They adapted to live in a very hostile and unforgiving terrain, honing their skills and improving their cooperative instincts. When they stumbled out and found a far more fertile lands, the emigre population zoomed up. The original population continues to struggle in the same hostile and unforgiving land.
The Intellectual Property Hostage Corporation has claimed that it has a patent on the source of all languages and every one in the world should pay it license fees. A law suite has been filed in the East Texas, listing all human beings and corporations as respondents.
I wonder what would happen to the birds who fly into the beam near the focal point. Or would there be enough thermal convection signals there to scare them off?
Hope Gadaffi is merely the dry run, and the liberators would come to rescue the wretched masses suffering under the totalitarian regimes of AT&T and Verizon too.
I read with much interest your user manual about exploiting the email list. However I do not see a script or code that I can download and use with your user manual. Please provide the same sir.
It is efficient only because these intensive factory farms don't pay all the costs. They pass it on to the government, and other people. The factory farms do not have the inherent right to let their fertilizer run off and create algae blooms in the Gulf of Mexico. They do not have the right to let their noxious smelly wastes to waft across to their neighbors. They do not have some inherent right to ethanol subsidies, floor prices and special tax treatment in tax policies. When the factory farms pay full cost of their operation, they can talk about efficiency.
One basic method used by almost all animals with stereoscopic vision is to look at the scene using two eyes and use the difference to perceive depth. Human babies apparently achieve this remarkable feat between three and nine months of age. (Determined by placing babies face down on a glass ledge and checking to see if they feel alarmed. When the babies have mobility they checked to see if a baby would be wary of an apparent chasm and stay on the right side of the ledge. No babies were harmed in the research).
Another is parallax, used heavily by birds. Since the birds are constantly in motion, the view keeps changing. Objects far away change their bearings much more slowly than objects nearby. Thus birds of prey are able to judge distances accurately despite having non overlapping field of vision from their eyes. That is why birds keep cocking their head rapidly when they are sitting on a branch. They are using parallax to determine depth and distance.
For this technology to work, you need to develop the habit of cocking your head like a mocking bird constantly to get the depth perception.
If a private company uses the same software and harvests the license numbers of all the cars and makes it available to divorce attorneys or blackmailers or sociopaths with restraining orders, there is nothing illegal about it. If you obtained a restraining order against a creep, and he uses such a service to harm you, then you can go after this service, after you have been harmed, if you can prove that in court.
We made the Government small enough to be drowned in bath tub ages ago. The larger corporations promptly drowned and it has replaced it with a Zombie government fully controlled by their paid servants in the Senate, HoR, WH and the Supreme Court.
Excellent. Hope the way Google is handling enhancements set the standard of behavior for corporations. Microsoft, Oracle, Apple all have terrible track record in this respect. Hope the good behavior of Google gets recognized and appreciated by all. Hope such actions give Google some legal protection against patent trolls.
As part of the "Let's make the web faster" initiative, we are experimenting with alternative protocols to help reduce the latency of web pages.
This smells very close to the "embrace extend and extinguish" technique of Microsoft. Unless Google follows it by keeping the technology open, work on getting it certified into the next version of the standards, this would become the first step in Google becoming the next Microsoft.
Folks, save yourself some time and skip reading the article. It does not mention carbon freeze, or mini black hole based ionic propulsion, jumping into hyperspace, worm holes, tachyon particles, not even those ray blasting cannons that curiously recoil like a second world was naval gun, phasors that could be set to stun, or transporters.
OK, OK I concede that stuff like flue powder, aparating and portals seem improbable, just to show that I am not unreasonable, and am considering only proven viable technologies.
I think the math part is not difficult. I think I will make an A, not merely a passing grade in in Math section. (My All India Rank in JEE was around 800, My GRE scores were 800 Quant, 790 Verbal and 780 Analysis). There is one thing Indian schools are very good at. It is preparing pupils to take a test. Education? It came long after I was done with taking tests;-)
Even history and geography section is not difficult, at the end of high school I would have got an B there too, now I have forgotten some. If the priority was in India instead of Europe I would have made an A for questions of same level of difficulty. Greek/Latin I would have flunked, because it was never part of my high school education.
