You don't mean, I think, the kind of Diesel-electric common in ships and trains. It's very inefficient - you generate power with the engine and then use it in the motors, so you have extra energy losses. It is more efficient than the old hydraulic auto boxes, and allows you to have a large gear ratio without mechanical complexity and fragility, e.g. in a ship you can step down electrically by 30 to 1 in one stage. It isn't that it doesn't scale, it's that its benefits outweigh the costs only when you have systems with difficult gear ratios and layouts.
I think you mean the Diesel-electric hybrid. In this there is only one combined motor generator. The engine can charge a battery while moving, and the battery can move the vehicle slowly in town and restart the engine almost instantly when needed, just as in a gasoline hybrid. The truth is that gasoline hybrids have been mainly cosmetic environmentalism with poor payback of the initial excess energy investment in the batteries and electric motors. Diesel hybrids could do better, especially since it's easy to design a Diesel engine for a 6000h-plus life and thus achieve much better dust to dust costs. (300000 mile service life versus maybe 120000 for a Prius.)
I remember a comment from a literary critic - forget who- on much thriller writing from the early 20th century. One of the common themes was dastardly (insert enemy here) trying to steal the plans of the latest battleship. As he pointed out, you would need (in those days) an entire railway train to steal the plans for a battleship. You might be able to find out about the planned armament, and even the displacement and SHP, but these would certainly not help very much in building a copy.
If you are prepared to teach maths, science or foreign languages - you will get support in the UK. And if you are somebody who could otherwise have gone into a graduate training scheme and become a manager in a large company - you will get nearly free MBA-grade tuition and the opportunity to get on accelerated promotion schemes. Because the UK Government has recognised that parts of the education system are broken and are trying to fix it.
Many years ago we were actually paid to go to U, because the government argued that every graduate created far more jobs and net wealth than they earned. Unfortunately many of my cohort emigrated to the US (whose companies basically took advantage of the UK system). The free movement of labour has destroyed the concept of the Government using education to boost the economy directly. However, there is still the argument that improving the public school system (not, for UKers, the Public School system) reduces welfare dependency and juvenile crime. Therefore, spending money on teachers leads in the end to reduced taxes.
This post so exactly matches other stuff heard from BBC people that I guess you may well work for the Corporation.
I am not silly enough to believe the BBC is a conspiracy, but I do know it is manipulated by its staff to support their own agendas. One example was the way that a Dimbleby appeared to be able to affect BBC coverage of the Bath bypass so that the interests of the families who were being affected by the traffic on the A4 (in the days of leaded petrol) got little hearing, simply because Dimbleby's view from his house would include the new road. If BBC staff were held to the same interest declaring standards as MPs, that couldn't have happened.
More recently, the BBC apparently did no background checks on a commissioned programme for Panorama in which the seller of, basically, tinfoil hats and fake radiation detection equipment was allowed to allege at length that radiation from 802.11 devices and cordless telephones was dangerous. On Channel 4, an equally untrustworthy programme was made claiming that global warming was a myth, again with no checks or balances. A recent opinion poll suggests that public confidence in the BBC has dropped.
Finally, on the evidential side, the fact is that the BBC did reverse the order of the footage, showing miners throwing stones followed by a police baton charge. Your attempt at exculpation is vacuous, which is why I think you must work for the BBC. It is admitted that the order of events was reversed, and this was therefore a lie. It is a matter of great public interest whether the police actively provoke violence. Years after a similar event in Wiltshire involving the police and travellers, there is still a committee in existence to deal with police/traveller relations, purely because a member of the aristocracy actually witnessed the events and testified in court. Flannel about the essential hopelessness of trying to establish cause and effect merely tries to obscure the fact that the BBC critically failed in its duty to speak truth unto nation.
