* Posts by Jeff Davies

9 publicly visible posts • joined 14 Jan 2008

Concrete-jet 'printers' to build houses, Moonbases in hours

Jeff Davies
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There are numerous ways to construct arches

1. make a small supporting pillar system that is easily dislodged when the full arch is up.

2. just make a solid wall, and use a diamond tipped teeth chainsaw to make the doorways and windows.

Also by using a lot of lime in the concrete, it can set in 10 minutes. (strong enough to walk on).

Heavyweight physics prof weighs into climate/energy scrap

Jeff Davies

This "scientist" doesn't consider simply using less

"Covering half the country in turbines would only generate enough energy to power half the cars".

Fifty years ago this country used a fraction of the energy it uses now.

Were people noticably cleaner? Was society worse?

No. You can wash your whole body in a pint of water, you don't need 30 minutes in a power shower with 50 litres of water.

In many ways society was better. People were fitter and happier, socialising more as they walked down the streets together. Maybe they even grew their own food. And food did taste better than the cr*p we get from supermarkets.

How did we get here? Why on earth would someone buy sliced bread instead of proper bread? we allowed ourselves to get so busy, spending longer in work and trading this for quality of life.

Why commute 30 miles each way every day? It's only the fact you have been able to do so cheaply that allowed you to choose this as an option. As fuel rises in price, people will simply move closer to work, or move work closer to their homes (get another job). The nature of work will change too.

I personally think most men are more fulfilled in some way with manual jobs, so I can see many people finding this a good future.

It's also perfectly possible to have a house in britain that requires zero heating even through winter (Grand Designs).

Jeff Davies

"Reduce the demand. There are just too many people on this planet." damn

It's worth pointing out at this point that 99% of the people on earth use nothing like as much energy as we use. It isn't them, it's us. We individually use more energy than thousands of people outside the privileged west. WE need to change the way WE live, and just use less energy.

9/11 an inside job, says Irish pop folkster

Jeff Davies
Stop

Jim Morrow.... thousands of tons of aviation fuel?

You see this is the kind of nonsense that allows the lack of a math model to be ignored.

Please please go find out how much a plane weighs and how much fuel a plane contains.

So say you had 20 tons of aviation fuel, which burns at quite a low temperature. (this is paraffin). (757-222 carries 50,000 litres on takeoff = 40 tons)

by the time it made it to the trade centre, this is going to be more like 30 tons.

(much used on takeoff).

Girders of the type used in bridge construction (0.14M square) and building construction are about 7.5 tons per metre.

Steel melts at 1400 degrees celsius. Aviation fuel burning in a non-optimal environment will burn at 800 degrees celsius perhaps. But for how long.

I'd expect most of the fuel would have burnt in the explosion (remember the explosion as the plane hit).

So where is the energy that caused the building to fall down.

Now I can point you to a physics paper proving there is not enough energy in the system for this to be plausible. But why not go find it yourself.

Basically the math just doesn't add up. The dust pattern, white hot steel and so on just doesn't add up. The building probably had thermite lining the girders.

(and a vast amount of it). Note: the fuel burning couldn't set off thermite either. It requires something like Magnesium burning at 2200 degreesC to set off.

Also, the first 3 sky scapers to fall down from fire fell down on 911. Doesn't that strike anyone as odd?

This includes a skyscraper that was hit by a fully fuelled B17 bomber just after WW2. A few floors went on fire, and that was that.

This had 8000 litres of aviation fuel (about 7 tons).

Here's something to try at home. Get a butane torch with 500ml butane container as used by many DIYers for home plumbing. The butane burns at 1300 degreesC far far higher than paraffin, but not enough to melt steel.

Now spend 30 minutes heating a 6mm thick steel bolt. You'll empty the canister while you're doing it. You can try the same with a paraffin lamp if you want to. (this is much lower temperature).

Think about the quantities of material involved. Now revisit the assertion that 30 tons of paraffin melted not one but many girders. Does not compute.

And interceptors didn't intercept *any* of the seized planes, despite this having been a working system in place for many years. Again, doesn't compute.

It is amazing to me that the ignorant say things like "they wouldn't kill their own people". Please read about the start of the Spanish American war where US agents blew up their own ship killing 40 in order to start the war, and get the public on side, so that Spanish territory could be annexed and money made.

This is regarded as a lesson in "how to do it" in hawk circles in the US, and they frequently use this tactic. No-one even during the war suspected that Hitler had actually burnt down the Reichstag, but after the war, documents proved that this had in fact happened. By doing this, Hitler was able to justify emergency powers politically, and suspend the Reichstag.

A tour of history books will uncover this gambit over and over again.

GWB said prior to 911 "we need a new pearl harbour", and after it, he said "this is our new pearl harbour".

