Approach this like an engineer. Straight hovering thrust is too much power. It's wasteful on energy, dangerous from the amount of power required, and we can't actually do it. bummer. Ok, so what we need is something with wings, that would be good. And the whole jet idea sucks from the noise perspective. ok... so lets use an internal combustion engine so we can muffle the noise. Hm... but it's got to be light and cheap. how about under $10k? sound fair? And we need to have a backup parachute in case there are problems.
YES Under 10k YES Internal combustion engine YES No louder than a loud lawnmower YES has wings YES has backup parachute
Speed, ~40 MPH MPG, near infinite... if you're good at thermaling
Granted there are some draw backs. A few big ones are that it requires some skill to fly (kind of like a car to drive), storage space passenger space suck, wind will ground you, and the biggest hurdle is of course, you need take off and landing space.
But really, are those hurdles harder than getting a jet pack working????
The truth of the matter is that I don't read anymore... at least not for fun. I read for work, I read news on the internet, but I haven't read a book for fun for a couple of years.
but assuming I still read lots of books, the thing that could convince me to buy an ebook reader is that it puts the new-book-research and the new-book-buying in one place with instant gratification.
I'm no Amazon fanboi, but in the past when I've wanted to see if a book is any good I would jump to amazon and check it out. I think this is really where Amazon has done good is their original bread and butter, book reviews. I can read what people have said about the book, seen what other books they've liked, look up books I've liked and what other books fans of said book like... it's the equivalent of "tomshardware" for buying electronics. It's the best reference I've found to research books on the internet.
I've found that when I go into a book store now-a-days andlook for a book to read, I wish I had that information available instead of trying to judge the book by the cover so simply a reading a page or two.
Frankly, if I could get that information, AND read the first chapter, and THEN decide that I want to buy the book, then I'd happily pay a little bit extra for the book.
I mean seriously... it's $8-$10 for how many hours of enjoyment? Who cares about an extra buck or two.
I don't like the DRM, I tend to prefer the idea of reading a real book over a computer screen (even an e-ink one), but the convenience of researching, trying, and buying a new book could potentially sell me over....that is, if i still read books...
You kind of went off on a non-sequitur there. The previous articles weren't discussing "green" power or anything like that, they were talking about energy density of a power source. Nobody was talking about global warming or saving the earth in the parent's articles. I know that's where electrical/hybrid vehicles normally are talked about, but that wasn't the topic here.
I think this thread is much more interesting without the politics of all that being thrown in, especially considering the "your an idiot" tone I read from your post regarding the grand-parent post. Especially his/her information was much more interesting and on topic than yours.
The afgan thing wasn't motivated by a monetary gains or oil pipelines, it was purely political. The US government had to be seen as doing *something*. It didn't have to be the right thing. They didn't have to hit the right person, but they had to drop some really big bombs on someone and make it appear that they weren't powerless chicken hawks.
And in fact, the Taliban deserved to be bombed just because they where too stupid to see it coming. When the biggest badass on the street gets his nose snubbed, you don't stand in his way when he comes looking for the guy who did it... not unless you have some really bad ass friends to back you up, and the Taliban didn't.
Now Iraq was a different story... Bush and his criminal cohorts wanted to invade long before he did and used 911 (and fictional evidence) as a lever to open the door to invasion.
LOL... that's funny. I've read through half the articles and they've mentioned wikipedia a bunch of times, but I never thought anyone was actually comparing Yahoo answers to wikipedia. One is written by your average joe, the other is written by self-proclaimed experts. The difference is night and day. I go to wikipedia for answers, I go to yahoo answers for entertainment. (and not very good entertainment at that)
If you really want to see something scary, go look up some medical question in Yahoo answers. Wow. Some of the answers are seriously scary. Getting medical advice from non-scientific, homeopathic, anti vaccine, herbal nuts jobs... now that's some scary shit.
did you see the picture? They were wrapped in newspaper and there wasn't any tape. There's no way that didn't make any noise. Hell, I can't even figure out how that would fool someone into thinking it was the right weight. I could be wrong, but my guesstimate would be that that much tile would be be 2-3 times the weight of a HD.
