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ok, so why doesn't how stuff works implement this and see how many millions they make?

This idea's the R-pentomino of the micropayments world; it's possibly the simplest looking micropayments idea ever, on the face of it, but as soon as you let the thing run it explodes into a giant mess.

A few more questions for Marshall Brain to answer on v1.1 of this page:

Q: What if you live somewhere where a penny is enough to buy dinner?

Q: Are payments from people outside the USA to be made according to the exchange rate when the page was loaded, or the exchange rate when the user's Internet bill comes due at the end of the month?

Q: What about countries that refuse to ratify the international IP Trade Treaty that'll be needed to make this work? Here's a hint: China ain't gonna.

Q: If some countries refuse to pay, what's to stop ISPs in countries that do ratify the treaty from starting offshore data-haven proxies?

Q: What if you're someone who runs a proxy? What if your ISP does? What international organisation is going to force people to pay for pages that were never delivered from the server at the other end of the pipe, because they came from one of the numerous caches in between? Do the proxy owners get the money?

Q: And the flipside of that one - what if some webmaster somewhere insists that there are 250,000 pageloads in his server log from your IP, but you disagree?

Q: What about people who don't want users to have to pay to read their work? Will there be special HTML headers to specify free pages? What's to stop people making proxies that put those headers on everything that passes through, then?

I leave the next three billion giant show-stopping problems with this idea as an exercise for the reader. That seems fair enough to me, as Marshall Brain pretty much handwaved the whole implementation issue.

Plus, he's got some analogy problems. To quote the first page of the article:

"When you go to the book store, you never see free books. It is also very rare to find books containing advertising. Instead, people pay directly for the information that books contain because the information is valuable to them."

On the other hand, when you go to the library, you can read all of the books you like for free. And take 'em home, too. Who said anything about the Web being a book store?

And you know what? There are books containing advertising. They're called "magazines". I'm told that there are things called "newspapers", too. The cover prices of these publications generally make only a small contribution towards their bottom line; they run on ads.

I think you'll find that, commercially speaking, the ad-supported paper publications have proved to be a somewhat more vibrant market segment than the ad-free flavour of publishing.

Not that I think advertising is necessarily a good way to make the Web profitable. I just object to this strange assumption that loading a Web page is obviously an act for which you should pay. Even if the page turns out to be useless. Nobody makes me buy a book just because I picked it off the shelf and read the blurb on the back.

Oh, yeah. Books aren't priced by the page, either. Well, not unless you're one of those interior-decoration types who buys books of a certain colour by the yard.

Marshall Brain does great when he talks about refrigerators and rocket motors. But his site's called "How Stuff Works", not "Stuff I Think Might Perhaps Be Cool But Haven't Any Idea At All How It Might Work", and so I see no reason to cut the guy any slack on a sloppy job like this :-).

This idea's the R-pentomino of the micropayments world; it's possibly the simplest looking micropayments idea ever, on the face of it, but as soon as you let the thing run it explodes into a giant mess.

A few more questions for Marshall Brain to answer on v1.1 of this page:

Q: What if you live somewhere where a penny is enough to buy dinner?

Q: Are payments from people outside the USA to be made according to the exchange rate when the page was loaded, or the exchange rate when the user's Internet bill comes due at the end of the month?

Q: What about countries that refuse to ratify the international IP Trade Treaty that'll be needed to make this work? Here's a hint: China ain't gonna.

Q: If some countries refuse to pay, what's to stop ISPs in countries that do ratify the treaty from starting offshore data-haven proxies?

Q: What if you're someone who runs a proxy? What if your ISP does? What international organisation is going to force people to pay for pages that were never delivered from the server at the other end of the pipe, because they came from one of the numerous caches in between? Do the proxy owners get the money?

Q: And the flipside of that one - what if some webmaster somewhere insists that there are 250,000 pageloads in his server log from your IP, but you disagree?

Q: What about people who don't want users to have to pay to read their work? Will there be special HTML headers to specify free pages? What's to stop people making proxies that put those headers on everything that passes through, then?

I leave the next three billion giant show-stopping problems with this idea as an exercise for the reader. That seems fair enough to me, as Marshall Brain pretty much handwaved the whole implementation issue.

Plus, he's got some analogy problems. To quote the first page of the article:

"When you go to the book store, you never see free books. It is also very rare to find books containing advertising. Instead, people pay directly for the information that books contain because the information is valuable to them."

