someone could read someone else's thoughts is frankly said threatening.
Likewise. The following link lists uranium mines. With Australia having 40% of the reserves you would expect some mention of Exxon as i.e. Billitons top ten shareholder or something, but there is no such thing.
If they are right, then Exxon had a huge interest in nuclear energy or at least nuclear fuel, just where those 80% mineral rights come from I just don't understand.
Also I can't find much new info of Exxons uranium. Probably they don't want to talk much about this right now.
Now now - I didn't learn English so you guys can be lazy or just to be polite;).
I started to learn English because a lot of interesting stuff has been written in it, because maybe I owed it to the western world, and also because I wanted to understand the culture a bit better than second hand information allows me to.
If you go abroad to experience a different culture, and I think this is what you should do, then you should spent some effort in learning the language. Otherwise you will not enjoy it much unless your life mainly consists of work and the rest of it is just an annex. You will not be able to do much beside work because your engineering job or the like is the main place where people speak English thanks to the careful selection of HR. For anything outside work you will need to speak the local language because people without much exposure to English language, and just face it not all that many people get to go to university or abroad where they actually need it, can't really offer much in the way of a conversation otherwise.
I have met some Americans around here and the better their language skills were the better they were integrated. Some actually have a life beyond just coming to work.
You could just try to have a chat with some intern from abroad to get an idea how cumbersome a conversation can be when you have to think a while until you can form a sentence which conveys the meaning you want to get across, or when you just don't find the right idiom to express some thought which comes to you naturally in your native language, and finally when you pronounce the words you found in a way the other guy just can't understand them. You may be all nice and patient with the intern but it is just not the same.
BTW, if you are going through anything like a culture shock lacking linguistic ability is just going to aggravate the situation. That means that you get out of the basement even less often than some jokesters around here already claim you do.
Ultimately you have to get this language issue out of the way to immerse yourself into the other culture.
Some American colleague told me that after his stay in Germany home wasn't quite the same anymore. Who knows, you could argue that a different culture gives you a whole different view on things. Maybe that what you had to put up with at home wasn't really necessary after all, or that what other peoples subject them selfs to is good not to have at home.
Actually most exchange student programs encourage Americans as well as foreign students to go abroad . I like the symmetry of it so please go out into the world and visit us foreign people.
then only if some large blood vessels are extended. So theoretically if you have a splitting headache from a glass of red wine or a migraine you can always tell yourself your brain is not directly involved.
There are actually brain operations where the patient is awake and probably doesn't feel much pain.
Slashdot Mirror
I didn't mean to imply that people in the military are bound to be conservative.
What I mean is that because you require politicians to be part of a certain group of people you limit the voters choice. The "certain kinds" phrase wasn't meant to allude to anything.
In this particular case you would force the politicians to go through an institution which is made up of people which didn't get there through a democratic process (a meritocratic one certainly, but that is not sufficient). If you aren't fit for the army you can't be a politician either even though you might otherwise qualify. You would give the armed forces way too much power over your lawmakers or over who becomes one.
After all, I don't mind politicians mentioning their military service, you just can't make a law out of it.
BTW, you will have to have a whole bunch of wars to properly train your politicians, I'm not sure this is what you wan't.
>I really wished that there was a mandatory requirement for politicians to serve a tour of duty on the front line.
Sounds like Heinlein but isn't a good idea. It allows only certain kinds of people to become the leader of a country. I think this is not democratic at all. I think one of the ideas behind a democratic society is that every citizen has a say in the political process and no one can take that right away. Allowing only certain kinds of politicians limits the options a voter has to vote for his representative.
There are limits in place of course but even those are debated (see Mr. Schwarzenegger), so I doubt you would ever get lucky with your idea.
In this case you would basically allow the military to run the country and have a monopoly on power. As much as Heinlein was a cheerleader for the US I think puting this idea to work would do your country a disservice.
The political process doesn't exist for itself and shouldn't be abolished just because it would give you the leader you would like to see in power (John McCain?, he would probably object). It is a safeguard against people monopolizing power. As it is with all safety measures they are cumbersome but it is pointless to have them afterwards.
You might be well aware of all this but sometimes the obvious needs to be spelt out.
Fascinating!
I had a look what might happen and found the following ingredients:
"THE WORKS" TOILET BOWL CLEANER *32 oz. *Eliminates stains *Active ingredients: Hydrocloric Acid 20% Rodine 50.1%,Perfumes .1%
Ok, so you make hydrogen and don't even ignite it.
