I am a municipal engineer, and until a year ago I was a consulting engineer working on similar issues. While I would put it differently, discussing capacity and gap, you're right on. The one correction that I would make is that planners don't generally deal with traffic numbers. The would normally turn it over to an engineer, although the engineer's traffic projections are ultimately based on the growth in industry and housing that the planners expect. While their expectations often have some basis, they're ultimately just a WAG. I've never tried crystal balls, but predicting the future can be tough.
Something else that can be tough is prediction of traffic shifts. If you improve the capacity of a corridor and several adjacent corridors are near or over capacity, a good deal of traffic often shifts over to your new and improved corridor, so that the perception is that you "spent all this money" and improved nothing.
I'm not trying to argue that the planners and engineers haven't failed, but rather that the failure isn't necessarily a straighforward thing. It may be as simple as errors in calculation, or perhaps growth projections were good, but there was a failure to properly account for a traffic shift. As with mechanical design (my first career) there are several modes in which highway design can fail, and it often takes careful study to understand where things have gone wrong.
Roundabouts require that you yield on entry (unless there's a stop, but that's poor design) to the facility. If there's a steady flow from one direction, they often don't leave enough of a gap for traffic from a conflicting leg to enter.
Roundabouts are great when traffic is not at full capacity on any one leg, but can be a real bear when it is.
As the article points out, roundabouts are becoming quite popular in the US, and folks like me (transportation engineer) are spending a considerable amount of time observing and simulating them.
You may want to re-read the article. The kid worked pretty hard to find a lab that allow him in to do the work he wanted to do, and has done some preliminary testing on cells. I wish that the article was longer and told more about him, but it sure doesn't seem as though he's relying on mommy and daddy to help him build a volcano.
I can't disagree with you much, but for my work, I may need to perform field calculations that require an immediate guesstimate. For that, I can use an 8 oz calculator which turns on instantly, or a 5 lb laptop that takes 2 minutes to get to a spreadsheet. . ..And my employer refuses to supply a laptop.
I like to double-check myself with spreadsheets, and for fun, wrote a vba rpn calculator. I also build some rather extensive statistical models with spreadsheets with a level of detail that would take a year with a calculator and paper records. I've also done finite element modelling both with a calculator and a spreadsheet. I can definitely see and understand the difference in the practical uses for both.
Recently, it occurred to me that Octave might be better for one of my models than a spreadsheet, but I've had trouble getting the time in to learn the software. *sigh* I've used both Matlab and Mathematica when I was in school, but it's so long ago, that my ossified brain refuses to instantly bring up needed experience.
Have any recommendations for a good online Octave tutorial?
Long live the 48. My favorite is my 48gx, and my backup is a pale 35s. (Curse be to (s)he who designed the 'enter' key on the 35s.) It's a nice, small benefit to running a course somewhat different from most. My calculators use RPN, and my computers read the keyboards as dvorak by default. Those who know me cringe at the notion of borrowing a computer or calculator from me.
I really must agree with you about the learning curve. The first time that I used RPN, a light bulb came on (and immediately burned out) when I realized how much easier a long algorithm would be. I can still use the other calculators, but I cringe at the extra effort it takes.
Mildly funny story: I lent my work laptop to a colleague in the waiting lounge of the car rental area at DFW and immediately went to the bathroom. I simply didn't think about the keyboard setting, so didn't mention it to him. The poor guy, in the 7 or 8 minutes that I was gone quickly mapped out what was different about the keyboard, and had managed to log into his Yahoo e-mail account in that short time. I got a good chuckle, and was impressed with his speed.
To be fair in the case of the bridges, they probably failed to account for increased traffic over the last fifty years and underfunding of maintenance by corrupt local governments. First one's the bridge buidlers' fault
Not really. A bridge in the 60's may, or may not, have included a planner or planners. If it did, the traffic volume would have probably included a planner in the first stage, defining the traffic and thereby the cyclic loading. If not a planner, then there may have been an engineer filling the same role. If there was no planner, then it went straight to an engineer for preliminary design, then another (or possibly the same) engineer for final design, then the final design would have been presented for bidding. There are early and late instances where construction and design were combined, but in the 60s, it was much more common for the two to be separate. Today, they're still separate firms, but may be operating as a team. The general point is that it's not *necessarily* the builder's fault that a bridge failed. It may have been the fault of planners, engineers, builders or even an incomplete understanding of the materials involved.