On the other hand, when you go to the library, you can read all of the books you like for free. And take 'em home, too. Who said anything about the Web being a book store?

And you know what? There are books containing advertising. They're called "magazines". I'm told that there are things called "newspapers", too. The cover prices of these publications generally make only a small contribution towards their bottom line; they run on ads.

I think you'll find that, commercially speaking, the ad-supported paper publications have proved to be a somewhat more vibrant market segment than the ad-free flavour of publishing.

Not that I think advertising is necessarily a good way to make the Web profitable. I just object to this strange assumption that loading a Web page is obviously an act for which you should pay. Even if the page turns out to be useless. Nobody makes me buy a book just because I picked it off the shelf and read the blurb on the back.

Oh, yeah. Books aren't priced by the page, either. Well, not unless you're one of those interior-decoration types who buys books of a certain colour by the yard.

Marshall Brain does great when he talks about refrigerators and rocket motors. But his site's called "How Stuff Works", not "Stuff I Think Might Perhaps Be Cool But Haven't Any Idea At All How It Might Work", and so I see no reason to cut the guy any slack on a sloppy job like this :-).

This idea's the R-pentomino of the micropayments world; it's possibly the simplest looking micropayments idea ever, on the face of it, but as soon as you let the thing run it explodes into a giant mess.

A few more questions for Marshall Brain to answer on v1.1 of this page:

Q: What if you live somewhere where a penny is enough to buy dinner?

Q: Are payments from people outside the USA to be made according to the exchange rate when the page was loaded, or the exchange rate when the user's Internet bill comes due at the end of the month?

Q: What about countries that refuse to ratify the international IP Trade Treaty that'll be needed to make this work? Here's a hint: China ain't gonna.

Q: If some countries refuse to pay, what's to stop ISPs in countries that do ratify the treaty from starting offshore data-haven proxies?

Q: What if you're someone who runs a proxy? What if your ISP does? What international organisation is going to force people to pay for pages that were never delivered from the server at the other end of the pipe, because they came from one of the numerous caches in between? Do the proxy owners get the money?

Q: And the flipside of that one - what if some webmaster somewhere insists that there are 250,000 pageloads in his server log from your IP, but you disagree?

Q: What about people who don't want users to have to pay to read their work? Will there be special HTML headers to specify free pages? What's to stop people making proxies that put those headers on everything that passes through, then?

I leave the next three billion giant show-stopping problems with this idea as an exercise for the reader. That seems fair enough to me, as Marshall Brain pretty much handwaved the whole implementation issue.

Plus, he's got some analogy problems. To quote the first page of the article:

"When you go to the book store, you never see free books. It is also very rare to find books containing advertising. Instead, people pay directly for the information that books contain because the information is valuable to them."

On the other hand, when you go to the library, you can read all of the books you like for free. And take 'em home, too. Who said anything about the Web being a book store?

And you know what? There are books containing advertising. They're called "magazines". I'm told that there are things called "newspapers", too. The cover prices of these publications generally make only a small contribution towards their bottom line; they run on ads.

I think you'll find that, commercially speaking, the ad-supported paper publications have proved to be a somewhat more vibrant market segment than the ad-free flavour of publishing.

Not that I think advertising is necessarily a good way to make the Web profitable. I just object to this strange assumption that loading a Web page is obviously an act for which you should pay. Even if the page turns out to be useless. Nobody makes me buy a book just because I picked it off the shelf and read the blurb on the back.

Oh, yeah. Books aren't priced by the page, either. Well, not unless you're one of those interior-decoration types who buys books of a certain colour by the yard.

Marshall Brain does great when he talks about refrigerators and rocket motors. But his site's called "How Stuff Works", not "Stuff I Think Might Perhaps Be Cool But Haven't Any Idea At All How It Might Work", and so I see no reason to cut the guy any slack on a sloppy job like this :-).

People in the U.S. tend to prefer a flat-rate model to a pay-per-unit model. Could there be a flat-rate model with penny per page?
Probably the easiest way to implement a flat-rate model would be to create a cap. Let's say that the monthly cap were $20 per month. Everyone would know that if they looked at more than 2,000 pages per month, they would pay no more than $20 per month. If they looked at less than 2,000, they would pay only for the pages viewed. For people who hit the cap, the billing model would simply divide the $20 paid by the customer by the number of pages viewed and pay the sites whatever amount that turned out to be per page.