Interestingly the Rodine should block the corrosion of the metal but it doesn't do so sufficiently to prevent your experiment.
Here is an example by Henkel:
"Rodine® 213â is an organic, liquid, cationic corrosion inhibitor especially designed to inhibit the attack of hydrochloric acid on iron and steel during industrial cleaning operations. It also inhibits acid attack on copper and brass. It does not contain arsenic, chlorinated hydrocarbons, or lead compounds. The addition of Rodine 213 inhibitor to hydrochloric acid solution provides maximum protection for equipment during: a. The removal of lime deposits or water scale from power plant boilers and piping systems and from evaporating equipment. b. The removal of scale and deposits from equipment in refineries, utility companies, paper mills, chemical plants and other industries. Rodine 213 meets the requirements of Military Specification Nos. MIL-I-17433 and MIL-C-17434."
Funny I just made two comments which could be construed as being pro Russian. Maybe I should check for which side I'm writing.
I wouldn't go as far as accusing foreign governments of messing with Slashdot. I suspect its just the usual patriots. This would be entirely sufficient for what you are seeing.
I'm sprinkling more articles in than some Russian posters but it might easily happen, that I take a not entirely western position just because I want to play the devils advocate and because there might be hypocrisy in our claims to moral superiority.
Let me remind you that you might easily get diverging opinions on an international site like Slashdot. I find it helpful in combating excessive black and white painting by our own PR. Whether it helps to get the truth out is another issue entirely.
For your entertainment here is a link about articles:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Article_(grammar)
Nukes won't prevent war.
If you want to achieve a goal other than total annihilation of an opponent (glass parking lot) you leave open the possibility of a conventional war or limited nuclear war. Especially geographical closeness could enforce a conventional war.
Notice that in the second world war Germany didn't use Chemical weapons because it didn't want to bring them into the game for fear of retaliation and reduced usefulness. The same thing might apply in future conflicts, you can't nuke the territory you want to occupy.
Just face it, in the end even bad guys want to live.
Also notice that we might find attacking states like North Korea or Iran unpleasant right now because our highly developed (I have no better words) societies have too much to loose from a couple of stray nukes or terror attacks. But just imagine we were more like China or Russia, whole new possibilities for engagement with erratic neighbors would emerge.
They do have laser guided bombs:
http://eng.ktrv.ru/production_eng/323/518/519/
So this is the accuracy I guess:
Root mean square deviation, m : 4 - 7
Lets see what comparable bombs the us has:
http://www.fas.org/man/dod-101/sys/smart/gbu-27.htm
has a CEP of 8 but the GPS + some other Laser guided ones are better.
Someone mentioned the lack of Glonass guided bombs though:
http://www.defencetalk.com/forums/archive/index.php/t-4381.html
The question is whether they use guided bombs. I would think though that guided bombs are far more efficient. You would need far less bombs to achieve a certain goal, this could reduce the number of planes to use in a mission and who knows what kind of infrastructure is necessary to run
the whole effort. Given that Russia is also running a PR war the added benefit of only hitting what they want may factor into their considerations as well.
Here is a link claiming that their ground weapons used are inaccurate:
http://pajamasmedia.com/richardfernandez/2008/08/09/whos-winning-in-georgia/
Clearly we should have Onion Funny and HaHa Funny as moderator tags. That way we would know when to cringe and when to smile.
You should have asked for this honour thingy during WW1 maybe.
Never mind the mods I love your choice of words. I mean this is educational.
So and what are you doing about a bunch of drunk guys peeing into the corners? Certainly we would have to do a study who adds more nitrogen to the environment.
This kind of thinking turns up way too often. The titanium oxide exists in nature as such and as a catalyst remains unchanged for ever. You can't beat that.
The same silly thinking comes up with power plants. Oh but it takes a lot of energy to mine such and such. BS! You can read:
http://www.amazon.com/Food-Energy-Society-David-Pimentel/dp/0870813862
They have nice tables on how much energy you invest into most technologies to get another amount of energy out, and guess what you always get more out. Just some look worse than others like biofuels and nuclear energy (sniff, my nuclear fanboyism just got demolished)
Just as a side note if you can't quantify your gut feel read up on it and prevent yourself from sounding silly.
This is remarkable, Larrabee is a fairly low resolution area, what are you guys trying to hide?
Also notice the rectangular street patterns, uncanny how it resembles a chip layout.
So are you renaming one of those streets into memory lane, the parking lot in front of the bank into Cache Plaza maybe ...
