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Unless I'm mistaken, fission plants just boil water with the heat generated by the reactor, and drive turbines. It's a new way of generating energy, but not electricity.

There was a slashdot article a long ways back about a preliminary version sugar-cube burning machine/robot thing.

aha - a link from howstuffworks shows all.

Here's some quick good links. I'm sure there are hundreds of others. Please educate others. There is no voodoo and radio waves for the most part will not hurt you, unless you stand in front of a high power transmitter.

How Radio Works

How Antennas Work

Yeah, retailers were a big part of the education campaign. (Think Walmart, not Wally's Corner Market)

That pen you used was to test for the presence of wood-based paper. The old iodine-starch trick.

There is an interesting article at How Stuff Works that explains how chess programs work: article. Also, here is a link to a related story.

good night.

Well, for example, they could be tracking you when you are taking a quick stroll down the mall after visiting the library, when you step through one of those electronic anti-shoplifting system (EAS) antennas at the entrance of shops. They could be modified in no time flat to track more sophisticated RFID tags.

Basically, anywhere you have to 'squeeze' through a relatively confined space, they could install concealed antennas and track you passing through.
A few examples (to show just how common these are, some are already being used for RFID tracking):
- Office entrances
- Subway turnstiles, train doors
- Elevators
etc.
... or places where people tend to concentrate confined to a small space for some time
- pedestrian crossings, at traffic lights
- in front of reception desks
etc.

In case you're wondering if this is all a load of bollocks, I have discussed this many times with my friend, who has been developing EAS and RFID systems for many years.
He also says the RFID detection range is steadily improving (they're ofcourse already working on the next genration systems, using DSP to eliminate background noise and boost the signal), so the need for a confined space is becoming less and less.

--
Just because you're paranoid, it doesn't mean they're not out to get you...

Seriously though, a little lobbying is just fine in my book as long as that lobbying is truly an education of lawmakers on the issues and solutions to problems. The problem becomes when individual companies have such power and control as to dominate the lobbying process with money and resources so as to eclipse all other concerns.

I agree with you, if lobbying was just people attempting to talk to, inform, and educate etc lawmakers about whatever than I would have no problem with lobbying. However, I believe that now almost all lobbying is they type that you describe as a problem; the type where people are simply...lets be frank... buying decisions of law makers.

A "democracy" where money = votes (where he/she who can make the highest bid or has the most money gets what he/she wants) is not a true democracy at all, it's an oligarchy.

I personally feel, that until there is some sort of law that completely outlaws giving money by individuals (corporations counting as individuals) to elected officials the oligarchy will continue; real democracy will only be talked about in intellectual circles, and money = votes "democracy" will continue to be a placebo of the masses.

Just FYI here is some figures to show just what elected officials in the US make each year, I have no idea what UN officials make, so I think they could get by with out taking more money form the wealthy.

President of the US (Clinton was the last to make 200,000 Bush is the first to get this much.) $400,000

Rank and File Senators and Rep's $154,700

Senate Leadership Majority Leader - $171,900 Minority Leader - $171,900

House Leadership Speaker of the House - $198,600 Majority Leader - $171,900 Minority Leader - $171,900

Above info from usgovinfo and how stuff works

I predict MRAM will be the near replacement. It leverages all that we've learned in chipmaking, and hard drives(1). Think of hard drives as a simplified mram (or core memory for you old school guys).It will be easier to do something like this because of the lower power consumption, and hence heat. The main issue is economic, and time will take care of that.

(1) What we've learned from flat-screen technology will help as well.

It is possible.

Here's a link to an article on how a similar compound works (sodium polyacrylate). This compound only absorbs 600 times its weight of distilled water, not a few thousand times.

93 octane gasoline isn't out there because it is 'cool'. It is out there because some engines are built with high compression and require a higher anti-knock index (the amount that you can compress the vapor before it spontaneously ignites).

The idea that a lot of people have, that the 93 is 'more powerful' or in some other way better, is a myth that is perpetuated by oil companies. Indeed many have been sued over advertisements that implies that 93 will boost your engine in some way, when in reality 93 in an engine tuned for 89 is a waste of money. But for an engine with a higher compression ratio, you will have problems if you don't use high octane gasoline.

For more on octane rating, read up at how stuff works. For more on the lawsuit over false claims, try this description which indicates that the difference is only one of anti-knock rating.

These cans will have to transmit their position to Coca-cola. The article does not say how they do this. I assume that GPS enabled cell phones use the cellular network to transmit their positions. Will the cans use the cell phone network? Some other radio transmission?

Also, for info on how GPS works, click.