" What would prevent a site from having a page that pops up 100 new pages when you land on it to ream the unsuspecting visitor out of a dollar?
The billing mechanism should track for and eliminate charges for that, as well as for pages that auto-refresh themselves, error and non-existant pages, pages arrived at by pressing the back button, duplicate pages and so on."

I fully agree that many (most?) sites are economically unviable. But to say that we have start paying a penny for every "page" (never mind that they don't fully understand the difference between a "page" and a "server hit") is about as silly as those US government to tax E-mail" hoaxes floating around the net.

And readability has a whole lot to do with maintainability. Programs should not just be written for the computer to understand. Much more importantly, other people should be able to clearly read and unambiguously understand the code.

I've read and written quite a lot of Lisp and other Lisp-like languages, not only in school, but also in the real world. I've spent much time reading, understanding and modifying huge complex Lisp systems written by other people, and I don't think it's unreadable at all. Well written Lisp code is extremely elegant, and a joy to read.

Complaining about parenthesis is trivial, misguided nit picking, and totally misses many much more important points.

Don't like parenthesis? Then let's talk about how all the subtle levels of operator precedence and associativity rules effect the readability and writability of C, C++, Java and Perl code!

Can't remember the difference in precedence between "==" and "<="? Then you have to either look it up (and require the poor bastards reading your code to either remember it or look it up themselves), or use an extra level of parenthesis!

Now whose code has lots of unnecessary parenthesis? Not the Lisp code. Every paren is in there for a reason. But most C, C++, Java and Perl code is eather riddled with unnecessary parenthesis, or totally unreadable, brittle and unmaintainable, because it subtly depends on operator precedence and associativity.

Most competent programmers put in lots of extra parenthesis just to be sure, because code is changed over time by other people. Relying on operator precidence causes many subtle, hard to find bugs, because it's extremely easy to make and miss practically invisible mistakes. And text editors like Emacs can't give you any help with operator precedence and associativity, like they can with parenthesis.

The arguments for operator precedence that claim people expect it are ridiculous. It's an utterly arbitrary and capricious linguistic artifact foolishly copied from mathematics (which most people don't understand), and taken to a ridiculous extreme (with many additional subtle levels of precedence for operators that simply don't exist in standard mathematical notation).

http://www.howstuffworks.com/c14.htm
C contains many operators, and because of the way in which operator precedence works, the interactions between multiple operators can become confusing.

x=5+3*6;

X receives the value 23, not 48, because in C multiplication and division have higher precedence than addition and subtraction.

char *a[10];

Is a a single pointer to an array of 10 characters, or is it an array of 10 pointers to character? Unless you know the precedence conventions in C, there is no way to find out. Similarly, in E.11 we saw that because of precedence statements such as *p.i = 10; do not work. Instead, the form (*p).i = 10; must be used to force correct precedence.

The following table from Kernigan and Richie shows the precedence hierarchy in C. The top line has the highest precedence.

[I am forced to spell out the operators in order to get past slashdot's lameness filter -- and I totally agree that languages with lots of ridiculous noisy punctuation are lame. Save it for cursing in comic strips.]

Operators : Associativity
"open paren" "open bracket" "minus" "dot": Left to right
"exclamation mark", "plus", "minus", "plus-plus", "minus-minus", "star", "ampersand", "(type-cast)", "sizeof": Right to left
(in the above line, "plus", "minus" and "star" are the unary forms)
"star", "slash", "percent": Left to right
"plus", "minus": Left to right
"less-less", "greater-greater": Left to right
"less", "less-equal", "greater", "greater-equal": Left to right
"equal-equal", "exclaimation-equal": Left to right
"ampersand": Left to right
"caret": Left to right
"pipe" : Left to right
"ampersand-ampersand": Left to right
"pipe-pipe": Left to right
"question-colon": Left to right
"equal", "plus-equal", "minus-equal", "slash-equal", "percent-equal", "ampersand-equal", "caret-equal", "pipe-equal", "less-less-equal", "greater-greater-equal": Right to left
"comma": Left to right

Using this table, you can see that char *a[10]; is an array of 10 pointers to character. You can also see why the parentheses are required if (*p).i is to be handled correctly. After some practice, you will memorize most of this table, but every now and again something will not work because you have been caught by a subtle precedence problem.

-Don

The hum of a fan, whatever it is cooling, is often at a level that you might strain to hear clearly. It is these levels that can cause hearing strain. This is similar to eye strain when you need glasses and can give you monster headaches.

