They tried building a hydrogen powered spy plane back in the 70s or something. LH2 is kind of a nightmare to deal with compared to jet fuel. For one thing, its a cryogenic. The US Air Force decided that playing with LH2 was a) too dangerous and b) too much of a logistics headache. And even with LH2, your energy density is still significantly lower than jet fuel. They had a nightmare trying to get the range required on that spy plane. Wiki-link for you: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_CL-400_Suntan. If you're interested, try finding Ben Rich's Shunkworks. He spends a chapter talking about trying to build this thing (and all the wonderful fun they had playing with LH2... they apparently went ahead and did all the usual Liquid Nitrogen fun stuff... except with LH2).
The bypass ratio refers to the mass of air moved around the core to the mass moved through the core, not the ratio of thrust. For any given mass of air being put through the core, it will produce more thrust than the same ratio outside the core because it gets hotter/faster.
Uh... we use something called i<clicker. It costs like 20 bucks for a wand (and the university store sells them at 30 dollars to students... of course). The support software/hardware is like a hundred bucks per prof or something. Haven't really had any problems with them.
Requiring Professors to teach by certain techniques is certainly going to lead to disaster. While in surgery, newer procedures are almost always a measurable improvement over previous procedures in some way (time, cost, success rate, whatever), I feel it that its simply too difficult to quantify the 'success' of various techniques. Especially when the success depends so much on the course material, professors, and the students. For example, I could hardly imagine Calculus I being improved with video conferencing or blogs.
What benefit would forcing professors to teach integration with powerpoints bring? If anything, I believe there are entire concepts which are better taught on a chalkboard, not with powerpoints or slides. Things where the process matters (like integration, or physics problems) where simply seeing the steps laid out before you seems to miss out on some of the 'magic'. I really feel this because I've just completed a term where I had a calc prof teaching all on chalkboard, and a physics prof who had most of the material laid out in powerpoint, and would fall back to the board when asked a question, or having to elaborate.
There is nothing wrong with encouraging profs to try something new. Provide them with resources and information on new ways to teach. Don't force them. You'll likely just end up with a bunch of profs pissed off at the university admin, and classfuls of bored students.
That said, I do find the use of the clickers really useful. I do wish more courses/profs used them.
BlackBerrys are assembled in Canada, Mexico and Hungary. Most of the parts are manufactured from all across Asia (the low-end batteries are exclusively made in China, nearly all screens are made in Japan). It doesn't really look like that's really going to change in the future. In fact, I really don't know why RIM doesn't push this point more... it'll certainly please those pundits crying about the destruction of North America's manufacturing base. I mean, there's a BlackBerry factory right in Waterloo.
As for India's complaint, the summary is leaving out some important information. Couple years back they pressed on RIM, and RIM relented, agreeing to allow Indian security agencies access to BB comms on request (they have similar arrangements with North American law enforcement and intelligence agencies I imagine). RIM did not agree to setup a local NOC (the server where all BB traffic flows) in India. Lately, RIM agreed to set up a NOC in China (giving Chinese agencies somewhat easier access to BB traffic), in exchange for being able to do business there. India is ticked off cause they wanted the same setup and is now pushing again. It's not a question of India getting access to local BB traffic, its a question of how easy it is for them to get it.
Well, the restrictions really don't matter cause all communications to/from the President must be recorded and be made available. Bush Jr gave up on his personal email (it was an aol account) when he became president cause he didn't want to have to disclose private information. Obama's BB will be under similar restrictions. Whatever BES he's attached to probably has all sorts of ridiculous auditing and filtering stuff turned on for his account. It's very much going to be 'boring' work phone.
Blizzard usually doesn't go for the latest and greatest graphics. If you look at screenshots of SC2, it's using graphics that are technically a few years old. As in a video card from 06 could render it with no problem.
Whatever money blizzards dumps into their graphics, its into the art, not into trying to cram more polygons on screen.
Because this isn't meant for use in North America at all. There are places in the world where all they have is base GSM without GPRS. Or as another poster pointed out, you could have whacked out data pricing schemes.
