Um, did you RTFA? Look at the signal, it's obviously an encoded byte. You would prefer to create a system where you have to rebuild the entire system if they change the code? She even explicitly mention that different stores have different codes, and that she included a simple switch to choose which signal to broadcast... seems like smart engineering to make your interface as easily modified as the system it's interfacing with.
Did you look at the hardware or read the descriptions of the design? It's pretty clear that she is not at all afraid of circuitry, and even included *many* disclaimers showing people places where if they didn't follow the electronics design properly they could be seriously injured.
Just because it's not the GPL or whatnot doesn't mean it's not "Open Source".
The complete documentation, schematics, and code is released. The only restriction is (as far as I can see) that it not be used in commercial products, and that any changes made stay under the same license. Just because they chose not to allow people to sell it (though it looks like that may have been because they were worried about people being sued) doesn't mean it's not open source, they just chose a different set of restrictions on their work than you might have.
Well, while it's true that brittle materials are frequently stronger than tough materials like aluminum, it's much more difficult to tell when they will fail under cyclic loading. Unless, that is, they're operating under such low stresses that no damage is ever done (unlikely).
Nowadays, a huge amount of work goes into inspecting the fuselage and wings for microcracks, because there is a maximum length that a crack can be before it expands rapidly. A great example of this is the DeHavilland Comet aircraft of the early 1950's, of which two disintegrated in midflight. There are lots of ways to figure out what that maximum length is, though I'm personally more familiar with the methods for materials that work harden like aluminum. However, I am 90% sure that carbon fiber engineered in a similar spec to the aluminum would be able to deal with a much smaller maximum crack length before failing catastrophically.
But, I can say with confidence that the engineers at Boeing certainly know all about this. The thing to be worried about is probably damage done to the wing due to cyclic loading, because that damage builds up until it reaches the critical threshold when it propagates uncontrollably. It'd just be a matter of either making absolutely sure that the strain is below the threshold where it causes any damage (which it sounds like they might have done), or to have cool new technologies with which to detect the microfractures that will form.
Um... IAAMS... that was probably way too much information.
1. Efficiency: This article talks about brightnesses of 100 suns. Well what about 1 sun? Or fraction of that (cloudyness)? Are these efficiencies realized then too? If not, does the technology still work at or near where that is?
31.3% for the metamorphic version, and 32.0% for the lattice matched version.
As for the rest of your questions, that's why when environmentalists talk to me about how solar cells are clean energy, I describe for them what a semiconductor fab is. Once I describe the organometallics that go into the process, they decide that fission isn't so bad after all. They're far worse than fission, fission is already viable and safe, fission is available, and with breeder reactors, fission will supply us our power for hundreds and hundreds of years.
For those that are interested/know what this means, the curie point for iron-cobalt alloys is around 930C. Platters are typically made of SiO2, which melts at 1830C. I'm pretty sure if you brought your disk to 930C, the data would be irrecoverable. Naturally, if you brought it up to 1830C, there won't even be a disk left.
Both are readily achievable in an induction furnace. You can build your own for a few hundred dollars, provided you can give it enough current and provide a ceramic insulator.
Well, if I recall the articles about TPD, it's basically a pressure cooker. After everything is broken down, the plant matter has been turned to solid crap that you could filter out, and the remainder should just be a layer of oil, and water.
Not knowing any better... how about using a pressure cooker for a "long time" to see if it completely breaks down the plant matter? Throw in the algae you have, maybe around half algae and half water by mass, boil it at pressure for a few hours. The solids should be denser than water, so they'd settle to the bottom. Whether or not the oil will float will depend on it's density, so if it decomposes to short-chain lipids, which I imagine it would, it'd float.
According to wikipedia (... for what it's worth), TPD breaks down the long chain lipids into shorter hydrocarbons, so you should be even more likely to find a film on top instead of oil settling to the bottom.
Also (perhaps you already know how to do this since you're on a farm?), you might be able to use slightly modified methods for making vegetable or olive oil on the algae directly. I know that they frequently use solvents like hexane to do the oil extraction, but you could also just straight use a press to separate the solids from the liquid.