Fuck You. The notion that somebody would reply so rudely astounds me.
Raw fuel heats a catalytic converter. When catalytic converters were first put on carbureted engines, this was a common failure point. The fuel ignites in the converter, sometimes melting the catalyst. Some of the early converters used beads as the catalyst. These beads conducted heat poorly to neighboring beads, so they would heat very quickly, melting and eventually plugging the converter. Converters are more robust today, and engines much more tightly managed, so this particular failure mode is much less common.
The real-world results to which you are referring are so small, and at such a high throttle, that they're useless to 99% of the driving public. At best, a high-flow air filter moves the point at which the air flow chokes back to some other point, such as the throttle body, the intake manifold, the head (or heads) or the valves. In many instances, the air filter isn't even the restriction that chokes the intake as a system. I handled one of your closing sentences obliquely, but I'll address it out-of-order here: Of course restricted air flow reduces the potential of an engine. Perhaps you should learn to parse what you read properly, then come back and notice that my assertion is that there are bigger gains to be made elsewhere.
The comment to which you first replied was made by somebody driving a Toyota Matrix. This is not a performance-oriented car, so he's probably bothered about low-end throttle response. At the low end, a high-performance filter is not going to change anything. By necessity, the air flow will not be choked by a clean air filter at low engine speeds. A performance air filter CANNOT make any difference at the engine speeds that Tom17 is probably driving.
I didn't say "all", I only used the plural. In your original reply, you mentioned both an air filter and exhaust, hence my plural usage. As to idiots on slashdot, I was just now asking the same question.
Really, you little shit-tard, you know nothing about me. I've been repairing and improving cars since I was 14, for close to 30 years now. I was a mechanic for ten, until I finished an undergraduate degree in Mechanical Engineering. I'm quite aware that such experience doesn't necessarily make me smart, but your assumption that I'm stupid may be misplaced in the face of your demonstrated ignorance of air flow basics. Your continued, and false, assertion that hot catalytic converters cool with the introduction of raw fuel similarly betrays your ignorance. What's most disturbing to me is your bravado. You sound to me like some young little shit trying to cover his ignorance with bravado. I strongly doubt you would talk to me this way if you saw my time slips at the track. Have a good day: I've wasted too much time on you already.
Many fuel injected systems, which don't generally flood, also use a throttle cable. Throttle cables are not unique to carbureted engines.
Both a lean and a rich condition generally heat, not cool, the catalytic converter.
In fuel injected engines, fuel-based traction control is possible even with a throttle cable: Several manufacturers include an actuator on the throttle body that can close the throttle no matter what you do with the pedal.
The major safety improvement is that even if the throttle system is in the engine compartment, it can remain sealed from the intrusion of dirt and water
I don't think that fancy filters and fancy exhaust really make much difference at the bottom end, where most people are operating anyway. They definitely don't make a difference if your injectors and fuel pump can't flow enough fuel to match improvements in air flow. The real-world improvements from these "upgrades" that you recommend usually approach nil until you make other improvements that allow engine to actually use the improved air flow. Try this on a chassis dyno, rather than with "some quick throttle response tests." (I learned this the hard way as a youngster. The bummer is that my dad was in the background telling me that I was wasting money with headers, fancy ignition, et c. until I spent time and effort on the engine.)
I really hate April 1. Between my kids and Slashdot, the day is always ruined. I have a sense of humor, but I stopped laughing about 30 minutes after the kids got home. Sigh.
I used to work in downtown Los Angeles, and it's a decent place to walk. The current mayor of LA is working actively and hard to make the entire city bikeable. I'll admit to some dilapidation, but I never worried about being shot. I regularly used transit or rode a bike when I was working downtown.
Portland is a wonderful city. My youngest sister lives in Portland and loves the place. Her husband bikes everywhere he wants to go, and she walks or uses transit. They don't own a car, and they don't worry about being shot.
I used to live near Seattle, and my home is the interior of Alaska. I never worried about being shot.
For a short time, I lived in Mobile, Alabama and for a few years in Burlington, Vermont. I never worried about being shot.
I lived in the vicinity of Killeen, Texas for five years and never worried about being shot.