If the hydrogen is extracted from natural gas, there is a relatively small amount of carbon dioxide as a by-product, but fuel cells still emit much less pollution than traditional energy sources.

20 megabit Adsl2

What a coincidence!. It looks like Dean Kamen's company was working on just such a thing!

Okay, now to turn off the sarcasm (sorry, I couldn't resist) - Kamen was working on the just-approved product called iBot for quite some time. It was the "Fred" to Segway's "Ginger" (after legendary film dance pair Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers), and was in the FDA approval process for quite some time before being approved earlier this year as a medical device. iBot can maneuver disabled humans in an upright position, navigate stairs, and handle terrain that would stymie conventional wheelchairs. I believe they cost around $20k - they're being sold commercially through a Johnson & Johnson division.

It's known that Kamen is working on a Stirling Engine variant. There's been a lot of speculation that it's being developed as a power source for a Segway 2.0-type device. A Stirling power source could seriously improve the range of a Segway and make it a much more practical means of travel.

Actually, movies are run at twice that, i.e. in order to reduce the flickering each frame is projected twice. And 48Hz is just barely acceptable for straight on viewing. You'll see the flicker clearly out of the corner of your eye.

Given the description of how the stuff works, I think a Magnadoodle is a much better comparison...

=Smidge=

yo...

this is quite a good explanation:
Is it harmful to breathe 100-percent oxygen?

You can't say that having a larger bus of 64-bits in comparison with 32-bits is not going to transfer data faster at equivalent clock speeds.

My point is that the width of the data bus isn't actually tied directly to the size of the integer registers.

Here is the first link off the Google: How motherboards works ;-)

You can argue that having 64bit registers and instructions means that you can tell the CPU to move 64bits in one go (instead of 2x 32bits). But with things like caching involved the impact on performance isn't likely to great. Also bear in mind that the serious number crunching is typically floating-point. Desktop CPUs have been pushing around floating-point numbers with more than 32bits for quite sometime now.

I remember the good old days when each new chip was 2-3 times faster than the last... I think thoses days are gone...

--
Simon

but anybody short of that gets their pipe doubled ... would you go for it?

That's a rather broad assumption. Has it occurred to you that maybe they want to drop the top 1% because they simply want to make more money off the other 99%? If you haven't read this, then do so now. To quote from that article,

The good news is that this particular performance issue can be resolved by the cable company adding a new channel and splitting the base of users.

In other words, with 6 Gigabits/s available in that coaxial cable the bandwidth on the cable company's network is not the problem. The traffic generated outside their network, and costing Comcast $X is the problem. You're connection isn't going to get any faster when the pigs are gone. At best you'll get a short lived boost while they find other 'desirable' customers to use that bandwidth. Considering we are being sold on 'Always on, super fast connections' with no mention of bandwidth limits, I would be supremely upset if it were my ISP trying to pull this stunt. If they did, I would probably be shopping around for a new ISP. They provide no guidelines as to how much is too much, effectively making it a 'we can boot anyone we don't like' agreement.

And the worst part of it is, this crap happens all the time when something is internet related. Ridiculous stuff like $150,000 dollar fines for downloading a song. Let's see an electric utility try to pull a stunt like this, citing overloaded power grids and making the grids work for the other 99%. Or maybe the water supply, we'll just cut off LA's water supply then the rest of the state can use all they want! Wouldn't happen in a million years.

By contrast, magnetic fields have a very measurable effect on the body. Your blood is composed of about 7-28 umol/L, or if I did the math right, about 1 mg/L. Take a magnet and rub it near a vein sometime. If the field is strong enough, you get reorientation of the red blood cells, and eventually clumping of those cells. In sufficiently concentrated doses, the health effects could be significant.

That's false. Red blood cells do not clump in the presense of magnetic fields.

There have been studies on the phosphene effect, where strong magnetic pulses cause subjects to percieve brief visual images.

Lawrence Livermore National Labs has a page on the harmful effects of very strong magnetic fields, upwards of 40,000 Gauss -- but such fields are rarely encountered. Typical MRI magnetic fields, by comparison, are typically between 5,000 and 20,000 guass. But even in very high static magnetic fields, the effects are temporary.

The big danger is for people with implanted metal, like pace makers or surgical clips.

Now, I did find a study on red blood cells in very strong magnetic fields that does suggest that they reorient, even in fields as low as 10,000 Gauss. No mention of clumping.

Your typical hand-held magnet, even a strong one, produces a field on the order of 4,000 Gauss. Not harmful.

The fields produced by any kind of transmitters mentioned in the article would be tens or hundreds of Gauss -- too weak to move a paperclip.

