It was around the time this was going on in America. It turned out the guy had a history of mental health problems, there was nothing wrong with the car and he was just lying to the police - the media reported the sensational part loudest and no one remembers what it actually turned out to be (he was crazy and on a joy ride).
They had a Renault engineer on the phone during all of this, and couldn't come up with a way to stop the car.
So if it can be stopped by the brakes (which the article says actually sped the car up), neutral, or just turning it off, wouldn't they maybe have thought of that at some point?
No, the real problem here is these cars are too computer reliant and if the computer has a problem the driver is just along for the ride.
On the phone but not in the car. If someone's going crazy in a car, there's not a lot you can do once they tell you "no the brake isn't working really!".
It sounds like most of the controls are wired controllers--that is, if the controller electronics or computer have become faulty, you no longer have a way to control the car. It's a bit like playing a game and having your controller stop responding while your character goes running into a room full of bosses, only in this case, you're the character. This is a lot more common in cars today that most of us are aware; there are many cars out there that have millions of lines of code designed to prevent you from making a catastrophic mistake, but who knows what can happen if this goes wrong. The steering seems to be the only thing that was still available in this case.
Except - and I'm going to stress this - there is no modern car in production which doesn't have hydraulically linked brakes.
My Prius - essentially state of the art technology - has hydraulically linked brakes. The worst possible situation is that the power-boost can shutdown and I'd have trouble applying strong braking force. Unless you actually cut the brake lines though (which would trigger all manner of warnings) I would still be able to brake the car.
No one does drive-by-wire brakes, for exactly the reason that there's any number of situations you want the brake to work when the car is not on.
I'd like to conduct an experiment on the car whereby someone manages to show how the brakes - even if they were somehow triggering the accelerator - couldn't have stopped the car, because everytime this comes up it's pointed out that full on brake-force will over-power the engine and stop a car.
There's also no physical way for the brakes to not stop the car - all modern cars brakes are connected hydraulically to the actual pads, and power-boosted so you can get more braking power. There isn't a mechanical means by which you can push the brake and somehow accelerate the car - unless you're hitting the accelrator.
This sounds way more like he left the cruise control on and kept stepping on the accelerator, then panicked about it - because pressing the accelerator in most cars won't disengage cruise control.
You could use kilometers wide mylar sheeting to build solar furnaces, and provided you didn't spin it or over-tension it it would be just fine.
At a pressure of about 10Pa in LEO, drag would be non-negligible.
In LEO yes - but you're not going to bother with asteroid mining in LEO to start with. That's the operational altitude of the space shuttle, not our satellites and not anything we're putting up seriously in the near future (i.e. the James Webb telescope, which is all the way out at a La Grange point).
There's no real reason to do things in LEO, and with asteroids it'd be a hell of a lot simpler (and safer) to transfer them to a relatively high Earth or Lunar orbit.
Actually I think you're applying a lot of conventional earth-bound thinking to an enterprise which is not.
Earth mining has a lot of constraints which space doesn't. For one thing, solar power is perpetual and constant. There's no gravity - so structures don't need to support their own mass, only the forces they experience due to their own accelerations/rotations. You could use kilometers wide mylar sheeting to build solar furnaces, and provided you didn't spin it or over-tension it it would be just fine.
Building volume is practically limitless, there's no environmental issues or clean up to worry about (though not scattering debris in the orbital regions would be important). There's also no convection - anything you heat up is only going to lose heat by inefficient radiative cooling. Keeping hot things hot would be ridiculously easy.
The single biggest problem with space mining is refining - and it's not a problem, we've just never thought about how to do it in that environment. The goal of the mining/refining process is to use as few depleteable items as possible - i.e. you'd want to do as much as you could with free-floating masses of material and focussed sunlight as you could.
Factories, refineries, mining picks/drills/whatever - all these ideas are irrelevant in such an environment. And all this can be done in an area less then a light-second away from Earth - so no need for any humans to be in space whatsoever.
