Slashdot Mirror

Is there a secret mirror site for the results and methods referenced? I can't seem to find them and I suspect they are hidden under a cloak of invisibility.

Vista's DRM will support High-Bandwidth Digital Content Protection (HDCP) which will regulate what types of periferals (monitors, sound cards, video cards, etc.) that can show, play, encode, decode, etc. the content. For example, you may not be able to watch a movie (or only be able to watch it at lower definition) unless your video card monitor and sound card are all approved by Mircosoft. HDCP will only be supported by new components hence the need to upgrade. Monitors are paricularly harmful to the environment because they contain quite a bit of lead. http://electronics.howstuffworks.com/question678.h tm

but with fuel cells, you're not just plating electrodes. You're using the the platinum was a catalyst, and it has to completely divide the cell.

HowStuffWorks: Fuel Cells

Never heard of MEMS I see.

http://electronics.howstuffworks.com/dlp1.htm

It's fast enough for DLP!

MEMS is one of the major advances in overall technology that the human race has had recently. It's probably as important as the transistor or the laser. Read up.

Well, a little googling turned up this which seems to explain it better without of the nasty physics technobabble. And this is how to do it yourself.

Is this a good site for that?

I'm not quite sure how it works, but the composer always makes money on airplay, I think it's called "Mechanical Royalties". There's an article here: http://entertainment.howstuffworks.com/music-royal ties6.htm

but I have no idea if it's accurate.

In terms of fuel consumption, and air pollution, is it better to have one huge powerful engine, or two or more less powerful engines?

Or how about three diesel engines that are each more powerful than this supposedly most powerful diesel engine:

http://auto.howstuffworks.com/question647.htm

This truck runs on Diesel with three engines that deliver 36000 horses together, so much more than this engine...

http://auto.howstuffworks.com/question647.htm

The main challenge in bringing a building down is controlling which way it falls. Ideally, a blasting crew will be able to tumble the building over on one side, into a parking lot or other open area. This sort of blast is the easiest to execute, and it is generally the safest way to go. Tipping a building over is something like felling a tree. To topple the building to the north, the blasters detonate explosives on the north side of the building first, in the same way you would chop into a tree from the north side if you wanted it to fall in that direction. Blasters may also secure steel cables to support columns in the building, so that they are pulled a certain way as they crumble.

Sometimes, though, a building is surrounded by structures that must be preserved. In this case, the blasters proceed with a true implosion, demolishing the building so that it collapses straight down into its own footprint (the total area at the base of the building). This feat requires such skill that only a handful of demolition companies in the world will attempt it.

not the same ingredients - methyl alcohol v. butyl esthers

Dude, this line of reasoning comes straight from militia freaks in Oregon who want to steal your money. I had a friend in Hawaii who was scammed by these guys. I tried to tell him that it was all bullshit, even showing him books about the Fed that contradicted what these asshole scammers said, but of course that was all just propaganda. Poor guy lost thousands to the scammers and thousands more to the IRS.

If you want to believe this crap, go ahead, I won't try to talk you out of it. But here's some links so you can find out more for yourself:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_reserve_bank
http://www.frbsf.org/publications/federalreserve/f edinbrief/index.html
http://money.howstuffworks.com/fed.htm

And to provide some balance, here's more from the scammers themselves (please take with a HUGE grain of salt):
http://www.fdrs.org/banking_history.html

You can still get three-way bulbs for lamps. I've never seen a wall switch wired for three-way lighting, though. I see you can even get a 3-way CF bulb. (Costs as much as three regular CF bulbs!)

More than once, I've had déjà vu about having déjà vu about, well, let's just say it's recursive and I don't feel like there's an end to it. Good way to make your head spin for a while. Although, maybe I should call what I've felt déjà vecu ... :]

In fact, you probably have a table top particle accelerator in your house. http://science.howstuffworks.com/atom-smasher2.htm Yes, a CRT is also considered a particle accelerator!

Me and my buddy darth are building a moon-sized space station. Its a WIP, but you can see photos here: http://static.howstuffworks.com/gif/death-star-2.j pg

howstuffworks.com link

Basically, 747 gets between 69.8 to 100mpg passenger miles per gallon.

Comparing both vehicles as being "full" is a faulty assumption. Airlines work their arses off to ensure that their airplanes take off as close to capacity as possible. Lots of people drive their SUVs to work alone.

(And the 747 is not exactly Boeings most fuel efficient airplane, the 787 is going to kick its arse! Not a huge jumbo jet, but amazingly cool. :) )

Good for you... and your analogy is quite succinct.