Personally, I'd give the pressure cooker a try first, and see if you can just skim any oil off the top of the liquid. That'd be neat.
I'm not an expert on biodiesel, but a good friend of mine is. If I recall correctly, the "hard part" is separating the plant matter from the oil. I don't see much in the way of reactor designs in the literature (probably all proprietary at this point, with good reason), but the suggestions are that a square meter would yield about a gallon of biodiesel a year. So... you might be disappointed with the yield volume unless you have a seriously large greenhouse... but it'd still be a fun experiment, and shouldn't be prohibitively difficult.
I'd be interested in trying something similar. Even if I only generated a few mL of oil, it'd be extremely neat to try. Especially the actual separation mechanism. If you'd like to work together on designing a system to try to do this, I'd be interested. My suspicion is that the best way to get the oil out might be the thermal depolymerization process that that turkey offal plant in carthage uses. Throwing something in with a 50% oil content would probably give you pretty good efficiency. Another friend of mine builds the reactors for those plants, maybe he could give some pointers.
I absolutely love the idea of getting biodiesel from algae. I think it is hands down the most promising technology out there (even though I work with ethanol). Algae isn't a food crop, it grows in crap, has a decent oil content, and even better, turning biodiesel into hydrogen isn't any harder than turning ethanol into hydrogen (an in fact you can use the exact same catalyst, minus the rhodium).
You're right! The reason is actually extremely subtle. I was talking about enthalpies of reaction. The gibbs free energy (i.e. the important one), however, goes down. All values are kJ/mol. Enthalpy is the relevant free energy when pressure is constant, but your reactor doesn't allow heat flow (i.e. entropy is constant). Gibbs is the relevant free energy when pressure is constant, and your temperature is constant. Not really sure which is applicable to the fermentation itself, but certainly after temperature is equilibrated (which has to happen sooner or later), the ethanol will have less energy per mole than the sugar.
6CO2 + 10H2O -> C6H12O6 + 4H2O (\Delta G = +2830, \Delta H = +2540) (photosynthesis)
C6H12O6 + 4H2O -> 2CO2 + 2 etOH + 4H2O (\Delta G = -210, \Delta H = +20) (fermentation)
2CO2 + 2 etOH + 4H2O -> 6CO2 + 10H2 (\Delta G = -330, \Delta H = -140) (reforming)
Neat. I hadn't really noticed that before, since I only really deal with the reforming step. Thanks for pointing that out.
Batteries are nice, but the energy density is too low. The energy density of a fuel like ethanol or gasoline is on the order of 20-30 MJ/L. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_density). Compare that to a sodium-sulfur battery (1.23) or a Li-ion (0.9-1.9) and you'll see how big the gap is. There are some awesome people like Prof. Chiang at MIT (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A123) who are working on nanostructured batteries that have a lot of promise. His A123 batteries can output massive amounts of current (the energy density is still typical), but he's working on some new ones that massively decrease the volume of the electrolyte, increasing the percentage of the battery that actually stores energy.
Supercapacitors have the same problem -- ~30 times less energy density.
I think fuel cells are much closer to being practical than batteries.
That said, fuel cells are much, much easier to use in large scales. The ethanol reforming system I'm working with requires at an absolute minimum 300C to function. That kind of temperature is tricky to achieve in small systems, and if you needed a more typical 400C it's starting to get seriously out of reach for a car. I'm not a process engineer, so I don't know a heck of a lot about how hard it'd be to build something like that, but I really like the idea of replacing backup generators with fuel cells attached to an ethanol, starch, or whatnot-tank.
Now, I know this probably will never get seen by anyone, but none of the posts so far were appropriate to reply to.
I am actually a bioengineer, and I'm actually working in this field, trying to convert ethanol into hydrogen.
And I can say, this process looks excellent. Finding natural enzymes that do the conversion makes everything enormously easier.
