The early bird gets the worm;
I do not care for foods that squirm.
I'll rise at noon to make my rounds
And scoop some coffee from the grounds.
I think that was Ogden Nash, but maybe not.
I don't think it was in the article, so you didn't overlook it. I think it is sort of counter-intuitive, that the building code for your state isn't written by your state, but rather adapted from something a third-party wrote. Certainly it isn't common knowledge outside of the construction industry. I know because I have a copy of the IBC sitting on my desk that I reference constantly and because I had a professional licensure exam based on it.
Building codes, in most places, aren't written by the state. They're mostly adaptations of the International Building Code written by the International Code Council. The 2007 version of the California Building Code is the 2006 IBC with updates. The ICC says they own the copyright to the IBC (and they hold a trademark on it, too) in the hardcopy of the book. It may be that states charge exorbitant fees for a print copy because ICC charges the state.
By posting the CBC, you are certainly posting large portions of work copyrighted by the IBC. Some states publish an addendum to the IBC containing modifications of the IBC, essentially just a booklet saying, "replace section 1609.1.1 with the following...." Those are clearly written by the state and are public information.
Some states post their entire code online at the ICC website, such as Florida, New Jersey and Connecticut. You can read and print, but not save. New York City has their 2008 code (it is based on IBC with heavy modifications) up on the Department of Buildings website available for download. Washington, DC posts their modifications online at their own site. There doesn't seem to be a consensus as to the best way, just what each state wants. Each state has a differing degree of customization, from exact cut-and-paste of the IBC to very specific tailoring in in the structural section.
But, it's probably not even necessary, as blueprints and photos exist on the internet for any target one might find interesting.
You are absolutely correct.
Our project manager was doing a site visit to the George Washington Bridge in New York City. The Port Authority people told him he couldn't take any pictures of the bridge, for security reasons. Never mind that dozens of highway contractors, painting contractors, steel contractors, scaffold contractors and scads of engineering firms, architectural firms, government agencies of all forms and engineering schools have structural drawings in whole or part. Never mind one MILLION hits on Google images. Never mind the Historic American Buildings Survey in the Library of Congress http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/collections/habs_haer/index.html has wonderful high-definition scans of large and medium format film photos. This one is my favorite. You can check the rivet patterns: http://memory.loc.gov/pnp/habshaer/ny/ny1200/ny1264/photos/119063pv.jpg
It has nothing to do with security. It has everything to do with control. Problem is, when I point out the idiocy of the situation, the contradictory rules and the artificial restrictions this security places on good practice, they tell my boss I'm harassing the (Port Authority|ConEd|MTA) employees. I feel it is my duty as a professional engineer to point out the incredibly poor results (both in construction and in intention) of these rules that a layman may not be able or interested to do. It doesn't help that the (PA|CE|MTA) usually guys start with a nasty attytood, no construction background and no project preparation.
Douglas Fir is 1ksi in tension parallel to the grain per the American Forest and Paper Association's National Design Specification. Dense select structural southern yellow pine (a very expensive timber) is 1.65ksi, about as strong as you're going to get out of wood. Standard mild steel is ASTM A36 steel and according to the specification, yields at 36ksi and fractures at 58ksi.
I would clarify your statement about isotropic behavior. For most metals isotropic is the norm, though cast iron, the yardstick in TFA is a notable exception, being stronger in compression than in tension. Cementitious mixtures like concrete, asphalt and masonry are notorious for being anisotropic and used compression-only when used without some sort of tensile reinforcing. Polymer-based stuff, like cellulose-based materials, are anisotropic - it depends on which way the fibers are oriented in relation to the forces.
Steel is very ductile, so you can make shapes with very slender elements. This is why you can have cold-formed steel studs doing the same job as 2x4 timber studs. The weight difference between the two is small - steel at 1.0 pounds per foot versus wood at.8 pounds per foot for a nominal 2x4 shape.
The paper in the TFA has a tensile capacity of 31ksi. That's pretty strong stuff. I can see it used in tensioned-fabric structures like the Dresden Train Station or in temporary enclosures.
The tower is built on alluvial silt, and that's pretty nasty stuff to build on. Modern techniques for such poor soils rely on very large and very stiff concrete mats, like Chicago's skyscrapers, or on piles driven to bedrock like at the beach. One of the temporary stabilizing measures they used for the tower was to stiffen the soil by pumping liquid nitrogen through pipes to freeze the groundwater in the silt to prevent it from subsiding more on the side of the tilt until they figured out a more permanent solution.
If you look at pictures of it (I guarantee, pick any geotechnical book and Pisa will either be the cover or in the first chapter), you'll notice a subtle banana shape. The builders over time knew it was tilting, so they started correcting as they were building.
Another fascinating thing about the tower is that the walls are built of rubble clad with marble facing. The rubble over time subsided, and now the entire weight of the tower is bearing on the thin marble. Some of the tilt-side masonry is under enormous stress, and the very fine joints keep most stress concentrations low.
