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Why are people so gung-ho on asteroid mining? I can only assume that they have little concept of the processes involved in getting refined metals out of a mixture of ores. According to this page to create a ton of pig iron, you start with 2 tons of ore, 1 ton of coke and half-ton of limestone. The fire consumes 5 tons of air. Once you get the pig iron, you need to blast oxygen through the molten iron to convert it to steel. Or are they planning to "land" an asteroid in the Earth, and refine it here?

The big bucks will be in capturing comets. Comets are full of water, which means oxygen. A large plastic bag wrapped around a comet can capture the outgassing. By directing the outgassing through jets, the comet can be coaxed into a reasonable orbit. Solar power and distillation techniques could separate the materials.

What about FutureTruck? Or the GM HyWire? How is it a conflict of interest for auto manufacturers to build fuel cell/diesel/hybrid vehicles?
Yes, their project was built for I think this is a step forward but to sit there and claim that there's some kind of conspiracy is laughable. To produce a viable alternative to the combustion engine takes time. It took us over 100 years to get engines that last 100K miles, while at the same time get 30 miles to the gallon, and go 0-60 in around 7 seconds (2004 Honda Accord V6) while at the same time have enough space to seat 5, and put all their stuff in the trunk. And that's what people expect; go around 300 miles before fillups, be able to carry all their stuff and not worry about their engine breaking down on them. That's why we're seeing hybrid technology first so we can build on top of proven technology.

Here you go folks, I found a decent picture.

Hes right you know, it looks similar.

http://auto.howstuffworks.com/automatic-transmissi on10.htm

Anyway, I think the moral of the story is that space flight can be suprisingly cheap once you have removed the cost of politics.

This reminds me of fuel injectors for cars. They are simply silicon valves that open and close hundreds of times per second depending on fuel needs. More info can be found at howstuffworks: http://auto.howstuffworks.com/fuel-injection3.htm One of the big problems of the auto industry is making engines burn fuel more efficiently. A lot of it has to do with how well the fuel and air mix before combusion. There may even be an application for this in car engines, if we replace single injectors with many thousands of little injectors. This would hopefully allow precise control of air/fuel mixtures which would reduce emissions, improve power, and improve engine efficiency. If this technology becomes ubiquitous, perhaps we could be looking at a new means of supplying fuel to your engine. There are a lot of steps between here and there, but there is still a good need for mechanical valves outside of the computer storage industries!

The water is absolutely NOT radioactive and it in fact vents off into the atmosphere.

No, you're wrong. Water which touches the Uranium is radioactive, and it is NOT vented into the atmosphere because it is highly toxic.

Nuclear rods heat the water or another fluid. The fluid travels down pipes to a heat exchange mechanism, where it heats water in a SECOND set of tubes and then circulates back to the nuclear fuel. The water in the SECOND set of tubes powers the turbines.

The vapor coming from the giant cooling towers is from the SECOND set of tubes, and is not contaminated.

Here is a diagram (Flash required). Notice the orange/red line is contaminated, the blue line is not.

"The uranium bundle acts as an extremely high-energy source of heat. It heats the water and turns it to steam. The steam drives a steam turbine, which spins a generator to produce power. In some reactors, the steam from the reactor goes through a secondary, intermediate heat exchanger to convert another loop of water to steam, which drives the turbine. The advantage to this design is that the radioactive water/steam never contacts the turbine. Also, in some reactors, the coolant fluid in contact with the reactor core is gas (carbon dioxide) or liquid metal (sodium, potassium); these types of reactors allow the core to be operated at higher temperatures. "

Ok, this is going completely offtopic, but

The PS2 is simply two PS1 cpu's in one box.

Err, that's just a lie. PS specs vs PS2 specs.

They didn't improve the controller design

In fact, the directional pad and button pads are analogue on the PS2 controller, they were pure digital "On/Off" on the PS1. Also, since the shape of the controller is pretty much perfect as far as most people are concerned, it would have been a little silly to replace it.

nor did they include a hdd or network connection

Makes it a damn sight cheaper than an XBox, particularly when they first came out, wonder if that was the idea?

And for kickers, they placed they power switch on the back of the system

This is golden! The power switch is on the front of the system. It's the one with the universal power switch symbol used on every TV, hifi, video recorder since I was born. Hold it down for a second, et voila!

On topic though, I agree that the whole ATRAC thing is a load of bollocks. The real reason I stopped buying Sony (with the exception of my PS2) is that after my minidisc walkman's power adapter broke and it cost £15 for a new one - even though its exactly the same as a £5 adapter you could buy from any electronics shop, just with a funky plug.