Here's the deal. Ethanol has slightly more energy than straight sugar, because the fermentation adds energy to the system. That added energy is negligible in comparison to the total energy. However, you lose a butt-load of energy because you have to heat the sugar up in order to ferment it, deal with transportation costs for the crops, and if you're using it as an additive (instead of reforming 20-25% ethanol in water directly), distill it to 100%, which uses a ridiculous amount of energy (10 times more to get it from 95-100 than from 20-95). However, the plus side is that ethanol is a pretty high energy density liquid, about 85% that of gasoline, and much higher energy density than compressed hydrogen gas. So, with an ethanol+water mixture, you end up getting 6 H2 out of every one etOH molecule. Pretty durn good. (if you think I'm an idiot because I have more hydrogen coming out than are on an ethanol molecule, look up steam reforming instead of making yourself look like a fool)
However, at the end of the day, it's extremely questionable whether or not ethanol itself is net energy positive, because of all the energy that goes into producing it (even though the liquid itself increases in energy density). Sugar, however, is less refined, and so less energy goes into making it. The idea is this -- if the net energy is negative, then you're still using more fossil fuels than you save. But if sugar is energy positive, then you can use 1kg of sugar to produce 2kg of sugar, and use that to make 4kg of sugar, and so on.
Sure, you have to pay attention to the problems of rising food costs. But starch? Don't worry about it, it'll be more efficient than gasoline, and it'll be more efficient than ethanol. You're talking a 3x fold improvement on efficiency right off the bat because it's a fuel cell instead of an I.C.E. Now, your sugar production has to be net energy positive, so multiply that factor (guess would be around 2-3) times the 3x fold efficiency improvement in the fuel cell and you're using 6-9 times less energy to produce the same amount of work. The economy will figure out the rest -- hell, you can get starch out of all sorts of crop waste way more easily than you can get ethanol out of them.
No, they meant with the properties of a laser [beam]. The polaritons are coherent when they're confined, just* like photons are coherent in a laser beam.
Using specially designed optical structures with nanometer-thick layers-which allow polaritons to move freely inside the solid-Snoke and his colleagues captured the polaritons in the form of a superfluid. In superfluids and in their solid counterparts, superconductors, matter consolidates to act as a single energy wave rather than as individual particles.
I suppose saying "beam" or talking about the photons in the laser beam would have been slightly more clear to the people who didn't read the article, but it's hardly something poorly written enough to be complaining about.
IAA physicist and material scientist, but I don't know enough about superconductors to really make worthwhile comments on that analogy. However, I am under the impression that the electrons pair up to form bosons that are then able to occupy the same energy levels and become coherent whereas normal electrons are fermions and can't do that.
The music is beautiful, even if the explanation is more than a bit unconvincing.
I would have liked to see how they pulled the actual tonal progression out of the sequence though. How did they know which direction to read it?
Although in the end, the how is irrelevant. It's an unusually interesting inspiration for a beautiful modern piece of music. At least they did more then just hide the chord progression from "Happy Birthday" in the bass line.
I would point out that it is necessary for political elements to have extreme views in order to enact substantial change. It's a matter of good negotiating -- if you come in saying that all you want is to limit copyrights to 10 years, and patents to 4 years, you'll get 30 years and 12 years. Those impractical people suggesting that patents be abolished entirely (which I admit I have a personal stake in, as I'm a research scientist and one of my few routes to making it big is coming up with a really awesome idea) need to exist in order to make limiting patents to four years sound reasonable and middle-ground (though from my experience, 4 years really isn't even enough time to bring most things to market, 7 years is more reasonable in cases of non-software stuff).
The middle ground perpetually shifts, according to the fraction of people on each extreme. Simply watch those around you and you will see it to be true. The majority of us don't like conflict, our views are a mere reflection of the views of those we respect, except for those things which we have personally invested ourselves in. I doubt very much that more than a handful of people here have personally invested themselves beyond lip service to the cause of limiting copyright and patents. How many people who complain to the end of time on here have even called their congressman (or whatever the appropriate legislator would be for your country)? The only time I've contacted my legislator about technology policy was when Quinn was under fire for endorsing ODF, and that was more out of indignation that the legislature thought it knew better than the technology director for the state of Massachusetts.
I am personally invested in only a few things, as are most of you. The rest of my opinions on the world, are, by and large, a synthesis of the opinions of those around me. The extremists on either side shape that opinion, coloured by my trust of the source, and my own partiality towards libertarianism.