(The earth's magnetic field is about 0.5 Gauss, for comparison)

On the other hand, the LLNL page mentions that magnetic fields equal to the strength of the Earth's can disrupt circadian rhythm! And it has been proven that birds are sensitive to the Earth's field... so even small magnetic fields can have a measurable biological effect.

But FEAR FEAR FEAR is not warranted.

- Peter

Actually, rotary engines can burn a variety of fuels including hydrogen, and operate by internal combustion.

It has been proven (rather conclusively) that pot has a detrimental effect on memory and cognitive processes while the person is still under the influence of it (the same can be said of flu remedies though...). Considering that the compound often stays in the body for as much as a week, this will certainly cause effects much as you describe (blocking pathways associated with long-term memory and cognitive processes) in a regular user.

It has to due with neurotransmitters. Pot doesn't actually kill brain cells (I think alcohol actually does, but I could be wrong). It just stimulates certain transmitters or something. I read all about it Here.

The real issue is that there is no proof of chronic effects. While the compound blocks these parts of the brain, and intoxicates the person while the substance is in their bloodstream, the parts are not destroyed (unlike, say, alcohol, which kills the cells).

Long-term effects are there. Your brain gets used to the pot being there and ultimately starts producing less of the relevant neurotransmitters. Whether or not your brain ever fully recovers I have yet to experience. My short-term memory has been crap every since I started smoking pot, but I only did it for 2 years. Heavily when I did it, mind you, but now it's > 7 years after I quit, and my short-term memory still hasn't recovered. I used to be able to remember phone numbers given to me once. I can't remember more than 2-3 digits in sequence anymore. It's very frustrating.

One of the original killer pop ups developed in WWII and used extensively in Vietnam, the "Bouncing Betty" would wait until your foot left the mine and then Pop Up(tm) to about 3 feet and blast outward in a circular pattern. Carnage ensued.

Learn more at How Stuff Works

Or they could be worried that he may build a fusion bomb.

I agree that 50 mW of power is probably high if a palm pilot uses ~ 200 mW of power. But lets use that number as you suggest.

According to this BBC article, a single cell phone caused enough instrument panel craziness and communications interference. The direct quote is:

He heard the interference in his headphones, and at the same time his automatic landing system was showing anomalous behaviour.

I swear I am getting somewhere. According to this cell phone for dummies tutorial, it says the the average cell phone puts off 3W signals (3000 mW) (into 4pi steradians), just as you are proposing the palm pilot emitts 50 mW. That means 60 people using a Palm Pilot could cause enough interference to make equipment malfunction. Now if you take your typical Delta plane, it seems that the number of seats is about 150 for continental, and about 225 for intercontinental flights. If about 1/3rd of the people (continental) or 1/4th (intercontinental) are using a palm pilot, this is enough to cause significant interference, and enough for something like "the stick-shaker in the cockpit, a warning signal that the plane is about to stall, started to operate." (again from the BBC article). It is still not worth it to me.

Any time you are looking for information on how something works, I suggest howstuffworks.com. For instance, this page here on Torsen Differentials.

Anyway Torsen differentials have two major advantages; they can handle very high loads because they are gear-based, and they do not have appreciable loss as you often see in viscous limited slips. They also have the advantage over clutch-type limited slip differentials in that they do not tend to wear out. Clutch-type differentials have great response, are often tunable, and do not have much loss at all, but the clutches wear out. Plus, they're available in 1-way, 1.5-way, and 2 way types, which controls when they slip, and when they don't. Viscous limited slip differentials tend to waste some power (converting it into heat) when they slip, but they almost never wear out, and they are very consistent. The Subaru Impreza STi uses a mechanical (I assume that means gear-type, like the torsen) diff in the rear and a viscous unit in the front, so obviously they all have their uses for which they are most applicable, except open (non-LSD) differentials which are simply inexpensive. There is never a time when it would be better to have no limited slip, but open diffs are a couple hundred bucks cheaper to produce than a viscous limited slip unit, I guess. I have a hard time believing they're worth even that much, but the going rate on a factory viscous limited slip for my car for example, a 240SX, runs $500. (That's the whole diff, but since you have to have special tools to change the workings, if you pay someone to change the guts, you end up spending just as much.)

Any time you are looking for information on how something works, I suggest howstuffworks.com. For instance, this page here on Torsen Differentials.