Ok, this is going completely offtopic, but

The PS2 is simply two PS1 cpu's in one box.

Err, that's just a lie. PS specs vs PS2 specs.

They didn't improve the controller design

In fact, the directional pad and button pads are analogue on the PS2 controller, they were pure digital "On/Off" on the PS1. Also, since the shape of the controller is pretty much perfect as far as most people are concerned, it would have been a little silly to replace it.

nor did they include a hdd or network connection

Makes it a damn sight cheaper than an XBox, particularly when they first came out, wonder if that was the idea?

And for kickers, they placed they power switch on the back of the system

This is golden! The power switch is on the front of the system. It's the one with the universal power switch symbol used on every TV, hifi, video recorder since I was born. Hold it down for a second, et voila!

On topic though, I agree that the whole ATRAC thing is a load of bollocks. The real reason I stopped buying Sony (with the exception of my PS2) is that after my minidisc walkman's power adapter broke and it cost £15 for a new one - even though its exactly the same as a £5 adapter you could buy from any electronics shop, just with a funky plug.

No.. the vehicle uses an RCS for attitude control for much of the trajectory.

Here's more on the White Knight craft. An important but much overlooked part of the proceedings. http://science.howstuffworks.com/spaceshipone3.htm http://www.x-plane.org/Detailed/3881.shtml

I don't think so!
http://consumer.usa.canon.com/ir/controller?act=Mo delTechSpecsAct&fcategoryid=139&modelid=10 598
From here.

4992 x 3328 pixels over a (36 x 24 mm) 1.4 x .94 inch CMOS array essentially tells you they have a cmos with a 7micron pixel pitch. This is hardly revolutionary. Assuming the optics are similar in quality to a comparable film camera, to have the same image quality that would be equivalent to saying that ordinary film has 7 micron light sensitive (silver?) particles. This is ridiculous!

http://science.howstuffworks.com/film3.htm
here says that "The imaging layers contain sub-micron sized grains of silver-halide crystals that act as the photon detectors". That's submicron.

So it's a nice camera. That doesn't mean it's a fantastic sensor - it still suffers from the same attributes that other CMOS/CCD sensors do. They've got phenomenal ADC's but the sensors just can't be packed as tightly as silver can be.

http://www.home.earthlink.net/~fyiglover/articles/ resolution.html
says that "All three silver microfilm manufacturers (Agfa, Fuji & Kodak) certify their medium speed microfilms to have the ability to achieve 800 lines/mm of resolution."

Well, Wyatt, all the examples you cite show that the elected candidate as the one who got the most votes, so I'm not seeing your point.

There have been 4 presidential elections including 2000 where the candidate who received a plurality of popular votes lost in the Electoral College. Arguing that the guy with the most popular votes "really" won is silly. Both candidates would have campaigned very differently if the election were decided by popular vote because swing states become far less important, and many voters would likely have made different decisions whether or not to vote for third parties.

Also eggs cooking is the water coming out.

Now that is plain b-s. As I said, what happens is that when you add energy (heat) to the proteins, they re-fold and turns into a more stable substance, transforming from a liquid to a firm state.

Just to clearify this so that people dont believe your disinformation. If you boil and egg, in water, with the eggshell intact, you still think you will boil the water away from the "egg", making it firm ? You are utterly wrong, and not informative at all. Even a simple google reveals this, look here or here.

Go back to your cave, troll.

Which is too bad, because it actually looks pretty cool, technologicallly speaking. HowStuffWorks put up a new article last week that runs through the specs in detail. Innovative stuff.

http://www.howstuffworks.com/ has a pretty good explaination. If you're too lazy, basically you get a big mass of plutonium and pelt it with pellets of uranium until it goes boom. It's basically a really big nuclear meltdown.

Home distribution to the end user in the US is 240 V single phase, which is actually is two pairs of a three phase system. This is then split into two 120 V circuits in the home by a step down transformer. Large businesses may have full three-phase feeds at somewhat higher voltages (typically up to 500-1200 V), and often get rate discounts if they "load balance" their impedance as seen by the electric company connection to match the feed source for maximum throughput, or if they agree to scale back their usage during an energy crunch.

Distribution in both the US and Europe above the street level is done well above 240 Volts. Use your favorite search engine to lookup "power distribution" or read more about it here.

Or power your laptop with a bike

The Elektron generators split oxygen from water molecules, which are primarily obtained from the crew's waste water. For more info on the ISS' life support, check out this page.

...the 'printable' version of the article.