I lived for short periods in Albuquerque, New Mexico; Sacramento, CA; Beverly Hills, CA; Turlock, CA; Coalinga, CA; and a few other places within the United States, and a couple of places outside the Unites States. I've visited a number of places, including the innumerable cities in the US (although I've never been to the state of Hawaii), Canada, Mexico, Germany (Berlin), the UK (London and Glasgow) and Israel (Jerusalem and Tel Aviv) and I NEVER WORRIED ABOUT BEING SHOT, OR EVER BLOWN UP! I'm currently contemplating a job offer in Singapore, among other far east offers. I don't expect to be shot, should I accept any of the offers in front of me. (I'm currently inclined to reject them, for my own reasons.)
I don't know what kind of paranoid life you live, but your fear might be getting the better of you. There are places where you should worry: Much of the middle east, and a significant portion of Africa are places where everyday fears of shootings might be relevant, but the majority of the US has seen a falling rate of shootings despite rising gun ownership for quite a long time.
I might speculate that your fear comes from a misunderstanding of urban areas. Assuming so, I'll tell you that I grew up in a variety of places, including rural, exurban, suburban and urban. It might be that you should visit a few places in order to come to grips with your fears. Yes, risks exist, but for the most part, should you live your life normally, you'll find that it's quite safe. After all, there are 84,183,991 living in urban centers of 100,000 or more. If so many people were at such risk of being shot, something would have happened, either to correct the problem, or to remove the shootable (if I may be allowed to coin a word) population.
P.S. Why is it necessary to remove all white space between paragraphs when I submit a comment to slashdot now? It was much easier before the newest changes.
Sorry that I tried to educate the educated. When you mentioned the efficiency, I assumed that you had read a little bit somewhere and were extending it outward, so I simplified.
meaning that you need more surface area to compensate.
It's not quite as simple as that. In a modern refrigerator (an air source heat pump) the humidity on the cold side is controlled, so that the icing is not typically a problem. Even for those in which the humidity is not controlled, you see a significant improvement in efficiency by removing any ice that's built up.
In areas where the temperature is very cold, you might need to provide 80 kW of heat for a sizeable house. An air-to-air heat exchanger usually relies on forced convection for heat transfer. If the heat exchanger is jammed with ice, it can't do it's job. In order to do the same job, you would need a massive (read expensive) heat exchanger to do the same job.
Water-source heat pumps have no use once the well has frozen, as it depends on circulation. A well large enough to do the job in a very cold environment would be prohibitively expensive.
Direct exchange ground-source systems will pay versus electricity, but frankly, the installation is much too expensive when you compare it to gas or heating oil in a very cold environment.
To be sure, I'm not trying to say that a heat pump won't generally beat out resistance heaters for efficiency, I'm only saying that there are some places where it won't work well, or just doesn't make sense because of the amount of work and/or materials involved in building the system.
That's a rather arrogant way to put it, don't you think? Did you know that there are a significant number of homes in semi-rural areas that have no natural gas available? In areas that aren't really cold, and that don't have natural gas available, electric heat makes more sense. And frankly, it would be best to do a cost-benefit analysis before retrofitting a heat pump in place of the resistance heaters that are still fairly common.
What you also ignore in Marcello's statement is that he proposes a mechanism whereby he would pay for the damage caused by his preferences. Pot, meet kettle.
Not everywhere. For air source heat pumps, the COP* (what you meant when you said efficiency) is about 1.0 at 0 degrees F. In fact, because of icing, they're not necessarily useful at much colder temperatures. Shortly before I finished school, the University of Alaska, Fairbanks mechanical engineering department was testing the performance of various commercial heat pumps in the long, cold winters of Alaska. They didn't pay.
*For heat pumps, we usually talk about the Coefficient of Performance, rather than the efficiency. A loose definition of efficiency is (energy input)/(energy output). Your statement suggests that you get more energy out than you put in, rather than just transporting it from one place to another.
You're a hardier soul than am I. I just gave up. My ISP also doesn't block port 25, but I ended up using the ISP's mail server anyway. Once I ended up on a blacklist, and even with a static ISP I found that UCLA wouldn't accept mail from me, no matter what. I don't remember with any certainty, but I may have had trouble with Hotmail once, too.
Gaza Strip, illegal occupation of land, assassination of foreign nationals who are nuclear scientists, bombings of Iraqi and Syrian reactors, cyber warfare against Iran.
Is that a list, or a sentence? Are you ignoring 50, 500 or 5000 years of history in that list?
