He is also wary of hiring "young men without a wife or a girlfriend or a dog or parents. They are at risk because they can get so immersed in their job that it drives them crazy. We don't want the type who read e-mails on their way to brush their teeth. They need a life."?
Is this guy spoiling to get some discrimination law suite?
And why does he diss checking emails? What about checking/. postings?
Is that good or bad?
You just dont want to go the whole hog and chip 11 million illgal immigrants. As a pilot project let us chip the executives of these RFID Chip making companies.
May be I am wrong, but I thought the Digital Millennium Copyright Act prohibited breaking any encryption and made it a crime to "attempt to circumvent protection". The anti-virus people reverse engineered the virus code, decompiled it, probably ran it under SoftICE and published the password for the whole world to see. Can the author of the virus sue these anti-virus people under DMCA for causing "irreparable financial harm"? And hold slashdot as an accomplice for aiding and abetting the dissemination of the cracking key?
The Ariane 5 Rocket self destructed because of an unhandled overflow exception thrown by the flight control software.
http://www.around.com/ariane.html
Pretty soon the Blue-Screen-of-Death is going to become a lot more sinister.
These charlatans keep sprouting like weeds. There was this illiterate high school drop out who claimed to make petrol from herbs. He would boil these herbs and constantly stir it using a very thick complex looking paddle. And then light the boiling "water" that would burn with thick black fumes. He steadfastly refused to be tested under strict conditions. Eventually he persuaded his state government to provide him with 20 acres of land to do "research". Eventually when it was time for him to put up or shut up, he demonstrated his method in front of professors from the IITs. They completely debunked his "herbal" petrol. His stirring paddle was hollow, filled with store bought kerosene and plugged with wax. Once the was melts, it dumps the kerosene into the water. Here are the google hits on his name.
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&q=Ramar+pil lai+&btnG=Search
Most of these experiments rely on "stored" energy. The blackbox he refused to open or be examined must have some kind of metal hydride or whatever that releases H2 when heated. For a short while the black box will produce more energy that what is going in, but unless the devices are weighed before and after and the amount of H2 released is estimated, you should be very skeptical of such back yard inventors.
It is not cricket, but the way Indians play cricket, that shows the symptoms of lack of killer instinct. When young little tots start playing it, we tell them stories. If you know you are out, you should not wait for the umpire to declare you out. You should walk. That's cricket. If you know you took the catch at half-volley or have grounded the back of your glove while taking a catch, you should not shout appeal for an out. That's not cricket.
Well, the trouble with India is it thinks it is really true and plays under this code of conduct at ODI/Test level. When was the last time you heard a batsman declared out for "handling the ball" at test cricket? [FYI K Shrikant, HTB, appeal by Tony Craig, Captain, MCC.] The ball was on the pitch and Shrikant was mending it for the next delivery nearby. Tony Craig, from silly point was walking in to retrieve the ball. That idiot Shrikant was crounched padding a spot on the pitch down. Instead of letting the tall English captain stoop over to pick the ball, he picked the ball and handed it to him. Tony appealed for "handling the ball" and got Shrikant out. True, what Tony did was by the rule. But that was not Cricket by the book of Indians. That is the problem with the Indians.
As XchristX says, may be success will change their mentality. Once they see how much benefit one gets by having a little killer instict and sacrificing a little "gentlemen" image. If they do good for them.
Are they preloading Firefox and make it the default browser?
The Google softwar pack included OpenOffice too. Both will be included?
That will be interesting.
Nah, not in India. They lack the killer instinct. They play cricket. They want to be respected and called gentlemen rather than winners. India has the second largest muslim population in the world, and even the muslims there dont become suicide bombers or end up in gitmo. It is a very mild mannered nation. Destined to produce the nerds and supply them to other Silicon Valleys of the world.
Natural Gas. Really. Natural gas can be heated and cracked to produce H2. The machine that does it is called a reformer, and it is small enough to be installed on any gas station that is conveniently connected to the Natural Gas Grid. It is small enough for home use too.
True it is not totally pollution free. It still emits carbon to the atmosphere. But the key thing about Natural Gas is that, Saudi Arabia does not have a monopoly on it. What most people miss in the Energy debate is that energy-for-transportation is different from energy for homes and factories. There is abundant supply of energy for homes and factories. But the transportation infrastructure is so dependant on the sweet crude from Saudi Arabia, it is quite scary. First we need to liberate our transportation sector from its dependancy on Saudi Arabia and other such hostile nations. This is urgent.