The answer, of course, is that the BBC has to remember Douglas Adams' comment - that the BBC and the commercial channels are not in the same business. The job of commercial television is to deliver viewers to advertisers, and I hope it fails. The job of the BBC is to deliver content to licence payers. Its duty is to us, not even to the government. Most licence payers are of a generation that expects a degree of truth in broadcasting, and we have a right to expect it. The BBC needs to clean up its act, and ask the Government to change the rules by which it is expected to rely on outside suppliers with no tradition of public service (such as that pool of exploitative excrement Endemol.) And governments have the right to expect that footage of their own deliberations is not modified and selectively distorted to misrepresent what happens, whether it be by Fox News, the BBC, or some Ann Coulter lite with a video editor and the ability to post to YouTube. Rory Bremner sending up politicians is clearly satire. Modified footage of actual parliamentary sessions is misrepresentation. The line should be quite clear.
I wrote: "the order of footage was reversed". That means that different bits of filming were shown out of order, not that the film was reversed. I suggest you learn English a bit better before posting about English syntax in future.
Private companies killing three people just to try to get a nonorbital short flight to amuse the super-rich doesn't look very innovative to me. At least Mark Shuttleworth actually got to spend time in orbit - in a system built and maintained by NASA and its Russian counterpart. I venture to doubt that private companies will ever get as far as that. They are all basically in the "what can I do after I bought by SunSeeker" business.
Over here in the UK we have been finding out just how much our national broadcaster has been lying to us. In particular, how during the miners' strike in the 1980s the order of footage was reversed to suggest that miners had attacked police, when the exact opposite was the case (the police baton charged a picket line.) We are also finding out just how broadcasters and newspapers have been lying by association - deliberately waiting for a politician to, say, yawn and then using the picture to suggest that he was asleep during a debate. I am no fan of Bush but it is obvious that the US press does exactly the same, trying to get photos of him looking like a chimpanzee.
This is we the people being manipulated by professional liars. It seems to me that the NZ parliament has every right to demand that footage of its debates not be manipulated to suggest things that are not true.
Interestingly, a recent opinion poll in the UK suggested that younger people are less worried about media distortion of public events and people. I suggest this is a mistake. They should be. They have the least political power, the least share of the national wealth. Allowing people who are mostly rich, overentitled middle aged white males to foist lies on them by distorting apparent photographic footage suggests that, at the very least, compulsory reading of _1984_, the history of the 1920s in Russia and history of the 1930s in Germany should be considered.
There were conventional reed relays that were rated for 300 million operations only because nobody could be bothered to run the test equipment any longer than that. And how do you think a piezoelectric crystal works? Multi-megahertz crystals in radios can last for 20 years or more.
As for your last comment, it's rubbish. Have you ever seen a teleprinter? A piezo inkjet printer? a hard disk drive?
Obviously you aren't an ancient hacker, or you would know a bit more about electromechanical technology.
Well, we had a Prime Minister who was widely perceived as ensuring that your Mr. Bush kept his anus nice and clean. Now we have a new Prime Minister who wants to distance himself from his predecessor (owing to a few things like Iraq, corruption scandals, being in hock to corporates). Said new Prime Minister is also from a Scots Presbyterian background and probably is not too keen on the modern music industry. I guess these things trickle down a bit.
I'm just very tired of mass media overhyping engineering that may have almost no effect on most people. It leads to cynicism of the "what happened to my flying car" variety.
I don't think they are actually postulating something like a Difference Engine at all. The reason? I/O. With the exception of piezo inkjets, that market has gravitated to thermal drive for the ink and all the upcoming inkjet designs I know of also use electrical power->heat to drive the ink. The article talks about engine management systems, but again the I/O of these is currently electrical, driving motors and solenoids, and given the sheer amount of development invested in the present technology, the timescale to invent cheap and reliable mechanical amplifiers will probably mean that the I/C engine will be more or less obsolete before it happens.
I suspect that what is being thought of is actually relay technology - so let's call it a Turing/Von Neumann/Mauchly approach (Alan Turing was a pioneer of relay logic among his other achievements, and Von Neumann and Mauchly were both associated with relay calculators.) Although relay computers were effectively obsolete by the 70s, they persisted in industrial controls for longer because (a) they could be debugged by electricians and (b) they could tolerate levels of contamination that destroyed the electronics of the period. The last generation of ultra-clean sealed relays and mercury relays were extremely durable and reliable. They didn't have the power handling, size for size, of power transistors but they had less internal dissipation. As a simple example, I was designing equipment in the late 80s which had to switch a few watts at around 500VDC. Although there are transistors that can handle these voltages, the design of the switching circuit necessitated a hybrid device costing around $200. A suitable relay cost $10 and was immune from punchthrough.