If you're interested in learning a bit about lock picking, but aren't sure you want to spend $20 on this book yet, take a look at this article at Howstuffworks.com.

It offers a great introduction to lock picking, and has some nice graphics that really helped me understand how locks work, and how they can be circumvented. If you really get into it, then I'm sure this book would offer a lot more information to help you along.

I most certainly like how slashdot provides links in its articles

the people using flash are either:
1. 14 years old
2. incredibly annoying
3. advertisers

The only site I know that uses flash properly.

example

the people using flash are either:
1. 14 years old
2. incredibly annoying
3. advertisers

The only site I know that uses flash properly.

example

Your Brain Does This

The eye has only about about 7 million cones (the detail receptors in the eye) ... since each cone only sees one color, that yields 233k "pixels" (ok ok, i know the cones aren't split evenly amoung RG and B) ... or an image of about 1500 x 1500 pixels.

The reason we perceive a higher resolution than that has to do with the rate at which our brain samples these photoreceptors compared to the frame rate at which we see... i.e. the frame rate of the human eye might be somewhere in the 30-60 FPS range, but our brain gets info from our eye (or at least some receptors in our) more often than that. Read about sub-pixel interpolation in the other posts in this thread.

Also, check out this site:
http://webvision.med.utah.edu/temporal.html

We get solar dust every day, it's called aurora borealis, or the northern lights.

I'm curious if anyone could fill me in on why they chose Florida as their center for launching vehicles with the potential each year for hurricanes?

The nearer you get to the equater the faster the rotational velocity. This gives you an extra boost when trying to escape Earth's gravity.

Some info about launching satellites

I know we are talking only about a heat shield in this design, but the TransHab module (wiki, Howstuffworks) is even more resistant to puncture than the actual "skin" of the ISS.

For the little story, TransHab was really a great project but got canned by congress because it was way over budget. NASA still decided to fund a research project on it and that time Congress actually forbad NASA any new research on an inflatable habitation module. So NASA gave it of the Italian contractor that was building parts for the ISS and had them continue the work on it.

Murphy

I'd suggest reading these:
How Music Licensing Works
How Music Royalties Work

I'd suggest reading these:
How Music Licensing Works
How Music Royalties Work

"Question

How much does it cost to download music at AllOFMP3.com?

The price of the files that you download is determined by the quality of the file you choose to download. The price is determined by the file size and type.

The price of 1 Mb of the files marked as VIP or Online Encoding is 0.01 USD.

The price of 1 Mb of the files marked as Online Encoding Exclusive is 0.02 USD.

You will not be charged for previewing tracks are for the encoding process itself.

Note: All media that is available with OEEX are also available for download in regular encoding format."

- From the Payments section of help

This is Slashdot. If you (or the Russians) don't know the difference between bits (b) and bytes (B), than I suggest you (or the Russians) fark off and quit acting like your advertising for AllOFMP3.com!

MB is commonly used when referring to a file size. However, corporations routinely use Mb as a marketing leverage. In this case, slip in Mb and suddenly the price is cut by a factor of 8. Download speeds are increased by a factor of 8 when you refer to them as Kb instead of KB.

1 MB = 8 Mb
5 MB = 40 Mb
...therefore
40 Mb @ $0.01 / Mb = $0.40 (files marked as VIP or Online Encoding)
40 Mb @ $0.02 / Mb = $0.80 (files marked as Online Encoding Exclusive)

P.S. Don't come crying to me when you find out that you just downloaded a 23 min long Pink Floyd song and it comes to ~$2.60 (or even $5.20 for that matter).

How mag lev trains work: http://travel.howstuffworks.com/maglev-train.htm

The toyata prius has a very special system that deals with this, as this page shows. Especially with hybrid SUV's coming out soon, building your own hybrid seems like it would be way too much work.

Also keep in mind, that right now making a hybrid car (for a major automanufacturer) costs several thousand dollars more than making an equivalent conventional car mostly because they don't have enough mass production on the hybrid parts, and they are making thousands and thousands of cars. Buying the parts individually, the price would be outragous.

The ESB uses a steel framework to carry the load. The rock facing you see is simply hung from this framework. See this link for a brief description.

The WTC had no such framework. There was a central core which was the main frame. From that central core the floor panels were attached on one end and on the other end were attached to an outside aluminum framework whose sole purpose was to supply rigidity. It was not designed to carry the building load. See this site for a very good description of the design.

When the planes slammed in to the WTC the outer rigidity was compromised as was the central core. The burning of the jet fuel softened (NOT MELTED) the steel supports under the floor panels which caused them to sag. Add in the extra weight of the plane sitting on the floor panels and the panels were eventually pulled loose from their attachments to the outer aluminum wall. The floor panels then began to fall in the now proverbial 'pancake' fashion.