I don't know about other places, but in Boston (and suburbs) you can go to the government website and almost always find a photo of any property in the city along with construction type, size, floors, zoning, value, owner, purchase price, purchase date... it's all public information. As long as it's not the inside of the house, or displaying the house at a ridiculously inopportune time (like when you're playing naked twister in the living room with the blinds open), I think that's completely reasonable. The outsides of buildings are not private...
My company looked into this briefly about a month ago. A quick estimate showed that using current LED technology and the cheapest possible effective powering method resulted in a cost of over $12 per bulb, and that's assuming you can get the LED manufacturers to cut the "1000s of" price by a factor of four due to the vast quantity's needed.
Plus, then we did the power consumption calculations -- it takes 9 white LED's with a current of 1A and a forward bias of around 4V to give you 900 lumens (the brightness of a 60W incandescent). So, 36W. How pathetic is that? A typical CF bulb takes only around 16W, and costs at most $3.
So, incandescents are 5% efficient and cost nothing, CF's are 20% efficient and cost $3 a bulb or so, and LED lights are 10% efficient and cost $12 or more per bulb. And before you complain that 10% efficient for a LED is absurdly low, keep in mind that with a 4V forward voltage, you can only put on 30 LED's before it's impossible to power them off of a simple diode rectified, filtered, and voltage stabilized 120V AC line without a boost converter. So, in order to get 900 lumens with 30 LED's, they have to each provide at least 30 lumens. Any LED that high power has sacrificed most of it's efficiency for power.
It's just not feasible until someone makes a massive breakthrough in LED technology -- and breakthrough technologies simply can't be relied upon for mass production systems... not that I don't like the idea, it's just that CF are the only practical solution until high-efficiency AND high-power LED's are commodity items.
Slashdot Mirror
I took one look at this, saw that it asked you to put in your SSN... psht, yeah right.
Um, did you RTFA? Look at the signal, it's obviously an encoded byte. You would prefer to create a system where you have to rebuild the entire system if they change the code? She even explicitly mention that different stores have different codes, and that she included a simple switch to choose which signal to broadcast... seems like smart engineering to make your interface as easily modified as the system it's interfacing with.
Did you look at the hardware or read the descriptions of the design? It's pretty clear that she is not at all afraid of circuitry, and even included *many* disclaimers showing people places where if they didn't follow the electronics design properly they could be seriously injured.
Hi,
Just because it's not the GPL or whatnot doesn't mean it's not "Open Source".
The complete documentation, schematics, and code is released. The only restriction is (as far as I can see) that it not be used in commercial products, and that any changes made stay under the same license. Just because they chose not to allow people to sell it (though it looks like that may have been because they were worried about people being sued) doesn't mean it's not open source, they just chose a different set of restrictions on their work than you might have.
Well, while it's true that brittle materials are frequently stronger than tough materials like aluminum, it's much more difficult to tell when they will fail under cyclic loading. Unless, that is, they're operating under such low stresses that no damage is ever done (unlikely).
Nowadays, a huge amount of work goes into inspecting the fuselage and wings for microcracks, because there is a maximum length that a crack can be before it expands rapidly. A great example of this is the DeHavilland Comet aircraft of the early 1950's, of which two disintegrated in midflight. There are lots of ways to figure out what that maximum length is, though I'm personally more familiar with the methods for materials that work harden like aluminum. However, I am 90% sure that carbon fiber engineered in a similar spec to the aluminum would be able to deal with a much smaller maximum crack length before failing catastrophically.
But, I can say with confidence that the engineers at Boeing certainly know all about this. The thing to be worried about is probably damage done to the wing due to cyclic loading, because that damage builds up until it reaches the critical threshold when it propagates uncontrollably. It'd just be a matter of either making absolutely sure that the strain is below the threshold where it causes any damage (which it sounds like they might have done), or to have cool new technologies with which to detect the microfractures that will form.
Um... IAAMS... that was probably way too much information.
You clearly need to switch to Dvorak. I don't use it because I'm not French, but I hear that you can type up to twice as fast as you can think.
Did you mean: french economic defeats
31.3% for the metamorphic version, and 32.0% for the lattice matched version.