The book cited in the the summary, Tilt, was an excellent history of Pisa, because the history of the city is completely entwined with the history of the tower. A very fine read, though the hardback book is cut at an angle, so the book, when shelved , tilts back into the shelves.
We Can Remember it for You Wholesale was the basis for Total Recall, and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep was the basis for Bladerunner. Not to enter the debate about whether the movies should have followed the original Philip K. Dick, but you at least have to know the relationships.
Is OpenDWG really in industry standard? You are correct - my copy of ACAD 2006 won't save anything other than various versions of.DWG or.DXF, and it won't export to an openDWG, either. Since a very large proportion of drafters (in my ancecdotal experience, I've run across three in ten years of construction and engineering who use something else) use Autocad, wouldn't it be the case that the.DWG is a de facto standard - more people use it? IntelliCAD et al may claim a standard, but if most people aren't using, it isn't really a standard, is it?
Autodesk does have a.DXF, which I've found to be a reasonable output for various structural analysis packages (like Visual Analysis and STAAD) and some CAM systems. It might also be a proprietary format that they license to developers. The proprietary format sucks because as a de facto industry standard, you have to use ACAD and thus you have to use the hardware, OS and ancillary programs (STAAD, etc) Autodesk supports. No Linux, no Mac OS.
The proprietary format is a lucky move on their part that became a cash cow. If you want to be in the game, you have to be able to communicate with the engineers, architects, suppliers and contractors, most of whom use ACAD. Your new employees all come from school knowing ACAD. You can't change formats if you started with ACAD, because then you have to convert all your old drawings to the new format, plus all your standards, detail libraries and blocks. They've got you by the shorthairs - you've gotta use it and you can't leave it. For exactly the same reasons, you can't evoid it.
Usually, it isn't so easy. We know where the floodprone areas are. We've got FIRMettes [1], flood insurance rate maps that show where the floods are known to happen, and they show the high water marks for the design flood. The problem is that the design flood occurs more frequently now. The spread of suburbia means less agricultural and sylvan land for infiltration, and very efficient storm water management systems that dump right into the river at speed. The weather over the short term seems to favor concentrating precipitation into shorter periods of time. There are more floods of the design flood magnitude and thus the big floods are worse. As an aside, I have a feeling that there will be sweeping changes in what we're required to design for as previous high water events are classified as 50-year and 25-year floods instead of the 100-year tag they carry now.
Your second guy probably had a building on a river that used to wet the basement every twenty years or so. Now, he's gotten slammed with three 100-year events in less than 2 years and he's lost everything on the first floor down to sruds and foundations. The probability of these events occurring is very small, so the insurance people play their numbers game, assuming the hydrologists and statisticians know their stuff, and they write Guy 2 a check each time. Even if the hydrologists and statisticians are exactly up-to-date on their stuff, the probability is still small.
Where the real problems happen is when we have a historic structure or a thriving business. On the one hand, it sucks to fund constant money sinks. On the other, we shouldn't hinder the economic growth of the area or demolish our physical history. If the federal flood insurance program were more common-sense, we'd have a situation where an analysis determines the feasibility of rebuilding, relocating or rebuilding with floodproofing. I don't think the feds will pay for relocating or rebuilding with floodproofing, but they will pay for returning it to its pre-event condition. We're stuck in a cycle, and it's hard to make the choice about whether a building is historical enough to warrant moving or drastic renovation, as that's often a subjective choice (Lafayette slept here twice, so is it worth less that the place down the street where he spent a week?).
You are correct in saying that new construction should be held to stricter standards both in structure and location. Most places will make sure that new construction in a flood zone isn't an unreasonable drain on flood funds, even at the expense of additional tax revenue. In most places, that effectively means Guy 1 isn't building there, because if pimpin' ain't easy, floodproofin' is hard.
This network from the article seems redundant for the US. We've already got mostly real-time flow data from the USGS [2], posted to the web and freely available. The data's there, and using a hydrograph with the USGS data, rainfall data and Google Earth, you could do it all from a desk. The trick is to ensure that the all the localities along the river work together with a comprehensive plan to mitigate downstream problems. They're trying to do that on the Delaware, but you've got many large organizations that have to be forced to cooperate, like the New York City Water Department and the Army Corps of Engineers. They usually don't pay much attention the county and municipal governments along the lower river.
For the biological sciences, also add Eugenie Clark (kids love sharks), Konrad Lorenz (his books are easy reads), Jacques Cousteau (and thus learn SCUBA is an acronym), Watson and Crick (though _The Double Helix_ is a bit dense for kids that age), Edward Drinker Cope and Othniel Charles Marsh (kids also love dinosaurs), Aldo Leopold, the Leakey family, and Charles Darwin (he might have been mentioned above).
You could also add some of the famous engineers. Big and ambitious public works projects usually had a driving personality behind them, a chief engineer with intensity like John, Washington and Emily Roebling (The Brooklyn Bridge), Othmar Ammann (Golden Gate, Verrazano Narrows and George Washington Bridges), James Eads (caissons and the bends), and Leon Moisseff (the first Tacoma Narrows bridge). For good measure, add Frank Lloyd Wright. Not exactly a scientist, but certainly a fascinating character.