It is basically a gas turbine engine. There is a centrifugal compressor. Followed by combustion chamber. Then a centrifugal turbine. Like a typical gas turbine the exhaust gases turn the turbine the is on the same shaft as a compressor. The compressor compresses the incoming air. The innovative thing is that the combustion chamber is made very compact and turned radially inward. Now a days gas turbines and jet engines use axial compressor making them long. And the combustion chamber is also arranged as long cylindrical cans along the axis. Here everything is radial. Compressor and turbine are centrifugal the chamber is radially inward.
The gas turbine takes in air continuously and produces smooth power. This one has some kind of of ring that closes incoming air. Once it is spun and if the inlet is closed it is going to create very interesting airflow, and that is some how harnessed into self ignite the fuel air mixture. It will probably have a very narrow range of operating rpm. Starting would require us to spin this up to the operating rpm before it would produce power. So forget about low end torque or any such thing. It will produce power only at one speed and at one rate. In a gas turbine you could indirectly control speed/power by controlling the fuel flow rate. This one might not work at any other rpm or even fuel flow rate. Run it, charge the batteries and shut off, is going to be the mode of operation.
So the efficiency is not going to be three fold increase. That claim comes by including the gains made by reducing the engine + transmission weight. But there is going to be electric motors and batteries added. So the claims are a little over stated. On the other hand it does not depend on any intricate seals like Wankel engines or other unknown things. Gas turbines are well known since WW II. So it is a good promising technology, but it is not likely to be any better than many other unusual engines people are fiddling with.
A better picture:
http://green.autoblog.com/2011/04/08/wave-disk-generator-engine-wave-of-future-video/
The engine is optimized totally for efficiency. What is traded off is low end torque. Also response time is sacrificed. Present day automobile gas engines need to propel the car from rest, and also provide surge power to overtake other vehicles. Once you outsource these jobs to the electric motor and and produce constant power and allow a battery to absorb the excess power and use it when it is needed, the gas engine can do its only job, that is to convert chemical energy in the fuel into mechanical energy. Toyota Prius achieves its efficiency mostly by ditching the low end torque. All that regenerative braking etc make much smaller contribution. But even the Prius engine runs at various RPM depending on road speed.
So despite the prof looking like Indiana Jones, what he is saying and showing is plausible. What is going to make or break this technology would be the weight of the battery pack needed to store all that extra energy to provide surge and low end torque. Prius has a very tiny battery, relatively, just enough to propel the car for about 2 miles. We might need a battery midway between Prius and Chevy Volt/Nissan Leaf for this technology to work. Of course, the fine tolerance manufacturing, durability of the engine and seals (the bugaboo of Wankel) and other issues might crop up.
But the basic idea is plausible. Giving it one and half (guarded) thumbs up.
When the seller is not looking for repeat customers, they will do anything they can get away with. You see it tourist spots where they sell shoddy goods to the tourists. The proverbial user car salesmen do high pressure sales and scams because most of them are not looking for repeat customers. And your local grocery store is working on wafer thin margins. Still it would gladly refund the cost of a bag of chips if you go back and tell them "The bag of chips I bought yesterday was no good, it was stale" just on your word.
When there is not much of repeat custom, sometimes a trusted third party would certify the goods as good. Only when trust develops between buyer and seller the economy would flourish. Can I explain the important role played by that federal bureaucrat who defines the difference between tomato sauce and tomato ketchup to a tea partier in 30 seconds? No way. Well, that would off topic here too.
I saw several anti-Chinese racist comments in that link. I am very sure there are anti-American racist comments in Chinese sites ranting against Standard & Poor granting top AAA ratings to CDOs structured by cows. It is not the race, it is just commerce. In Chapter 13, Nice Guys Finish First,
in the book The Selfish Gene, Richard Dawkins gives a very nice theory of the development of trust and altruism purely based on self interest.
Now, next time Iran fakes out a missile launch test and claims it has tested some 53 rockets and shows pictures, it is going to be impossible to detect the cut/paste jet plumes.
The correct ratio seems to be 31 ^ ( 9.2 - 7.4 ) = 483. So this earthquake would be considered a moderate one, about 500 times less powerful than the 9.2 that stuck a few weeks ago.
Chronic stress grows hair for mice. For men they tear their hair out in tufts and become bald. That shows when you are the masters of the universe you control everything for your personal benefit.