The black market has already formed and you know what... its free! Now it's a question of what people will pay for "legal".
As for me, if they had a well setup DRM free, commercial free, cheap TV show site, I'd pay some money for the shows I watch. My price point is around $1 per show and an easy "i own what I DL" requirement (I'm not "renting" it). If they had that, I'd actually pay for what I watch.
However with assholes like this guy and the MPAA RIAA running around it'll be a cold day in hell before I pull out my credit card and actually pay for the shit i watch/listen-to.
Who's the moron who takes ownership of a hard drive that clinks like a bunch of tiles!? I mean, WTF? You'll initially believe that it's just a hard drive, but when you shift the box and it goes "clink clink", you'll think, "shit, this hard drive is toast" without even opening the box or getting more than 10 steps from the store.
This guy is totally scamming best buy and using us to try and put pressure on best buy and get a second hard drive for free.
What bullshit. The tiles were wrapped in newspaper! Only a complete dumbass wouldn't be able to tell that it wasn't a hard drive.
and BTW, I *hate* best buy.... but i hate the type of people who would do this more.
Give me a break... this guy hacked into the system and "told" the cops where to go. How much harder would it have been to tell the people reading the message "All your bases are belong to us"? Or Simply "I'm taking over... where is Sarah Conner?" or if those are too abstract for boring 911 or swat operators just say "I've hacked into your system and am taking over... downloading sensitive files now...".
There are sooo many fun things you can write... he didn't have to write a "real" report for the swat to act on.
How about: "Rampaging kitty in the 1200 block of Chatsworth district. Warning extremely dangerous. Shoot on sight. White, fuzzy, and answers to the name 'Snook'ums'."
Do about 5 of those and someone will get the hint!
"5x more sunlight than earth"? So what? Than means that all you have to do is install only 5 times the amount of solar panels down here *near where you use the power* and you get the equivalent power out? That's dirt cheap here, but massively expensive up there. How much energy do you think you waste in shooting that chunk of plastic up into space?
Now lets deal with getting that energy back down to earth. You have really only two choises, #1 you create some sort of teather to transmit electricity. That's nuts on so many levels... resistance of the wire being the biggest one... nothing light enough, long enough to be able to do transmit that amount of power you want being the other one. The second choice is that instead of generating the electricity up in space you reflect it back down to earth. Again, you're wasting sunlight here on the planet earth already... what makes you think sunlight*2 is going to somehow solve our energy problems? If you want to use solar power, lack of sunlight is NOT the problem you need to overcome. The places which have a massive surplus of sunlight are not places where overpopulation is a problem.
A closed steam energy cycle? Um... that actually seems pretty hard to do. First you need to get a bunch of liquid up into space... not cheap. it's heavy and you would need quite a bit. But second and much more problematic, you must cool down the steam once you boil the water and its damn hard to cool down things in space. The steam system requires some way to turn the steam back into water (aka cooling it down) or the system is broken. And even if you do all that... all you've got is electricity 26000 miles up in space.
The funny thing is, I'm not a pessimist, I'm an engineer by trade and I like figuring out how to make things work, but I also know BS when i see it and it doesn't get anymore obvious than this.
Solar power in space??? I mean WTF. If you're interested in solar power, go buy a few hundred thousand sq miles of desert land for $10 per sq mile and set up solar plants there. If solar power was economical people would just do that already. You think putting solar panels (or mirrors) 26 thousand miles up in space is going to somehow make things economical? That would be the most costly energy in history.
There are many places that we have an abundance of sunlight that we're not using (see the entire state of New Mexico for example). Those places are all ripe to be tapped >IF we could make solar power work economically (or if we could provide enough dis-incentives to using coal).