The episodic expansion included five hours of new game play, no new weapons, no new vehicles and one new monster. The environments are all the same stuff we've already seen. How long did that take them and how much did we have to pay? Sure, they have other stuff going on, but after HL2 I feel a little let down. Enough so that I don't think I'll be downloading the SIN episodes.
Still, I'll keep buying just so I can find out what happens, but I thought Minerva: Metastasis was more interesting and engaging and free. Valve should have given the cash to Adam Foster.
That is telling the person to be a serf. While there may be the occasional wealthy person that can walk or ride a bike/bus to work, the only reason that those people can do it is because very few people try. The number of well paying jobs that can be maintained withour a car are very few.
There are huge bedroom communities around New York City where median home values top $500K simply because they are near a commuter rail line. Take Summit, New Jersey as an example. Similarly, Bucks County, Pennsylvania has a county bus that takes commuters to a SEPTA line that either connects to Center City Philly or to NYC via Amtrak. When I take a Metroliner or Acela Express to NYC or DC, it is full of people with monthly passes. You may be correct for other areas of the US, but you're wrong on the Boston-DC Corridor.
You are not required to buy insurance to drive.
Yes, you are. In Pennsylvania, your license and registration can be suspended if you do not maintain the required level of automobile insurance. Showing the State Trooper your bank statement is very unlikely to convince him not to give you a ticket for failing to carry liability insurance. Requiring you to buy insurance from a corporation is a way for the state to guarantee some sort of surety for the liability amount. Again, that may be the case in rural areas of the US, but it certainly isn't the case in the Mid-Atalantic.
Pervasive private ownership of firearms is certainly a deterrent against an opressive regime. Guerilla tactics work for small motivated forces against modern state-sponsored armies. Consider the Soviets in Afghanistan and the US in Vietnam. If said guerillas, in their home territory, start out well armed, their escalation of materiel is much faster, even to the point where serious inroads can be made before the regime has the chance to mobilize.
In some US states, you can use the same firearm the armed forces use. Sidearms, assault rifles (the technical definition, not the political one), sniper rifles and infantry support weapons are all legal to own and use. You can pay the taxes and follow the rules and mount Ma Deuce on the back porch and happily chew trees into toothpicks.
As for criminal encounters, well that's a little different. The odds of an insurrection against the Federal Government is small, but the odds of a criminal encounter is much larger than it should be. Gun control targets those who have already made a choice to follow the rules. It has no effect on those who aren't going to follow the rules - they've made a choice to attack a citizen in some fashion and thus aren't interested in the rules. They've illegally acquired a weapon, perhaps even a weapon imported illegally in the first place. If you follow the rules and they don't, they have you at their mercy. What about the police, you ask? Never mind them. In the US, the government is not liable if they fail to protect you. They must make a good faith effort, but if you die before the cops show up, too bad. If the criminals are armed and the cops aren't liable for you, what solution is there except to arm yourself, the happy byproduct of being a member of the unorganized portion of the well-regulated militia.
As for the efficacy of an armed citizen against a criminal, consider the predator-prey relationship. The predator wants the easy pickings - moderate reward for minimal risk. That's why we see muggings, fraud and picked pockets, rather than frontal assaults on banks. Make the risk for the criminal higher - make them look elsewhere for an easy meal. Study a martial art, excercise, use good judgement, be wary, but when that all fails, use a.45ACP to reinforce your use of the word "No."
Since we can't disarm the entire country because we need the firearms to resist an opressive regime, we must allow personal protection against criminals.
Does that cause more crime and violence? Florida's Stand-Your-Ground Law, one of the most generous in allowing a citizen the right to use deadly force in response to a threat, did not result in an increase in homicide. The creation of shall-issue concealed carry permits doesn't, either.
While the national ID isn't the problem, the big database behind it is, as others have pointed out. The state keeps a record of your firarm purchase (which is against the law, but de facto implemented), links it to your national ID records, and the repressive regime the Second Amendment was designed to fight, can now round up all the lawful gun owners and confiscate. I see all of this being done in the name of the War on Terror.
It is the same situation in all sorts of fields.
Take shooting. Go to a big sporting goods store, like Dick's or Sports Authority. Selling you a gun is a real pain in the ass because they have to do paperwork and make phone calls and escort you from the premesis. The margins are low, you ask too many questions, the same story as buying a PC at Best Buy.
Go to the local gun shop. Sometimes, they have an attached range, and they'll rent you a piece so you can try it in the lanes. The sales staff is eager to help and get you the iron you need. IPSC? Hunting? Silhouette? Carry? No problem, they'll find the right one, show you how to strip & clean it, suggest some ammo to try and help you pick a holster. They're all incredibly polite, but that may be more a function of the fact that everybody there is armed than of a scales program.
Try fly fishing. Go to the big box, what you see is what you get. If a sales person is willing to talk to you, they'll only have rudimentary knowledge. Go to the local fly shop, they'll have coffee on, and even though the flies are $0.35 more each, they'll pick them out based on where you want to go and when. They usually will dole out a little info, like which landowner allows access to the stream, where to park, how far to hike, that sort of thing.