Anyway Torsen differentials have two major advantages; they can handle very high loads because they are gear-based, and they do not have appreciable loss as you often see in viscous limited slips. They also have the advantage over clutch-type limited slip differentials in that they do not tend to wear out. Clutch-type differentials have great response, are often tunable, and do not have much loss at all, but the clutches wear out. Plus, they're available in 1-way, 1.5-way, and 2 way types, which controls when they slip, and when they don't. Viscous limited slip differentials tend to waste some power (converting it into heat) when they slip, but they almost never wear out, and they are very consistent. The Subaru Impreza STi uses a mechanical (I assume that means gear-type, like the torsen) diff in the rear and a viscous unit in the front, so obviously they all have their uses for which they are most applicable, except open (non-LSD) differentials which are simply inexpensive. There is never a time when it would be better to have no limited slip, but open diffs are a couple hundred bucks cheaper to produce than a viscous limited slip unit, I guess. I have a hard time believing they're worth even that much, but the going rate on a factory viscous limited slip for my car for example, a 240SX, runs $500. (That's the whole diff, but since you have to have special tools to change the workings, if you pay someone to change the guts, you end up spending just as much.)

If you can't seamlessly play Flash media in IE (or Mozilla or Opera, eventually), well that sucks. Who the hell are these Eolas guys and are they intentionally trying to send the Web's progress back about six years?

Actually, this would make me very happy. There's nothing I despise more than a flash-only site that subjects me to flashing pictures and annoying sounds that I didn't initiate. Ninety-five percent of the time, this extra glitz isn't there to add construtive bits to the site -- it's just there because the web designer thought that this new toy from Macromedia was cool.

There are some very enjoyable uses of Flash -- like the animations on http://www.howstuffworks.com or homemade animated music videos. But, maybe this will free us from the flash-intro pages that are so irritating.

Actually, they aren't that irritating anymore since I have Privoxy filter out the sh*t that I don't want to see. I've found that people who only bother to present their information in Flash usually don't have anything useful to say.

Is it too much for me to ask that people just use the right tool for the job? Maybe by making the annoying tool less convenient, some folks will reconsider what they are doing and rely on the basic solid tools that will let you ignore a page on your desktop until *you* are ready to read it.

I'm struck by how much the HowStuffWorks picture of MRAM memory (*) looks like the donut-on-a-wire ferrite core memory. All that's missing are the 150-ohm terminating resistors.

I like the idea of a HD-less instant-on PC. One of the great things about my Palm Pilot is that the kids can turn it on and off without any "shutdown" process... although all my kids have known how to shut down Windows properly since they could understand the "To turn off press Start" concept.

On the other hand, it's already hard enough to restart a locked-up PC when the so-called power switch doesn't have anything to do with the power. How will I fix a PC when pulling the plug doesn't even reboot the OS?

MRAM @ How Stuff Works

Here's a better link for more info on MRAM. Pretty graphic of an MRAM cell.

A little more indepth view of MRAM can be read here.

Does anyone know if MRAM will be sensative to external magnets? Aka if I bump my portable mp3/ogg player into a giant fridge mag will I lost my data?

The bulb in the projector doesn't turn on and off continuously.

The film is pulled frame by frame in front of the lens, and you may get the impression of flicker, but that's only because of a misaligned shutter that's in front of the bulb-- it lets light through when the frame is aligned, and blocks the light as the next frame is being pulled down. This happens 24 times per second.

You may want to consult this article at How Stuff Works, specifically the fourth page, which deals with bulbs, shutters, etc.

What school was that?

The bulb in the projector doesn't turn on and off continuously.

The film is pulled frame by frame in front of the lens, and you may get the impression of flicker, but that's only because of a misaligned shutter that's in front of the bulb-- it lets light through when the frame is aligned, and blocks the light as the next frame is being pulled down. This happens 24 times per second.

You may want to consult this article at How Stuff Works, specifically the fourth page, which deals with bulbs, shutters, etc.

What school was that?

The bulb in the projector doesn't turn on and off continuously.

The film is pulled frame by frame in front of the lens, and you may get the impression of flicker, but that's only because of a misaligned shutter that's in front of the bulb-- it lets light through when the frame is aligned, and blocks the light as the next frame is being pulled down. This happens 24 times per second.

You may want to consult this article at How Stuff Works, specifically the fourth page, which deals with bulbs, shutters, etc.

What school was that?

You are, however, eligible to be drafted into the US military.

Actually no, I'm not. But only because of age.

I did a little searching. Wow! I knew that non-citizens could serve in the military, but did not know they could be drafted

The best picture I could find was this one on HowStuffWorks.

The best picture I could find was this one on HowStuffWorks.

This rather reminds me of HowStuffWorks.com - I've just noticed that they have done a site redesign. A whole lot of neat documents there...