The intended use of this is for once a day updates of information to locations with poor internet connectivity. These people weren't pulling in high data to begin with, and likely were sending even less. For example, if all you need to do is send crop prices, weather reports, etc that update once a day, then you can just push all that data once a day over SMS.
Beyond that, as a student currently at Waterloo, I'm fairly certain that this PhD student, some prof, or some other smart ass student (there are a LOT of those here) probably already considered the problem of congestion. And they probably worked out acceptable loads, or solutions, or w/e.
Not like no country is the free world is evil enough to ban porn for children right? Right?
Get a grip guys. China may do some horrible/stupid things. But this is overblowing things. We have laws preventing commercial entities from selling certain products/services to people underage in north america (and most of the industrial world). We have laws making underage possession of said entities illegal for fuck's sake, and we've all gone out and made arguments based on children's lack of education/inability to take responsibility of themselves, and then went and ahead and accepted the unfortunate coarseness of age based laws.
So don't go out and bash the fuck out of China for this. Yes, they are controlling the Chinese children's freedom. Just like how I wasn't able to buy my own booze when I was 16. There are better things to criticize China for.
For many games, the "official" content has nothing to do with the best or flashiest plays. Starcraft comes to mind. Blizzard has nothing to do with nearly all high level play. Hell, all high level play specifically by passes Bnet ladder. The closest Blizzard comes to 'claiming' any high level play is the yearly Blizzcon tournament. Which is something that very few game companies have the size and clout to pull off.
Really, the thing is lack of centralization. Aside from MMORPGs, game companies won't be able to directly see what the players are doing. They would have to rely on player submissions, which really boils down to youtube again. They could sponsor/host events more often (which I think is a great idea), but once again, there are few companies that have that kind of rapport with their communities for them to be taken seriously. And being taken seriously is pretty much key for 'good' players to show up and show off 'awesome' plays.
Finally, just doing that is a lot of work. It really is. It really is easier for most companies to let their fans upload their killtages and epic matches on youtube by themselves, and maybe comment on them every so often. I mean, that's what Bungie did with Halo. They gave the community the tools, and the community (and MLG) took care of the rest. All Frankie had to do was link to random videos every so often in weekly updates.
It doesn't seem like its the technicians who are forcing this through. TFA says it was the management who decided it was a good idea to "ease pressure". Which probably meant that the techies were feeling overworked (they probably are overworked) and complained (not really expecting something like THIS to happen). And instead of doing anything constructive (or maybe they're just all out of money), the management went for some crazy ass stupid idea that somehow past muster.
Pointy Head Boss eh? IT isn't the only place where they exist.
TFA says that the rice additive has been used since the Ming Dynasty... and then goes on to say 1500 years ago. Ming Dynasty ruled around 1500 AD. They got themselves a 1000 year discrepancy there. Would sure be nice if they were more accurate about what they meant.
The XT was pretty much made for laptops. It's really the only place where getting a true hybrid (as opposed to HDD + SSD) really makes sense.
For the XT, the SSD works as a read cache, and read cache only. You're only going to be seeing performance increases on whatever it has cached (4gigs). So if you have a few frequently used programs with long startup times, you'll see more than 'a couple of percent' better. And that's about it.
Hybrid drives will always be the compromise between HDD and SSD. You will never see them performing on the same order of performance as SSD across the board unless the SSD component becomes huge.
Early cold war devices were in the 25MT range. By the late 70s and 80s they were mostly back to using kT range warheads. Just more of them. And more likely to actually hit the damn target.
They've done this numerous times in the past. Mars Global Surveyor, Mars Recon Orbiter, etc etc. If its a good idea, or would even work (from a power perspective) is different, but putting the satellites in orbit is doable. Infact, I suspect it's easier than actually landing the rovers. Not having to do all the breaking and stuff. Hell, I would think (can't confirm it anywhere), whenever you send payload over to Mars, you're going to go into a Mars orbit first before deorbiting onto the surface. So a single rocket could send the power sat, and the rover together.