Don't kid yourselves into thinking that somehow the coolness factor of putting this thing in space is really going to change anything. For every benefit you can list I can list a huge negative. You think that the lack of an atmosphere is great? Try dealing with tiny meteorites that fly by every once in a while and turn your GIGANTIC solar panel into swiss cheese. In addition I bet that if you did the calculations you would find that the amount of energy that it took to put a solar panel up in space would take 100 years to recoup from that same solar panel even if you ignore the major and nearly insurmountable hurdle of getting the energy back to earth!
I don't know about you... but for ANYTHING radioactive that I'm going to be sticking on my lap I want more than a "modest" amount of shielding thank you very much.
What? you think people in the lower 50% actively go out and look to take an IQ test? Unless your "median" is from a randomly sampled pool of people, I would have every expectation the IQ test results would be biased high.
This is actually really great. The ONLY way a music store can compete with itunes is to offer DRM free music. There is no DRM they can actually use that is supported in the marketplace (there are no players). This is what itunes really offers the music companies... DRM support. IPODs dominate the market and there is no second place DRM offering that they can bank on (the MS-squirt doesn't count).
The great thing is that even if some other company wins at selling DRM free tracks, Amazon in this case, the music companies must keep their music prices low or people will pirate. If they raise their prices too much piracy will go up, if they keep their prices reasonable, they will sell more tracks but at less profit. There are really good market forces here to keep their prices in check.
You'll note that the exact same thing holds true if they sell the music direct. The only thing that is likely to happen is that they will start embedding user information into the tracks, but I'm sure that can be stripped pretty easily.
Hm... so this means that young male techno-savy people are going to write the laws now? What do you think they will be?
1. Piracy is legal for any copyright that is represented by the RIAA or MPAA 2. Cute girls can't wear shirts 3. The new legal drinking age is 13 4. People over 50 aren't allowed to vote
The difference is between the barrier that we perceive exists between the "tool" and it's application. Yeah, police officers carry guns, but we don't believe they will use them just because we flick them off or call them names, however if you give them something that is non-lethal then we believe there's a lower barrier to them using it on us.
Choking gas, or bruising clubs and water cannons, or agitated K-9 units don't happen much these days but they make for very dramatic visuals on the evening news. On the other hand, we're afraid that a bunch of protesters wriggling on the ground in pain doesn't really push the "holy shit, what is our government doing to us" button.
In my opinion, it's kind of like smart bombs. The more we can sit in safety in comfy little chairs and blow the crap out of people whose faces we never even see the easier it is for us to do. That's what's scary here. The US government is developing weapons that can be turned on it's own citizens and are now safe for the 6 o'clock news.
So how's it feel america??? Still trust your government now? Feel like pissing away any few more of your civil rights?
Look, when i send my kid to the store to buy a game for me, I expect him to come home with the game, not some store manager to give him crap about his grades!!!
??? Ok, so the original post I was commenting on said, "don't rotate the ship, just build two engines, one on the front and one on the back." But I'm not even sure what you're saying here. "Rotate the drive plate around the vessel" is the same as having two engines. If you rotate the passenger portion 180 degrees and now use the engine on the front, then you might as well rotate the entire vessel. That makes no sense as far as I can tell.
My whole argument is that you flip the ship around so that your gravity is always in the same direction as seen by the crew module is concerned with the small exception of the time in which you're flipping the ship around. (plus you wouldn't need two engines.)
actually there is another problem with this concept besides the extremely wasteful "building a second engine" part. Think about crew quarters... if you've got 1G acceleration you've got a floor and a ceiling. If you just reverse directions of the engines without spinning the craft you now swap what is your floor and what is your ceiling. Makes for some interesting redecorating, but not really vary practical. It makes MUCH more sense from an engineering point of view to spin the ship. It's easier and more efficient.
Slashdot Mirror
This just in!! "Low Current key to Energy-Efficient Chip!"
You've just described this, but with an internal combustion engine instead of a jet.
http://www.mosquitoamerica.com/
You guys are killing me here.
... if you're good at thermaling
Approach this like an engineer. Straight hovering thrust is too much power. It's wasteful on energy, dangerous from the amount of power required, and we can't actually do it. bummer. Ok, so what we need is something with wings, that would be good. And the whole jet idea sucks from the noise perspective. ok... so lets use an internal combustion engine so we can muffle the noise. Hm... but it's got to be light and cheap. how about under $10k? sound fair? And we need to have a backup parachute in case there are problems.