I am used to buying most of the engineering text books at reasonable prices in India. They are all legal, and produced under the label Eastern Economy Edition. They will have some disclaimers about "not for sale in USA/Europe/Australia/New Zeland" etc. Compared to per capita income and the buying capacity of graduate students these books were not really cheap or affordable. Half a month scholarship for one book Engineering Mechanics Vol 1 by Erwin W Shames or Physics by Halliday and Resnick or any of the Schaum series books, Aircraft Performance Stability and Control by Perkins and Hage, what appeared to be hundreds of books in contiuum mechanics by Timoshenko. Still you gotta buy a book when you gotta pass the examn. So we scrimped and saved and bought those books. But never thought what these things cost in USA.
Imagine my shock when I saw that these books were priced at 10 to 15 times the price of Indian versions! Now my daughter's text book bill from a US Univ is exceeding the annual pay I drew as a gazetted officer (Sr Scientific Officer II) in the service of Government of India.
I really would like these gurus to get respectable reward for their excellent scholarship, and to attract more talented people to continue to author such excellent books. But I wonder if the policy of maintaining huge margins on low volumes of sales is really maximizing the profits. Despite rampant piracy and the complete evisceration of their overseas markets, Bollywood is thriving. A R Rahman's music is being played in more music players in South Asia than the entire population of USA+Canada+Europe. He is not getting a single dime for it. He gets one time payment for composition, and it is almost public domain for all intents and purposes on the day the movie is released! The Superstar Rajnikant's movie The Robot shows up as 1$ DVD in Toronto two days after it was released in India. Still they thrive. It is high time the western music industry learn to be agile and learn to live in modern markets.
Welcome to the real world, American speakers. For centuries the colonial rulers have mangled the names given by the native people for their lands and mountains and rivers and made them memorize pronunciation of stuff like Quixote (not quick-sotte) or Worcestershire (not worcestershire) or rendezvous (not ran-dezz-voos) or San Jose (not saan jose). Now the shoe is on the other foot. You guys learn to pronounce names like Sathyavakeeswaran and Bengalooru.
Reminds of this joke:
James Bond was traveling in a plane and the Indian in the next seat tries to make small talk.
"What ees your good name saar?"
"Bond, James Bond "
The Indian likes the style a lot and so he introduces himself the same way.
It is very well known that most of the strength of a structure [*] comes from the outermost parts of the structure and the center is usually a dead weight. That is why you see most wheels are thinned out between the hub and the rim with lots of weight reducing holes in the in-between portion. Next time you board a plane, gander a look at the thickness of the skin of the fuselage. What you see is the strengthened and parts because of the cutout for the door. Even then it looks awfully thin. The real skin of the plane is hardly 1 or 1.5mm thick. Now remember there is no "chassis" or a frame for a airplane fuselage. That skin is the only load bearing part for the fuselage. It is called monocoque (single shell) construction. The entire bending strength and torsional rigidity of the airplane fuselage comes from the skin. The bulkheads are used to keep the shape and to attach the load of your seats and deck to the fuselage! Ha, ha, scared you right? But it is true.
So hollow bones of these massive animals does not mean the bones are weak. It just means evolution, tinkering with the design has found that it can save some weight and materials by using hollow cross sections like box girder's for a load bearing part.
[*] OK, for the structural engineering purists: I plead guilty to oversimplification. What I really mean is that most of the contribution to moment of inertia comes from the outer parts of the cross section. I beams, box girders etc.
I like Firefox because of NoScript. So I set Firefox as the default browser and use it to visit all sites outside our corporate firewall. I use Chrome without extensions, full permissions for javascript etc, to visit all servers on this side of the firewall. So corporate applications are happy. I am sure I will not accidentally trigger a drive by download. Firefox with NoScript with a very tiny whitelist creates a very limited and crippled web experience. That is good on my work machine. Less distractions.
In my home machine I am sticking with Firefox for now, till I figure out the equivalent of NoScript for Chrome. Firefox + NoScript + FlashBlock + AdBlock allows me to control what I allow to run on my machine and take up real estate on my screen. I am not giving that back to the servers and pages. Ever!
Slashdot Mirror
They adapted to live in a very hostile and unforgiving terrain, honing their skills and improving their cooperative instincts. When they stumbled out and found a far more fertile lands, the emigre population zoomed up. The original population continues to struggle in the same hostile and unforgiving land.