Except fans tend to generate white noise, which can drown out other distracting sounds and can also be soothing once you get used to it (like rain). For more info see how stuff works article.

I leave my computer on at my bed all the time and have no trouble with the fan per say. The thing that drives me mad is the harddrive noise (ie access noise)

See this, You use it to plug in electronic componates without having to solder or wirewrap them. The holes are electricaly connected in 5-hole patterns under the plastic face.

In the US, for most plans, they will ask for your Social Security Number in order to run a credit check. This isn't needed for prepaid plans, but when I signed up for one, they still wanted a picture id (drivers license), adddress, etc. IIRC, customer support still asks for some of that info. Of course ids can be faked, so it's not like any of this foolproof.

There are a few companies trying to make disposable phones that are made of paper and/or have such limited features that they are very cheap and the cost of the phone will be very small compared to the prepaid air time. How Stuff Works has an article about them too. From what I understand, you have the advantage of a standard handset that can be used with any provider. That's my biggest pet peeve with the US cell phone system.

Isn't it possible to hide a weapon or explosive inside of a working device?

From How Airport Security Works:

Electronic items, such as laptop computers, have so many different items packed into a relatively small area that it can be difficult to determine if a bomb is hidden within the device. That's why you may be asked to turn your laptop or PDA on. But even this is not sufficient evidence since a skilled criminal could hide a bomb within a working electronic device. For that reason, many airports also have a chemical sniffer.

In short, it raises the bar. It is necessary but not sufficient. Packing a windows emulator and a bomb into a notebook is harder than just packing a bomb. Unless you're got a dell inspiron 8000, in which case just remove one of the dual 20 pound batteries and replace it with C4. But I digress.

On the issue of controlling the solenoids, I would suggest you use logic gates run by a digital watch clock signal. Because most circuits allow you to set the time by sending the raw clock signal past the dividers (that slow it down) and straight into the counters. This has the effect of speeding up the clock and the digits change very fast.

(Remember when McGuyver was locked into a hazederous waste incinerator and the hot wast was about to pour into the chamber and the door had a time lock on it. He opened the back of the timer (not that it would have been accessible from the inside of the door) and shorted out the circuit (specific the divider circuit) and the timer started to run at like 1000 seconds per second. The door opened early and he an his female companions got out before the hazardous green sludge started to pore in. They also remembered to grab the folder containing the secret documents hidden behind a pipe to lure him inside the chamber). {rant}I am SOOOOOOO pissed that it was canceled. I learned so much clool stuff from that show.{/rant}

Take a look at this article, and search around for "half adders" and "full adders". Those are the kind of circuits you will be dealing with. Also, you could use a chain of flip-flops and capacitors attached to the coils to carry the signal down the length of the pipe.

I really like your idea and if you need additional advice or ideas, e-mail me. I'm not an expert on magnets or electronics, just a hobbiest I guess. :)

On the issue of controlling the solenoids, I would suggest you use logic gates run by a digital watch clock signal. Because most circuits allow you to set the time by sending the raw clock signal past the dividers (that slow it down) and straight into the counters. This has the effect of speeding up the clock and the digits change very fast.

(Remember when McGuyver was locked into a hazederous waste incinerator and the hot wast was about to pour into the chamber and the door had a time lock on it. He opened the back of the timer (not that it would have been accessible from the inside of the door) and shorted out the circuit (specific the divider circuit) and the timer started to run at like 1000 seconds per second. The door opened early and he an his female companions got out before the hazardous green sludge started to pore in. They also remembered to grab the folder containing the secret documents hidden behind a pipe to lure him inside the chamber). {rant}I am SOOOOOOO pissed that it was canceled. I learned so much clool stuff from that show.{/rant}

Take a look at this article, and search around for "half adders" and "full adders". Those are the kind of circuits you will be dealing with. Also, you could use a chain of flip-flops and capacitors attached to the coils to carry the signal down the length of the pipe.

I really like your idea and if you need additional advice or ideas, e-mail me. I'm not an expert on magnets or electronics, just a hobbiest I guess. :)

But back to he point, those cranes are accurate to 5 metres/15 feet. See how GPS works more information. This page only leaves out on thing. They state you need 3 satelites to make out your position. They don't mention that it's posibble to make calculations with more than 3 satelites. In that case you end up with several position with which the actually position is interpollated. This works quite well because on most places on earth you receive signals from 4 or 5 satelites which means you don't get 1 position but 2 or even 3.