I'm prepared to guess that there will be niche applications for these ideas - but as with the IC engine, the sheer accumulated R&D in electromechanical systems will mean that widespread adoption will never be economic. It's easier to duct cold air over an engine management system (as on my car, with a few $ of plastics) than it is to redesign the entire chain from logic to actuator to use a different technology. And the current density of flash memory suggests that the hill to be scaled by electromechanical memory is enormous. Back in the days when flash chips were 256 bytes and not too reliable, there might have been a chance. Now when 8GByte USB dongles are cheap and reliable, it will be a lot harder.
From the header: "planes will be able to fly closer together and in reduced visibility conditions"
Which means that if there is a solar flare or something of the sort, the potential for disaster is enormous. Loads of planes flying around close together using a system that depends on vulnerable satellite links.
This is also assuming that air travel continues to expand. I know that/. is full of posts from global warming deniers, but now that even the politicians are starting to do things rather than talk, this could be a system that takes 20 years to implement and then is redundant.
Oh dear. Tolkien's main ancestors are the Icelandic Sagas. But there are plenty of other examples in European literature, such as Ariosto's Orlando Furioso, and Rabelais' Gargantua et Pantagruel (which not only roams over a vast fantasy world but, once you have spent a little time understanding his period, is actually very funny. Warning: not work safe unless you can read the original French.) Even the device of putting "ordinary" people (the Hobbits) in his fantasy world as epiagonists is traceable to Rabelais, whose Panurge is the ancestor of Pratchett's Rincewind.
The Odyssey is a type of a fantasic voyage - a different literary genre but one that has many examples including the ancient Irish stories and some of the Sagas.
Truly there is very little new under the Sun - and that quote goes back probably over 2500 years.
First, it's very easy to link to pictures of naked women on the Internet. And second, any society that wants to prevent children from looking at Titians has something very, very wrong indeed with it. Don't get me wrong; I don't believe anybody ought to be allowed to profit from the depiction of sexual cruelty and violence. But the fuss that some factions in the US make about a bare nipple or two makes the US look ridiculous in most of the developed world. So don't apologise to Disney for accidentally linking them with a great picture. Apologise to the shade of Titian for accidentally linking him with Disney.
_You_ might argue that, I certainly wouldn't. Socialism is the one that favours State monopolies. "The State shall own the means of production, distribution and exchange". The free market is the one that says that individuals should be allowed to do what they want, cooperate as much as they want, and do what they like with their labour.
The State has effectively (in the US) handed a monopoly to Microsoft. In Europe, the State is resisting that. So it looks to me as if it is the US which is practically engaged in dirigism, and Europe which is standing against it. There is a name for a system of government in which the political State includes corporations.
By the way, Godwin's law does not say what you think it does. Godwin's law says that anyone who invokes the Nazis as a counter-argument ("If you think that, then you are thinking like a Nazi") has lost the argument. Correctly, it says nothing about identifying something as being aligned to a particular political philosophy. The trouble with some of you US citizens is that you think words like "Communism", "Socialism","Capitalism" are terms of abuse or praise. They are not. They are descriptive terms with meaning. The Chinese government may be a human rights disaster, and bad for that reason, but it is not bad because someone calls it Communist, or good because someone calls it "State Capitalist."
Flying Pig's Law: Any Slashdot post mentioning any political philosophy will result in at least one counter-post which blindly equates Communist=evil, Capitalist=good.
most Linux distros are just the equivalent of the different versions of Windows you get on OEM machines. End user versions like many from Dell include loads of crapware and bloatware - sorry, antivirus programs-, or bundled MS Works. Corporates often come with added management controls and built in Office. Small business machines from Acer come with hidden partition restores and management consoles. Many notebooks some with such specialised Windows versions that the only way to fix a broken system is a complete restore because of all the custom drivers. In reality, the range of Windows distribution versions is probably many times greater than the range of Linux distros.