We also have to find alternative energy that is less pollution. That is important. They are not contradictory or mutually exclusive. We should do both. Take care of urgent things first and try to switch to NaturalGas->H2 over the next 10 to 15 years. Plan on replacing fossil source natural gas with bio-mass, farm waste, agri-waste methane over the next 25 years.
Thank you Angel! Supplie Sankaran [FootNote1] did his job well. Somehow the 99% efficiency figure got stuck in my mind, even though most of the things about shunt-wound and series-wound motors and the Y and Delta configurations have decayed away. 99% efficiency for electrical machines make sense. The devices to dissipate waste heat in electric motors look comically simple compared to the radiators of IC engines delivering same amount of power to the shaft. Clearly shows there is not much of a loss in electrical machines.
[FootNote1] Prof Sankaran, who taught us Elec.Mach.301, graded so strictly most of us flunked and had to take the supplie (supplimentary examination) at the end of summer vacation to pass the course. That earned him the not-so-endering nickname Supplie Sankaran.
One thing strange in the story was the plan to capture the carbon and sequester it. But is it necessary? Only carbon coming from fossil fuels need to be sequestered. The carbon from the sugars actually came from the atmosphere and there is no harm in returning it to the atm.
Thanks for the correction. Even at 80% efficiency for the electric motor, the over all efficiency is 38%, almost double the overall efficiency of the IC engine system.
Electrical Machines 101 was so long ago, I got confused transformers with motors. Sorry about that.
Thing to note is that we are starting from natural gas, another fossil fuel. It is still not the non-polluting nirvana imagined by many fans of fuel cells.
The IC engine is not a paragon of efficiency either. The Carnot efficiency for heat engines for the typical IC engine temperatures is just 56%. That is, no more than 56% of the heat content of the fuel can ever be converted to mechanical energy. A fixed powerplant operating gasturbines at fixed speed and humongous cooling towers and waste heat recovery systems operate at 40% efficieny. The IC engine in the car operates typically at 30%. After paying for the friction in the cylinders and piston, and reduction gear in transmission, torque converters, differentials etc, the mechanical energy available to the wheels of the car are just 20% of the heat content of the fuel.
Now let us do a full cycle efficicency calc for the fuel cell. Starting with natural gas heated and cracked into H2, the efficiency is 60%. i.e. the H2 has 60% of the heat content of the natural gas we began with. Fuel cells efficiency is 80%. i.e. 80% of the heat content of H2 is available as electricity. There is no gear box. Electric motors convert electriciy to mechanical energy at >99% efficiency. Over all efficiency is 48% of the heat content of natural gas is available to the wheels of the car. This is already more than twice the efficiency of the gasoline energy to brake-horse-power to the wheels conversion.
The IC engine systems are at the pinnacle of their efficiency over 100 years of research and development and tinkering. The CH4 -> H2 reforming and H2->electricity fuel cell technology has barely started now [*]. Their efficiency will improve over the coming decades. Throw in the assorted facts like, 15% of the energy in the crude oil is spent in extracting it, refining it and distributing it or 80% of US Gas stations can be connected to the natural gas grid and reform CH4->H2 on site. The future of fuel cells is bright. They will win.
How soon can the US SUV fleet switch to H2? Well, in 1940 the entire locomotive fleet of USA was external combustion steam engines (6% overall efficiency energy_to_wheels/heat_of_coal). The diesel-electric hybrid locomotives had overall efficiency of 15% those days. By 1955, steam locomotives were dead.
[*] The principles of fuel cells are as old or even older than IC engines, but the large scale R&D effort has not yet been directed towards fuel cells and reforming CH4 compared to the R&D money poured into IC engines over the last century.
Jay,
You seem to be convinced the sex is sin and the main purpose of human sex is procreation. And you seem to be very conflicted and guilt ridden because of sex. Well, buddy, do yourself a favour. There is a delightful little book by Jared Diamond, titled "Why Sex is Fun?". A great book that explains the main purpose of human sex is to reinforce the love, affection and the bond between a man and a woman. Procreation is just a side effect.
You are convincing yourself that evolution is the way God designed us. If that is the way you want to resolve the conflict between your desire to believe in God and the scientific evidence starting at you, fine. There is no problem. Who knows, may be God is making me write this posting so that the last ounce of guilty feelings can be purged from you.