Look, using non-metallic parts/coating may work. But seriously, I think some people are overblowing the difficulty of salt water turbines. I mean, most ships today are turbine powered... it's basically a floating turbine generator backwards. It's an added design constraint, but it's a solvable (and largely solved) problem I would think. I mean, the Bay of Fundy already has a barrage style tidal plant operating. And the Atlantic on our side is more or less as salty as the Atlantic on the other side.
The bigger problem is just how little power gets stored up. A height difference of 50cm isn't very large, even with such a large reservoir size.
Well. For what it's worth, if they brought down an operational or recently decommissioned Chinese or Russian satellite, the world would come one step closer to exploding. Seriously, its great to fantasize about this stuff. But going out and blatantly stealing other countries' military/intelligence hardware (and in effect, deploying an ASAT weapon) would just become a diplomatic disaster.
They do look down at significant angles. This is why you have to hide stuff you don't want seen whenever the spy satellite is over the horizon, not just when its over head. The operators get to decide when to use fuel (or bleep off a flywheel) to reorient a satellite.
It means that life that already started may not cease when supermassive black holes enter the super radiant (ha!) phase. The article mentions this phase lasts hundreds of millions of years. The estimated time of start of life on earth is like 4 billion years ago. So if the atmosphere of a life bearing planet can shield enough of the xrays, then life could well continue on a planet during the super radiant stage.
It just means life (well, really stars) will end faster in those galaxies in the LONNGGG run.
Deception is skill. Playing the player is every bit as important as playing the "cards". This is true of nearly any sport/game. Two boxers may be physically identical with the same reaction times, strength, speed, technique, etc etc. But if one guy can make the other step in the wrong place (playing the player) then that "light" jab will put them right out.
The robots are for sniping practice. For long range shooting, nothing comes close to the actual thing. You really don't want to put real people out on the range.
I mean sure, they COULD just send their snipers off big game hunting, but that might not play so well.
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They tried building a hydrogen powered spy plane back in the 70s or something. LH2 is kind of a nightmare to deal with compared to jet fuel. For one thing, its a cryogenic. The US Air Force decided that playing with LH2 was a) too dangerous and b) too much of a logistics headache. And even with LH2, your energy density is still significantly lower than jet fuel. They had a nightmare trying to get the range required on that spy plane. Wiki-link for you: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_CL-400_Suntan. If you're interested, try finding Ben Rich's Shunkworks. He spends a chapter talking about trying to build this thing (and all the wonderful fun they had playing with LH2... they apparently went ahead and did all the usual Liquid Nitrogen fun stuff... except with LH2).
The bypass ratio refers to the mass of air moved around the core to the mass moved through the core, not the ratio of thrust. For any given mass of air being put through the core, it will produce more thrust than the same ratio outside the core because it gets hotter/faster.
Uh... we use something called i<clicker. It costs like 20 bucks for a wand (and the university store sells them at 30 dollars to students... of course). The support software/hardware is like a hundred bucks per prof or something. Haven't really had any problems with them.
Requiring Professors to teach by certain techniques is certainly going to lead to disaster. While in surgery, newer procedures are almost always a measurable improvement over previous procedures in some way (time, cost, success rate, whatever), I feel it that its simply too difficult to quantify the 'success' of various techniques. Especially when the success depends so much on the course material, professors, and the students. For example, I could hardly imagine Calculus I being improved with video conferencing or blogs.
What benefit would forcing professors to teach integration with powerpoints bring? If anything, I believe there are entire concepts which are better taught on a chalkboard, not with powerpoints or slides. Things where the process matters (like integration, or physics problems) where simply seeing the steps laid out before you seems to miss out on some of the 'magic'. I really feel this because I've just completed a term where I had a calc prof teaching all on chalkboard, and a physics prof who had most of the material laid out in powerpoint, and would fall back to the board when asked a question, or having to elaborate.
There is nothing wrong with encouraging profs to try something new. Provide them with resources and information on new ways to teach. Don't force them. You'll likely just end up with a bunch of profs pissed off at the university admin, and classfuls of bored students.