Without the floor panels providing the necessary support the outer skin was not able to do its job. Thus, the floors above the impact point no longer had the stability they once had. When those floors began to collapse that was when the whole structure gave way.

The other key difference in the two hits is that the plane that hit the ESB was traveling at a much slower speed than were the planes that hit the WTC. Further, the two planes carried a much higher fuel load and were nearly full upon impact.

Here is the most current report and testing results. It was released on August 25th. While I read the NY Times version this is from the official tests. Lots of .pdf files.

I've been following moller for a while and the solution they are pushing to eliminate drivers having to learn how to essentially fly a plane is to not let them at all...

What a lot of the companies like moller have been trying to come up with is a virtual highway system, much like you see in the Jetsons. Instead of everyone just flying around in the sky where ever the hell they want, they are forced onto virtual computer controlled freeways that traffic is limited to. The idea is with the help of GPS and navigation systems, you would simply type in your destination (much like mapquest) and it would autopilot you to your location. Now since they have dedicated towers and people tracking this for commercial planes, I doubt this could ever work out when you have millions of objects to track.

Now what computer would be driving this, and how far away this technology is... well your guess is as good as mine. I know that I sure as hell wouldn't be running windows on my flying car. It would bring a scarey new meaning to the "blue screen of death".

Read this for more info flying-car

Robert E. Fulton, a man who as a teenager was the first to ride around the globe on a motorcycle, already invented the flying car in 1945. He called it the Airphibian. In 1950 he flew it to Washington D.C. where he landed and then drove it to the Civil Aeronautics Association where it was certified for use. It traveled 110 mph in the air and 55 mph on the ground, and changed between car and plane in five minutes due to its simple system for removing the wings and propeller. Charles Lindhberg flew it and declared it "an improvement." It never did well commercially and sold only under 600 total. There is only one remaining today. It is in the Smithsonian. More Info: http://www.nasm.si.edu/research/aero/aircraft/fult on.htm
History: http://travel.howstuffworks.com/flying-car1.htm

This doesn't say that you will disband fuel efficient tech. Rather a technology will become better efficient wise as a technology matures and mistakes are learnt from. Afterall, you wouldn't be saying China should be embargoed because of their recent spike in oil demand and expect them to be using a UN-specified percentage of fuel efficient cars within their boundary.

It's like the maglev train china decided to go and build. The only problem was who it was going to service with the price being a bit high for that middle class chinese citizen. Quoting myself from a post in an earlier article, "one trip costing roughly 1/20th of one person's income for a month." That demonstrates the sociological implications of investing in a technology, but also environmental as in this post says Price conscious people takes the bus to major transportation hubs, and convenience / time consicous people takes the taxi (which is only like 15 dollars compared to 10 dollars that the maglev costs - besides the point that the other end station is nowhere near the city and you have to take a cab anyway so it's not that much faster).

Which basically says that as long as the tech is defined to profitable areas like the airport and downtown it can remain cheap and less the cost of other tech. But what happens when you need to get somewhere else and that issue of human convenience comes up?

I think it is a matter of trade-offs. That and allowing engineers to work on interesting problems.

... to develop a gliding horse cart, which, to no great surprise, failed.
loc. cit.

CC.

Everyone has his or her own version of this technology, but what about actually make use of it... "Holographic memory offers the possibility of storing 1 terabyte (TB) of data in a sugar-cube-sized crystal." http://computer.howstuffworks.com/holographic-memo ry1.htm And what ever happened to Mini-disc, they had a great idea to but a case around the disc so when we lightly grazed it with our hand we didn't loose our important data we tried to backup. So if you want to impress us... A.) Do the same thing in a small little crystal that I can carry around and not have to worry about scratching and make it reasonably priced and big enough to just buy one crystal. B.) Go back to the old school days of mini-disc and put it in a permanent protective jewel case so I don't have to blow on it and baby it like an old Nintendo.

I'm still holding out for the Indrema linux based console!

Just kidding.

LK

Hey -- in the future, spend 5 more bytes to put around that uri. It's pretty convenient that way for the 'complete and total morons': they just have to click, and not worry about taking the extra spaces out. :)

Just another great feature of Slashdot: http://electronics.howstuffworks.com/telephone2.ht m

Proprietary is anticompetitive by definition.