American school systems are more concerned about protecting the fragile self esteem of dumb students. It cares less about turning out the best possible graduates. In sports everyone knows who came in first, second and third and who came in last. No one cares about protecting the self-esteem of the losers in sports. The jocks swagger in school and America produces world quality athletes. In academics, the grades scored by the students are closely guarded as though they were nuclear secrets. We churn out dumb students.
Where I went to school, you have to get passing grade on all subjects to get "ranked". They publish the scores of all the students publicly. We discussed grades openly. We made fun of kids who failed. College entrance examn results, ranks are published in web sites for the whole world to see. For rank holders of prestegious examns are published in newspapers. Just today I saw in a Indian newspaper the Rank List of candidates for some civil service examnination with photographs of the top 10 candidates. When did we see public accolades for students with good academic achievements? You see sports, sports, sports and more football stars on local newspapers, school newsletter etc. The kid that slogged to get stright As must hide the fact and apologize to the student body for making the dumb kids look dumb. If shaming a C grader in high school motivates her to study harder, let us shame her. If shaming makes her sulk and demotivates her, then that dumb chick's self-esteem and ego is not worth protecting. Let her find work hard in something that interests her and the she feel proud of that. Never protect the self-esteem of slackers.
The American School System is turning out exactly what it is designed to churn out. Dumb students with inflated egos. What is really amazing is that it also produces remarkably intelligent smart graduates. Despite being labeled nerds and reviled, with absolutely no encouragement from the system, constantly discouraged from flaunting one's grades and academic achievements, despite all, America still produces some of the most gifted and amazingly intelligent students. But for it compete with China and India churning out millions of engineers, it is high time we let our Straight A students a little chance to swagger.
I immigrated to USA hoping to see John Galts, Howard Roarks, Taggny Taggarts and Hank Reardens in charge. Now I realize here too, just like in India, it is Ellsworth Tooheys who are running the show.
EBCDIC might be still alive, but it is no longer providing an extra margin for the people who foisted it on us. Those IBM sales reps and product managers are long gone. Even when EBCDIC terminals and tape drives were selling at premium prices compared to VT100s and Tektronix terminals etc, not all the extra price went in as profit margin. Volume of production was low and so the unit cost was high for IBM. All those short-sighted executives are gone, IBM is getting out of hardware, but the companies that were stuck with IBM-370s continue to bleed dollars because they are stuck with such nonstandard hardware.
Sony never learned from Betamax and tried to foist the infernal memory stick on us, now it has finally relented and supports MMC & SD. Not only it wasted money in tooling and development of the memory stick, it has to continue to spend extra to support two memory interfaces in its products.
Today it looks like, the cause for open document formats, open APIs and open standards is doomed and is continually sabotaged by the evil empire de jour, that happens to be Microsoft. But such high margin islands dont survive.
That is what this issue of MoneyMag says. There was even a thread in/.
(Too lazy to find it and post a link)
If there is a demand, and if there is a shortage of supply, the
pay will automatically go up. Trust free markets.
During the last ice age the sea level was lower and the
Straits of Bosphorus, connecting the Black Sea with the
Mediterranian was actually an isthmus (or a landbridge).
When the ice melted 11000 years ago and the Med overtopped
the isthmus, it was a levy break of catatrophic proportions.
Before that the Black Sea was a freshwater lake and its
North-Eastern shores were very fertile and well inhabited.
People living there were serverly dislocated and fled the flood.
Only the descendants of those people who resettled in the
Middle East (Noah), Persia (Gilgamesh) and North India (Manu)
believe in the quick catastrophic flood, as a divine punishment
for sinful mankind. Only Moslem, Christian, Jewish and Hindu
religions belive in the Flood being punishment and a complete
make over of the universe.
Other Flood legends from the Tamils, Japanese, Chinese, Incas
etc talk about gradual Flood as a natural phenomena. World
existing before and after in substantially the same way.
BTW all the water in the atmosphere is not enough to cover the
world to the depth of four inches.
PS: First time breaking out of Readonly-mode in/. Please be kind to me;-)
Remember how long IBM insisted on foisting on us the EBCDIC
and actively sabotaged ASCII for decades? Using monopoly power
to sabotage compatibility is nothing new. And it does not work
either. dhtml, proprietary file formats, "new-and-improved"CSS
all will end up in the same dust heap of history along with
EBCDIC and Betamax.
Slashdot Mirror
You just dont want to go the whole hog and chip 11 million illgal immigrants. As a pilot project let us chip the executives of these RFID Chip making companies.