There are always exceptions, like the Dick's guy who was starting his own gun shop but was working there while waiting for his FFL and the nasty little troll at a local gun shop who has to carry to keep the customers from kicking his ass. I think if we reduce the problem to an abstraction, the boutique sales staff is involved with what they sell - they use it or read the literature of the field. The big box staff is punching the time clock.
True - we are outgunned. Still, the fact that the civilian population of some US states is armed to the teeth means that they can wage a guerilla war with minimal influx of materiel. Look at Iraq - the insurgents seem to be doing quite a fine job of making things dangerous for the US military. Consider also the modern IRA and the Viet Cong. Tanks, planes, artillery, Globalhawk and some big boats don't seem to work so well against a small indigenous group with an ideological axe to grind.
All you have to do is make the folks of Georgia or Pennsylvania or Arizona mad enough and suddenly, you've got IED's, snipers, sabotage and mayhem on a big scale. Maybe they'll liberate a National Guard Armory.
Show an gun battle between Army Humvees and pickups full of militia men on the Baltimore Beltway on the evening news and see how fast the resistance grows. Then, the people in New Jersey and California and Massachusetts start demanding answers and the militia gets to explain their grievances on the front page of the NY Times.
That's why the Second Amendment's there and that's why it doesn't matter that we're outgunned to start. Domestic surveillance is a nasty end-around, preventing the militia from organizing.
You are totally correct about why big A/E firms stick with Autocad. Any loss in productivity from a switch to a different CAD program would mean big losses, despite a no-damages-for-delay clause. If you include all the extras, like the Desktops from Autodesk and all the little LISP programs floating around for free, it makes sense to fork out the cash. It has so much "drafting style" legacy support that the same program is suitable to people fresh out of college and those that have been doing it for many years. Also, as it is a de facto standard, you can save a file as Release 12, and almost everybody can read it. The industry popularity makes it an almost de facto standard, and if you use something else, you lose some ability to exchange information. They teach it in college drafting classes.
Autocad is like Excel. It will take FOSS a long time to get where Autocad is today. Novell can offer an alternative that will work just fine for a person who never intends to work with another A/E firm or do any 3D work.
It may be that Autocad is what keeps A/E firms on Windows.
As others have mentioned, the X-Wing/TIE set, Wing Commander/Privateer set, Doom and Quake and the Civ I/II sets were all great for wasting time.
I bought an expensive joystick just for X-Wing and I think Civ I was the first game I ever stayed up all night playing. I packed as much RAM into my 386SX-16 as I could so I could run that masterpiece Doom, and I built a new computer just to play Mechwarrior 2. The first game I ever played across a LAN was Doom ][ over a null modem cable in college. I was the poster boy for "software sells hardware."
StarCon2, though, that was sweet. I bought sci-fi game compilation pack back a few years ago just for that. Thanks for reminding me. I am going to fire up that Dos-box thingie and start that up tonight.
Wait. Nevermind. It's Valentine's day. I'll not be playing StarCon.
It happened in Philadelphia, too. The original article appeared July 3, 2002 in the Philadelphia Inquirer. An art student of some sort from Finland and a local Democratic Party committee member were taking pictures of the Sunoco refinery from the Passyunk Ave. bridge. Cruisers, choppers, cops galore. They took the cameras, destroyed the film and detained them for a couple days. When protesting to the police that they were taking art photos, the cop said, "Nobody takes pictures of refineries as art, especially not in Philadelphia."
The city later admitted the arrests were wrong and settled a potential law suit with the local Democratic Committeeman, but the other guy got nothing, so the ACLU filed suit on his behalf.
And, it happened to me. I was on some decrepit lift bridge over Jamaica Bay taking pictures for a field survey for a refurbish project. I'm almost finished, and some asshat from the NYC Bridge Authority comes shouting up at me.
Asshat: You can't be out on this walkway!
Me: Why not? the sign says open to the public?
Asshat: No, it says you can't be here!
Me: Lets walk back and look at what the sign says.
Asshat: Don't make me call the cops on you!
Me: Then why're these five people jogging over the bridge?
Asshat: Hey, did you unlock this gate?
Me: Where would I get a key for a big-ass padlock on some rusty bridge over Jamaica Bay?
Asshat: You better not have! You can't take pictures of this bridge!
Me: Then fix your own fuc-
The salesguy with me took over, started schmoozing the asshat and I took the last few measurements and pictures. The salesguy saved that Bridge Authority cocksmooch from going over the railing. At the time I was about to go nuclear and quit, but a week later it was pretty damn funny, especially when the salesman reenacted it with the Brooklyn accent and all.
Slashdot Mirror
The early bird gets the worm; I do not care for foods that squirm. I'll rise at noon to make my rounds And scoop some coffee from the grounds. I think that was Ogden Nash, but maybe not.
Try An Introduction to Mathematics by Alfred North Whitehead. Very well written.