For the analogy, I'll color in a bit more:

• The ship is adorned with thousands of handles on the exterior.
  
• On each handle, hangs a monkey (monkey/chimp/lemur... anything can be trained)
  
• Upon liftoff, each monkey throws "wrenches" at the ground, repeatedly.
  
• Just above the bottom of the ship is an electromagnet that speeds-up the wrenches as they fall.
  
• As the wrenches pass the electromagnet, they polarize and fall straight to the ground.
  
• The wrenches themselves are buoyant and come floating in the air; an endless supply of them.
  

If nothing else, I guess that liftoff would come about by the sheer pile of wrenches on the ground. (I know: ha... ha... ha... :P)

... but doesn't that also describe current rocket-propulsion systems? Whether a chemical reaction, (stored-energy chain-reaction) or the ionization of molecules (steady, energy-conversion reaction) the effect is roughly the same.

It's not necessarily a strict Newtonian equation; the model also has to appreciate aerodynamics and fluid displacement forces.

After all that; consider that we're not going to build ships of balsa, tinfoil and corona-wire. The "lifters" are a general proof-of-concept experiment and make a great science fair exhibit. The REAL benefit of the technology is a hidden potential that—to my knowledge—isn't being thoroughly explored. (the main gist of my posts)

• Corona wire anode could be tested with other conductors. (superconductors?)
• Tinfoil cathode could be any number of low-grade conductors. (why not the ships hull?)
• Capacitance gap can be any number of insulators, not just air. (forming a venturi, perhaps?)
• Mix into that all variations of DC voltages, or even AC frequencies that could elicit an unexpected "boost" and might burst the power/weight ratio to become a new propulsion system.

I never said it was a ready-to-implement technology, and I think the research still has a long way to go. Personally, it seems to be a revolution waiting to happen. Everyone is entitled to disagree with that. If I have any point to make here, it is that obvious avenues of research are being overlooked in favor of the incredibly terrestrial concept of "elevators".

The Biefeld-Brown concept, however, has taken flight in other ways.

I'm off to other threads... this is bound to come up again! Bon chance, mon amis!

What your friend said was a half truth. Microwaves are designed to heat water, but they do not only have affects on water. The way microwaves work is they emit microwaves with the wave length that will exicte the nuclea bonds present in a water molecule. Imagine a molecule of water, H2O and think about the motion it can have. There is a vibration that acts like a spring between the atoms, there is the rotation of the water molecule (spinning like a top) and then there is linear motion where the water molecules are moving fast and bouncing off things (this is temperature. You want to heat the water molecule, or get it bouncing around. That is harder to do then the vibrational. Like 2 pitchforks with similar tuning, if you strike one, the other resonates. The mircowaves hit the water molecule and excite the rotational motion (I am pretty sure it is the rotational, it might be the vibrational, but am pretty sure it is the rotational frequency). Once the molecuel is excited, it hits another molecule nearby (water or non) and transfer the rotational excited energy into motion of what it just hit. The water molecule looses rotational energy, the other gains linear velocity, i.e. heat and the microwave re-excites teh water molecue.

So while the microwaves are spewing forth the right frequency waves to excite water molecules, they can excite other things as well even if no water is present. Other things than water responds to the same frequencies, and some things react violently to microwaves via reflection (like metal) or other ways.

Yes, I am a geek. Chem Eng. by profession, spent time working in a physics lab. http://home.howstuffworks.com/microwave.htm hints at this, but doens't get into the same level of detail, just says water and fats absorbs the energy transfering ti directly into heat.

Theoretically, you could do a bit-for-bit clone of the DVD disk, and, in this manner, you wouldn't have to decrypt it in order to copy it. However, you'd need some pretty specialized equipment for that.

Oil spills are local disasters. They suck, but for some perspective, for each of the 31 million gallons of crude spilled in that accident, there are about 10 trillion gallons of ocean water.

http://science.howstuffworks.com/question157.htm

Perhaps there is some long term consequence to that kind of concentration(1 in 10^13), but I doubt it.

My appologees: 6 "hardware threads"

Three symmetrical cores running at 3.2 GHz each

Two hardware threads per core; six hardware threads total

It is. Unfortunatly, to build solar cells you need crystalline silicon. These crystals have to be carefully grown and are quite expensive to produce.

There is more info at ... http://www.howstuffworks.com/solar-cell.htm

By the measurement that it is an analogue medium.

It's like the difference between a film negative and a digital camera. The digital camera can grow in quality until it far surpasses the demands of the market, but it will never get even vaguely close to the quality of film.