The car analogy is a good one too. There are now far fewer platforms than there are models, e.g. in Europe VW has the Polo, Golf, A4, A5 and A6 platforms that are used by a wide range of models spread over several brand names (SEAT, Skoda, AUDI, VW). Ubuntu can be seen as using exactly the same approach, with Kubuntu, Edubuntu and Ubuntu as brands but based on a small number of real platform variants. You can argue that the Linux world is actually more visibly attuned to the consumer market, while Windows is more like Communism - the State of Gates decides what the factories will make, and the end users put up with what they are given.
It makes far more sense to be a legal, well rewarded security researcher with a useful CV than a criminal. Nothing gives a person ethics like being well paid for it.
Our R&D Department had a no. 10 Meccano set till it was stolen. I guess at today's valuation that theft would have resulted in a police investigation.
In fact it was last really used in anger to build a remote control to perform a one off dangerous operation safely, and its loss probably cost the company a lot of money when POC models had to be engineered expensively by local contractors instead of being built quickly and cheaply by an engineer in house.
So RIP real Meccano. Doing FEA on a workstation just isn't the same as using an analog computer.
Some of the most intelligent people in history have devoted their entire careers to things like numerological analysis of the Bible, astrology and hermetic and unverifiable systems like Freudian psychoanalysis. Intelligence is not proof against being totally and utterly wrong about things which are not readily demonstrable. String Theory unfortunately has all the hallmarks of a belief system which, because we do not currently have the ability to falsify its predictions, lends itself to being entirely wrong.
Unfortunately there is often just enough truth in some crackpot ideas to keep people pursuing them. We do have biological cycles which are influenced by the Moon (astrology), there probably are some numerological bits of weirdness in the Bible -it would be amazing if there weren't given the range of authors and their interests - and Freud had some genuine insights. It's this that can help to draw in intelligent and curious people.
I may have posted about this before. Years ago I took over the "chemistry section" in an industrial R&D Department. It turned out the person in charge wasn't actually a chemist - but he was a tinkerer. In a locked cupboard I found, inter alia, about a kilogram of thorium oxide and some other even more interesting stuff that I won't specify. Before the mid 80s you could just buy it from chemical suppliers with almost no control. He went off to pursue an alternative career, and the substances went off in a van with hazard signs all over after being sealed up in a thick layer of epoxy resin.
There must have been lots of other idiots like him, and there must be lots of other unrecorded samples lying around in warehouses and sheds. Unfortunately, the bureaucracy associated with dumping it is such that many people would just stay quiet about it and hope no-one noticed (it cost us nearly $30000 to dispose of our little store of radioactives, most of which was paperwork.)
I guess you could make quite a neat little dirty bomb with a few kilos of ANFO and a kilo of finely powdered thorium oxide, certainly condemn a fair number of people to a long term death from cancer. A sensible response would be to appeal to all factory owners, medical facilities etc. to look for any old radioactives and hand them in under an amnesty at no charge and with no questions asked, rather than give the impression that the moment you report anything your business will be shut down while they try to charge you with something.
Si monumentum requiris, circumspice. That's Wren not Marx, but it applies.
Of course Marx wasn't right about everything and, as I made I thought clear, I wasn't talking about his political philosophy. Marx perceived that the effect of unrestricted capitalism was that ultimately all wealth would end up in the hands of a very few rich people. And that is incorrect how? He never suggested that the economy was static; Marx wasn't stupid.
It never fails to amaze Europeans that many Americans confuse consumer goods with wealth. Many American workers have few vacations and work long hours. They find it hard to save. They may have relatively large houses and cars, but in many ways they are still bonded workers. They cannot just leave their jobs and survive without very unpleasant consequences. To an Athenian or a Roman citizen, (or to an obnoxious Brit with no mortgage and money in the bank) that's slavery. And that's without considering the inner city subclass and the illegal migrants. In the US, a form of slavery is still very much in fashion, but people are in denial about it. Unfortunately we have allowed it to be exported to this country, with bonded laborers, many Chinese or Eastern Europeans, being controlled by gangs and the Government making sympathetic noises and doing precisely nothing.