I think you mean EPOCH ALE
I don't think it was in the article, so you didn't overlook it. I think it is sort of counter-intuitive, that the building code for your state isn't written by your state, but rather adapted from something a third-party wrote. Certainly it isn't common knowledge outside of the construction industry. I know because I have a copy of the IBC sitting on my desk that I reference constantly and because I had a professional licensure exam based on it.
Building codes, in most places, aren't written by the state. They're mostly adaptations of the International Building Code written by the International Code Council. The 2007 version of the California Building Code is the 2006 IBC with updates. The ICC says they own the copyright to the IBC (and they hold a trademark on it, too) in the hardcopy of the book. It may be that states charge exorbitant fees for a print copy because ICC charges the state.
By posting the CBC, you are certainly posting large portions of work copyrighted by the IBC. Some states publish an addendum to the IBC containing modifications of the IBC, essentially just a booklet saying, "replace section 1609.1.1 with the following...." Those are clearly written by the state and are public information.
Some states post their entire code online at the ICC website, such as Florida, New Jersey and Connecticut. You can read and print, but not save. New York City has their 2008 code (it is based on IBC with heavy modifications) up on the Department of Buildings website available for download. Washington, DC posts their modifications online at their own site. There doesn't seem to be a consensus as to the best way, just what each state wants. Each state has a differing degree of customization, from exact cut-and-paste of the IBC to very specific tailoring in in the structural section.
But, it's probably not even necessary, as blueprints and photos exist on the internet for any target one might find interesting.
You are absolutely correct.
Our project manager was doing a site visit to the George Washington Bridge in New York City. The Port Authority people told him he couldn't take any pictures of the bridge, for security reasons. Never mind that dozens of highway contractors, painting contractors, steel contractors, scaffold contractors and scads of engineering firms, architectural firms, government agencies of all forms and engineering schools have structural drawings in whole or part. Never mind one MILLION hits on Google images. Never mind the Historic American Buildings Survey in the Library of Congress http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/collections/habs_haer/index.html has wonderful high-definition scans of large and medium format film photos. This one is my favorite. You can check the rivet patterns: http://memory.loc.gov/pnp/habshaer/ny/ny1200/ny1264/photos/119063pv.jpg
It has nothing to do with security. It has everything to do with control. Problem is, when I point out the idiocy of the situation, the contradictory rules and the artificial restrictions this security places on good practice, they tell my boss I'm harassing the (Port Authority|ConEd|MTA) employees. I feel it is my duty as a professional engineer to point out the incredibly poor results (both in construction and in intention) of these rules that a layman may not be able or interested to do. It doesn't help that the (PA|CE|MTA) usually guys start with a nasty attytood, no construction background and no project preparation.
Douglas Fir is 1ksi in tension parallel to the grain per the American Forest and Paper Association's National Design Specification. Dense select structural southern yellow pine (a very expensive timber) is 1.65ksi, about as strong as you're going to get out of wood. Standard mild steel is ASTM A36 steel and according to the specification, yields at 36ksi and fractures at 58ksi.
.8 pounds per foot for a nominal 2x4 shape.
I would clarify your statement about isotropic behavior. For most metals isotropic is the norm, though cast iron, the yardstick in TFA is a notable exception, being stronger in compression than in tension. Cementitious mixtures like concrete, asphalt and masonry are notorious for being anisotropic and used compression-only when used without some sort of tensile reinforcing. Polymer-based stuff, like cellulose-based materials, are anisotropic - it depends on which way the fibers are oriented in relation to the forces.
Steel is very ductile, so you can make shapes with very slender elements. This is why you can have cold-formed steel studs doing the same job as 2x4 timber studs. The weight difference between the two is small - steel at 1.0 pounds per foot versus wood at
The paper in the TFA has a tensile capacity of 31ksi. That's pretty strong stuff. I can see it used in tensioned-fabric structures like the Dresden Train Station or in temporary enclosures.
The tower is built on alluvial silt, and that's pretty nasty stuff to build on. Modern techniques for such poor soils rely on very large and very stiff concrete mats, like Chicago's skyscrapers, or on piles driven to bedrock like at the beach. One of the temporary stabilizing measures they used for the tower was to stiffen the soil by pumping liquid nitrogen through pipes to freeze the groundwater in the silt to prevent it from subsiding more on the side of the tilt until they figured out a more permanent solution.
If you look at pictures of it (I guarantee, pick any geotechnical book and Pisa will either be the cover or in the first chapter), you'll notice a subtle banana shape. The builders over time knew it was tilting, so they started correcting as they were building.
Another fascinating thing about the tower is that the walls are built of rubble clad with marble facing. The rubble over time subsided, and now the entire weight of the tower is bearing on the thin marble. Some of the tilt-side masonry is under enormous stress, and the very fine joints keep most stress concentrations low.
The book cited in the the summary, Tilt, was an excellent history of Pisa, because the history of the city is completely entwined with the history of the tower. A very fine read, though the hardback book is cut at an angle, so the book, when shelved , tilts back into the shelves.