Explanation of holographic/crystal storage. Extremely interesting article, btw. Kinda heavy on the physics(?) for dilletantes in the field tho.

Propulsion should be one of our priorities though obviously "warp" is far off. We need to both find a cheaper way of leaving the atmosphere and find a method of high-speed space travel. Howstuffworks outlines some possibilities but there are other ideas floating about. A moonbase does sound like a good idea, though. A Europa probe may be a few years off.

I bet everyone here has actually had real experience with a mechanical compuer (of sorts). While not a 'computer' in the mathematical description, it's pretty close: It's the automobile automatic transmission. They are probably the most complex mechanical device that people contact every day, except for the very newest computer regulated ones.

It actually does computational tasks in a strict sense -- it takes input, does "intelligent" operations on it based on data and outputs it, except in this case it's motion not math. It uses a series of planetary gears, pumps and pulleys to the extent that it make my brain hur thinking about it.

Don't believe that they are so amazing? See for yourself. They even have a cool video showing you how the whole package works.
.

Why not use hybrid? Hybrids use electric and batteries and a generic heat engine. For this all you have to do is replace the typical infernal cumbustion section of the hybrid and replace it with his Rotery Engine.

Hybrid type systems are equivilent to programming language wrappers: You have a base system that you can recharge and power the vehicles motion, -- Your basic functionality. Then you wrap the actual code/engine that with an abstract class, electricity in wires is pretty generic.

You then power the system with your engine of coice:
Infernal cumbustion, Wankel rotary, McMaster rotary, nuclear fission, fuel cell, biomass, propane, methane,

So why would the article say that he tries to surpass it? Hybrid would be very complimentry.

McMaster's ultimate goal is to displace one very entrenched technology -- the internal combustion engine -- while leapfrogging other, more experimental ones, such as gas-electric hybrid vehicles and those powered by fuel cells

some hybrid urls pulled up quickly with google.
http://www.howstuffworks.com/hybrid-car.htm
http://www.ott.doe.gov/hev/

http://www.chinfo.navy.mil/navpalib/factfile/missi les/wep-toma.html

Millitary specifications on the tomahawk

http://www.fas.org/man/dod-101/sys/smart/bgm-109.h tm

A technical guide to how the Tomahawk works.

http://members.tripod.de/usnavy/weapons/tomahawk.h tm

Some statistics on Tomahawk missiles

http://www.howstuffworks.com/cruise-missile.htm

A less technical guide to how the Tomahawk works.

http://www.softwar.net/emg.html

Information on a cool EMG warhead that a Tomahawk can be
fitted with.

Given that from what it seems the US + coalition did not have any eyes and ears on the ground in the -stans on the 11th, I guess a lot of the (at least, initial) intelligence must have come from satellites...

Does anyone know what resolution you could get from a spy satellite? Does anyone know what sets the resolution limit - the optics or image processing? I bet a combination of RF/IR/visible photos of the region could give you shitloads of info about what's Out There.

I read somewhere that bin Laden does not use any electrical devices in fear of detection. Personally, I am not sure about that - he'd need to coordinate activities and keep some intelligence channels to keep up to date. Unless he's doing things the Pony Express way, he must maintain some sort of telecoms. That's perhaps where an EP-3E would be handy...

Let's hope the US can infiltrate bin Laden's network, compromise his crypto and communications, and screw with his and his friends' heads until they mess up their operations big time, Cryptonomicon way. That would be the best way to catch bin Laden and put an end the entire Catch-22 situation of having to drop both Cruise missiles and aid on the poor Afghans' heads. And, hey, the boys and girls at Langley have probably been working hard on it the last few weeks, but that's the war we don't and won't hear about.

http://www.chinfo.navy.mil/navpalib/factfile/missi les/wep-toma.html

Millitary specifications on the tomahawk

http://www.fas.org/man/dod-101/sys/smart/bgm-109.h tm

A technical guide to how the Tomahawk works.

http://members.tripod.de/usnavy/weapons/tomahawk.h tm

Some statistics on Tomahawk missiles

http://www.howstuffworks.com/cruise-missile.htm

A less technical guide to how the Tomahawk works.

http://www.softwar.net/emg.html

Information on a cool EMG warhead that a Tomahawk can be fitted with.