Why do you assume that it's only Israeli aggression? I don't think that the middle east would look like it did (does?) if Israel were the only aggressor. You imply a simplicity that does not exist.
First of all, USA does not provide Israel with any help. ..
Yes, actually, it does. Israel currently receives more than $3 billion in (mostly military) aid from the US of A.
Jews compose no more than 0.3% . . . 30% of Nobel prizes . . . this is why they flourish.
You're wrong again. I won't dispute the statistics, but I will dispute the conclusion. They (oops, We) flourish because of a strong tradition of academic study, necessitated by the sheer volume that one needs to learn before Bar Mitzvah (and Bat Mitzvah for the more modern Jew). Further, in some areas of the world, Jews were forbidden from owning land (see the definition of "ghetto") so they were, by necessity, forced into academia, banking and other "service" occupations.
There was a single attack on the USA, and it went to war with another country. There is a terrorist attack on Israel every day. ..
Again, you grossly mis-charactarize, and ignore certain facts. The attack that brought down the World Trade Center (WTC) wasn't the first on that pair of buildings. Further, there was another (not of middle-east origin) terrorist attack in Oklahoma several years before the WTC was brought down. To make matters worse, we have more money than we deserve, and our president at the time was an authoritarian zealot.
I don't care to suggest that Israel, and Jews more generally don't have a difficult time, but your posting shows an ignorance that can't go without some response.
. ..basically meant that someone came and took the land away from them! Of course they are annoyed and angry about it!
This is not accurate, though it's not entirely inaccurate, either. Some Palestinians left when fighting began, some were encouraged to leave and some were forced to leave.
I don't care to minimize the losses that have been suffered by forcibly displaced Palestinians, but I don't care to hear this canard repeated, either. In 1948, several Arab nations offered refuge until their armies destroyed the nascent Jewish state.
There is, by the way, one more thing worth noting: The land which Israel recognizes at it's own (their own?) is much, much smaller than that which the British administered as "the Jewish homeland" beginning about 1920. Further, it was the largely the Jews who revolted and ejected the occupying British in 1947-1948. The 20th century history of Israel is much more complicated, as you suggested with your "short straw" comment, than your implication that someone came along and took things away. (Holy crap! In rereading this, I've oversimplified, too. You just can't do any justice to even the 20th century history of the region in anything less than a tome.)
One more note, then I'll shut up: Many of the Jews in Israel prior to 1948 had been there for centuries, or were themselves displaced (or the descendents thereof) from Arab states. I'm not trying to say that folks haven't been hurt or forced out from their homes, just that it's really much more complicated than you, me, the press, most Arabs, most Israelis and several historical commentaries allow for.
huh? Direct access is certainly what Hotfile is selling. Neither my ISP, nor AT&T (my monopolist phone provider) are selling that (direct) access, so their interests are certainly indirect.
I've also seen more than one open source software distributed this way, but it's not really relevant, unless they only make a profit on open-source software.
My ISP isn't directly profiting by this, any more than AT&T, my telephone provider (protected monopolist) is. Any use that I might have for Hotfile is indirect, in respect to my ISP, or AT&T. If I download a movie (I won't and wouldn't) any profits or the phone company or my ISP are distinctly indirect. Hotfile, however, is making a direct profit, assuming that they're profitable.
I used to live in Alaska, and expect to live there again, quite soon. My biggest complaint about your comment is 'all the other "conservatives"'. I've known quite a lot of people of different stripes, and branding so many of them as "conservative" is quite a disservice. Overall, they were probably just looking for a different brand of conservatism than Murkowski's. I think it's a shame that Parnell is governor, but he looks better than either Palin or Murkowski. Please don't forget that Knowles and Cowper were both governors before Palin. (Yes, I remember Hickell, but he was even more nuts than Palin. He was thankfully ineffectual, and we should be forgiven for having elected Mr. Water Pipeline. After all, Minnesota managed to elect Jesse Ventura.)
To place even more limits on his time, he's probably had meetings with lawyers, and anything that he thinks is marginal goes to the lawyers for review.
To make matters worse, Alaska has long had a shortage of technical types: Engineers, IT, et c. I've been in southern CA for a while, but the recession left me with nothing but the occasional odd job. I recently started applying with the state of Alaska (where I'm from) and have received the following advice: Apply early and often, because of a shortage of engineers has left the state in a bit of a bind. Because of the shortage of talent overall, they apparently have a single hiring manager (the person who checks references and processes applications) and won't even be able to call my references for another week.