That said, I do find the use of the clickers really useful. I do wish more courses/profs used them.
BlackBerrys are assembled in Canada, Mexico and Hungary. Most of the parts are manufactured from all across Asia (the low-end batteries are exclusively made in China, nearly all screens are made in Japan). It doesn't really look like that's really going to change in the future. In fact, I really don't know why RIM doesn't push this point more... it'll certainly please those pundits crying about the destruction of North America's manufacturing base. I mean, there's a BlackBerry factory right in Waterloo.
As for India's complaint, the summary is leaving out some important information. Couple years back they pressed on RIM, and RIM relented, agreeing to allow Indian security agencies access to BB comms on request (they have similar arrangements with North American law enforcement and intelligence agencies I imagine). RIM did not agree to setup a local NOC (the server where all BB traffic flows) in India. Lately, RIM agreed to set up a NOC in China (giving Chinese agencies somewhat easier access to BB traffic), in exchange for being able to do business there. India is ticked off cause they wanted the same setup and is now pushing again. It's not a question of India getting access to local BB traffic, its a question of how easy it is for them to get it.
Well, the restrictions really don't matter cause all communications to/from the President must be recorded and be made available. Bush Jr gave up on his personal email (it was an aol account) when he became president cause he didn't want to have to disclose private information. Obama's BB will be under similar restrictions. Whatever BES he's attached to probably has all sorts of ridiculous auditing and filtering stuff turned on for his account. It's very much going to be 'boring' work phone.
Blizzard usually doesn't go for the latest and greatest graphics. If you look at screenshots of SC2, it's using graphics that are technically a few years old. As in a video card from 06 could render it with no problem.
Whatever money blizzards dumps into their graphics, its into the art, not into trying to cram more polygons on screen.
Because this isn't meant for use in North America at all. There are places in the world where all they have is base GSM without GPRS. Or as another poster pointed out, you could have whacked out data pricing schemes.
The intended use of this is for once a day updates of information to locations with poor internet connectivity. These people weren't pulling in high data to begin with, and likely were sending even less. For example, if all you need to do is send crop prices, weather reports, etc that update once a day, then you can just push all that data once a day over SMS.
Beyond that, as a student currently at Waterloo, I'm fairly certain that this PhD student, some prof, or some other smart ass student (there are a LOT of those here) probably already considered the problem of congestion. And they probably worked out acceptable loads, or solutions, or w/e.
Not like no country is the free world is evil enough to ban porn for children right? Right?
Get a grip guys. China may do some horrible/stupid things. But this is overblowing things. We have laws preventing commercial entities from selling certain products/services to people underage in north america (and most of the industrial world). We have laws making underage possession of said entities illegal for fuck's sake, and we've all gone out and made arguments based on children's lack of education/inability to take responsibility of themselves, and then went and ahead and accepted the unfortunate coarseness of age based laws.
So don't go out and bash the fuck out of China for this. Yes, they are controlling the Chinese children's freedom. Just like how I wasn't able to buy my own booze when I was 16. There are better things to criticize China for.
For many games, the "official" content has nothing to do with the best or flashiest plays. Starcraft comes to mind. Blizzard has nothing to do with nearly all high level play. Hell, all high level play specifically by passes Bnet ladder. The closest Blizzard comes to 'claiming' any high level play is the yearly Blizzcon tournament. Which is something that very few game companies have the size and clout to pull off.
Really, the thing is lack of centralization. Aside from MMORPGs, game companies won't be able to directly see what the players are doing. They would have to rely on player submissions, which really boils down to youtube again. They could sponsor/host events more often (which I think is a great idea), but once again, there are few companies that have that kind of rapport with their communities for them to be taken seriously. And being taken seriously is pretty much key for 'good' players to show up and show off 'awesome' plays.
Finally, just doing that is a lot of work. It really is. It really is easier for most companies to let their fans upload their killtages and epic matches on youtube by themselves, and maybe comment on them every so often. I mean, that's what Bungie did with Halo. They gave the community the tools, and the community (and MLG) took care of the rest. All Frankie had to do was link to random videos every so often in weekly updates.