Thanks, you just made me have a look at Almasi and Gottlieb (1994) again, where else would I need it than on slashdot. Chapter 10 Section 3 and following is good to have a look at.
Your last statement leaves me puzzled. It seems that you must have something to connect caches and memory with so we could be content with a simple bus which A&G describes as existing in Sequents cost effective machines.
When you read further you come across the KSR1 which uses a hierarchical ring architecture, sporting large cashes which connect straight to disk through a second level cache. So there is no memory in our sense. Well I mean a ring is better than a bus, it gives the end nodes the same connectivity as all the other ones.
Notice also that in Larrabie according to an Annandtech article, somebody mentioned here, the L2 is a per node L2. http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/intel/showdoc.aspx?i=3367&p=3
The Networking chapter in A&G mentions other networks with much stronger connectedness than a ring but never mind CELL proves it right it seems also from their performance prediction shown on their wiki page.
Anyway, I think that the difference between CELL and Larrabie is that Intel is pandering heavily to the slowest element in the computing environment - the programmer/user. Same old instruction set, simpler memory architecture (I'm not sure about your DMA only comment), lots of vague information about a product which is at least two years out while trying to keep up with the other guys, sounds like Intel. Funny enough they have 45nm now, and also with IA64 they tried to offer something with entertainment value to assembly programmers, so I can't even be angry.
I must get some sleep now. Wake me up when something surprisingly new in CS comes up.
>I think that the Germans [wikipedia.org] would have something to say about that :)
Thanks for reminding me to hide my thumbs.
But independently of that I never heard much about Fahrenheit when I was young. Instead my grandfather had a thermometer with Celsius and Reaumur scale on it. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R%C3%A9aumur_scale
This is probably because France was all the rage over here before the US became the new kid on the block. How you guys got stuck with Fahrenheit is beyond me though.
All nationalist instincts aside, he still broke into other peoples computers. That should be punished somehow.
You would ask now which countries law should apply. Did he enter the other through the internet or did he remain in Britain?
I could understand that a sovereign UK would want to protect its people for all sorts of reasons, but so does the US.
For something as international as the internet there should be an international law too and believe me it will come somehow if the world stays as interconnected as it is right now (and not just through the internet).
In case you are worried about the extradition treaty, there are people in the US who think they got short changed, so it seems fairly symmetric.
After all, if the US one day gets more civilized I expect you guys to become some sort of early adopters of international law unless the US loses its influence in some drastic way, which I doubt that it will.
>Secondly, it's unlikely that if 20g to orbit is $2000, 200g to orbit will be $20000.
My assumption was that this rocket is either your only means to space and you have to assemble in orbit (I don't know how), or that for comparison you hitch a ride and pay by weight. Then having the Kg to orbit price helps comparing your options. However I doubt that you can get away with only paying for the weight, probably they let you pay for a part of the launch service and that won't be cheap.
Also I just read somewhere (not just your comment) that hitching a ride is difficult and only infrequently an option.
The reason this might not be entirely illegitimate a comparison is that the N-Prize doesn't require you to put the licensing and other non-technical stuff on the budget to win the prize, so in our wonderful world of engineering we only pay for the price to put a kilogram into orbit.
Just as a side note regarding the non-technical aspect, if you plan to go into orbit you are most probably exceeding the amateur rocket class and you need a license from the FAA for an ELV:
http://ecfr.gpoaccess.gov/cgi/t/text/text-idx?c=ecfr;sid=411c0579c5834b8dfae3aee3e75392dd;rgn=div5;view=text;node=14%3A4.0.2.9.9;idno=14;cc=ecfr
I don't know how much this costs but I fear you are going to lose as a hobbyist just because of the requirements. The guys from Cambridge may have a better chance to pull this off I guess.
Also notice that the US is said to have the least complex regulations for you to reach space as a commercial enterprise for instance, so I wonder whether you will find an easier country to deal with.
I agree with your third point but it holds some promise. Spaceflight has driven miniaturization and it will continue to do so unless some drastically cheaper way to orbit comes along. Also the N-Prize requirement says that your payload should not weigh more than 19.99g.
This wouldn't even make too much sense since
with that kind of money a kilogram in orbit would cost around 50000 pound. There are much cheaper means of getting to orbit:
http://www.futron.com/pdf/resource_center/white_papers/FutronLaunchCostWP.pdf
Interestingly small launchers seem to be less efficient than larger ones on average.
Maybe one should just try to hitch a ride.