As for the rest of your questions, that's why when environmentalists talk to me about how solar cells are clean energy, I describe for them what a semiconductor fab is. Once I describe the organometallics that go into the process, they decide that fission isn't so bad after all. They're far worse than fission, fission is already viable and safe, fission is available, and with breeder reactors, fission will supply us our power for hundreds and hundreds of years.
For those that are interested/know what this means, the curie point for iron-cobalt alloys is around 930C. Platters are typically made of SiO2, which melts at 1830C. I'm pretty sure if you brought your disk to 930C, the data would be irrecoverable. Naturally, if you brought it up to 1830C, there won't even be a disk left.
Both are readily achievable in an induction furnace. You can build your own for a few hundred dollars, provided you can give it enough current and provide a ceramic insulator.
Well, if I recall the articles about TPD, it's basically a pressure cooker. After everything is broken down, the plant matter has been turned to solid crap that you could filter out, and the remainder should just be a layer of oil, and water.
Not knowing any better... how about using a pressure cooker for a "long time" to see if it completely breaks down the plant matter? Throw in the algae you have, maybe around half algae and half water by mass, boil it at pressure for a few hours. The solids should be denser than water, so they'd settle to the bottom. Whether or not the oil will float will depend on it's density, so if it decomposes to short-chain lipids, which I imagine it would, it'd float.
According to wikipedia (... for what it's worth), TPD breaks down the long chain lipids into shorter hydrocarbons, so you should be even more likely to find a film on top instead of oil settling to the bottom.
Also (perhaps you already know how to do this since you're on a farm?), you might be able to use slightly modified methods for making vegetable or olive oil on the algae directly. I know that they frequently use solvents like hexane to do the oil extraction, but you could also just straight use a press to separate the solids from the liquid.
Personally, I'd give the pressure cooker a try first, and see if you can just skim any oil off the top of the liquid. That'd be neat.
Here is the patent for the thermal depolymerization system. It's pretty detailed, and a reactor could probably be built from those specs: http://www.google.com/patents?id=0LYmAAAAEBAJ&prin tsec=abstract&zoom=4&dq=5,269,947#PPA1,M1
I asked my friend what he thought of the idea of using algae in a TPD reactor, hopefully he'll get back to me later this week.
I'm not an expert on biodiesel, but a good friend of mine is. If I recall correctly, the "hard part" is separating the plant matter from the oil. I don't see much in the way of reactor designs in the literature (probably all proprietary at this point, with good reason), but the suggestions are that a square meter would yield about a gallon of biodiesel a year. So... you might be disappointed with the yield volume unless you have a seriously large greenhouse... but it'd still be a fun experiment, and shouldn't be prohibitively difficult.
I'd be interested in trying something similar. Even if I only generated a few mL of oil, it'd be extremely neat to try. Especially the actual separation mechanism. If you'd like to work together on designing a system to try to do this, I'd be interested. My suspicion is that the best way to get the oil out might be the thermal depolymerization process that that turkey offal plant in carthage uses. Throwing something in with a 50% oil content would probably give you pretty good efficiency. Another friend of mine builds the reactors for those plants, maybe he could give some pointers.
I absolutely love the idea of getting biodiesel from algae. I think it is hands down the most promising technology out there (even though I work with ethanol). Algae isn't a food crop, it grows in crap, has a decent oil content, and even better, turning biodiesel into hydrogen isn't any harder than turning ethanol into hydrogen (an in fact you can use the exact same catalyst, minus the rhodium).
You're right! The reason is actually extremely subtle. I was talking about enthalpies of reaction. The gibbs free energy (i.e. the important one), however, goes down. All values are kJ/mol. Enthalpy is the relevant free energy when pressure is constant, but your reactor doesn't allow heat flow (i.e. entropy is constant). Gibbs is the relevant free energy when pressure is constant, and your temperature is constant. Not really sure which is applicable to the fermentation itself, but certainly after temperature is equilibrated (which has to happen sooner or later), the ethanol will have less energy per mole than the sugar.