It doesn't seem like its the technicians who are forcing this through. TFA says it was the management who decided it was a good idea to "ease pressure". Which probably meant that the techies were feeling overworked (they probably are overworked) and complained (not really expecting something like THIS to happen). And instead of doing anything constructive (or maybe they're just all out of money), the management went for some crazy ass stupid idea that somehow past muster.
Pointy Head Boss eh? IT isn't the only place where they exist.
TFA says that the rice additive has been used since the Ming Dynasty... and then goes on to say 1500 years ago. Ming Dynasty ruled around 1500 AD. They got themselves a 1000 year discrepancy there. Would sure be nice if they were more accurate about what they meant.
The XT was pretty much made for laptops. It's really the only place where getting a true hybrid (as opposed to HDD + SSD) really makes sense.
For the XT, the SSD works as a read cache, and read cache only. You're only going to be seeing performance increases on whatever it has cached (4gigs). So if you have a few frequently used programs with long startup times, you'll see more than 'a couple of percent' better. And that's about it.
Hybrid drives will always be the compromise between HDD and SSD. You will never see them performing on the same order of performance as SSD across the board unless the SSD component becomes huge.
No. That was a modified measles virus to eradicate cancer cells.
They aren't getting the info without the permission. It's an opt in feature.
Early cold war devices were in the 25MT range. By the late 70s and 80s they were mostly back to using kT range warheads. Just more of them. And more likely to actually hit the damn target.
GPS accuracy isn't that bad. Ground based Differential GPS has an absolute worse case accuracy of 10m lateral/vertical.
They've done this numerous times in the past. Mars Global Surveyor, Mars Recon Orbiter, etc etc. If its a good idea, or would even work (from a power perspective) is different, but putting the satellites in orbit is doable. Infact, I suspect it's easier than actually landing the rovers. Not having to do all the breaking and stuff. Hell, I would think (can't confirm it anywhere), whenever you send payload over to Mars, you're going to go into a Mars orbit first before deorbiting onto the surface. So a single rocket could send the power sat, and the rover together.
Look, using non-metallic parts/coating may work. But seriously, I think some people are overblowing the difficulty of salt water turbines. I mean, most ships today are turbine powered... it's basically a floating turbine generator backwards. It's an added design constraint, but it's a solvable (and largely solved) problem I would think. I mean, the Bay of Fundy already has a barrage style tidal plant operating. And the Atlantic on our side is more or less as salty as the Atlantic on the other side.
The bigger problem is just how little power gets stored up. A height difference of 50cm isn't very large, even with such a large reservoir size.
Well. For what it's worth, if they brought down an operational or recently decommissioned Chinese or Russian satellite, the world would come one step closer to exploding. Seriously, its great to fantasize about this stuff. But going out and blatantly stealing other countries' military/intelligence hardware (and in effect, deploying an ASAT weapon) would just become a diplomatic disaster.
They do look down at significant angles. This is why you have to hide stuff you don't want seen whenever the spy satellite is over the horizon, not just when its over head. The operators get to decide when to use fuel (or bleep off a flywheel) to reorient a satellite.
It means that life that already started may not cease when supermassive black holes enter the super radiant (ha!) phase. The article mentions this phase lasts hundreds of millions of years. The estimated time of start of life on earth is like 4 billion years ago. So if the atmosphere of a life bearing planet can shield enough of the xrays, then life could well continue on a planet during the super radiant stage.
It just means life (well, really stars) will end faster in those galaxies in the LONNGGG run.
Deception is skill. Playing the player is every bit as important as playing the "cards". This is true of nearly any sport/game. Two boxers may be physically identical with the same reaction times, strength, speed, technique, etc etc. But if one guy can make the other step in the wrong place (playing the player) then that "light" jab will put them right out.
The robots are for sniping practice. For long range shooting, nothing comes close to the actual thing. You really don't want to put real people out on the range.
I mean sure, they COULD just send their snipers off big game hunting, but that might not play so well.