I saw picture of the jars of Certainty and Uncertainty. Is it safe to store them that close?
Not a water plant, but how about the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, OK on April 19, 1995?
We Can Remember it for You Wholesale was the basis for Total Recall, and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep was the basis for Bladerunner. Not to enter the debate about whether the movies should have followed the original Philip K. Dick, but you at least have to know the relationships.
I'll need three hundred gallons of marinara.
Is OpenDWG really in industry standard? You are correct - my copy of ACAD 2006 won't save anything other than various versions of .DWG or .DXF, and it won't export to an openDWG, either. Since a very large proportion of drafters (in my ancecdotal experience, I've run across three in ten years of construction and engineering who use something else) use Autocad, wouldn't it be the case that the .DWG is a de facto standard - more people use it? IntelliCAD et al may claim a standard, but if most people aren't using, it isn't really a standard, is it?
.DXF, which I've found to be a reasonable output for various structural analysis packages (like Visual Analysis and STAAD) and some CAM systems. It might also be a proprietary format that they license to developers. The proprietary format sucks because as a de facto industry standard, you have to use ACAD and thus you have to use the hardware, OS and ancillary programs (STAAD, etc) Autodesk supports. No Linux, no Mac OS.
Autodesk does have a
The proprietary format is a lucky move on their part that became a cash cow. If you want to be in the game, you have to be able to communicate with the engineers, architects, suppliers and contractors, most of whom use ACAD. Your new employees all come from school knowing ACAD. You can't change formats if you started with ACAD, because then you have to convert all your old drawings to the new format, plus all your standards, detail libraries and blocks. They've got you by the shorthairs - you've gotta use it and you can't leave it. For exactly the same reasons, you can't evoid it.
Usually, it isn't so easy. We know where the floodprone areas are. We've got FIRMettes [1], flood insurance rate maps that show where the floods are known to happen, and they show the high water marks for the design flood. The problem is that the design flood occurs more frequently now. The spread of suburbia means less agricultural and sylvan land for infiltration, and very efficient storm water management systems that dump right into the river at speed. The weather over the short term seems to favor concentrating precipitation into shorter periods of time. There are more floods of the design flood magnitude and thus the big floods are worse. As an aside, I have a feeling that there will be sweeping changes in what we're required to design for as previous high water events are classified as 50-year and 25-year floods instead of the 100-year tag they carry now.
o ?storeId=10001&catalogId=10001&langId=-1&content=f irmetteHelp_0&title=FIRMette%20Tutorial
Your second guy probably had a building on a river that used to wet the basement every twenty years or so. Now, he's gotten slammed with three 100-year events in less than 2 years and he's lost everything on the first floor down to sruds and foundations. The probability of these events occurring is very small, so the insurance people play their numbers game, assuming the hydrologists and statisticians know their stuff, and they write Guy 2 a check each time. Even if the hydrologists and statisticians are exactly up-to-date on their stuff, the probability is still small.
Where the real problems happen is when we have a historic structure or a thriving business. On the one hand, it sucks to fund constant money sinks. On the other, we shouldn't hinder the economic growth of the area or demolish our physical history. If the federal flood insurance program were more common-sense, we'd have a situation where an analysis determines the feasibility of rebuilding, relocating or rebuilding with floodproofing. I don't think the feds will pay for relocating or rebuilding with floodproofing, but they will pay for returning it to its pre-event condition. We're stuck in a cycle, and it's hard to make the choice about whether a building is historical enough to warrant moving or drastic renovation, as that's often a subjective choice (Lafayette slept here twice, so is it worth less that the place down the street where he spent a week?).
You are correct in saying that new construction should be held to stricter standards both in structure and location. Most places will make sure that new construction in a flood zone isn't an unreasonable drain on flood funds, even at the expense of additional tax revenue. In most places, that effectively means Guy 1 isn't building there, because if pimpin' ain't easy, floodproofin' is hard.
This network from the article seems redundant for the US. We've already got mostly real-time flow data from the USGS [2], posted to the web and freely available. The data's there, and using a hydrograph with the USGS data, rainfall data and Google Earth, you could do it all from a desk. The trick is to ensure that the all the localities along the river work together with a comprehensive plan to mitigate downstream problems. They're trying to do that on the Delaware, but you've got many large organizations that have to be forced to cooperate, like the New York City Water Department and the Army Corps of Engineers. They usually don't pay much attention the county and municipal governments along the lower river.
[1] http://msc.fema.gov/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/inf
[2] http://water.usgs.gov/waterwatch/
Yup. Jane's agood one.
For the biological sciences, also add Eugenie Clark (kids love sharks), Konrad Lorenz (his books are easy reads), Jacques Cousteau (and thus learn SCUBA is an acronym), Watson and Crick (though _The Double Helix_ is a bit dense for kids that age), Edward Drinker Cope and Othniel Charles Marsh (kids also love dinosaurs), Aldo Leopold, the Leakey family, and Charles Darwin (he might have been mentioned above).
