These things aren't difficult, but 1) a panicked driver is going to try repeatedly pressing neutral or power, and isn't holding the button down, and 2) I'm willing to bet most of these people didn't fully read their owners manual to find out how to do these things when the vehicle is moving.
I agree, and would like to add: 3) Even if the driver does exactly the right thing, they're still depending on the software to function properly. The button and the joystick are just the driver's way of politely asking the computer to turn off the engine, or change gear. There seems to be no physical way of forcing a disconnect or shutdown. In mechanical systems, if the button doesn't work, you push the button harder and it'll probably work. In software systems there's no direct analogue (hence all the 'hold key X for 3 seconds then press reset button Y with a pin" hackery).
You're right about average vs. peak power, but you've got the wrong end of the stick. Specifically with semiconductor light sources (my particular experience was with high-intensity LEDs but should apply to diode lasers too) you overdrive them by ridiculous amounts as long as the average power stays the same. I've put half an amp through a 30mA LED for 50 microseconds without causing any damage.
Anyway the bulk of my argument was that you wouldn't need jigger-ma-whats of power because you wouldn't need to constantly illuminate the whole target area. Instead, you'd have a 100m x 100m illuminated spot scanning around the target area at 1km/sec. By my calculations, assuming that the original estimate of 1GW was accurate, a 100ms pulse every 3 seconds over the whole area gives a 1/30 duty cycle, or about 30kW sustained. That's well within the limits of LiPoly batteries. A 10kW battery pack can output 40kW for 15 minutes without too much trouble, most modern lithium batteries are designed for 10C or higher discharge rates.
True, but my point was that it wouldn't drain much power at all, unless the scale of the disaster is so huge that warning won't help anyway. With a few simple modifications (chiefly, the assumption that instead of constant illumination, it's better to make the light blink) the power requirements are easy to fulfill with a solar panel and a modest sized battery pack - say, one smaller than that used by the GM Volt.
The difference - and this is important - is that they used the word 'robot' and pretended it was something exciting, rather than an incremental improvement on the standard light-pipe design.
How about instead of assuming that we need to simultaneously light up hundreds of square miles of land, we assume that we only need to make the land 'blink'? Using your figure of 10 watts per square meter, and assume a 0.1 second flash every 3 seconds. That would require 1/30th the power, and it would only be necessary to transmit the warning for maybe 15 minutes at a time. A 10kWh battery pack should do the trick, and can trickle-charge from solar panels between tsunamis. In fact, the figures are even better because the tsunami would hit different pieces of coastline at different times.
Nope. Still too soon. Just reading the letters "SBLive!" sent a flood of nauseating memories through my consciousness... broken drivers, bluescreens, corrupted windows installations, and oh so many lost hours.
Yeah. Like that 'rich dad poor dad' guy. He thinks he's a financial guru but what he really did was make a modest fortune by sniping mortgage foreclosure auctions (in essence, ripping off the struggling families who'd just lost their homes), and then when that stopped working, he switched tactics to making money by selling "how to make money" books and giving seminars.
How do you mean? All that jazz about "the most important things in life are free"... sure, if you're comfortably fed, clothed, and protected. Romantic walks on the beach, religious activities, whatever else it was that you were thinking of that money can't buy - I can guarantee that they would not be too high up your list of priorities if you were freezing, starving, or in physical danger.
Now, that's not to say that he couldn't make money using the predictions, but maybe he's actually more interested in the science/mathematics side of it than the business potential?
I've heard that sort of excuse a lot, but I don't buy it. (heh.) You can buy pretty much anything with money. Saying you're not interested in money is saying that you're not interested in anything you can buy with money. The only person who genuinely have no interest in anything you can buy with money are the people who already have it all, and even they would start being interested in money if they lost it all.
What about one that doesn't destroy the original you?
There's a long plotline in Schlock Mercenary about this exact thing. Interstellar gates (basically stargates) used for commerce, but the species running them could use them to create clones of anything that went through (enabling them to interrogate any public official who travelled through a gate, etc.)
I calculated above that if it's exactly 1 trillion (10^12) carbon atoms in a graphite structure, the object was about 550 nanometers across. For bonus points I'll mention that this implies that it's green.:)
Correction: I slipped a decimal point. 559 nanometers, which is around the wavelength of green light, and thus it *would* be possible to 'see' it using visible light, although not with the naked eye.
Using 'trillion' as 10^12, and assuming carbon (as you have done), their object was 1.66*10^-12 grams. In the form of graphite, carbon has a density of 2.267 g/cm^3, giving their object a volume of 7.32*10^-13 cm^3. If their object was spherical, it would have been 5.59*10^-5 cm, or 55 nanometers, in radius. So yeah, it wouldn't be visible.