(If you're looking for work and don't mind the cold, look at the state of Alaska's job page.)
Slashdot Mirror
I am a municipal engineer, and until a year ago I was a consulting engineer working on similar issues. While I would put it differently, discussing capacity and gap, you're right on. The one correction that I would make is that planners don't generally deal with traffic numbers. The would normally turn it over to an engineer, although the engineer's traffic projections are ultimately based on the growth in industry and housing that the planners expect. While their expectations often have some basis, they're ultimately just a WAG. I've never tried crystal balls, but predicting the future can be tough.
Something else that can be tough is prediction of traffic shifts. If you improve the capacity of a corridor and several adjacent corridors are near or over capacity, a good deal of traffic often shifts over to your new and improved corridor, so that the perception is that you "spent all this money" and improved nothing.
I'm not trying to argue that the planners and engineers haven't failed, but rather that the failure isn't necessarily a straighforward thing. It may be as simple as errors in calculation, or perhaps growth projections were good, but there was a failure to properly account for a traffic shift. As with mechanical design (my first career) there are several modes in which highway design can fail, and it often takes careful study to understand where things have gone wrong.
Roundabouts require that you yield on entry (unless there's a stop, but that's poor design) to the facility. If there's a steady flow from one direction, they often don't leave enough of a gap for traffic from a conflicting leg to enter.
Roundabouts are great when traffic is not at full capacity on any one leg, but can be a real bear when it is.
As the article points out, roundabouts are becoming quite popular in the US, and folks like me (transportation engineer) are spending a considerable amount of time observing and simulating them.
You may want to re-read the article. The kid worked pretty hard to find a lab that allow him in to do the work he wanted to do, and has done some preliminary testing on cells. I wish that the article was longer and told more about him, but it sure doesn't seem as though he's relying on mommy and daddy to help him build a volcano.
I can't disagree with you much, but for my work, I may need to perform field calculations that require an immediate guesstimate. For that, I can use an 8 oz calculator which turns on instantly, or a 5 lb laptop that takes 2 minutes to get to a spreadsheet. . . .And my employer refuses to supply a laptop.
I like to double-check myself with spreadsheets, and for fun, wrote a vba rpn calculator. I also build some rather extensive statistical models with spreadsheets with a level of detail that would take a year with a calculator and paper records. I've also done finite element modelling both with a calculator and a spreadsheet. I can definitely see and understand the difference in the practical uses for both.
Recently, it occurred to me that Octave might be better for one of my models than a spreadsheet, but I've had trouble getting the time in to learn the software. *sigh* I've used both Matlab and Mathematica when I was in school, but it's so long ago, that my ossified brain refuses to instantly bring up needed experience.
Have any recommendations for a good online Octave tutorial?
Long live the 48. My favorite is my 48gx, and my backup is a pale 35s. (Curse be to (s)he who designed the 'enter' key on the 35s.) It's a nice, small benefit to running a course somewhat different from most. My calculators use RPN, and my computers read the keyboards as dvorak by default. Those who know me cringe at the notion of borrowing a computer or calculator from me.
I really must agree with you about the learning curve. The first time that I used RPN, a light bulb came on (and immediately burned out) when I realized how much easier a long algorithm would be. I can still use the other calculators, but I cringe at the extra effort it takes.
Mildly funny story: I lent my work laptop to a colleague in the waiting lounge of the car rental area at DFW and immediately went to the bathroom. I simply didn't think about the keyboard setting, so didn't mention it to him. The poor guy, in the 7 or 8 minutes that I was gone quickly mapped out what was different about the keyboard, and had managed to log into his Yahoo e-mail account in that short time. I got a good chuckle, and was impressed with his speed.
To be fair in the case of the bridges, they probably failed to account for increased traffic over the last fifty years and underfunding of maintenance by corrupt local governments. First one's the bridge buidlers' fault
Not really. A bridge in the 60's may, or may not, have included a planner or planners. If it did, the traffic volume would have probably included a planner in the first stage, defining the traffic and thereby the cyclic loading. If not a planner, then there may have been an engineer filling the same role. If there was no planner, then it went straight to an engineer for preliminary design, then another (or possibly the same) engineer for final design, then the final design would have been presented for bidding. There are early and late instances where construction and design were combined, but in the 60s, it was much more common for the two to be separate. Today, they're still separate firms, but may be operating as a team. The general point is that it's not *necessarily* the builder's fault that a bridge failed. It may have been the fault of planners, engineers, builders or even an incomplete understanding of the materials involved.