On the other hand this seems to be a fun project.
I hope they are successful.
I agree with this a lot. Nowadays the connectivity of a micro controller is much better than my C64 ever had. All those ad converter and GPIO pins just beat those pathetic game controller ports. Also they are easily extensible through ports like I2C which is pretty much kid friendly with its four lines, nothing like this C64 extension port.
Just make sure that uC doesn't have banked register files, switching register banks is a pain you needn't inflict upon your kid.
I wouldn't go as far as judging people by their operating system (the one on their computers), its more a matter of where their priorities are.
it just chooses its friends wisely.
I mean there are always alternatives, you could even use MacOS. (not windows though)
I do have a bit of an issue with some developments. Some supposedly user friendly Linux installations /etc. To control the config file control process you have to edit certain configuration files in a hard to find location.
think they should also be fool proof. Like certain NAS solutions, or maybe even Ubuntu which I'm using right now. There really are machine generated and machine controlled config files in
People, this is counterintuitive! Call me old fashioned but if I change a config file in /etc I mean it. I don't need some clippy like demon thingy to tell me that I can only edit its own configuration. It should be able to read the darn /etc file if it is that smart. If /etc isn't expressive enough invent something else and don't leave old stuff around.
There you go, got your two minutes of hate now?
Honestly I appreciate kdawsons positive attitude toward us and our progressive ways of putting benefits for society before potential downsides only a tree hugging hippie could worry about. (I'm liberally reading his mind here.)
I would like to remind you though that at least one of us treasures his individualism even more, and to think that someone could read someone else's thoughts is frankly said threatening.
>I'm deeply dubious of this claim.
Likewise. The following link lists uranium mines. With Australia having 40% of the reserves you would expect some mention of Exxon as i.e. Billitons top ten shareholder or something, but there is no such thing.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_uranium_mines
I stopped after Rio Tinto, Cameco, and Areva and not finding much mention of Exxon anywhere.
However some NGO has some info:
http://www.sea-us.org.au/gulliver/exxon.html
If they are right, then Exxon had a huge interest in nuclear energy or at least nuclear fuel, just where those 80% mineral rights come from I just don't understand.
Also I can't find much new info of Exxons uranium. Probably they don't want to talk much about this right now.
Indeed, but to the lazy (like me) classes help a lot to get started.
Now now - I didn't learn English so you guys can be lazy or just to be polite ;).
I started to learn English because a lot of interesting stuff has been written in it, because maybe I owed it to the western world, and also because I wanted to understand the culture a bit better than second hand information allows me to.
If you go abroad to experience a different culture, and I think this is what you should do, then you should spent some effort in learning the language. Otherwise you will not enjoy it much unless your life mainly consists of work and the rest of it is just an annex. You will not be able to do much beside work because your engineering job or the like is the main place where people speak English thanks to the careful selection of HR. For anything outside work you will need to speak the local language because people without much exposure to English language, and just face it not all that many people get to go to university or abroad where they actually need it, can't really offer much in the way of a conversation otherwise.
I have met some Americans around here and the better their language skills were the better they were integrated. Some actually have a life beyond just coming to work.
You could just try to have a chat with some intern from abroad to get an idea how cumbersome a conversation can be when you have to think a while until you can form a sentence which conveys the meaning you want to get across, or when you just don't find the right idiom to express some thought which comes to you naturally
in your native language, and finally when you pronounce the words you found in a way the other guy just can't understand them. You may be all nice and patient with the intern but it is just not the same.
BTW, if you are going through anything like a culture shock lacking linguistic ability is just going to aggravate the situation. That means that you get out of the basement even less often than some jokesters around here already claim you do.
Ultimately you have to get this language issue out of the way to immerse yourself into the other culture.
Some American colleague told me that after his stay in Germany home wasn't quite the same anymore. Who knows, you could argue that a different culture gives you a whole different view on things. Maybe that what you had to put up with at home wasn't really necessary after all, or that what other peoples subject them selfs to is good not to have at home.
Actually most exchange student programs encourage Americans as well as foreign students to go abroad . I like the symmetry of it so please go out into the world and visit us foreign people.
just to be nit picky I wondered whether he could feel the pain of scooping out the brain.
If the following is right
http://yarchive.net/med/brain_pain.html
then only if some large blood vessels are extended. So theoretically if you have a splitting headache from a glass of red wine or a migraine you can always tell yourself your brain is not directly involved.
There are actually brain operations where the patient is awake and probably doesn't feel much pain.
Hope that helps.