Phi for All

How'd that work out for him? Would he do it again?

I have a problem with that. The stop time at top dead center and bottom dead center will vary depending on the rpm rate of the engine, but it will never be 0. Mainly because of your other question:

This is the way I thought about it too. The sine wave analogy only made sense to me if you look at the piston's movement up and down with respect to its forward motion as part of the engine of a moving car. Maybe I'm still not seeing the action as Tony sees it. To me, the piston, though part of a larger mechanism, is, in this case, just a single solid cylinder moving up the inside of a tube, reaching the top, stopping, then moving down, reaching the bottom, stopping and then repeating that process. Make the tube clear, isolate the piston on high-speed video and that's just what you'd see. No matter how small a time it stops, it can't change direction WITHOUT stopping.

! Moderator Note Thread closure imminent. Porn rules violation, put them back in your pants, gentlemen.

To me, This statement makes all the difference between normal human failing and incompetence. Failing at something doesn't make you incompetent; refusing to acknowledge the failure and learning nothing from it makes you incompetent. The fact that a failure made you introspective says a lot about your character, and is what learning is all about, imo. There are a lot of people who think mistakes lessen their value as a person, and would rather risk covering them up rather than taking those mistakes on board and making them part of their learning experience. I think this does a lot of damage. Sadly, there are very few good systems in industry to properly handle mistakes that cost a company money, especially when unemployment is high. Science is usually pretty forgiving of mistakes (or wrong answers); that's how you gather data and it's just part of the process. As long as your mistakes aren't part of your methodology, and you properly acknowledge where you were in error, science is pretty forgiving.

! Moderator Note This is a discussion forum, Greg Boyles, and while you may have started the thread, you don't get to decide who responds to you. If you have a problem with the content of a post, please use the Report button (as others did with your posts). And if you don't want this thread to get closed like the last one, you WILL treat others civilly.

Actually, the question is, "What is 'stopped'?" Does it mean the piston slows to a velocity of 0? I don't see that as a similar argument at all.

You are SO right. I wish you could have as well.

Well, I'm no expert. In the DHS vs OWS scenario I posted earlier, there may be nuances that could be more effective. You're right, you arrest the whole crowd and they feel more solidarity. But if you separate one or just a few, the rest feel more vulnerable because they're still free and someone else is not. It's classic police procedure to separate perpetrators for questioning, classic military strategy to divide and conquer, classic terror tactics to make people feel they need to separate themselves from the crowd and go hide somewhere. Let me ask you this: In retrospect, doesn't the War on Terror seem a bit strange? There were only a few hundred Al Qaida members in 2000, maybe a few thousand Taliban fighters. Would you EVER have imagined it would take a trillion taxpayer dollars and the resources of a superpower nation over ten years to FAIL to wipe these guys out? Rhetorical, really, and off-topic probably. I point this out to show that there may be more reasons, more justifications, more opportunities stemming from the War on Terror than to remove a few thousand insurgents. That's good enough for me. I didn't look forward to researching all the times US law has been re-written because we found out too late that special interests had written loopholes and exploited them. Not for the difficulty, but for the sheer volume.

As CaptainPanic points out, the people who are working together to exploit this law (or others) don't necessarily have to have villainous intent. They may be carrying out directives that seem to have extremely justifiable motivation to them. In the example I used a few posts ago, about the invention of a cheap, portable electrical generator, there will be people who genuinely think that such an invention should be stifled because of the impact it would have on current markets, while others feel it would be the greatest thing ever to happen to mankind, at a time when we need it most. Current laws allow the government to seize such an invention, force the inventor not to speak about it, and jail him for treason under John Doe proceedings if he even looks like he's going to. The law currently sides with stifling innovation at the cost of basic rights. I know some policemen who think it's stupid to throw people in jail for smoking pot, but it's the law and it's their job to do so. If I think that law is stupid and speak out against it, are you going to tell me I'm a conspiracy nut just because I think that the law is still on the books because banning hemp and hemp products benefits certain business sectors and jailing so many people for it benefits private prisons who want docile, tractable inmates? Isn't it more of a case where lots of people are independently taking unfair advantage of existing loopholes in the law to further their businesses rather than some interwoven conspiracy? And how do we correct such problems? Isn't the easiest, best way, the way to work within the system, to simply protest such laws to bring them to the public's attention so we might vote in representatives who will change those laws? There were more than two candidates. The problem is not with the Republican or Democrat parties, it lies with our winner-take-all voting system. We need a system where votes for candidates outside the major parties are not considered "wasted votes".