Adam Smith believed that everybody would benefit from the invisible hand of the market - well, except a load of foreigners and poor people who did not count. Marx believed that the rich and greedy would, in the end, impoverish everybody else relatively speaking. Look at the US. Look at the reduction in status and opportunity for most of the middle classes, compared with the 50s and 60s.
In the late 50s my father bought his first house on one and a half times his salary. That house now costs more than ten times the average UK middle class salary. In those days there were few gadgets, but look at those gadgets now. They are basically small and cheap ways of delivering cheap content at high prices; iPods, mobile phones.
You're being screwed by monopolists while being told you're in a free market. And if you don't like Marx, read two prophetic books by three great US science fiction writers: The Space Merchants, by Pohl & Kornbluth, and Player Piano, by Kurt Vonnegut.
Skilled people have the option to go, not only where the money is good but also where the cost of living is lower. Much of the US used to have a lower cost of living than the UK, plus higher wages, but I didn't notice you complaining when all our best scientists emigrated.
However, there are downsides. Life in China by all account is not a lot of fun for most people. Access to things we take for granted is limited to the usual third world elite. It is not free trade is your problem, but the lack of democracy and knowledge about the rest of the world that China's people suffer from, and, I think, the acquiescence of the US population in their country being run by large businesses with monopolistic practices. If you had free trade, you would be able to buy those $3 Windows copies and the cheap medicines in the US. But you don't.
The difference between Adam Smith and Marx is basically that Smith lived in a world of tiny companies and thought capitalism was benign, while Marx lived in a world of growing capitalist monopolies and saw that it was not. What is happening in China is a repeat of the British industrial revolution - poor workers making an elite rich while being kept in a state of ignorance. Just as in the UK, some of those workers are more highly paid (the ones in the cities). How long before they start to get difficult? I really think that over the next thirty years we will find out whether in fact it was Smith or Marx who was right (my money is on Marx, as an economist you understand) and the laboratory will be China.
The rovers really are an amazing achievement. And it is not in any way to belittle it to add that the various space programs not only of the US, but also Russia, the EU, and an increasing number of other countries are also evidence of what really bright people can achieve when allowed to.
The really depressing thing is the bar experts already posting on this topic as to how, if only they were in charge of the program, they would have had backup systems for this and harder environmental standards for that, as if the collective efforts of NASA and its subcontractors wouldn't have thought of that already and dismissed it because of some obvious constraint like payload mass, or because merely specifying semiconductors to JANTXV standards won't ensure your system can recover from temperatures below -40 (note deliberate omission of unit there.)
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I think you mean the Diesel-electric hybrid. In this there is only one combined motor generator. The engine can charge a battery while moving, and the battery can move the vehicle slowly in town and restart the engine almost instantly when needed, just as in a gasoline hybrid. The truth is that gasoline hybrids have been mainly cosmetic environmentalism with poor payback of the initial excess energy investment in the batteries and electric motors. Diesel hybrids could do better, especially since it's easy to design a Diesel engine for a 6000h-plus life and thus achieve much better dust to dust costs. (300000 mile service life versus maybe 120000 for a Prius.)
I remember a comment from a literary critic - forget who- on much thriller writing from the early 20th century. One of the common themes was dastardly (insert enemy here) trying to steal the plans of the latest battleship. As he pointed out, you would need (in those days) an entire railway train to steal the plans for a battleship. You might be able to find out about the planned armament, and even the displacement and SHP, but these would certainly not help very much in building a copy.
Many years ago we were actually paid to go to U, because the government argued that every graduate created far more jobs and net wealth than they earned. Unfortunately many of my cohort emigrated to the US (whose companies basically took advantage of the UK system). The free movement of labour has destroyed the concept of the Government using education to boost the economy directly. However, there is still the argument that improving the public school system (not, for UKers, the Public School system) reduces welfare dependency and juvenile crime. Therefore, spending money on teachers leads in the end to reduced taxes.
I am not silly enough to believe the BBC is a conspiracy, but I do know it is manipulated by its staff to support their own agendas. One example was the way that a Dimbleby appeared to be able to affect BBC coverage of the Bath bypass so that the interests of the families who were being affected by the traffic on the A4 (in the days of leaded petrol) got little hearing, simply because Dimbleby's view from his house would include the new road. If BBC staff were held to the same interest declaring standards as MPs, that couldn't have happened.