The outer space treaty says that nations can't "claim ownership" of space bodies and they can't use them for weapons testing. But AFAIK that doesn't prohibit commercial exploitation of an asteroid
But many (all?) launching nations have laws that any meteorites, space-craft, or space debris belongs to the government. Which would include any metals you return from space. And even if you drop them into international waters, and you don't get to them first, normal salvage rules probably apply. So you'll need a large landing/crashing area in a desert which you own mineral rights to, in a country that doesn't regulate the trade in meteorites.
In a world where record companies have been buying laws, it seems unlikely that any company capable of engaging in space mining wouldn't quickly be able to get the laws changed to something more up to date. Only in this instance, it would actually be a positive change to allow actual free enterprise.
*sigh*. If you're going to quote the scientific literature in support of your argument, you need to at least make some effort to understand it first.
The paper says that cosmic rays strongly correlate with ozone depletion. The data point to cosmic-ray driven reactions of halogenated molecules as being the cause of the correlation. The *only* halogenated molecules present in the stratosphere in any significant concentration are CFCs. I'll repeat that: where the paper talks about "halogenated molecules", it's talking about CFCs, HCFCs and other man-made chemicals.
"Coastal waters of the tropical Western Pacific produce natural halogenated organic molecules involving chlorine, bromine and iodine atoms that may damage the stratospheric ozone layer. "
"Micro-organisms such as macro-algae and phytoplankton form natural halogenated organic molecules, which are released into the air, where they eventually find their way into the stratosphere."
And yet - as was pointed out in the paper - the concentration of CFCs in the atmosphere is carefully monitored these days, and has been static since about 1992 which correlates with treaties and provisions phasing out CFC use in industry. The quantities man put up are staggering compared to any natural production.
Most American appliances can use 120 or 240 without any need for conversion these days - companies make everything all over the world, so it's a lot easier to simply change the power-cords then the transformers and drive electronics.
Well, except for the fact that ozone is an important GHG -- one of the three most important ones, from the spectroscopic data -- albeit one that is most common in the stratosphere where it warms the tropopause from above, rather than in the troposphere...
rgb
It's also in staggeringly low quantities there. The ozone-layer is about the reduction of UV-irradiation, and in the troposphere it has a very short half-life because it's no reactive (hence why depletion in the stratosphere is a problem).
Good job misrepresenting that. Here, let me post the abstract, literally the first thing you'd read:
This Letter reports reliable satellite data in the period of 1980–2007 covering two full 11-yr cosmic ray (CR) cycles, clearly showing the correlation between CRs and ozone depletion, especially the polar ozone loss (hole) over Antarctica. The results provide strong evidence of the physical mechanism that the CR-driven electron-induced reaction of halogenated molecules plays the dominant role in causing the ozone hole. Moreover, this mechanism predicts one of the severest ozone losses in 2008–2009 and probably another large hole around 2019–2020, according to the 11-yr CR cycle.
The paper does not say it's dependent on cosmic rays exclusively, instead it points out that cosmic ray activity seems to play a significant role in determining the activity of halogenated molecules destroying ozone. Guess which one of those parameters we've totally screwed around with from the 1970s onwards?
I'll give you a hint: it's not cosmic ray irradiation.
Quantum theory is a product of applying Occam's razor - it was developed because the Bohr model of the atom, for it's insight, didn't work - it couldn't be extended beyond hydrogen. Thus it was necessary to add more logical entities (in this case a new theoretical framework).
Occam's razor states "do not multiply logical entities beyond necessity".
Just get one of these things and test it under rigorous scientific conditions and scrutiny.
If it works, it works; If it doesn't it's back to the drawing board and we can all move on.
Al this fucking shitbrained arguing over nitpicky sematic points is just maddening. Put up or shut the fuck up, because we don't want to hear your not-based-on-anything-that-counts armchair scientist opinions.
"Just get one of these things"
You know who has one of these things? The people who built it. You know what evidence they can't put up? The type which discredits a very obvious criticism. One would think with that type of headstart and knowledge of its operation and experience with test setups, this type of demonstration would be an obvious one.