You could also add some of the famous engineers. Big and ambitious public works projects usually had a driving personality behind them, a chief engineer with intensity like John, Washington and Emily Roebling (The Brooklyn Bridge), Othmar Ammann (Golden Gate, Verrazano Narrows and George Washington Bridges), James Eads (caissons and the bends), and Leon Moisseff (the first Tacoma Narrows bridge). For good measure, add Frank Lloyd Wright. Not exactly a scientist, but certainly a fascinating character.
The episodic expansion included five hours of new game play, no new weapons, no new vehicles and one new monster. The environments are all the same stuff we've already seen. How long did that take them and how much did we have to pay? Sure, they have other stuff going on, but after HL2 I feel a little let down. Enough so that I don't think I'll be downloading the SIN episodes.
Still, I'll keep buying just so I can find out what happens, but I thought Minerva: Metastasis was more interesting and engaging and free. Valve should have given the cash to Adam Foster.
Ahh, I see that you, too, have received the Drexel Shaft.
No matter how many Drexel students and alumni I talk to, I have yet to meet one that had a positive overall experience there.
There are huge bedroom communities around New York City where median home values top $500K simply because they are near a commuter rail line. Take Summit, New Jersey as an example. Similarly, Bucks County, Pennsylvania has a county bus that takes commuters to a SEPTA line that either connects to Center City Philly or to NYC via Amtrak. When I take a Metroliner or Acela Express to NYC or DC, it is full of people with monthly passes. You may be correct for other areas of the US, but you're wrong on the Boston-DC Corridor.
Yes, you are. In Pennsylvania, your license and registration can be suspended if you do not maintain the required level of automobile insurance. Showing the State Trooper your bank statement is very unlikely to convince him not to give you a ticket for failing to carry liability insurance. Requiring you to buy insurance from a corporation is a way for the state to guarantee some sort of surety for the liability amount. Again, that may be the case in rural areas of the US, but it certainly isn't the case in the Mid-Atalantic.
Pervasive private ownership of firearms is certainly a deterrent against an opressive regime. Guerilla tactics work for small motivated forces against modern state-sponsored armies. Consider the Soviets in Afghanistan and the US in Vietnam. If said guerillas, in their home territory, start out well armed, their escalation of materiel is much faster, even to the point where serious inroads can be made before the regime has the chance to mobilize.
.45ACP to reinforce your use of the word "No."
In some US states, you can use the same firearm the armed forces use. Sidearms, assault rifles (the technical definition, not the political one), sniper rifles and infantry support weapons are all legal to own and use. You can pay the taxes and follow the rules and mount Ma Deuce on the back porch and happily chew trees into toothpicks.
As for criminal encounters, well that's a little different. The odds of an insurrection against the Federal Government is small, but the odds of a criminal encounter is much larger than it should be. Gun control targets those who have already made a choice to follow the rules. It has no effect on those who aren't going to follow the rules - they've made a choice to attack a citizen in some fashion and thus aren't interested in the rules. They've illegally acquired a weapon, perhaps even a weapon imported illegally in the first place. If you follow the rules and they don't, they have you at their mercy. What about the police, you ask? Never mind them. In the US, the government is not liable if they fail to protect you. They must make a good faith effort, but if you die before the cops show up, too bad. If the criminals are armed and the cops aren't liable for you, what solution is there except to arm yourself, the happy byproduct of being a member of the unorganized portion of the well-regulated militia.
As for the efficacy of an armed citizen against a criminal, consider the predator-prey relationship. The predator wants the easy pickings - moderate reward for minimal risk. That's why we see muggings, fraud and picked pockets, rather than frontal assaults on banks. Make the risk for the criminal higher - make them look elsewhere for an easy meal. Study a martial art, excercise, use good judgement, be wary, but when that all fails, use a
Since we can't disarm the entire country because we need the firearms to resist an opressive regime, we must allow personal protection against criminals.
Does that cause more crime and violence? Florida's Stand-Your-Ground Law, one of the most generous in allowing a citizen the right to use deadly force in response to a threat, did not result in an increase in homicide. The creation of shall-issue concealed carry permits doesn't, either.
While the national ID isn't the problem, the big database behind it is, as others have pointed out. The state keeps a record of your firarm purchase (which is against the law, but de facto implemented), links it to your national ID records, and the repressive regime the Second Amendment was designed to fight, can now round up all the lawful gun owners and confiscate. I see all of this being done in the name of the War on Terror.
It is the same situation in all sorts of fields.
Take shooting. Go to a big sporting goods store, like Dick's or Sports Authority. Selling you a gun is a real pain in the ass because they have to do paperwork and make phone calls and escort you from the premesis. The margins are low, you ask too many questions, the same story as buying a PC at Best Buy.
Go to the local gun shop. Sometimes, they have an attached range, and they'll rent you a piece so you can try it in the lanes. The sales staff is eager to help and get you the iron you need. IPSC? Hunting? Silhouette? Carry? No problem, they'll find the right one, show you how to strip & clean it, suggest some ammo to try and help you pick a holster. They're all incredibly polite, but that may be more a function of the fact that everybody there is armed than of a scales program.