More recently, the BBC apparently did no background checks on a commissioned programme for Panorama in which the seller of, basically, tinfoil hats and fake radiation detection equipment was allowed to allege at length that radiation from 802.11 devices and cordless telephones was dangerous. On Channel 4, an equally untrustworthy programme was made claiming that global warming was a myth, again with no checks or balances. A recent opinion poll suggests that public confidence in the BBC has dropped.
Finally, on the evidential side, the fact is that the BBC did reverse the order of the footage, showing miners throwing stones followed by a police baton charge. Your attempt at exculpation is vacuous, which is why I think you must work for the BBC. It is admitted that the order of events was reversed, and this was therefore a lie. It is a matter of great public interest whether the police actively provoke violence. Years after a similar event in Wiltshire involving the police and travellers, there is still a committee in existence to deal with police/traveller relations, purely because a member of the aristocracy actually witnessed the events and testified in court. Flannel about the essential hopelessness of trying to establish cause and effect merely tries to obscure the fact that the BBC critically failed in its duty to speak truth unto nation.
The answer, of course, is that the BBC has to remember Douglas Adams' comment - that the BBC and the commercial channels are not in the same business. The job of commercial television is to deliver viewers to advertisers, and I hope it fails. The job of the BBC is to deliver content to licence payers. Its duty is to us, not even to the government. Most licence payers are of a generation that expects a degree of truth in broadcasting, and we have a right to expect it. The BBC needs to clean up its act, and ask the Government to change the rules by which it is expected to rely on outside suppliers with no tradition of public service (such as that pool of exploitative excrement Endemol.) And governments have the right to expect that footage of their own deliberations is not modified and selectively distorted to misrepresent what happens, whether it be by Fox News, the BBC, or some Ann Coulter lite with a video editor and the ability to post to YouTube. Rory Bremner sending up politicians is clearly satire. Modified footage of actual parliamentary sessions is misrepresentation. The line should be quite clear.
I wrote: "the order of footage was reversed". That means that different bits of filming were shown out of order, not that the film was reversed. I suggest you learn English a bit better before posting about English syntax in future.
Private companies killing three people just to try to get a nonorbital short flight to amuse the super-rich doesn't look very innovative to me. At least Mark Shuttleworth actually got to spend time in orbit - in a system built and maintained by NASA and its Russian counterpart. I venture to doubt that private companies will ever get as far as that. They are all basically in the "what can I do after I bought by SunSeeker" business.
This is we the people being manipulated by professional liars. It seems to me that the NZ parliament has every right to demand that footage of its debates not be manipulated to suggest things that are not true.
Interestingly, a recent opinion poll in the UK suggested that younger people are less worried about media distortion of public events and people. I suggest this is a mistake. They should be. They have the least political power, the least share of the national wealth. Allowing people who are mostly rich, overentitled middle aged white males to foist lies on them by distorting apparent photographic footage suggests that, at the very least, compulsory reading of _1984_, the history of the 1920s in Russia and history of the 1930s in Germany should be considered.
As for your last comment, it's rubbish. Have you ever seen a teleprinter? A piezo inkjet printer? a hard disk drive?
Obviously you aren't an ancient hacker, or you would know a bit more about electromechanical technology.
Well, we had a Prime Minister who was widely perceived as ensuring that your Mr. Bush kept his anus nice and clean. Now we have a new Prime Minister who wants to distance himself from his predecessor (owing to a few things like Iraq, corruption scandals, being in hock to corporates). Said new Prime Minister is also from a Scots Presbyterian background and probably is not too keen on the modern music industry. I guess these things trickle down a bit.
I'm just very tired of mass media overhyping engineering that may have almost no effect on most people. It leads to cynicism of the "what happened to my flying car" variety.