4b. Drink the water, go to England's drought areas, use their bathrooms, return to the Netherlands. Repeat until flooding subsides.

This is part of why you aren't attaching significance to the arguments iNow and I have been making. You're looking at this as repressing the free speech right of protestors, but those who would use this law's broad, vague, dangerous definitions would do so because these protestors want them held accountable for their misdeeds. These protestors represent a movement which may cost big businesses billions of dollars and change the way they're allowed to operate. These protestors represent the threat of prison time for some very powerful Wall Street operators. There is no free speech concern for them here. Many of these people see their corporations as people to be defended under the Constitution, by politicians who've been promised nice jobs with these corporations when they leave office, and these protestors represent a threat to those corporations. The justification for using this law is evident, the motivation clear, the potential is present. If the law allows these powerful men to do something so shocking and WRONG that you consider its actual use "highly unlikely", shouldn't the law be changed?

7. Keep drinking beer, send the water to Greece.

This seems copy/pasted. Please forgive me if it's not, but is this a homework question you joined to ask? It's OK if it is, but it's important for us to know.

I don't know where you get this. I used a pronoun after referencing the DHS. YOU made "they" all-inclusive to denounce it as conspiracy. That's the weak argument, part Straw Man, part Misleading Vividness and part Hasty Generalization. Imagine you're a cop at a protest rally. You see someone starting to get a bit aggressive with a heckler. You move in to arrest him but suddenly there's a DHS badge in your face and someone who outranks you tells you to back off, they'll take it from here, the suspect is a possible terrorist. For security's sake, they tell you there is to be no paperwork on this incident. They commend you on your vigilance, maybe point out someone else who is getting too rowdy, and they move in and take the suspect to their vehicle and speed away in typical bureaucratic fashion. So how many people were indoctrinated? Remember, the DHS guys are tasked with rooting out terrorism where they find it. If they wait till people get blown up, recriminations fall on them. If they can find the fledgling terrorist and any other cell members using tough guy tactics, they get commended. There's really not much in the way of indoctrination when you've got fear as your POV. If you are told by a single government agent that your friend that was next to you at the OWS rally (because we know you were there, Justin) is under investigation for crimes involving US national security, and the more you protest his innocence the more he starts asking questions about you, your place of work, your boss, your parents, your wife and kids, how long can you hold out before you start wondering if you don't know your friend as well as you thought?

Try websites that spell it "algorithm". That may yield better results. I think Algorythm is a music label.

Oh, come on, you're better than that. What a weak argument, playing the "conspiracy theory" card. YdoaPs was clearly referring to legislators who wrote the laws he mentioned, and I was clearly referring to the Dept of Homeland Security. And you are clearly reaching for straws with this kind of argument. It would actually be fairly simple to indoctrinate those who work for DHS to view protestors as fledgling terrorists. Profile: formerly peaceful citizens who have suffered during poor economic hardships, dissatisfied with the hard work and help their government has tried to provide, disillusioned with the commerce system, banding together in mobs and chanting anti-establishment slogans, together day and night and supplied by unknown benefactors, defiant of local law enforcement efforts to move them from entrenched positions. Conclusion: potential for violence against non-combatants is High, situation is detrimental to established policy and systems. Recommendation: See Handling Potential Terrorists. Btw, you should use the Multiquote button and prune it down so it references who you're quoting when you mix your quotes like this. Alternatively, you can Reply individually, copy the quote along with the ID tag, then Cancel that Reply and paste it into your main Reply. By now, even you should be able to acknowledge how much big business is able to influence our politicians. Do you think it's conceivable that a panel made up of the Patent Office Commissioner and representatives from DOD, AEC, NSA and the President's Cabinet might be "persuaded" to see a patent for a portable device that creates cheap electricity (some kind of generator, not a weapons-grade device) as a threat to national security, based on the fact that it would upset several industries? And isn't that really against all the principles of a free market economy? If you're a platform Republican, the denial of a patent strictly for reasons that it competes too much with existing products should make flames come out your eyeballs. If you're a platform Democrat, holding an inventor incognito under a John Doe proceeding without recourse to due process should make you equally angry. Libertarians, Greens, practically every political party I know should view this as a gross infringement of personal rights. It's more of a Fascist maneuver than anything else. Off-topic red herring. My point was, things you might have considered "highly unlikely" fifteen years ago have happened since. Using the "it's highly unlikely" argument now is moot. We're completely capable of using our military to further our economic expansion, and if a private citizen gets in the way of that, rather than unconstitutionally or illegally handling the situation, our government now has a methodology that makes it simple to deal with protestors. Just change what defines the person and a plethora of possibilities opens up. Big business owns the media, influences the laws and has the clout to not only get the government to declare you a terrorist, they can turn the public against you with a couple of well-rehearsed sound-bytes and some editing. John Doe, you're under arrest.