If I'm an auto manufacturer and I put a HEMI engine into my cars and I don't let anybody else put one in their cars, does that destroy the competitive market for automobiles? If Colonel Saunders has his own secret recipe of herbs and spices, does that destroy the competitive market for fried chicken? Ridiculous.

The Federal Reserve is a system set up by capitalists (banks) for capitalists (banks).

Wrong. The Federal Reserve System was set up by an act of Congress December 23, 1913. The Fed is a public/private organization with a complex structure that makes the Board of Governors Federal employees (like Mr. Greenspan) and the staffs of the regional banks private sector employees. Your questions about what it does will be answered somewhat here.

Instead of giving the money to individuals (which is the way it should be done in a truly free system), they pass it out to their buddies in the banking system who make a profit by leasing the money to individual borrowers.

How is this crap insightful? The Fed makes short-term loans to individual banks. These loans are at low interest rates but must be paid back quickly also. Banks also deposit cash reserves with the Fed. There is no 'giving' of money. Even if there were, that's a silly sentiment. "Let's power the economy by giving away worthless paper currency to everyone." It would be worthless because everyone had it in equal measure without any value being attached.

The Federal Reserve also has a very powerful way of making a shit load of money: inflation. They just print a lot more money that they would be allowed to print if the system were regulated by just laws. Who or where does all this money goes to? I have no idea.

Yes, you don't have any idea. You're completely clueless about our financial system. You probably aren't aware that at any moment, there are a few hundred billion in coin and currency in circulation (600 bil or so in 2003). The US GDP in 2003, for instance, was something on the order of 11 trillion dollars. Search that document, it's there. Please note that we aren't even considering bank deposits, stock ownership or any other securities, like bonds.

An intelligent person might come to the conclusion that most money doesn't exist as currency at all. It's only written on paper or stored in a computer somewhere. You'd be right if you came to that conclusion. Therefore, the Fed printing 100 billion more of $100 bills would have a negligible effect anyway.

There's an even more compelling reason why your statement above is stupid. The Fed doesn't *GIVE OUT* money. The funds are either loaned in the short term, or given out of the member bank's deposits to the Fed. Therefore, there is no inflationary pressure associated with $100 bills going to Bank X since they are paid for one way or another.

So how exactly were they making money off of this? Answer: they aren't. They make most of their money off of check processing and ACH transfers which they act as the middleman for.

Essentially, we have the wolves in charge of the chicken coop. There're making a killing, so to speak, and there's nothing you and I can do about it. Other than complain.

Next time you make a comment about something, how about knowing something...anything about what it is you are commenting about?

Thank you.

>was sick of all the blatant product placement in the film... it was beyond absurd

You haven't seen "I, Robot" then? So much blatent advertising for Audi, Panasonic, and Converse!

I was sceptical about this, but this page has numbers and agrees with you. It computes a 747 as being four times as efficient as a car, and while I could try arguing with some of their numbers, I couldn't get that down by a factor of four.

Nope, greenhouses work by allowing the infrared light in which hits the material in the greenhouse which in turn conducts the heat to the air. This air is small in volume and thus is easily heated by the relativly high energy per volume from the solar energy. For more info see this article at howstuffworks.

please read this. The work because of the reflectivity. It's not really a 'sail' in the Earthly sense, it's a giant mirror that's only reflective on one side.

In case you, like me, didn't know that much about solar sails, there's a great article at How Stuff Works about them: How Solar Sails Will Work. Looks like a pretty interesting technology!

Maybe they rely only on a part of the suns rays and not all of it?

Well as I understand it (I could be completely wrong here), normal silicon photovoltaic cells are essentially very thin diodes with a large surface area. When a photon (within the required energy band) hits an electron in the silicon it pushes the electron through the junction, giving up some of it's energy to do so. Since the junction forms a diode, the electron can't get back across the junction, producing a current which flows through whatever circuit you've attached to the cell.

Since the energy of a photon determines it's wavelength, I'd guess that giving up the energy in the solar cell would produce a red shift in the light?

According to how stuff works, in order to free the electron, the photon must be within a certain energy band - too low and it passes through unaltered, too high and the excess energy is lost (it doesn't explain where that energy actually goes - must go somewhere).

Track one is 210 bits per inch (bpi), and holds 79 six-bit plus parity bit read-only characters.

Track two is 75 bpi, and holds 40 four-bit plus parity bit characters.

Track three is 210 bpi, and holds 107 four-bit plus parity bit characters.

That just sounds like normal lock-picking to me. Here is an article on the technique that is describing pretty much the same thing on a more traditional yale-style key.

Great. I've just taught serveral thousand geeks how to lock-pick... ;-)