Also, your sig is a troll. "intensive", "begs the question", grarrgh.
It's not a straw man because he's not trying to imply that the GPP was making either of the justifications he suggested.
And my guess would be that $1 is just the biggest nice, round, small number. Virtually no-one would say "$1 is too much." Over $1 and you start getting people thinking 'hmm, $1.50? maybe. $2.00? nah." So they started with $1 per track and it stuck.
Lets just hope the money gets to the struggling artists!
From what I've read about this media tax in the past, they seem to collect the tax money and just kind of sit around with it, waiting for artists to contact them and ask for a slice of the pie. This actually opens up a new business model for indie bands: Make some tracks, leak them onto torrent sites (bonus points if people actually download them), then send the bill to Canada.
Especially in rodents. I had a pet rat, it got cancer. My sister had a pet rat, it got cancer too. She got three more pet rats. They got cancer. Bloody depressing, really.
And when you got your six pieces, you gotta get rid of them, because it's no good leaving it in the deep freeze for your mum to discover, now is it? Then I hear the best thing to do is feed them to pigs. You got to starve the pigs for a few days, then the sight of a chopped-up body will look like curry to a pisshead. You gotta shave the heads of your victims, and pull the teeth out for the sake of the piggies' digestion. You could do this afterwards, of course, but you don't want to go sievin' through pig shit, now do you? They will go through bone like butter. You need at least sixteen pigs to finish the job in one sitting, so be wary of any man who keeps a pig farm. They will go through a body that weighs 200 pounds in about eight minutes. That means that a single pig can consume two pounds of uncooked flesh every minute. Hence the expression, "as greedy as a pig".
Yeah, this sounds really cool. Now for the fun part - how do you communicate with these things?
IR data transmission would be the obvious choice. They've already got LEDs built into it, and they work both ways (light of exactly the right wavelength will create a voltage difference across a LED).
Slashdot Mirror
These things aren't difficult, but 1) a panicked driver is going to try repeatedly pressing neutral or power, and isn't holding the button down, and 2) I'm willing to bet most of these people didn't fully read their owners manual to find out how to do these things when the vehicle is moving.
I agree, and would like to add: 3) Even if the driver does exactly the right thing, they're still depending on the software to function properly. The button and the joystick are just the driver's way of politely asking the computer to turn off the engine, or change gear. There seems to be no physical way of forcing a disconnect or shutdown. In mechanical systems, if the button doesn't work, you push the button harder and it'll probably work. In software systems there's no direct analogue (hence all the 'hold key X for 3 seconds then press reset button Y with a pin" hackery).
You're right about average vs. peak power, but you've got the wrong end of the stick. Specifically with semiconductor light sources (my particular experience was with high-intensity LEDs but should apply to diode lasers too) you overdrive them by ridiculous amounts as long as the average power stays the same. I've put half an amp through a 30mA LED for 50 microseconds without causing any damage.
Anyway the bulk of my argument was that you wouldn't need jigger-ma-whats of power because you wouldn't need to constantly illuminate the whole target area. Instead, you'd have a 100m x 100m illuminated spot scanning around the target area at 1km/sec. By my calculations, assuming that the original estimate of 1GW was accurate, a 100ms pulse every 3 seconds over the whole area gives a 1/30 duty cycle, or about 30kW sustained. That's well within the limits of LiPoly batteries. A 10kW battery pack can output 40kW for 15 minutes without too much trouble, most modern lithium batteries are designed for 10C or higher discharge rates.
True, but my point was that it wouldn't drain much power at all, unless the scale of the disaster is so huge that warning won't help anyway. With a few simple modifications (chiefly, the assumption that instead of constant illumination, it's better to make the light blink) the power requirements are easy to fulfill with a solar panel and a modest sized battery pack - say, one smaller than that used by the GM Volt.
The difference - and this is important - is that they used the word 'robot' and pretended it was something exciting, rather than an incremental improvement on the standard light-pipe design.
How about instead of assuming that we need to simultaneously light up hundreds of square miles of land, we assume that we only need to make the land 'blink'? Using your figure of 10 watts per square meter, and assume a 0.1 second flash every 3 seconds. That would require 1/30th the power, and it would only be necessary to transmit the warning for maybe 15 minutes at a time. A 10kWh battery pack should do the trick, and can trickle-charge from solar panels between tsunamis. In fact, the figures are even better because the tsunami would hit different pieces of coastline at different times.
If half the planet is at risk from a single tsunami, we've got bigger problems than just 'how do we power this satellite?'.
Shudder ...