It's the same with quality vinyl recordings. A vinyl record has a groove carved into it that mirrors the original sound's waveform. No information is lost. The output of a record player is analog. It can be fed directly to your amplifier with no conversion.

You can find a good explanation of it on how stuff works:
http://electronics.howstuffworks.com/question487.h tm

Digital has many benefits, but quality isn't one of them. As a general rule, anything that's digital is of vastly inferior quality to its analogue counterpart by definition.

"Unlike some other peer-to-peer downloading methods, BitTorrent is a protocol that offloads some of the file tracking work to a central server (called a tracker)."

What BitTorrent Does

uhm, there's a technology that's used in light amplification technology that could solve the darkening problem. http://electronics.howstuffworks.com/nightvision1. htm at the bottom. wouldn't that solve the problem? i know it's only directional, but i'm sure it could somehow be minimized until it fits in front of the eyes without too much distortion or problems.

Drinking any cold drink lowers your body temperature, thus burning a few calories in the process. Thus any cold drink which itself has zero calories (such as cold water or any diet soda) effectively has "negative" calories, albeit just a few. Reference: http://health.howstuffworks.com/question447.htm/

Sigh. I quote:

The main ice covered landmass is Antarctica at the South Pole, with about 90 percent of the world's ice (and 70 percent of its fresh water). Antarctica is covered with ice an average of 2,133 meters (7,000 feet) thick. If all of the Antarctic ice melted, sea levels around the world would rise about 61 meters (200 feet). But the average temperature in Antarctica is -37C, so the ice there is in no danger of melting. In fact in most parts of the continent it never gets above freezing.

(from http://science.howstuffworks.com/question473.htm)

That's right, one of those ice caps is sitting on a land mass. It's not floating. If you melted all that ice, which would require a runaway condition but is not impossible no matter what anyone at howstuffworks says (yeah, it really makes sense that since it has never melted inside human experience, it will never melt, great logic there.)

But, nice try.

In fact, the researchers in the article are using strands of what's known as deoxyribonucleic acid, or DNA, to peform computations.

http://computer.howstuffworks.com/dna-computer1.ht m is a good link to explain how it works, double helixes and all.

You are, quite simply, completely and utterly wrong. There is no way around it.

I guess, to be fair, the site is not named howstuffpeopleactuallycareaboutworks.com... but sheesh, they're really scraping the bottom of the barrel here.

If you haven't RTFA, at least take a look at the picture of the Goomba on the "Reality Check" page for an example of how sad this really is. From what I can tell, that is their best, most-completed bit of interactive scenery.

Unless... as somebody said above, the whole thing is a joke... in which case, the fact that howstuffworks seems to have fallen for it is even more pitiful. Unless the howstuffworks article is also a joke, which I guess just makes all the rest of us even *more* pitiful for falling for that. Bleh.

http://home.howstuffworks.com/mre5.htm

Though it mentions the Hershey "Desert Bar" rather than M&Ms, other pages in the search did specifically state M&Ms:

To boost troop morale during the Gulf War, Mars created special, high quality, heat-resistant M&M's

tm

>it can run 10 hours, but how much fuel is that?

OK I JUST HAD TO look this up. Check my math if you must. I make no promises.
Lets break the question into its constituent parts:

A gallon of gasoline contains about 31,000 Calories
1 watthour = .860420 Calories (So, an ideal Calorie is equal to 86.042% of a watt.)
A gallon of gas contains 31000 Calories
Convert Calories per gallon into watts hours per gallon: 31000 * (86/100) = 26660 watt hours per gallon (at 100% efficiency)
That means the device would produce a single watt for 26,660 hours at 100% efficiency.(1,110.83DAYS) But it works at minus 5% efficiency = 25,327 hours (1,055.29 days) ))
and produces 100 watts, not a single watt, so divide by 100: the device would produce 100 watts for 253.27 hours, = 10.55 days, on a gallon of gas.

Now, YOUR question is how much gas would it take to run the device for 10 hours.
To get an hour of runtime's worth of fuel, divide a gallon by 253.27.
To make that 10 hour's worth, multiply the result by 10.
1 gallon [US, liquid] = 128 ounce [US, liquid]
Therefore, divide 128 fluid ounces by 253.27 and multiply by 10 =
5.05 fluid ounces

So the engine would run for 10 hours on a 5 fl.oz.(US) fuel tank.

sources:
http://auto.howstuffworks.com/question527.htm
http://www.onlineconversion.com/energy.htm
http://www.onlineconversion.com/volume.htm

Death and Taxes you can't avoid.
Getting water to flow uphill is easy:
You just need a RAM pump

http://science.howstuffworks.com/question318.htm

They're almost there...