May be I am wrong, but I thought the Digital Millennium Copyright Act prohibited breaking any encryption and made it a crime to "attempt to circumvent protection". The anti-virus people reverse engineered the virus code, decompiled it, probably ran it under SoftICE and published the password for the whole world to see. Can the author of the virus sue these anti-virus people under DMCA for causing "irreparable financial harm"? And hold slashdot as an accomplice for aiding and abetting the dissemination of the cracking key?
The Ariane 5 Rocket self destructed because of an unhandled overflow exception thrown by the flight control software. http://www.around.com/ariane.html
Pretty soon the Blue-Screen-of-Death is going to become a lot more sinister.
Most of these experiments rely on "stored" energy. The blackbox he refused to open or be examined must have some kind of metal hydride or whatever that releases H2 when heated. For a short while the black box will produce more energy that what is going in, but unless the devices are weighed before and after and the amount of H2 released is estimated, you should be very skeptical of such back yard inventors.
Well, the trouble with India is it thinks it is really true and plays under this code of conduct at ODI/Test level. When was the last time you heard a batsman declared out for "handling the ball" at test cricket? [FYI K Shrikant, HTB, appeal by Tony Craig, Captain, MCC.] The ball was on the pitch and Shrikant was mending it for the next delivery nearby. Tony Craig, from silly point was walking in to retrieve the ball. That idiot Shrikant was crounched padding a spot on the pitch down. Instead of letting the tall English captain stoop over to pick the ball, he picked the ball and handed it to him. Tony appealed for "handling the ball" and got Shrikant out. True, what Tony did was by the rule. But that was not Cricket by the book of Indians. That is the problem with the Indians.
As XchristX says, may be success will change their mentality. Once they see how much benefit one gets by having a little killer instict and sacrificing a little "gentlemen" image. If they do good for them.
Are they preloading Firefox and make it the default browser? The Google softwar pack included OpenOffice too. Both will be included? That will be interesting.
Nah, not in India. They lack the killer instinct. They play cricket. They want to be respected and called gentlemen rather than winners. India has the second largest muslim population in the world, and even the muslims there dont become suicide bombers or end up in gitmo. It is a very mild mannered nation. Destined to produce the nerds and supply them to other Silicon Valleys of the world.
OK, they got nerds and rich VCs. But did they win any Superbowls? We won it five times. GO STEELERS
True it is not totally pollution free. It still emits carbon to the atmosphere. But the key thing about Natural Gas is that, Saudi Arabia does not have a monopoly on it. What most people miss in the Energy debate is that energy-for-transportation is different from energy for homes and factories. There is abundant supply of energy for homes and factories. But the transportation infrastructure is so dependant on the sweet crude from Saudi Arabia, it is quite scary. First we need to liberate our transportation sector from its dependancy on Saudi Arabia and other such hostile nations. This is urgent.
We also have to find alternative energy that is less pollution. That is important. They are not contradictory or mutually exclusive. We should do both. Take care of urgent things first and try to switch to NaturalGas->H2 over the next 10 to 15 years. Plan on replacing fossil source natural gas with bio-mass, farm waste, agri-waste methane over the next 25 years.
[FootNote1] Prof Sankaran, who taught us Elec.Mach.301, graded so strictly most of us flunked and had to take the supplie (supplimentary examination) at the end of summer vacation to pass the course. That earned him the not-so-endering nickname Supplie Sankaran.
http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2006-05/24/con tent_4595131.htm
One thing strange in the story was the plan to capture the carbon and sequester it. But is it necessary? Only carbon coming from fossil fuels need to be sequestered. The carbon from the sugars actually came from the atmosphere and there is no harm in returning it to the atm.
Electrical Machines 101 was so long ago, I got confused transformers with motors. Sorry about that.
Thing to note is that we are starting from natural gas, another fossil fuel. It is still not the non-polluting nirvana imagined by many fans of fuel cells.
Now let us do a full cycle efficicency calc for the fuel cell. Starting with natural gas heated and cracked into H2, the efficiency is 60%. i.e. the H2 has 60% of the heat content of the natural gas we began with. Fuel cells efficiency is 80%. i.e. 80% of the heat content of H2 is available as electricity. There is no gear box. Electric motors convert electriciy to mechanical energy at >99% efficiency. Over all efficiency is 48% of the heat content of natural gas is available to the wheels of the car. This is already more than twice the efficiency of the gasoline energy to brake-horse-power to the wheels conversion.