Asked and answered. If you haven't noticed, our lawmakers are pretty good at passing laws that have one purpose for public knowledge, but when you dig deeper they've also added some caveats that a special few can exploit. They don't write laws like this and then never use them. According to the Federation of American Scientists, "There were 5,135 inventions that were under secrecy orders at the end of Fiscal Year 2010" implemented by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. In 2010, 26 of those inventions were handled under "John Doe" status, which basically means these private inventors were slapped with gag orders and the proceedings were completely secret, names were never disclosed and the outcomes are not protected under the Freedom of Information Act. We may never know what happened to these inventors and their inventions. The OWS protestors were just an example. Think about it, in a normal criminal proceeding, premeditation is something that the prosecution has to prove to a jury. If you get labeled as a terrorist, they can grab you on the spot, assuming that you planned violence on noncombatant targets. In fact, once they think you might be a terrorist, under this new law, the rest is a foregone conclusion. It's your word against the Dept of Homeland Security. And that's exactly the way they'd do it, to just a few so the rest are too terrified to speak out. Wait until the profit is in jeopardy. Did you forget we're talking about lawyers and the law here? Fifteen years ago, wouldn't it have been considered highly unlikely that a President of the United States would use a fabricated tale of nuclear weapons to invade another country?

I found some architectural drawings downloadable at ArchNet.org. They may have the elevations michel mentioned. I don't know if they're AutoCAD files or not, or if they'll help, but it's worth a try.

Have you ever heard of the Invention Secrecy Act of 1951? It basically says that if you submit something to the US Patent Office that is deemed detrimental to "national security" (that vague phrase again), the invention and everything about it will be seized and kept secret and you will be guilty of treason if you ever say anything to anybody about it. In the interests of "national security", your trial for treason wouldn't even show up on the books if you tried to protest publicly. Due to the nature of laws like these, there may even be provisions to cover up disappearances. If you wanted to grab a terrorist suspect, would you want his compatriots to be able to trace the disappearance back to the government? Hundreds of people disappear without a trace EVERY DAY in the US, and the usual assumption is that, for some reason, they don't want to be found, and that explanation ends up satisfying almost everyone concerned.

Under U.S. Code Title 22, Ch.38, Para. 2656f(d), the definition of terrorism is "premeditated, politically motivated violence perpetrated against noncombatant targets by subnational groups or clandestine agents". You could lose your cool at an OWS rally, punch someone who was heckling you and, instead of going through due process, be instantly labeled a terrorist and disappear under a cloud of federal agents. The news headlines, with attached video of you assaulting an unarmed onlooker, would probably read, "FBI detains suspected terrorist infiltrator", or worse, "US citizen involved in suspected terrorist attack". Spun in a skillful way, half the country would want you hung. If they ever heard from you again. That's the worst part, we can't even know if they're already doing it. Friends of someone taken this way might fear association if they speak out.

Outside? Your words put fear in my heart.

I tried to give a new member the benefit of the doubt, but I suspect he was simply spamming the link I deleted. I'm not very familiar with eBay; do they have informative content?

Fair enough. There are many good reasons to choose ABS over polystyrene, and durability is one of them. You say you're casting hobby props, does this mean one-offs for your own use, or are you mass-producing these parts? Injection molding is the way to go with the kind of detail you're showing but production molds get pretty pricey. Short-run molds are cheaper. In either case, the first step is a 3D CAD model of your parts.

If there is a higher power in the universe, this is the reason I can't imagine it being concerned with humans as individuals. Maybe an entity that says to itself one day, "Hey, I have a great idea! Wait, no, hold on, YES! A few simple yet complicated laws to bring order to the chaos, wow, this could work! If I created time as well then it would kind of go on forever, sort of percolating and well, evolving all by itself. Oooh, evolving, evolution, that's also deliciously simple yet complicated! Let's start with a little bit of mass, squeeze it just so, wow, that heats up nicely! I just need some sort of sudden expansion, hmmm, like this and then..." <BANG!> "Not bad! Well, I'll let that cool a bit and look back in on it later. What's next?"