Sound good? Oh wait! This already exists!!
http://www.mosquitoamerica.com/
YES Under 10k
YES Internal combustion engine
YES No louder than a loud lawnmower
YES has wings
YES has backup parachute
Speed, ~40 MPH
MPG, near infinite
Granted there are some draw backs. A few big ones are that it requires some skill to fly (kind of like a car to drive), storage space passenger space suck, wind will ground you, and the biggest hurdle is of course, you need take off and landing space.
But really, are those hurdles harder than getting a jet pack working????
don
hang glider ..."and landing gear is easily damaged"
I love this especially considering that hang gliders pilots LAND ON THEIR FEET!!!
lol
don
Damn man, you've got my vote.
d
The truth of the matter is that I don't read anymore... at least not for fun. I read for work, I read news on the internet, but I haven't read a book for fun for a couple of years.
...that is, if i still read books...
but assuming I still read lots of books, the thing that could convince me to buy an ebook reader is that it puts the new-book-research and the new-book-buying in one place with instant gratification.
I'm no Amazon fanboi, but in the past when I've wanted to see if a book is any good I would jump to amazon and check it out. I think this is really where Amazon has done good is their original bread and butter, book reviews. I can read what people have said about the book, seen what other books they've liked, look up books I've liked and what other books fans of said book like... it's the equivalent of "tomshardware" for buying electronics. It's the best reference I've found to research books on the internet.
I've found that when I go into a book store now-a-days andlook for a book to read, I wish I had that information available instead of trying to judge the book by the cover so simply a reading a page or two.
Frankly, if I could get that information, AND read the first chapter, and THEN decide that I want to buy the book, then I'd happily pay a little bit extra for the book.
I mean seriously... it's $8-$10 for how many hours of enjoyment? Who cares about an extra buck or two.
I don't like the DRM, I tend to prefer the idea of reading a real book over a computer screen (even an e-ink one), but the convenience of researching, trying, and buying a new book could potentially sell me over.
d
You kind of went off on a non-sequitur there. The previous articles weren't discussing "green" power or anything like that, they were talking about energy density of a power source. Nobody was talking about global warming or saving the earth in the parent's articles. I know that's where electrical/hybrid vehicles normally are talked about, but that wasn't the topic here.
I think this thread is much more interesting without the politics of all that being thrown in, especially considering the "your an idiot" tone I read from your post regarding the grand-parent post. Especially his/her information was much more interesting and on topic than yours.
d
I actually think you guys are pretty crazy.
The afgan thing wasn't motivated by a monetary gains or oil pipelines, it was purely political. The US government had to be seen as doing *something*. It didn't have to be the right thing. They didn't have to hit the right person, but they had to drop some really big bombs on someone and make it appear that they weren't powerless chicken hawks.
And in fact, the Taliban deserved to be bombed just because they where too stupid to see it coming. When the biggest badass on the street gets his nose snubbed, you don't stand in his way when he comes looking for the guy who did it... not unless you have some really bad ass friends to back you up, and the Taliban didn't.
Now Iraq was a different story... Bush and his criminal cohorts wanted to invade long before he did and used 911 (and fictional evidence) as a lever to open the door to invasion.
d
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d
LOL... that's funny. I've read through half the articles and they've mentioned wikipedia a bunch of times, but I never thought anyone was actually comparing Yahoo answers to wikipedia. One is written by your average joe, the other is written by self-proclaimed experts. The difference is night and day. I go to wikipedia for answers, I go to yahoo answers for entertainment. (and not very good entertainment at that)
If you really want to see something scary, go look up some medical question in Yahoo answers. Wow. Some of the answers are seriously scary. Getting medical advice from non-scientific, homeopathic, anti vaccine, herbal nuts jobs... now that's some scary shit.
don
did you see the picture? They were wrapped in newspaper and there wasn't any tape. There's no way that didn't make any noise. Hell, I can't even figure out how that would fool someone into thinking it was the right weight. I could be wrong, but my guesstimate would be that that much tile would be be 2-3 times the weight of a HD.
don
The black market has already formed and you know what... its free! Now it's a question of what people will pay for "legal".