Nope. Still too soon. Just reading the letters "SBLive!" sent a flood of nauseating memories through my consciousness ... broken drivers, bluescreens, corrupted windows installations, and oh so many lost hours.
Shoulda been using DOS. Duh.
Yeah. Like that 'rich dad poor dad' guy. He thinks he's a financial guru but what he really did was make a modest fortune by sniping mortgage foreclosure auctions (in essence, ripping off the struggling families who'd just lost their homes), and then when that stopped working, he switched tactics to making money by selling "how to make money" books and giving seminars.
How do you mean? All that jazz about "the most important things in life are free"... sure, if you're comfortably fed, clothed, and protected. Romantic walks on the beach, religious activities, whatever else it was that you were thinking of that money can't buy - I can guarantee that they would not be too high up your list of priorities if you were freezing, starving, or in physical danger.
Now, that's not to say that he couldn't make money using the predictions, but maybe he's actually more interested in the science/mathematics side of it than the business potential?
I've heard that sort of excuse a lot, but I don't buy it. (heh.) You can buy pretty much anything with money. Saying you're not interested in money is saying that you're not interested in anything you can buy with money. The only person who genuinely have no interest in anything you can buy with money are the people who already have it all, and even they would start being interested in money if they lost it all.
I teleported home one night
With Ron and Sid and Meg
Ron stole Meggie's heart away
And I got Sidney's leg.
- Douglas Adams, HHGTTG
What about one that doesn't destroy the original you?
There's a long plotline in Schlock Mercenary about this exact thing. Interstellar gates (basically stargates) used for commerce, but the species running them could use them to create clones of anything that went through (enabling them to interrogate any public official who travelled through a gate, etc.)
Laden or unladen?
:)
I calculated above that if it's exactly 1 trillion (10^12) carbon atoms in a graphite structure, the object was about 550 nanometers across. For bonus points I'll mention that this implies that it's green.
Correction: I slipped a decimal point. 559 nanometers, which is around the wavelength of green light, and thus it *would* be possible to 'see' it using visible light, although not with the naked eye.
Using 'trillion' as 10^12, and assuming carbon (as you have done), their object was 1.66*10^-12 grams. In the form of graphite, carbon has a density of 2.267 g/cm^3, giving their object a volume of 7.32*10^-13 cm^3. If their object was spherical, it would have been 5.59*10^-5 cm, or 55 nanometers, in radius. So yeah, it wouldn't be visible.
Also, your sig is a troll. "intensive", "begs the question", grarrgh.
Does the levy apply to thumb drives? What about to phones? (Since virtually all phones can play MP3s nowadays).
It's not a straw man because he's not trying to imply that the GPP was making either of the justifications he suggested.
And my guess would be that $1 is just the biggest nice, round, small number. Virtually no-one would say "$1 is too much." Over $1 and you start getting people thinking 'hmm, $1.50? maybe. $2.00? nah." So they started with $1 per track and it stuck.
(I would happily pay a few bucks extra a month to get a pirate's licence, by the way.)
A pirate's ricense? Is that what you need to fly pranes in China?
Lets just hope the money gets to the struggling artists!
From what I've read about this media tax in the past, they seem to collect the tax money and just kind of sit around with it, waiting for artists to contact them and ask for a slice of the pie. This actually opens up a new business model for indie bands: Make some tracks, leak them onto torrent sites (bonus points if people actually download them), then send the bill to Canada.
Here, baby, let's try this super position!!
Just being alive causes cancer, eventually ...
Especially in rodents. I had a pet rat, it got cancer. My sister had a pet rat, it got cancer too. She got three more pet rats. They got cancer. Bloody depressing, really.
And when you got your six pieces, you gotta get rid of them, because it's no good leaving it in the deep freeze for your mum to discover, now is it? Then I hear the best thing to do is feed them to pigs. You got to starve the pigs for a few days, then the sight of a chopped-up body will look like curry to a pisshead. You gotta shave the heads of your victims, and pull the teeth out for the sake of the piggies' digestion. You could do this afterwards, of course, but you don't want to go sievin' through pig shit, now do you? They will go through bone like butter. You need at least sixteen pigs to finish the job in one sitting, so be wary of any man who keeps a pig farm. They will go through a body that weighs 200 pounds in about eight minutes. That means that a single pig can consume two pounds of uncooked flesh every minute. Hence the expression, "as greedy as a pig".
- Brick Top, Snatch
Better that than a pizzahurt buttface.
A professional waxer?
Yeah, this sounds really cool. Now for the fun part - how do you communicate with these things?
IR data transmission would be the obvious choice. They've already got LEDs built into it, and they work both ways (light of exactly the right wavelength will create a voltage difference across a LED).