I suspect that what is being thought of is actually relay technology - so let's call it a Turing/Von Neumann/Mauchly approach (Alan Turing was a pioneer of relay logic among his other achievements, and Von Neumann and Mauchly were both associated with relay calculators.) Although relay computers were effectively obsolete by the 70s, they persisted in industrial controls for longer because (a) they could be debugged by electricians and (b) they could tolerate levels of contamination that destroyed the electronics of the period. The last generation of ultra-clean sealed relays and mercury relays were extremely durable and reliable. They didn't have the power handling, size for size, of power transistors but they had less internal dissipation. As a simple example, I was designing equipment in the late 80s which had to switch a few watts at around 500VDC. Although there are transistors that can handle these voltages, the design of the switching circuit necessitated a hybrid device costing around $200. A suitable relay cost $10 and was immune from punchthrough.
I'm prepared to guess that there will be niche applications for these ideas - but as with the IC engine, the sheer accumulated R&D in electromechanical systems will mean that widespread adoption will never be economic. It's easier to duct cold air over an engine management system (as on my car, with a few $ of plastics) than it is to redesign the entire chain from logic to actuator to use a different technology. And the current density of flash memory suggests that the hill to be scaled by electromechanical memory is enormous. Back in the days when flash chips were 256 bytes and not too reliable, there might have been a chance. Now when 8GByte USB dongles are cheap and reliable, it will be a lot harder.
Which means that if there is a solar flare or something of the sort, the potential for disaster is enormous. Loads of planes flying around close together using a system that depends on vulnerable satellite links.
This is also assuming that air travel continues to expand. I know that /. is full of posts from global warming deniers, but now that even the politicians are starting to do things rather than talk, this could be a system that takes 20 years to implement and then is redundant.
The Odyssey is a type of a fantasic voyage - a different literary genre but one that has many examples including the ancient Irish stories and some of the Sagas.
Truly there is very little new under the Sun - and that quote goes back probably over 2500 years.
First, it's very easy to link to pictures of naked women on the Internet. And second, any society that wants to prevent children from looking at Titians has something very, very wrong indeed with it. Don't get me wrong; I don't believe anybody ought to be allowed to profit from the depiction of sexual cruelty and violence. But the fuss that some factions in the US make about a bare nipple or two makes the US look ridiculous in most of the developed world. So don't apologise to Disney for accidentally linking them with a great picture. Apologise to the shade of Titian for accidentally linking him with Disney.
The State has effectively (in the US) handed a monopoly to Microsoft. In Europe, the State is resisting that. So it looks to me as if it is the US which is practically engaged in dirigism, and Europe which is standing against it. There is a name for a system of government in which the political State includes corporations.
By the way, Godwin's law does not say what you think it does. Godwin's law says that anyone who invokes the Nazis as a counter-argument ("If you think that, then you are thinking like a Nazi") has lost the argument. Correctly, it says nothing about identifying something as being aligned to a particular political philosophy. The trouble with some of you US citizens is that you think words like "Communism", "Socialism","Capitalism" are terms of abuse or praise. They are not. They are descriptive terms with meaning. The Chinese government may be a human rights disaster, and bad for that reason, but it is not bad because someone calls it Communist, or good because someone calls it "State Capitalist."
Flying Pig's Law: Any Slashdot post mentioning any political philosophy will result in at least one counter-post which blindly equates Communist=evil, Capitalist=good.
The car analogy is a good one too. There are now far fewer platforms than there are models, e.g. in Europe VW has the Polo, Golf, A4, A5 and A6 platforms that are used by a wide range of models spread over several brand names (SEAT, Skoda, AUDI, VW). Ubuntu can be seen as using exactly the same approach, with Kubuntu, Edubuntu and Ubuntu as brands but based on a small number of real platform variants. You can argue that the Linux world is actually more visibly attuned to the consumer market, while Windows is more like Communism - the State of Gates decides what the factories will make, and the end users put up with what they are given.
It makes far more sense to be a legal, well rewarded security researcher with a useful CV than a criminal. Nothing gives a person ethics like being well paid for it.
In fact it was last really used in anger to build a remote control to perform a one off dangerous operation safely, and its loss probably cost the company a lot of money when POC models had to be engineered expensively by local contractors instead of being built quickly and cheaply by an engineer in house.
So RIP real Meccano. Doing FEA on a workstation just isn't the same as using an analog computer.