As for me, if they had a well setup DRM free, commercial free, cheap TV show site, I'd pay some money for the shows I watch. My price point is around $1 per show and an easy "i own what I DL" requirement (I'm not "renting" it). If they had that, I'd actually pay for what I watch.
However with assholes like this guy and the MPAA RIAA running around it'll be a cold day in hell before I pull out my credit card and actually pay for the shit i watch/listen-to.
don
Who's the moron who takes ownership of a hard drive that clinks like a bunch of tiles!? I mean, WTF? You'll initially believe that it's just a hard drive, but when you shift the box and it goes "clink clink", you'll think, "shit, this hard drive is toast" without even opening the box or getting more than 10 steps from the store.
This guy is totally scamming best buy and using us to try and put pressure on best buy and get a second hard drive for free.
What bullshit. The tiles were wrapped in newspaper! Only a complete dumbass wouldn't be able to tell that it wasn't a hard drive.
and BTW, I *hate* best buy.... but i hate the type of people who would do this more.
don
Give me a break... this guy hacked into the system and "told" the cops where to go. How much harder would it have been to tell the people reading the message "All your bases are belong to us"? Or Simply "I'm taking over... where is Sarah Conner?" or if those are too abstract for boring 911 or swat operators just say "I've hacked into your system and am taking over... downloading sensitive files now...".
There are sooo many fun things you can write... he didn't have to write a "real" report for the swat to act on.
How about: "Rampaging kitty in the 1200 block of Chatsworth district. Warning extremely dangerous. Shoot on sight. White, fuzzy, and answers to the name 'Snook'ums'."
Do about 5 of those and someone will get the hint!
don
"5x more sunlight than earth"? So what? Than means that all you have to do is install only 5 times the amount of solar panels down here *near where you use the power* and you get the equivalent power out? That's dirt cheap here, but massively expensive up there. How much energy do you think you waste in shooting that chunk of plastic up into space?
Now lets deal with getting that energy back down to earth. You have really only two choises, #1 you create some sort of teather to transmit electricity. That's nuts on so many levels... resistance of the wire being the biggest one... nothing light enough, long enough to be able to do transmit that amount of power you want being the other one. The second choice is that instead of generating the electricity up in space you reflect it back down to earth. Again, you're wasting sunlight here on the planet earth already... what makes you think sunlight*2 is going to somehow solve our energy problems? If you want to use solar power, lack of sunlight is NOT the problem you need to overcome. The places which have a massive surplus of sunlight are not places where overpopulation is a problem.
A closed steam energy cycle? Um... that actually seems pretty hard to do. First you need to get a bunch of liquid up into space... not cheap. it's heavy and you would need quite a bit. But second and much more problematic, you must cool down the steam once you boil the water and its damn hard to cool down things in space. The steam system requires some way to turn the steam back into water (aka cooling it down) or the system is broken. And even if you do all that... all you've got is electricity 26000 miles up in space.
The funny thing is, I'm not a pessimist, I'm an engineer by trade and I like figuring out how to make things work, but I also know BS when i see it and it doesn't get anymore obvious than this.
don
Solar power in space??? I mean WTF. If you're interested in solar power, go buy a few hundred thousand sq miles of desert land for $10 per sq mile and set up solar plants there. If solar power was economical people would just do that already. You think putting solar panels (or mirrors) 26 thousand miles up in space is going to somehow make things economical? That would be the most costly energy in history.
There are many places that we have an abundance of sunlight that we're not using (see the entire state of New Mexico for example). Those places are all ripe to be tapped >IF we could make solar power work economically (or if we could provide enough dis-incentives to using coal).