Howstuffworks has a page about clearing landmines and here is another page that describes how it can be done. The US Army even has a page about different ways to detect and remove mines. There is a UK company/charity that is developing an anti-mine robot. During the Gulf War, the military used small rockets to shoot lengths of explosive cord into a mine field. When the cord exploded, it would detonate the mines near the surface. Detonation of fuel-air bombs is another technique that I've heard about. Unfortnately, most of the land mine resources on the web that I've found appear to be charity/activist pages about the need to get rid of land mines, but very little on how to actually do it.

I wasn't sure what chords the phone tones actually were, so I went to over to howstuffworks and took a look. On page 2 of this article on telephones, it has a great section on the tones.

In particular, I learned that "the dial tone sound is simply a combination of 350 hertz tone and a 440 hertz tone," and "if the number is busy, you hear a busy signal that is made up of a 480 hertz and a 620 hertz tone, with a cycle of 1/2 second on and 1/2 second off" and there is a great chart showing the tone for each button on the keypad. For example, the tone for "1" is a combination of a 1209 Hz tone and a 697 Hz tone.

A little more research turned up this cool frequency to note converter and where I discovered that 1209 Hz is equivalent to D6 plus 50 cents, and 697 is F5 minus 4 cents. So basically the keypad one is an out of tune inversion of the D minor chord. (music majors feel free to Score: -1, Moronic)

Of course, if you were into phreaking then you'd already know all that.

I wasn't sure what chords the phone tones actually were, so I went to over to howstuffworks and took a look. On page 2 of this article on telephones, it has a great section on the tones.

In particular, I learned that "the dial tone sound is simply a combination of 350 hertz tone and a 440 hertz tone," and "if the number is busy, you hear a busy signal that is made up of a 480 hertz and a 620 hertz tone, with a cycle of 1/2 second on and 1/2 second off" and there is a great chart showing the tone for each button on the keypad. For example, the tone for "1" is a combination of a 1209 Hz tone and a 697 Hz tone.

A little more research turned up this cool frequency to note converter and where I discovered that 1209 Hz is equivalent to D6 plus 50 cents, and 697 is F5 minus 4 cents. So basically the keypad one is an out of tune inversion of the D minor chord. (music majors feel free to Score: -1, Moronic)

Of course, if you were into phreaking then you'd already know all that.

I wasn't sure what chords the phone tones actually were, so I went to over to howstuffworks and took a look. On page 2 of this article on telephones, it has a great section on the tones.

In particular, I learned that "the dial tone sound is simply a combination of 350 hertz tone and a 440 hertz tone," and "if the number is busy, you hear a busy signal that is made up of a 480 hertz and a 620 hertz tone, with a cycle of 1/2 second on and 1/2 second off" and there is a great chart showing the tone for each button on the keypad. For example, the tone for "1" is a combination of a 1209 Hz tone and a 697 Hz tone.

A little more research turned up this cool frequency to note converter and where I discovered that 1209 Hz is equivalent to D6 plus 50 cents, and 697 is F5 minus 4 cents. So basically the keypad one is an out of tune inversion of the D minor chord. (music majors feel free to Score: -1, Moronic)

Of course, if you were into phreaking then you'd already know all that.

... and whoever said they do is a moron.

How Fuel Cells Work

My first choice would be for a live NPR feed though PRI and of course CBC would be welcome. All-music would be useful as an alternate though I'm really looking for something to keep me engaged on the long and at this hundredth-time boring night drive. Mp3's or other pre-recorded music aren't what I'm looking for (I already have a large collection of CD's & tapes) and so aren't interesting as an alternative. I could download some news & interview programming I like and burn it to a CD before each trip but this would be far more preparation then I care to do so regularly.

Unfortunately it appears that "satellite radio" will be as problematic for me as conventional radio. Driving through the mountains at ~45 North will likely result in service interruptions (doubtless the same as with conventional radio: always at the most interesting points.) Without much likelihood of repeaters in these rural areas this appears an inherent bug in the service and one which (at least for me) brings it from a strong possibility to something I'm not willing to pay much extra for.

A couple of tangential thoughts:

1. As Canada's CRTC takes no action to prevent piracy of US FCC-licensed satellite television broadcasts (aside from refusing to allow the services to be directly sold in Canada) I wonder if the same will hold true of radio broadcasts?
2. Is anyone aware of an online service where I could plug in a route (not a single location) and get a listing of stations by genre along the way? I imagine this would be a popular add-on to the many online route/map services but none seem to have anything like this. What I'd like to see would be something like a listing of public radio station by frequency along my route; others would presumably prefer country stations, pop or rock programming, etc.