Hot-to-hot means the voltage between the 2 phases. The voltage between a phase and neutral is usually 110V. When each phase is shifted by 180 degrees (think about the sine wave) the peak difference between p1 and p2 is 220, because one wave is at the +110 and the other is at -110. Read more.

Someone explain to me how that applies to Digital Cameras pixal density.

http://www.howstuffworks.com/digital-camera.htm

KFG

Yet in a large majority of the cases you'd never actually need to fill up at the gas station assuming you recharged your fuel cells overnight.

Fuel cells are "recharged" with. . .hydrogen, not electricity. The electricity is stored in. . .the hydrogen. When the hyrdrogen is gone, so is the electricity. That's the way it works.

If you want to recharge your electric car overnight without going to a filling station you'll need a battery. Perhaps you can use it to make it back to the filling station.

http://www.howstuffworks.com/fuel-cell.htm

KFG

When I became a DJ, I spent many hours talking to Those Who Came Before Me, and they all had one thing that they agreed on: If you want the real experience, you want vinyl. It does not matter what genre you are into, digital turntables do not compete with vinyl. (Of course, there is final scratch, etc.) The feeling I get when I grab that true vinyl record is proof that they are correct. I've played CD turntables, and they can be fun, but they will never perform at the same level as vinyl, nor will the sound quality ever compete.

As for today's vinyl quality VS yesterdays, I'm the proud owner of 6 original pressing Beatles LPs and the first 3 Led Zepplin LPs, and none of them are pressed on vinyl that is as good of quality as some of my 12" singles of today's EDM music.

And yes, there are some very very low bass sounds that could make vinyl skip, but compare that to every sound ever put on CD, and RTFM on how sound waves are all naturally analog, and just what happens to sounds when they are digitally compressed. Read more about CD compression VS. Vinyl sound quality here - http://electronics.howstuffworks.com/question487.h tm - be sure to look at the graph. It makes it pretty obvious.

Then, come back here, and we'll have an intelligent conversation.

That's not really a fair comparison.

The simple, small gas engines in lawnmowers and scooters use a two-stroke cycle whereas most car engines use a four-stroke cycle. Two stroke engines, by their very nature, output a lot more incomplete combustion products.

This thing is a gas turbine. Even if you fueled it with gas, I would expect that most of its output would CO2 and H2O (and, I'd imagine, that in normal use these things would be burning methanol, making the exhaust even cleaner).

Most likely, running one of these wouldn't be that different than adding another person's O2 consumption and CO2/H2O production to the office (in other words, negligible).

Heat production is another matter.

They accept most commercial fuels, such as natural gas, propane, diesel and kerosene. The are also able to produce renewable energy when fueled with biogas from landfills and sewage treatment plants.

My guess is that the cops were either misinformed, or chose to misinform the public to trick people into driving better for fear of getting a ticket.
The devices you are talking about are technically cameras, in that they manipulate light onto a sensor. But not the type of camera that can see you or take note of your license plate if you run a red light. Mind you, those types of cameras exist, and are becoming quite common, but they are not the ones that change the signal for emergency vehicles. 3M , Tomar, and others. The light you described was probably telling the driver of the ambulance he had control of the intersection, as described here.
The cameras that take your picture look more like this.

Unequivocably, yes. There are a few exceptions where that is not the case, and that usually involves trespass or using someone else's property without their permission. Ideas can't be patented, trademarked or copyrighted.

You're arguing against the concept of private property here. I'm not saying somebody's work in general, or an idea--I am directly referencing a good that someone else produces for the sole purpose of selling for income. If someone cuts down a tree of their own volition, you are not obligated to pay them, certainly--but if that person cuts down a tree to sell its lumber, and you take some of that wood, you are taking advantage of his/her work. If the person had said earlier that you were welcome to wood as long as you paid him for his labor in cutting down the tree, and you refused to do so, there's no doubt that you have no right to the wood. This is a pretty big distinction. If you don't believe that private property is valid, then we're arguing the wrong thing altogether.

See this is where things get complicated. I can't ethically compel someone to do work for me, but should someone be able to ethically compel me to pay for their work?

That depends on the circumstance. If their work was not requested, then of course not. But in this case, you are consciously deciding to take advantage of what someone else has produced, when they have clearly stated they wish to be paid for its usage. They have every right to ethically compel you to pay for their work--you decided it had value, and thus you decided to use it. Its usage is not free, by their decision, so they've got the ethical high ground.