6CO2 + 10H2O -> C6H12O6 + 4H2O (\Delta G = +2830, \Delta H = +2540) (photosynthesis)
C6H12O6 + 4H2O -> 2CO2 + 2 etOH + 4H2O (\Delta G = -210, \Delta H = +20) (fermentation)
2CO2 + 2 etOH + 4H2O -> 6CO2 + 10H2 (\Delta G = -330, \Delta H = -140) (reforming)
Neat. I hadn't really noticed that before, since I only really deal with the reforming step. Thanks for pointing that out.
Batteries are nice, but the energy density is too low. The energy density of a fuel like ethanol or gasoline is on the order of 20-30 MJ/L. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_density). Compare that to a sodium-sulfur battery (1.23) or a Li-ion (0.9-1.9) and you'll see how big the gap is. There are some awesome people like Prof. Chiang at MIT (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A123) who are working on nanostructured batteries that have a lot of promise. His A123 batteries can output massive amounts of current (the energy density is still typical), but he's working on some new ones that massively decrease the volume of the electrolyte, increasing the percentage of the battery that actually stores energy.
Supercapacitors have the same problem -- ~30 times less energy density.
I think fuel cells are much closer to being practical than batteries.
That said, fuel cells are much, much easier to use in large scales. The ethanol reforming system I'm working with requires at an absolute minimum 300C to function. That kind of temperature is tricky to achieve in small systems, and if you needed a more typical 400C it's starting to get seriously out of reach for a car. I'm not a process engineer, so I don't know a heck of a lot about how hard it'd be to build something like that, but I really like the idea of replacing backup generators with fuel cells attached to an ethanol, starch, or whatnot-tank.
Now, I know this probably will never get seen by anyone, but none of the posts so far were appropriate to reply to.
I am actually a bioengineer, and I'm actually working in this field, trying to convert ethanol into hydrogen.
And I can say, this process looks excellent. Finding natural enzymes that do the conversion makes everything enormously easier.
Here's the deal. Ethanol has slightly more energy than straight sugar, because the fermentation adds energy to the system. That added energy is negligible in comparison to the total energy. However, you lose a butt-load of energy because you have to heat the sugar up in order to ferment it, deal with transportation costs for the crops, and if you're using it as an additive (instead of reforming 20-25% ethanol in water directly), distill it to 100%, which uses a ridiculous amount of energy (10 times more to get it from 95-100 than from 20-95). However, the plus side is that ethanol is a pretty high energy density liquid, about 85% that of gasoline, and much higher energy density than compressed hydrogen gas. So, with an ethanol+water mixture, you end up getting 6 H2 out of every one etOH molecule. Pretty durn good. (if you think I'm an idiot because I have more hydrogen coming out than are on an ethanol molecule, look up steam reforming instead of making yourself look like a fool)
However, at the end of the day, it's extremely questionable whether or not ethanol itself is net energy positive, because of all the energy that goes into producing it (even though the liquid itself increases in energy density). Sugar, however, is less refined, and so less energy goes into making it. The idea is this -- if the net energy is negative, then you're still using more fossil fuels than you save. But if sugar is energy positive, then you can use 1kg of sugar to produce 2kg of sugar, and use that to make 4kg of sugar, and so on.
Sure, you have to pay attention to the problems of rising food costs. But starch? Don't worry about it, it'll be more efficient than gasoline, and it'll be more efficient than ethanol. You're talking a 3x fold improvement on efficiency right off the bat because it's a fuel cell instead of an I.C.E. Now, your sugar production has to be net energy positive, so multiply that factor (guess would be around 2-3) times the 3x fold efficiency improvement in the fuel cell and you're using 6-9 times less energy to produce the same amount of work. The economy will figure out the rest -- hell, you can get starch out of all sorts of crop waste way more easily than you can get ethanol out of them.
You seem to be making the mistake of applying logic to legal documents.
Don't do that. Implying things means nothing, and making it so people presume something is true without it being true is the name of the game.
No, they meant with the properties of a laser [beam]. The polaritons are coherent when they're confined, just* like photons are coherent in a laser beam.
Using specially designed optical structures with nanometer-thick layers-which allow polaritons to move freely inside the solid-Snoke and his colleagues captured the polaritons in the form of a superfluid. In superfluids and in their solid counterparts, superconductors, matter consolidates to act as a single energy wave rather than as individual particles.I suppose saying "beam" or talking about the photons in the laser beam would have been slightly more clear to the people who didn't read the article, but it's hardly something poorly written enough to be complaining about.