Your second point is spot on, though.
Fuck You. The notion that somebody would reply so rudely astounds me.
Raw fuel heats a catalytic converter. When catalytic converters were first put on carbureted engines, this was a common failure point. The fuel ignites in the converter, sometimes melting the catalyst. Some of the early converters used beads as the catalyst. These beads conducted heat poorly to neighboring beads, so they would heat very quickly, melting and eventually plugging the converter. Converters are more robust today, and engines much more tightly managed, so this particular failure mode is much less common.
The real-world results to which you are referring are so small, and at such a high throttle, that they're useless to 99% of the driving public. At best, a high-flow air filter moves the point at which the air flow chokes back to some other point, such as the throttle body, the intake manifold, the head (or heads) or the valves. In many instances, the air filter isn't even the restriction that chokes the intake as a system. I handled one of your closing sentences obliquely, but I'll address it out-of-order here: Of course restricted air flow reduces the potential of an engine. Perhaps you should learn to parse what you read properly, then come back and notice that my assertion is that there are bigger gains to be made elsewhere.
The comment to which you first replied was made by somebody driving a Toyota Matrix. This is not a performance-oriented car, so he's probably bothered about low-end throttle response. At the low end, a high-performance filter is not going to change anything. By necessity, the air flow will not be choked by a clean air filter at low engine speeds. A performance air filter CANNOT make any difference at the engine speeds that Tom17 is probably driving.
I didn't say "all", I only used the plural. In your original reply, you mentioned both an air filter and exhaust, hence my plural usage. As to idiots on slashdot, I was just now asking the same question.
Really, you little shit-tard, you know nothing about me. I've been repairing and improving cars since I was 14, for close to 30 years now. I was a mechanic for ten, until I finished an undergraduate degree in Mechanical Engineering. I'm quite aware that such experience doesn't necessarily make me smart, but your assumption that I'm stupid may be misplaced in the face of your demonstrated ignorance of air flow basics. Your continued, and false, assertion that hot catalytic converters cool with the introduction of raw fuel similarly betrays your ignorance. What's most disturbing to me is your bravado. You sound to me like some young little shit trying to cover his ignorance with bravado. I strongly doubt you would talk to me this way if you saw my time slips at the track. Have a good day: I've wasted too much time on you already.
Several comments:
Nope. Not Christian.
I really hate April 1. Between my kids and Slashdot, the day is always ruined. I have a sense of humor, but I stopped laughing about 30 minutes after the kids got home. Sigh.
Bushwah!
I used to work in downtown Los Angeles, and it's a decent place to walk. The current mayor of LA is working actively and hard to make the entire city bikeable. I'll admit to some dilapidation, but I never worried about being shot. I regularly used transit or rode a bike when I was working downtown.
Portland is a wonderful city. My youngest sister lives in Portland and loves the place. Her husband bikes everywhere he wants to go, and she walks or uses transit. They don't own a car, and they don't worry about being shot.
I used to live near Seattle, and my home is the interior of Alaska. I never worried about being shot.
For a short time, I lived in Mobile, Alabama and for a few years in Burlington, Vermont. I never worried about being shot.
I lived in the vicinity of Killeen, Texas for five years and never worried about being shot.
I lived for short periods in Albuquerque, New Mexico; Sacramento, CA; Beverly Hills, CA; Turlock, CA; Coalinga, CA; and a few other places within the United States, and a couple of places outside the Unites States. I've visited a number of places, including the innumerable cities in the US (although I've never been to the state of Hawaii), Canada, Mexico, Germany (Berlin), the UK (London and Glasgow) and Israel (Jerusalem and Tel Aviv) and I NEVER WORRIED ABOUT BEING SHOT, OR EVER BLOWN UP! I'm currently contemplating a job offer in Singapore, among other far east offers. I don't expect to be shot, should I accept any of the offers in front of me. (I'm currently inclined to reject them, for my own reasons.)