Unfortunately there is often just enough truth in some crackpot ideas to keep people pursuing them. We do have biological cycles which are influenced by the Moon (astrology), there probably are some numerological bits of weirdness in the Bible -it would be amazing if there weren't given the range of authors and their interests - and Freud had some genuine insights. It's this that can help to draw in intelligent and curious people.
There must have been lots of other idiots like him, and there must be lots of other unrecorded samples lying around in warehouses and sheds. Unfortunately, the bureaucracy associated with dumping it is such that many people would just stay quiet about it and hope no-one noticed (it cost us nearly $30000 to dispose of our little store of radioactives, most of which was paperwork.)
I guess you could make quite a neat little dirty bomb with a few kilos of ANFO and a kilo of finely powdered thorium oxide, certainly condemn a fair number of people to a long term death from cancer. A sensible response would be to appeal to all factory owners, medical facilities etc. to look for any old radioactives and hand them in under an amnesty at no charge and with no questions asked, rather than give the impression that the moment you report anything your business will be shut down while they try to charge you with something.
Of course Marx wasn't right about everything and, as I made I thought clear, I wasn't talking about his political philosophy. Marx perceived that the effect of unrestricted capitalism was that ultimately all wealth would end up in the hands of a very few rich people. And that is incorrect how? He never suggested that the economy was static; Marx wasn't stupid.
It never fails to amaze Europeans that many Americans confuse consumer goods with wealth. Many American workers have few vacations and work long hours. They find it hard to save. They may have relatively large houses and cars, but in many ways they are still bonded workers. They cannot just leave their jobs and survive without very unpleasant consequences. To an Athenian or a Roman citizen, (or to an obnoxious Brit with no mortgage and money in the bank) that's slavery. And that's without considering the inner city subclass and the illegal migrants. In the US, a form of slavery is still very much in fashion, but people are in denial about it. Unfortunately we have allowed it to be exported to this country, with bonded laborers, many Chinese or Eastern Europeans, being controlled by gangs and the Government making sympathetic noises and doing precisely nothing.
Adam Smith believed that everybody would benefit from the invisible hand of the market - well, except a load of foreigners and poor people who did not count. Marx believed that the rich and greedy would, in the end, impoverish everybody else relatively speaking. Look at the US. Look at the reduction in status and opportunity for most of the middle classes, compared with the 50s and 60s.
In the late 50s my father bought his first house on one and a half times his salary. That house now costs more than ten times the average UK middle class salary. In those days there were few gadgets, but look at those gadgets now. They are basically small and cheap ways of delivering cheap content at high prices; iPods, mobile phones.
You're being screwed by monopolists while being told you're in a free market. And if you don't like Marx, read two prophetic books by three great US science fiction writers: The Space Merchants, by Pohl & Kornbluth, and Player Piano, by Kurt Vonnegut.
However, there are downsides. Life in China by all account is not a lot of fun for most people. Access to things we take for granted is limited to the usual third world elite. It is not free trade is your problem, but the lack of democracy and knowledge about the rest of the world that China's people suffer from, and, I think, the acquiescence of the US population in their country being run by large businesses with monopolistic practices. If you had free trade, you would be able to buy those $3 Windows copies and the cheap medicines in the US. But you don't.
The difference between Adam Smith and Marx is basically that Smith lived in a world of tiny companies and thought capitalism was benign, while Marx lived in a world of growing capitalist monopolies and saw that it was not. What is happening in China is a repeat of the British industrial revolution - poor workers making an elite rich while being kept in a state of ignorance. Just as in the UK, some of those workers are more highly paid (the ones in the cities). How long before they start to get difficult? I really think that over the next thirty years we will find out whether in fact it was Smith or Marx who was right (my money is on Marx, as an economist you understand) and the laboratory will be China.
sorry, but not very.
The really depressing thing is the bar experts already posting on this topic as to how, if only they were in charge of the program, they would have had backup systems for this and harder environmental standards for that, as if the collective efforts of NASA and its subcontractors wouldn't have thought of that already and dismissed it because of some obvious constraint like payload mass, or because merely specifying semiconductors to JANTXV standards won't ensure your system can recover from temperatures below -40 (note deliberate omission of unit there.)
Why am I guessing you must be an American? Stereotyping, huh?