IAA physicist and material scientist, but I don't know enough about superconductors to really make worthwhile comments on that analogy. However, I am under the impression that the electrons pair up to form bosons that are then able to occupy the same energy levels and become coherent whereas normal electrons are fermions and can't do that.
* horrible, horrible use of the word "just"gnome-power-manager as the biggest power hog on the system.
Actually... under Feisty you can:
apt-get install vmware-player
!!!
Not for workstation or server though, which is unfortunate (and strange, since server is the useful free one).
The music is beautiful, even if the explanation is more than a bit unconvincing.
I would have liked to see how they pulled the actual tonal progression out of the sequence though. How did they know which direction to read it?
Although in the end, the how is irrelevant. It's an unusually interesting inspiration for a beautiful modern piece of music. At least they did more then just hide the chord progression from "Happy Birthday" in the bass line.
I would point out that it is necessary for political elements to have extreme views in order to enact substantial change. It's a matter of good negotiating -- if you come in saying that all you want is to limit copyrights to 10 years, and patents to 4 years, you'll get 30 years and 12 years. Those impractical people suggesting that patents be abolished entirely (which I admit I have a personal stake in, as I'm a research scientist and one of my few routes to making it big is coming up with a really awesome idea) need to exist in order to make limiting patents to four years sound reasonable and middle-ground (though from my experience, 4 years really isn't even enough time to bring most things to market, 7 years is more reasonable in cases of non-software stuff). The middle ground perpetually shifts, according to the fraction of people on each extreme. Simply watch those around you and you will see it to be true. The majority of us don't like conflict, our views are a mere reflection of the views of those we respect, except for those things which we have personally invested ourselves in. I doubt very much that more than a handful of people here have personally invested themselves beyond lip service to the cause of limiting copyright and patents. How many people who complain to the end of time on here have even called their congressman (or whatever the appropriate legislator would be for your country)? The only time I've contacted my legislator about technology policy was when Quinn was under fire for endorsing ODF, and that was more out of indignation that the legislature thought it knew better than the technology director for the state of Massachusetts. I am personally invested in only a few things, as are most of you. The rest of my opinions on the world, are, by and large, a synthesis of the opinions of those around me. The extremists on either side shape that opinion, coloured by my trust of the source, and my own partiality towards libertarianism.
I don't know about other places, but in Boston (and suburbs) you can go to the government website and almost always find a photo of any property in the city along with construction type, size, floors, zoning, value, owner, purchase price, purchase date... it's all public information. As long as it's not the inside of the house, or displaying the house at a ridiculously inopportune time (like when you're playing naked twister in the living room with the blinds open), I think that's completely reasonable. The outsides of buildings are not private...
My company looked into this briefly about a month ago. A quick estimate showed that using current LED technology and the cheapest possible effective powering method resulted in a cost of over $12 per bulb, and that's assuming you can get the LED manufacturers to cut the "1000s of" price by a factor of four due to the vast quantity's needed.
Plus, then we did the power consumption calculations -- it takes 9 white LED's with a current of 1A and a forward bias of around 4V to give you 900 lumens (the brightness of a 60W incandescent). So, 36W. How pathetic is that? A typical CF bulb takes only around 16W, and costs at most $3.
So, incandescents are 5% efficient and cost nothing, CF's are 20% efficient and cost $3 a bulb or so, and LED lights are 10% efficient and cost $12 or more per bulb. And before you complain that 10% efficient for a LED is absurdly low, keep in mind that with a 4V forward voltage, you can only put on 30 LED's before it's impossible to power them off of a simple diode rectified, filtered, and voltage stabilized 120V AC line without a boost converter. So, in order to get 900 lumens with 30 LED's, they have to each provide at least 30 lumens. Any LED that high power has sacrificed most of it's efficiency for power.
It's just not feasible until someone makes a massive breakthrough in LED technology -- and breakthrough technologies simply can't be relied upon for mass production systems... not that I don't like the idea, it's just that CF are the only practical solution until high-efficiency AND high-power LED's are commodity items.