Interesting since the Neocon "Project For A New American Century" published prior to GWB becoming president uses exactly this term.

Gates teases bankers with Windows 7 dates

Jeff Davies

Andy - there was a Windows 1 - it was called "Windows 286 and Windows 386"

There were 2 versions of Windows 1: Windows/286 and Windows/386.

Windows/286 ran on a 286 with 1meg of RAM.

It had notepad and calc and paint as I recall, and Program manager, task manager,

and a DOS windows. I don't know if anything else was written at the time to run under it.

Global-warming scientist: It's worse than I thought

Jeff Davies

Gary F and others, you need to get your head out of the sand

For starters: the Antarctic *IS* melting, so is the Greenland Ice sheet.

The head scientist of Norway thinks there is a good chance that the Arctic will cease to exist this summer (that's September for minimum sea ice extent). The reason?

Sure the current extent of the ice is slightly larger than last january (this is the total area of sea covered by ice), however during the Arctic winter the perennial ice (the stuff that isn't supposed to melt) has melted in huge quantities. If it's melting in huge quantities in winter, what's going to happen in summer? No one knows, but the smart ones fear.

The greenland ice sheet and west antarctic ice sheet are covered in moulins like larsen B before it shattered.

In addition to this, for the last 4 years crops have failed in the following territories: Australia, central europe, USA, South America, China, to the extent that staple food has risen 80% on the world markets. There are currently food riots in 52 countries including India, Pakistan, Egypt, Phillipines, Vietnam, Cambodia.

(lots of population). The global stock of food has fallen to a mere 5 weeks.

This means we could be 5 weeks away from starvation of billions in the worst case.

Spain is becoming uninhabitable, with the water in the reservoirs down so low that the remnants are unusable, as the dregs are full of heavy metals.

Salmon stocks have collapsed on the west of the USA, and fishing has been cancelled all the way up the US west coast as a result. The main reason for this isn't over-fishing, it's algal blooms in the sea starving the fish of oxygen.

The sea is full of plastic trash that is gradually being worn down into smaller and smaller particles, they even have a name for the giant mid-pacific trash island. The particles are injested by all sea-life. Unfortunately, due to their nature, these particles of plastic are adhesive to toxins, so each particle is becoming a poison pill for the sealife to injest.

What happens to the 3 billion people in asia that will march on europe when their food or water runs out? What happens when the ice sheets collapse flooding most of england and netherlands, bangladesh, and most large cities on the coast around the world?

Why aren't people talking about this? Is there a desire to avoid panic buying of food? I wonder. We are living on a knife edge.

Official: OOXML approved as international standard

Jeff Davies
Go

Ash, it's 20%

OpenOffice has 100 million users out of world market of 500 million for office suites. MS Office 2007 is also about 100 million users.

The rest mostly use old MSOffice versions.

MS Office 2007 cannot use ISO-OOXML it's different to DOCX. And both are different from ECMA-OOXML.

So currently ODF has 20% of the world market and OOXML has 0%.

Sure this will probably change in change, but that's the *current* situation.

Google's riches rely on ads, algorithms, and worldwide confusion

Jeff Davies

google aren't maintaining their monopoly by any illegal means I can see

As far as I can tell Google aren't employing evangelists, aren't stacking standards bodies to try to get their formats adopted, and in no way stop you using other search engines or limit you to "the google browser".

This lack of illegally leveraging their products means they are playing fair and square.

This is totally unlike Microsoft, who time and time again resort to the same illegal tactics of leveraging one product through another that they are a monopoly in.

If you look at the APIs and documentation that Google have published, the quality is outstanding.

The day that someone makes a better search engine than Google, everyone can freely move to the competitor, there is no tie-in. Put simply however, no-one has made a better search engine.

As far as I can tell there is no bias in Google's search results. I know if people try to cheat to get their website ranking higher, then Google punish this by demoting the site, which I think is fair enough. What I haven't seen is any convincing argument based on a scientific study that says that Google's search results are unfair.

Sure a guy trying to make his products rank over his competitors will be frustrated. Tough. That's exactly WHY people LIKE using google.

Remember the bad old days of hotbot, lycos where the first 5 pages of results were irrelevant ads, and hardly any effort was expended by the search engine owners to actually search relevant content. (they'd all just become pointless advertising engines).

If you don't like it, make your own one that you think is fairer. There is literally nothing stopping you.

MP accuses BBC chief of illegally championing Microsoft

Jeff Davies
Go

Democracy TV

I imagine anyone (such as myself) can download the streams using DemocracyTV,or one of the other stream savers.

Obviously the BBC wouldn't want this, but then they shouldn't screw up in this way.

The guy at the top here would have expected this result, and if he didn't, they he's an idiot. By making the service WindowsXP only, he's ensured people will save the streams, and you can guarantee people will then share the saved streams.