I don't know what kind of paranoid life you live, but your fear might be getting the better of you. There are places where you should worry: Much of the middle east, and a significant portion of Africa are places where everyday fears of shootings might be relevant, but the majority of the US has seen a falling rate of shootings despite rising gun ownership for quite a long time.
I might speculate that your fear comes from a misunderstanding of urban areas. Assuming so, I'll tell you that I grew up in a variety of places, including rural, exurban, suburban and urban. It might be that you should visit a few places in order to come to grips with your fears. Yes, risks exist, but for the most part, should you live your life normally, you'll find that it's quite safe. After all, there are 84,183,991 living in urban centers of 100,000 or more. If so many people were at such risk of being shot, something would have happened, either to correct the problem, or to remove the shootable (if I may be allowed to coin a word) population.
P.S. Why is it necessary to remove all white space between paragraphs when I submit a comment to slashdot now? It was much easier before the newest changes.
I saw this two or so years ago. When I searched a few minutes ago, I can't find that it's gone anywhere, but it's not yet been very long.
That's nice and all, but this looks much less like a drone. Cute, when you don't consider the implications of a virtually invisible spy drone.
Sorry that I tried to educate the educated. When you mentioned the efficiency, I assumed that you had read a little bit somewhere and were extending it outward, so I simplified.
meaning that you need more surface area to compensate.
It's not quite as simple as that. In a modern refrigerator (an air source heat pump) the humidity on the cold side is controlled, so that the icing is not typically a problem. Even for those in which the humidity is not controlled, you see a significant improvement in efficiency by removing any ice that's built up.
In areas where the temperature is very cold, you might need to provide 80 kW of heat for a sizeable house. An air-to-air heat exchanger usually relies on forced convection for heat transfer. If the heat exchanger is jammed with ice, it can't do it's job. In order to do the same job, you would need a massive (read expensive) heat exchanger to do the same job.
Water-source heat pumps have no use once the well has frozen, as it depends on circulation. A well large enough to do the job in a very cold environment would be prohibitively expensive.
Direct exchange ground-source systems will pay versus electricity, but frankly, the installation is much too expensive when you compare it to gas or heating oil in a very cold environment.
To be sure, I'm not trying to say that a heat pump won't generally beat out resistance heaters for efficiency, I'm only saying that there are some places where it won't work well, or just doesn't make sense because of the amount of work and/or materials involved in building the system.
That's a rather arrogant way to put it, don't you think? Did you know that there are a significant number of homes in semi-rural areas that have no natural gas available? In areas that aren't really cold, and that don't have natural gas available, electric heat makes more sense. And frankly, it would be best to do a cost-benefit analysis before retrofitting a heat pump in place of the resistance heaters that are still fairly common.
What you also ignore in Marcello's statement is that he proposes a mechanism whereby he would pay for the damage caused by his preferences. Pot, meet kettle.
Not everywhere. For air source heat pumps, the COP* (what you meant when you said efficiency) is about 1.0 at 0 degrees F. In fact, because of icing, they're not necessarily useful at much colder temperatures. Shortly before I finished school, the University of Alaska, Fairbanks mechanical engineering department was testing the performance of various commercial heat pumps in the long, cold winters of Alaska. They didn't pay.
*For heat pumps, we usually talk about the Coefficient of Performance, rather than the efficiency. A loose definition of efficiency is (energy input)/(energy output). Your statement suggests that you get more energy out than you put in, rather than just transporting it from one place to another.
You're a hardier soul than am I. I just gave up. My ISP also doesn't block port 25, but I ended up using the ISP's mail server anyway. Once I ended up on a blacklist, and even with a static ISP I found that UCLA wouldn't accept mail from me, no matter what. I don't remember with any certainty, but I may have had trouble with Hotmail once, too.
Gaza Strip, illegal occupation of land, assassination of foreign nationals who are nuclear scientists, bombings of Iraqi and Syrian reactors, cyber warfare against Iran.
Is that a list, or a sentence? Are you ignoring 50, 500 or 5000 years of history in that list?
Why do you assume that it's only Israeli aggression? I don't think that the middle east would look like it did (does?) if Israel were the only aggressor. You imply a simplicity that does not exist.
You're an idiot.
Not quite, actually
First of all, USA does not provide Israel with any help. . .
Yes, actually, it does. Israel currently receives more than $3 billion in (mostly military) aid from the US of A.