I can't steal music, I can only steal the medium the music is stored on.

That's a silly distinction to make. That's like saying: "I can't steal air, I can only steal the compressed air canisters that happen to have usable air inside of them." Well, yes, clearly--but the air is of no use to you unless it is in that form. Likewise, the music only has value to someone if it is in a format that they can consume. (Consume being used abstractly here.) So it's not a big leap to go from: "I steal the medium on which music is stored" to "I steal music." The two are functionally equivalent. I understand that you are trying to separate the intellectual property (the music that the musician created) and its means of distribution (CDs, tapes, etc.) but to do so makes no sense, because the former is essentially useless to us without the latter.

Now you have to understand is in the case of pirated music someone paid for it. The musician has been paid. The people who are loosing money are the people who make the physical storage devices for the music, they aren't getting paid because people aren't buying their music storage devices because the internet obsoletes them.

This is not entirely true--your logic is sound, but it doesn't accurately reflect the market. When a musician is contracted, yes, they are paid a lump sum, but this is an advance, not an independent payment. The artist actually ends up paying it back in royalties, assuming he/she is successful. The artist also pays back numerous other sums too--really, the recording artist gets fairly dicked in the recording industry. But if enough albums are sold, the royalties exceed the costs and the artist actually starts making money. So what happens if he/she stops selling albums? You guessed it--the artist is screwed. (Check here for a succinct, if simplistic, summary of how music royalties work.)

So it's not really how you've painted it to be--the musician getting paid is in fact directly related to whether or not people are buying his/her albums. If the musician is smart, he/she will try to use his/her fame to secure an endorsement deal, or arrange for private appearances (if the contract allows it), but

taken from howstuffworks:

But three important differences allow them to hold quite a bit more information than DVDs:
* They use 405 nanometer blue-violet lasers rather than 650 nanometer red lasers.
* The pits are smaller and the tracks are closer together.
* They use more efficient compression to cut down the size of the files they store.

It doesn't surprise me, I just think there might be a more effective way to spend money. Building a community is hard, and certainly companies will spend money on advertising. But advertising money into to build the next Digg is compeltely different from advertising a bottle of coke, because of the marketing effects. Certainly there are more effective ways to do that, and less effective ways.

I don't know if Digg intentionally makes a group of contributors more prominent. Certainly for every successful story, there are many duplicates, and it seems sort of random chance (or just more outrageous wording) that decides whose will get promoted.

Internally, Digg is pretty complicated though. They have an internal karma system to keep spammers out, so maybe the same thing works in reverse to build a cabal, but maybe it's just that once you gain enough karma, there might be places where Digg makes it easier for your story to get promoted?

Well subsitute electron gun for 'laser', and three instead of one and you'd be right. Okay, I'll admit it's one gun(assembly), but three beams.

I was shocked to hear the media talking about the possibility of bring nitroglycerin onto an airplane. The entire reason that dynamite was invented is because the liquid is horribly volitile. Some people have speculated that the terrorists were not attempting a large scale explosion as CNN and Fox News would have you believe. Instead they were waiting until the plane was in the middle of the Atlantic and starting a fairly large fire. There are many substances that can create a dangerous fire on an airplane in the middle of the ocean at 30,000 feet. There is no need for a Holywood style explosion at all. I am being intentionally vague in this post, but three men with drink containers full of certain substances starting three fires at three different parts of the plane would be extremely difficult to control, especially considering the lack of fire surpression systems in the passenger cabin. I am not a firefighter (rookie EMT and will be training to be a rescuer) but I cannot imagine trying to put out three fires with the 1-2 fire extingueshers available.

The first World Trade Center bombing and OK City show that everyday chamicals can be combined with horrific results. In those situations, however, there were truckloads of the two ingredients. I agree in part with TFA that it would be hard to perform an explosion the size of Pan-Am 103's with liquids, but that is not necesary.

"The gelatin you eat in Jell-O comes from the collagen in cow or pig bones, hooves, and connective tissues." Wikipedia is brain-damaged on some topics.

MMM..fresh roast sparrow and pigeon platter. Where do I sign up? Oh wait, we can't, but I seriously love listening to these claims made by the environazis. There are massive amounts of radiation from every imaginable chunk of the spectrum falling on our planet everyday. Granted the atmosphere soaks up a lot of it, but we still get hit all the time.

Someone needs to teach these people how a microwave really works http://home.howstuffworks.com/microwave1.htm

Hey after reading that article, maybe we can all just tweak our home wireless setups a little bit and do the cooking from the access point.