Don't kid yourselves into thinking that somehow the coolness factor of putting this thing in space is really going to change anything. For every benefit you can list I can list a huge negative. You think that the lack of an atmosphere is great? Try dealing with tiny meteorites that fly by every once in a while and turn your GIGANTIC solar panel into swiss cheese. In addition I bet that if you did the calculations you would find that the amount of energy that it took to put a solar panel up in space would take 100 years to recoup from that same solar panel even if you ignore the major and nearly insurmountable hurdle of getting the energy back to earth!
This is flat out insane.
don
I don't know about you ... but for ANYTHING radioactive that I'm going to be sticking on my lap I want more than a "modest" amount of shielding thank you very much.
don
What? you think people in the lower 50% actively go out and look to take an IQ test? Unless your "median" is from a randomly sampled pool of people, I would have every expectation the IQ test results would be biased high.
don
This is actually really great. The ONLY way a music store can compete with itunes is to offer DRM free music. There is no DRM they can actually use that is supported in the marketplace (there are no players). This is what itunes really offers the music companies... DRM support. IPODs dominate the market and there is no second place DRM offering that they can bank on (the MS-squirt doesn't count).
The great thing is that even if some other company wins at selling DRM free tracks, Amazon in this case, the music companies must keep their music prices low or people will pirate. If they raise their prices too much piracy will go up, if they keep their prices reasonable, they will sell more tracks but at less profit. There are really good market forces here to keep their prices in check.
You'll note that the exact same thing holds true if they sell the music direct. The only thing that is likely to happen is that they will start embedding user information into the tracks, but I'm sure that can be stripped pretty easily.
d
Hm... so this means that young male techno-savy people are going to write the laws now? What do you think they will be?
1. Piracy is legal for any copyright that is represented by the RIAA or MPAA
2. Cute girls can't wear shirts
3. The new legal drinking age is 13
4. People over 50 aren't allowed to vote
???
d
The difference is between the barrier that we perceive exists between the "tool" and it's application. Yeah, police officers carry guns, but we don't believe they will use them just because we flick them off or call them names, however if you give them something that is non-lethal then we believe there's a lower barrier to them using it on us.
Choking gas, or bruising clubs and water cannons, or agitated K-9 units don't happen much these days but they make for very dramatic visuals on the evening news. On the other hand, we're afraid that a bunch of protesters wriggling on the ground in pain doesn't really push the "holy shit, what is our government doing to us" button.
In my opinion, it's kind of like smart bombs. The more we can sit in safety in comfy little chairs and blow the crap out of people whose faces we never even see the easier it is for us to do. That's what's scary here. The US government is developing weapons that can be turned on it's own citizens and are now safe for the 6 o'clock news.
So how's it feel america??? Still trust your government now? Feel like pissing away any few more of your civil rights?
d
Look, when i send my kid to the store to buy a game for me, I expect him to come home with the game, not some store manager to give him crap about his grades!!!
d
??? Ok, so the original post I was commenting on said, "don't rotate the ship, just build two engines, one on the front and one on the back." But I'm not even sure what you're saying here. "Rotate the drive plate around the vessel" is the same as having two engines. If you rotate the passenger portion 180 degrees and now use the engine on the front, then you might as well rotate the entire vessel. That makes no sense as far as I can tell.
My whole argument is that you flip the ship around so that your gravity is always in the same direction as seen by the crew module is concerned with the small exception of the time in which you're flipping the ship around. (plus you wouldn't need two engines.)
d
actually there is another problem with this concept besides the extremely wasteful "building a second engine" part. Think about crew quarters... if you've got 1G acceleration you've got a floor and a ceiling. If you just reverse directions of the engines without spinning the craft you now swap what is your floor and what is your ceiling. Makes for some interesting redecorating, but not really vary practical. It makes MUCH more sense from an engineering point of view to spin the ship. It's easier and more efficient.
d
According to the RIAA and the MPAA the actual value of the copyright industry WITHOUT PIRACY should have been $120 trillion-ga-zillion dollars.
d
(and if you want to increase the Gross Domestic Product of the US, just copy your mp3 collection to another HD and the GDP will increase by $10k)