Jews compose no more than 0.3% . . . 30% of Nobel prizes . . . this is why they flourish.
You're wrong again. I won't dispute the statistics, but I will dispute the conclusion. They (oops, We) flourish because of a strong tradition of academic study, necessitated by the sheer volume that one needs to learn before Bar Mitzvah (and Bat Mitzvah for the more modern Jew). Further, in some areas of the world, Jews were forbidden from owning land (see the definition of "ghetto") so they were, by necessity, forced into academia, banking and other "service" occupations.
There was a single attack on the USA, and it went to war with another country. There is a terrorist attack on Israel every day. . .
Again, you grossly mis-charactarize, and ignore certain facts. The attack that brought down the World Trade Center (WTC) wasn't the first on that pair of buildings. Further, there was another (not of middle-east origin) terrorist attack in Oklahoma several years before the WTC was brought down. To make matters worse, we have more money than we deserve, and our president at the time was an authoritarian zealot.
I don't care to suggest that Israel, and Jews more generally don't have a difficult time, but your posting shows an ignorance that can't go without some response.
. . .basically meant that someone came and took the land away from them! Of course they are annoyed and angry about it!
This is not accurate, though it's not entirely inaccurate, either. Some Palestinians left when fighting began, some were encouraged to leave and some were forced to leave.
I don't care to minimize the losses that have been suffered by forcibly displaced Palestinians, but I don't care to hear this canard repeated, either. In 1948, several Arab nations offered refuge until their armies destroyed the nascent Jewish state.
There is, by the way, one more thing worth noting: The land which Israel recognizes at it's own (their own?) is much, much smaller than that which the British administered as "the Jewish homeland" beginning about 1920. Further, it was the largely the Jews who revolted and ejected the occupying British in 1947-1948. The 20th century history of Israel is much more complicated, as you suggested with your "short straw" comment, than your implication that someone came along and took things away. (Holy crap! In rereading this, I've oversimplified, too. You just can't do any justice to even the 20th century history of the region in anything less than a tome.)
One more note, then I'll shut up: Many of the Jews in Israel prior to 1948 had been there for centuries, or were themselves displaced (or the descendents thereof) from Arab states. I'm not trying to say that folks haven't been hurt or forced out from their homes, just that it's really much more complicated than you, me, the press, most Arabs, most Israelis and several historical commentaries allow for.
huh? Direct access is certainly what Hotfile is selling. Neither my ISP, nor AT&T (my monopolist phone provider) are selling that (direct) access, so their interests are certainly indirect.
I've also seen more than one open source software distributed this way, but it's not really relevant, unless they only make a profit on open-source software.
My ISP isn't directly profiting by this, any more than AT&T, my telephone provider (protected monopolist) is. Any use that I might have for Hotfile is indirect, in respect to my ISP, or AT&T. If I download a movie (I won't and wouldn't) any profits or the phone company or my ISP are distinctly indirect. Hotfile, however, is making a direct profit, assuming that they're profitable.
I used to live in Alaska, and expect to live there again, quite soon. My biggest complaint about your comment is 'all the other "conservatives"'. I've known quite a lot of people of different stripes, and branding so many of them as "conservative" is quite a disservice. Overall, they were probably just looking for a different brand of conservatism than Murkowski's. I think it's a shame that Parnell is governor, but he looks better than either Palin or Murkowski. Please don't forget that Knowles and Cowper were both governors before Palin. (Yes, I remember Hickell, but he was even more nuts than Palin. He was thankfully ineffectual, and we should be forgiven for having elected Mr. Water Pipeline. After all, Minnesota managed to elect Jesse Ventura.)
To place even more limits on his time, he's probably had meetings with lawyers, and anything that he thinks is marginal goes to the lawyers for review. To make matters worse, Alaska has long had a shortage of technical types: Engineers, IT, et c. I've been in southern CA for a while, but the recession left me with nothing but the occasional odd job. I recently started applying with the state of Alaska (where I'm from) and have received the following advice: Apply early and often, because of a shortage of engineers has left the state in a bit of a bind. Because of the shortage of talent overall, they apparently have a single hiring manager (the person who checks references and processes applications) and won't even be able to call my references for another week. (If you're looking for work and don't mind the cold, look at the state of Alaska's job page.)
. . .I'll go round up some oil execs.
Seed money, or fertilizer?