The IC engine systems are at the pinnacle of their efficiency over 100 years of research and development and tinkering. The CH4 -> H2 reforming and H2->electricity fuel cell technology has barely started now [*]. Their efficiency will improve over the coming decades. Throw in the assorted facts like, 15% of the energy in the crude oil is spent in extracting it, refining it and distributing it or 80% of US Gas stations can be connected to the natural gas grid and reform CH4->H2 on site. The future of fuel cells is bright. They will win.
How soon can the US SUV fleet switch to H2? Well, in 1940 the entire locomotive fleet of USA was external combustion steam engines (6% overall efficiency energy_to_wheels/heat_of_coal). The diesel-electric hybrid locomotives had overall efficiency of 15% those days. By 1955, steam locomotives were dead.
[*] The principles of fuel cells are as old or even older than IC engines, but the large scale R&D effort has not yet been directed towards fuel cells and reforming CH4 compared to the R&D money poured into IC engines over the last century.
You are convincing yourself that evolution is the way God designed us. If that is the way you want to resolve the conflict between your desire to believe in God and the scientific evidence starting at you, fine. There is no problem. Who knows, may be God is making me write this posting so that the last ounce of guilty feelings can be purged from you.
Where I went to school, you have to get passing grade on all subjects to get "ranked". They publish the scores of all the students publicly. We discussed grades openly. We made fun of kids who failed. College entrance examn results, ranks are published in web sites for the whole world to see. For rank holders of prestegious examns are published in newspapers. Just today I saw in a Indian newspaper the Rank List of candidates for some civil service examnination with photographs of the top 10 candidates. When did we see public accolades for students with good academic achievements? You see sports, sports, sports and more football stars on local newspapers, school newsletter etc. The kid that slogged to get stright As must hide the fact and apologize to the student body for making the dumb kids look dumb. If shaming a C grader in high school motivates her to study harder, let us shame her. If shaming makes her sulk and demotivates her, then that dumb chick's self-esteem and ego is not worth protecting. Let her find work hard in something that interests her and the she feel proud of that. Never protect the self-esteem of slackers.
The American School System is turning out exactly what it is designed to churn out. Dumb students with inflated egos. What is really amazing is that it also produces remarkably intelligent smart graduates. Despite being labeled nerds and reviled, with absolutely no encouragement from the system, constantly discouraged from flaunting one's grades and academic achievements, despite all, America still produces some of the most gifted and amazingly intelligent students. But for it compete with China and India churning out millions of engineers, it is high time we let our Straight A students a little chance to swagger.
I immigrated to USA hoping to see John Galts, Howard Roarks, Taggny Taggarts and Hank Reardens in charge. Now I realize here too, just like in India, it is Ellsworth Tooheys who are running the show.
Sony never learned from Betamax and tried to foist the infernal memory stick on us, now it has finally relented and supports MMC & SD. Not only it wasted money in tooling and development of the memory stick, it has to continue to spend extra to support two memory interfaces in its products.
Today it looks like, the cause for open document formats, open APIs and open standards is doomed and is continually sabotaged by the evil empire de jour, that happens to be Microsoft. But such high margin islands dont survive.
That is what this issue of MoneyMag says. There was even a thread in /.
(Too lazy to find it and post a link)
If there is a demand, and if there is a shortage of supply, the
pay will automatically go up. Trust free markets.
Before that the Black Sea was a freshwater lake and its North-Eastern shores were very fertile and well inhabited. People living there were serverly dislocated and fled the flood.
Only the descendants of those people who resettled in the Middle East (Noah), Persia (Gilgamesh) and North India (Manu) believe in the quick catastrophic flood, as a divine punishment for sinful mankind. Only Moslem, Christian, Jewish and Hindu religions belive in the Flood being punishment and a complete make over of the universe.
Other Flood legends from the Tamils, Japanese, Chinese, Incas etc talk about gradual Flood as a natural phenomena. World existing before and after in substantially the same way.
BTW all the water in the atmosphere is not enough to cover the world to the depth of four inches.
PS: First time breaking out of Readonly-mode in /. Please be kind to me ;-)
Remember how long IBM insisted on foisting on us the EBCDIC and actively sabotaged ASCII for decades? Using monopoly power to sabotage compatibility is nothing new. And it does not work either. dhtml, proprietary file formats, "new-and-improved"CSS all will end up in the same dust heap of history along with EBCDIC and Betamax.