Try fly fishing. Go to the big box, what you see is what you get. If a sales person is willing to talk to you, they'll only have rudimentary knowledge. Go to the local fly shop, they'll have coffee on, and even though the flies are $0.35 more each, they'll pick them out based on where you want to go and when. They usually will dole out a little info, like which landowner allows access to the stream, where to park, how far to hike, that sort of thing.
There are always exceptions, like the Dick's guy who was starting his own gun shop but was working there while waiting for his FFL and the nasty little troll at a local gun shop who has to carry to keep the customers from kicking his ass. I think if we reduce the problem to an abstraction, the boutique sales staff is involved with what they sell - they use it or read the literature of the field. The big box staff is punching the time clock.
True - we are outgunned. Still, the fact that the civilian population of some US states is armed to the teeth means that they can wage a guerilla war with minimal influx of materiel. Look at Iraq - the insurgents seem to be doing quite a fine job of making things dangerous for the US military. Consider also the modern IRA and the Viet Cong. Tanks, planes, artillery, Globalhawk and some big boats don't seem to work so well against a small indigenous group with an ideological axe to grind.
All you have to do is make the folks of Georgia or Pennsylvania or Arizona mad enough and suddenly, you've got IED's, snipers, sabotage and mayhem on a big scale. Maybe they'll liberate a National Guard Armory.
Show an gun battle between Army Humvees and pickups full of militia men on the Baltimore Beltway on the evening news and see how fast the resistance grows. Then, the people in New Jersey and California and Massachusetts start demanding answers and the militia gets to explain their grievances on the front page of the NY Times.
That's why the Second Amendment's there and that's why it doesn't matter that we're outgunned to start. Domestic surveillance is a nasty end-around, preventing the militia from organizing.
You just gave millions of guys an excuse. On my^H^Htheir behalf, I offer heartfelt thanks.
You are totally correct about why big A/E firms stick with Autocad. Any loss in productivity from a switch to a different CAD program would mean big losses, despite a no-damages-for-delay clause. If you include all the extras, like the Desktops from Autodesk and all the little LISP programs floating around for free, it makes sense to fork out the cash. It has so much "drafting style" legacy support that the same program is suitable to people fresh out of college and those that have been doing it for many years. Also, as it is a de facto standard, you can save a file as Release 12, and almost everybody can read it. The industry popularity makes it an almost de facto standard, and if you use something else, you lose some ability to exchange information. They teach it in college drafting classes.
Autocad is like Excel. It will take FOSS a long time to get where Autocad is today. Novell can offer an alternative that will work just fine for a person who never intends to work with another A/E firm or do any 3D work.
It may be that Autocad is what keeps A/E firms on Windows.
As others have mentioned, the X-Wing/TIE set, Wing Commander/Privateer set, Doom and Quake and the Civ I/II sets were all great for wasting time.
I bought an expensive joystick just for X-Wing and I think Civ I was the first game I ever stayed up all night playing. I packed as much RAM into my 386SX-16 as I could so I could run that masterpiece Doom, and I built a new computer just to play Mechwarrior 2. The first game I ever played across a LAN was Doom ][ over a null modem cable in college. I was the poster boy for "software sells hardware."
StarCon2, though, that was sweet. I bought sci-fi game compilation pack back a few years ago just for that. Thanks for reminding me. I am going to fire up that Dos-box thingie and start that up tonight.
Wait. Nevermind. It's Valentine's day. I'll not be playing StarCon.
It happened in Philadelphia, too. The original article appeared July 3, 2002 in the Philadelphia Inquirer. An art student of some sort from Finland and a local Democratic Party committee member were taking pictures of the Sunoco refinery from the Passyunk Ave. bridge. Cruisers, choppers, cops galore. They took the cameras, destroyed the film and detained them for a couple days. When protesting to the police that they were taking art photos, the cop said, "Nobody takes pictures of refineries as art, especially not in Philadelphia."
The city later admitted the arrests were wrong and settled a potential law suit with the local Democratic Committeeman, but the other guy got nothing, so the ACLU filed suit on his behalf.
And, it happened to me. I was on some decrepit lift bridge over Jamaica Bay taking pictures for a field survey for a refurbish project. I'm almost finished, and some asshat from the NYC Bridge Authority comes shouting up at me.
Asshat: You can't be out on this walkway!
Me: Why not? the sign says open to the public?
Asshat: No, it says you can't be here!
Me: Lets walk back and look at what the sign says.
Asshat: Don't make me call the cops on you!
Me: Then why're these five people jogging over the bridge?
Asshat: Hey, did you unlock this gate?
Me: Where would I get a key for a big-ass padlock on some rusty bridge over Jamaica Bay?
Asshat: You better not have! You can't take pictures of this bridge!
Me: Then fix your own fuc-
The salesguy with me took over, started schmoozing the asshat and I took the last few measurements and pictures. The salesguy saved that Bridge Authority cocksmooch from going over the railing. At the time I was about to go nuclear and quit, but a week later it was pretty damn funny, especially when the salesman reenacted it with the Brooklyn accent and all.