...it's a live action How Stuff Works? Neat.

Take a look at http://www.howstuffworks.com/. There's a lot of explanations for just about anything.

How many places are there to cram advertising?

Let's see...
...a sticker on your produce in the grocery store.
...on the back of the receipt.
...coupons printed along with that receipt.
...products placed in the checkout isle.
...in front of your face while you take a leak (for males)
...radio advertising
...concert/festival sponsorship
...cross licensing (Britney Spears's dance video game, Mortal Kombat soundtrack, ...)
...billboards
...T-shirts with corporate logos/slogans
...Channel One in schools
...curricula (e.g. "Pizza Hut" reading program, read books get "free" pizza)
...SPAM
...Happy Meal toys/boxes
..."collectable" plastic cups
...A mini music/data CD in the lid of your soft drink!
...dealer logo stuck on back of car (or on license frame in WA)
...fast food tray liner
...posters plastered on boarded-up buildings (ya, that's real classy)
...pre-movie slide show
...pre-movie commercials
...in-movie product placement
...studio music artists in studio picture show (as actors, or as soundtrack)
...paying "alpha" youths to use product in order to influence peers

I'll believe it after FORD endorses an electrical car,

You mean like this one?

So, lets say you have to buy a ring*, but you don't want to give DeBeers money. I suggest you buy Moissanite ring. Myself, when faced with that decision, I bought a Tanzanite ring because my honey likes Tanzanite, and I hate DeBeers.

True, Diamonds won't be expensive for long, and Moissanite is cheaper now, and may eventually cost more than diamond. But, Moissanite is harder than Ruby, and has a greater luster than diamond, and it also costs about 1/10 of what diamond does today.

* One day, you will find a nice little woman who wants a ring, and generally it is best to get her one! ;)

That's really cool.

I've often wondered whether we couldn't attach a Stirling engine directly
to the surface of the processor and recover some of the energy being lost
as heat and turn it into electricity. If we could do that then I could have
a cooler laptop that has a longer lasting battery since processor heat is
being used to power the processor.

Anything that stops my laptop burning my private parts and makes the
battery last longer would be very nice. If at the same time it makes
no noise (especially compared to the lawnmower like noise my Dell laptop's
two fans make) it would be even better.

John.

the 'genes' part is new (and very cool) but the 'snakebot' as a concept has been around for a while. NASA announced something like it in OCT-00 nasa and this guys tried to put it in layman terms: here

And to buy us the time it takes to install infrastructure like that; Replace every lamp in every traffic light with an LED version. Seriously.

And doing both these things would buy us the time we need to get solar and wind power into a substantial slab of homes. If we act fast enough we may not have to build another power station for 50 years.

Maybe in the next three decades, but right now flywheels cost $15,000 to store 2 kilowatt hours. Meanwhile, a $2,000 lead-acid battery pack stores 12 to 15 kilowatt hours.

Flywheels are more environmentaly friendly than a bank of batteries and less hazardous than storing volatile gasses.

Yeah, and biking to work is more environmentally friendly than driving, but that's not enough of a reason to switch.

CCD sensors, create high-quality, low-noise images. CMOS sensors, traditionally, are more susceptible to noise.

Because each pixel on a CMOS sensor has several transistors located next to it, the light sensitivity of a CMOS chip is lower. Many of the photons hitting the chip hit the transistors instead of the photodiode.

CMOS sensors traditionally consume little power. Implementing a sensor in CMOS yields a low-power sensor. CCDs, on the other hand, use a process that consumes lots of power. CCDs consume as much as 100 times more power than an equivalent CMOS sensor.

CMOS chips can be fabricated on just about any standard silicon production line, so they tend to be extremely inexpensive compared to CCD sensors.

CCD sensors have been mass produced for a longer period of time, so they are more mature. They tend to have higher quality pixels, and more of them.

CMOS is generally used in lower quality equipaments.

Canon's SLR's CMOS are that good because their sensor is big. You'd also have an astonishing picture with a same sized CCD sensor.

(...) CCD is getting kind of old... And the quality is not even close to the CMOS type pickups. (...) Yes, CMOS cameras are a lot more expensive (...)

CCD sensors, as mentioned above, create high-quality, low-noise images. CMOS sensors, traditionally, are more susceptible to noise.
Because each pixel on a CMOS sensor has several transistors located next to it, the light sensitivity of a CMOS chip tends to be lower. Many of the photons hitting the chip hit the transistors instead of the photodiode.
CMOS chips can be fabricated on just about any standard silicon production line, so they tend to be extremely inexpensive compared to CCD sensors.