Actually, the Newtonian Explanation (air hitting the wing) isn't really correct either, except at hypersonic speeds. Check out the reasonably well written "how stuff works" article on Popular (and Imperfect) Explanations of Lift Creation.

It's amazing how many people "know" something that is just fundamentally wrong (or at least fundamentally imperfect.)

lameness filters are lame. Here is something to fill space in this message: How Stuff Works

I know exactly what you mean.

When I saw the first news I headed over to all the news sites that I could find (I found out shortly after the first crash) and I was engrossed. My first reaction was one of "woah!" and I just wanted to follow everything that was happening, almost on the edge of my seat waiting for the next thing to happen. Figuring that a building could not possibly stand up after being hit by a plane, I headed over to here (love that site) to find out everything that I could about how those buildings were built. I was glued to the screen for a good 2 hours, until a thought stuck me. I was looking at one of the images, and said "man, that looks so fake" and caught myself thinking (one of those 1/2 second back-of-your-mind thoughts) "they should have done a better job on the CG of that one"...

BAM!

Then it hit me. Almost all of the images looked like something out of a movie. I had been so desensitized that, upon seeing these images, my mind just assumed that they were fake. It did not want to accept the idea that they were real, so it was neat to want to see all about it that I could find.

Man was I disgusted with myself when I figured that one out.

Flame me down if you want, but I know that I wasn't the only one who thought that way. Once it sunk in that this was real, and those falling bodies out of the windows were real people, and after the first tower collapsed knowing that for the same reason the second one would collapse, and looking at it and knowing that there wasn't shit that I could do, and knowing that the people outside and the firefighters knew the same thing, man. That was a shock. I tried to donate but the stupid amazon form wouldn't accept my postal code, so I went and gave blood instead. I was half of the mind to go down there to see if there was anything that I could do to help (I was about a 5 hour drive away, I'm 1.5hr from the US border in Toronto) but when the borders were closed, and I came to my senses, I realized how entirely useless I was.

I just hope that some good does come out of this. I stopped watching the news after about 4 hours because I was disgusted at the media trying to grandstand with every little bit of information that they had, and watching the rumours go from the first emergance, and hearing them spread from newsteam to newsteam like a bad game of broken telephone, I knew that I had to stop.

Ack. May the passing of the deceased pave the way for a new era of peace and harmony amongst all beings on the earth. I would hate to know that all of this happened and the result was nothing more than a little revenge. Lets hope that this anti-terrorism coilition will stand tall over time and help to eliminate this uglyness.

Yeah, whatever. The technologies are completely different.

Remedial overview: How Do Optical Mice Work?

Aligent, a spinoff of HP, created the optical mouse sensor.

AFAIK Microsoft was the first to actually build and sell an mouse using a modern (Aligent's) optical sensor.

What is a Smart Card? offers a brief explanation.

Nintendo's GameCube :
Photos show how gamers will eventually have the choice of a 56K modem or a broadband modem and
2 slots for 4-Mb Digicard flash memory cards or a 64-MB SD-Digicard adapter. The biggest change that Nintendo has made between the Nintendo 64 and the GameCube is that the GameCube will be the first Nintendo console not to use game cartridges. The GameCube will use small proprietary discs.

Nintendo's GameCube :
Photos show how gamers will eventually have the choice of a 56K modem or a broadband modem and
2 slots for 4-Mb Digicard flash memory cards or a 64-MB SD-Digicard adapter. The biggest change that Nintendo has made between the Nintendo 64 and the GameCube is that the GameCube will be the first Nintendo console not to use game cartridges. The GameCube will use small proprietary discs.

Man, I could sure go for some warm orange pie. Oh wait, that would require comparing... well you know.

Would you really want to have to set up a TCP/IP network between your DVD remote control and your DVD player? Would you really want a wireless network with only 1 Mbit of bandwidth? To quote CmdrTaco "Imagine that: Different uses! Different standards! Amazing!"

Check this site out.

How CargoLifter's Airship Will Work

I don't see how M$ could make things worse .