The Intellectual Property Hostage Corporation has claimed that it has a patent on the source of all languages and every one in the world should pay it license fees. A law suite has been filed in the East Texas, listing all human beings and corporations as respondents.
Wonder when they are going to implement malicious bit in TCP-IP.
I wonder what would happen to the birds who fly into the beam near the focal point. Or would there be enough thermal convection signals there to scare them off?
Can you hear me now?
I read with much interest your user manual about exploiting the email list. However I do not see a script or code that I can download and use with your user manual. Please provide the same sir.
Sincerely,
Scrip T K Iddie
All your email addresses are belong to us.
This is quite the honest appraisal of the status quo: premium customers get real food, while everyone else eats soybeans.
Nope, They will get to eat Soylent Green.
It is efficient only because these intensive factory farms don't pay all the costs. They pass it on to the government, and other people. The factory farms do not have the inherent right to let their fertilizer run off and create algae blooms in the Gulf of Mexico. They do not have the right to let their noxious smelly wastes to waft across to their neighbors. They do not have some inherent right to ethanol subsidies, floor prices and special tax treatment in tax policies. When the factory farms pay full cost of their operation, they can talk about efficiency.
Another is parallax, used heavily by birds. Since the birds are constantly in motion, the view keeps changing. Objects far away change their bearings much more slowly than objects nearby. Thus birds of prey are able to judge distances accurately despite having non overlapping field of vision from their eyes. That is why birds keep cocking their head rapidly when they are sitting on a branch. They are using parallax to determine depth and distance.
For this technology to work, you need to develop the habit of cocking your head like a mocking bird constantly to get the depth perception.
We made the Government small enough to be drowned in bath tub ages ago. The larger corporations promptly drowned and it has replaced it with a Zombie government fully controlled by their paid servants in the Senate, HoR, WH and the Supreme Court.
Excellent. Hope the way Google is handling enhancements set the standard of behavior for corporations. Microsoft, Oracle, Apple all have terrible track record in this respect. Hope the good behavior of Google gets recognized and appreciated by all. Hope such actions give Google some legal protection against patent trolls.
As part of the "Let's make the web faster" initiative, we are experimenting with alternative protocols to help reduce the latency of web pages.
This smells very close to the "embrace extend and extinguish" technique of Microsoft. Unless Google follows it by keeping the technology open, work on getting it certified into the next version of the standards, this would become the first step in Google becoming the next Microsoft.
OK, OK I concede that stuff like flue powder, aparating and portals seem improbable, just to show that I am not unreasonable, and am considering only proven viable technologies.
Even history and geography section is not difficult, at the end of high school I would have got an B there too, now I have forgotten some. If the priority was in India instead of Europe I would have made an A for questions of same level of difficulty. Greek/Latin I would have flunked, because it was never part of my high school education.
The gas turbine takes in air continuously and produces smooth power. This one has some kind of of ring that closes incoming air. Once it is spun and if the inlet is closed it is going to create very interesting airflow, and that is some how harnessed into self ignite the fuel air mixture. It will probably have a very narrow range of operating rpm. Starting would require us to spin this up to the operating rpm before it would produce power. So forget about low end torque or any such thing. It will produce power only at one speed and at one rate. In a gas turbine you could indirectly control speed/power by controlling the fuel flow rate. This one might not work at any other rpm or even fuel flow rate. Run it, charge the batteries and shut off, is going to be the mode of operation.
So the efficiency is not going to be three fold increase. That claim comes by including the gains made by reducing the engine + transmission weight. But there is going to be electric motors and batteries added. So the claims are a little over stated. On the other hand it does not depend on any intricate seals like Wankel engines or other unknown things. Gas turbines are well known since WW II. So it is a good promising technology, but it is not likely to be any better than many other unusual engines people are fiddling with. A better picture: http://green.autoblog.com/2011/04/08/wave-disk-generator-engine-wave-of-future-video/
So despite the prof looking like Indiana Jones, what he is saying and showing is plausible. What is going to make or break this technology would be the weight of the battery pack needed to store all that extra energy to provide surge and low end torque. Prius has a very tiny battery, relatively, just enough to propel the car for about 2 miles. We might need a battery midway between Prius and Chevy Volt/Nissan Leaf for this technology to work. Of course, the fine tolerance manufacturing, durability of the engine and seals (the bugaboo of Wankel) and other issues might crop up.