After reading the guidelines to the contest, I figured I'd offer the following models/design specs for those interested in participating:

• Understanding how the Brain works
• When will computer hardware match the human brain?
• How your Brain Works
• How the Human Brain Developed and How the Human Mind Works
• Theory of Sequentially Timed Learning
• If your toaster had a brain
• neuroinformatics (please don't confuse with clam-baking)
• Brain Implants Control Computers

check out: How Code Red Works

Look for Nintendo's GameCube to be launched on November 5, 2001. Photos show how gamers will eventually have the choice of a 56K modem or a broadband modem and 2 slots for 4-Mb Digicard flash memory cards or a 64-MB SD-Digicard adapter. The biggest change that Nintendo has made between the Nintendo 64 and the GameCube is that the GameCube will be the first Nintendo console not to use game cartridges. The GameCube will use small proprietary discs.

Look for Nintendo's GameCube to be launched on November 5, 2001. Photos show how gamers will eventually have the choice of a 56K modem or a broadband modem and 2 slots for 4-Mb Digicard flash memory cards or a 64-MB SD-Digicard adapter. The biggest change that Nintendo has made between the Nintendo 64 and the GameCube is that the GameCube will be the first Nintendo console not to use game cartridges. The GameCube will use small proprietary discs.

Luckily, this site is designed in such a way that even the likes of you have a chance of understanding it.

By my opinion, we won't be seeing truly useful personal computing devices until they make them for $20-30/item (So that you can buy several, spread them out over a desk, and not be too worried if you loose them/somebody accidentally borrows them/break them/etc.)

You mean something like this?

Play pong

Shows how the games work and shows how the light gun works.

Shows how the games work and shows how the light gun works.

This is actually very common in Recreational Vehicle circles, as RVs often carry propane but don't have electricity.

The refrigeration unit uses ammonia as the working fluid, rather than dichloro-difluro-methane (R-12). This is done because of the properties of ammonia.

In a normal refrigerator, the working fluid is compressed from a gas into a liquid. In doing so, the liquid gives up its latent heat of vaporization (the energy it takes to convert a liquid to a gas), and becomes much hotter as a result. The hot liquid is then run through a set of coils to transfer the heat to the environment.

The liquid then is fed through a throttle ( a small orifice) to reduce the pressure below the boiling point of the liquid. The liquid then evaporates, drawing the latent heat of vaporization from the environment (the inside of the fridge). The gas then runs back to the compressor and the cycle repeats.

In an ammonia fridge, rather than using a compressor pump driven by electricity, a heat source is used, and a mix of ammonia, water and hydrogen gas is used to move the heat around. A good explaination is at howstuffworks: http://www.howstuffworks.com/refrigerator5.htm

Basically, they use the fact that ammonia will dissolve in water to drive the ammonia around the cycle. That's why they cannot use R-12: it doesn't dissolve in water very well.

You really don't. Maybe this explanation is better than mine.

The point is that an airspeed indicator reports air SPEED. not amount of air, not air pressure, not lift. It actually reports the SPEED of the air moving past the aircraft.

I just noticed, however, that when you quoted me I said, "an airplane moving at 350kts", which I suppose accidentally implies ground speed, when I really meant to say "an airplane with an airspeed of 350kts", so this may have caused some confusion.

No confusion, pilots rarely talk about ground speed since it is really irrelevant to most aspects of flying (it is however important for navigation). That said, assuming no wind, a plane at sea level flying at 350kia (Knots Indicated Airspeed) will have the same groundspeed as the same plane flying at 35,000ft 350kia.

Anyway, for the most part, knowing how fast you actually move at a given times doesn't work out as important as knowing whether you have enough speed to create sufficient lift, which the airspeed indicator will tell you regardless of your altitude.

Knowing how fast you are going is probaly the single most important thing when flying. You know that you are creating sufficient lift because the plane is still flying, there is no "lift indicator" on aircraft. Again, REGARDLESS OF YOUR ALTITUDE the airspeed indicator tells you your AIRSPEED.

Naturally, as you go higher, the lesser density of the air means you need a greater groundspeed (and therefore, more thrust) to get the same airspeed, which explains why all airplanes couldn't just keep climbing until they reach outer space.

Let me reiterate, altitude has NOTHING to do with airspeed the reason for the static port is so that the airspeed indicator will "know" the ambient pressure and the indicator will compensate. In fact, your airspeed indicator will fail as you describe if your static port becomes clogged. Groundspeed = Airspeed +- Wind regardless of altitude. It takes LESS thrust to reach the same airspeed at a higher altitude because there is less drag that is why it saves fuel.

Not all airplanes are incapable of climbing out of the atmosphere the flight ceilings of most aircraft have more to do with the engines than the abilty to make lift.

Here's a good site on how these babys are proposed to work.
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