But the basic idea is plausible. Giving it one and half (guarded) thumbs up.
When there is not much of repeat custom, sometimes a trusted third party would certify the goods as good. Only when trust develops between buyer and seller the economy would flourish. Can I explain the important role played by that federal bureaucrat who defines the difference between tomato sauce and tomato ketchup to a tea partier in 30 seconds? No way. Well, that would off topic here too.
I saw several anti-Chinese racist comments in that link. I am very sure there are anti-American racist comments in Chinese sites ranting against Standard & Poor granting top AAA ratings to CDOs structured by cows. It is not the race, it is just commerce. In Chapter 13, Nice Guys Finish First, in the book The Selfish Gene, Richard Dawkins gives a very nice theory of the development of trust and altruism purely based on self interest.
Now, next time Iran fakes out a missile launch test and claims it has tested some 53 rockets and shows pictures, it is going to be impossible to detect the cut/paste jet plumes.
The correct ratio seems to be 31 ^ ( 9.2 - 7.4 ) = 483. So this earthquake would be considered a moderate one, about 500 times less powerful than the 9.2 that stuck a few weeks ago.
The scales are logarithmic. 7.4 earthquake is about 150 times less powerful than a 9.2
Chronic stress grows hair for mice. For men they tear their hair out in tufts and become bald. That shows when you are the masters of the universe you control everything for your personal benefit.
Imagine my shock when I saw that these books were priced at 10 to 15 times the price of Indian versions! Now my daughter's text book bill from a US Univ is exceeding the annual pay I drew as a gazetted officer (Sr Scientific Officer II) in the service of Government of India.
I really would like these gurus to get respectable reward for their excellent scholarship, and to attract more talented people to continue to author such excellent books. But I wonder if the policy of maintaining huge margins on low volumes of sales is really maximizing the profits. Despite rampant piracy and the complete evisceration of their overseas markets, Bollywood is thriving. A R Rahman's music is being played in more music players in South Asia than the entire population of USA+Canada+Europe. He is not getting a single dime for it. He gets one time payment for composition, and it is almost public domain for all intents and purposes on the day the movie is released! The Superstar Rajnikant's movie The Robot shows up as 1$ DVD in Toronto two days after it was released in India. Still they thrive. It is high time the western music industry learn to be agile and learn to live in modern markets.
Reminds of this joke:
James Bond was traveling in a plane and the Indian in the next seat tries to make small talk.
"What ees your good name saar?"
"Bond, James Bond "
The Indian likes the style a lot and so he introduces himself the same way.
"Rao"
"Siva Rao"
"Samba Siva Rao"
"Subramanya Samba Siva Rao
"Parameshwara Subramanya Samba Siva Rao "
"Gangadhara Parameshwara Subramanya Samba Siva Rao"
"Ananthapur Gangadhara Parameshwara Subramanya Samba Siva Rao"
It is very well known that most of the strength of a structure [*] comes from the outermost parts of the structure and the center is usually a dead weight. That is why you see most wheels are thinned out between the hub and the rim with lots of weight reducing holes in the in-between portion. Next time you board a plane, gander a look at the thickness of the skin of the fuselage. What you see is the strengthened and parts because of the cutout for the door. Even then it looks awfully thin. The real skin of the plane is hardly 1 or 1.5mm thick. Now remember there is no "chassis" or a frame for a airplane fuselage. That skin is the only load bearing part for the fuselage. It is called monocoque (single shell) construction. The entire bending strength and torsional rigidity of the airplane fuselage comes from the skin. The bulkheads are used to keep the shape and to attach the load of your seats and deck to the fuselage! Ha, ha, scared you right? But it is true.
So hollow bones of these massive animals does not mean the bones are weak. It just means evolution, tinkering with the design has found that it can save some weight and materials by using hollow cross sections like box girder's for a load bearing part.
[*] OK, for the structural engineering purists: I plead guilty to oversimplification. What I really mean is that most of the contribution to moment of inertia comes from the outer parts of the cross section. I beams, box girders etc.
In my home machine I am sticking with Firefox for now, till I figure out the equivalent of NoScript for Chrome. Firefox + NoScript + FlashBlock + AdBlock allows me to control what I allow to run on my machine and take up real estate on my screen. I am not giving that back to the servers and pages. Ever!