"Air currents from whatever source were eliminated in the first Proof of Concept project by testing the experimental thruster mounted in a hermetically sealed box. The experiment was reviewed and accepted by professional government scientists." [The research was being supported by the British government at the time.]
He also points out that real ion drives need much higher voltage and that "Anyone who thinks they can create grammes of thrust from ion wind at the voltages we work at clearly doesn’t understand physics." He does not believe a vacuum chamber test would show anything, as ion drives function in a vaccum and there would still be the question of wehther some ionised material was somehow being ejected. However, the hermetically sealed box test should have negated that possibility.
None of which addresses the problem which is not about ionization but about simple convection - the waveguide gets hot (from having 2.4kW of microwave energy pumped into it) and heats nearby gas asymmetrically, creating a net thrust (which, due to the taper would cause it to move in the direction of the wide end provided the overall surface area / taper angle creates more surface area then the large end has).
The hermetically sealed box is a red-herring too: if you were in a sealed box full of water you'd have no trouble swimming around inside it. The only thing it controls for is external air currents blowing the machine around.
"The thrust is reported to be from the large end towards the small end. "
No, TFA says:
"... experiences a net thrust towards the wide end."
"Thrust towards" is ambiguous. Dig through the website on the proposed theory. The implication is the force is exerted on the large end, so the contraption moves large end first.
Which - again - is the same behavior you'd get from heating air along the length of the taper.
There's a video of it pushing an experimental apparatus, so it's definitely not an instrumentation thing. I'm not saying it works, I'm just saying that's definitely not it.
Again, the reason there's a video is because it's in atmosphere, producing a lot of heat. It's surrounded by reaction mass and has a shape that allows it to generate thrust from the air.
The experiment is not suitably controlled for what they're claiming to show.
The thrust is reported to be from the large end towards the small end. The entire body of this thing that's heating up from a few kilowatts of microwaves would be warming air that flowed over the surface and thus imparting energy to it and providing a source of thrust. It would easily provide continuous thrust.
The principles behind the EmDrive have serious theoretical problems, and the original builder and designer never tested it in a vacuum chamber.
Taking a sealed container and pumping a few kilowatts of microwaves into it, chances are any thrust developed is actually air that's getting heated up and expanding out of the container. Unless the EmDrive has been put in a vacuum chamber where this can be demonstrated to definitely not be the case (i.e. low enough that their couldn't be enough reaction mass) then it's not actually working.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm visiting Geneva later this year for exactly this reason.
Hi.
I remember this incident in Australia.
It was around the time this was going on in America. It turned out the guy had a history of mental health problems, there was nothing wrong with the car and he was just lying to the police - the media reported the sensational part loudest and no one remembers what it actually turned out to be (he was crazy and on a joy ride).
Aren't high level seizures actually able to leave you low-level functioning without any real ability to engage in complex reasoning?
They had a Renault engineer on the phone during all of this, and couldn't come up with a way to stop the car.
So if it can be stopped by the brakes (which the article says actually sped the car up), neutral, or just turning it off, wouldn't they maybe have thought of that at some point?
No, the real problem here is these cars are too computer reliant and if the computer has a problem the driver is just along for the ride.
On the phone but not in the car. If someone's going crazy in a car, there's not a lot you can do once they tell you "no the brake isn't working really!".
It sounds like most of the controls are wired controllers--that is, if the controller electronics or computer have become faulty, you no longer have a way to control the car. It's a bit like playing a game and having your controller stop responding while your character goes running into a room full of bosses, only in this case, you're the character. This is a lot more common in cars today that most of us are aware; there are many cars out there that have millions of lines of code designed to prevent you from making a catastrophic mistake, but who knows what can happen if this goes wrong. The steering seems to be the only thing that was still available in this case.
Except - and I'm going to stress this - there is no modern car in production which doesn't have hydraulically linked brakes.
My Prius - essentially state of the art technology - has hydraulically linked brakes. The worst possible situation is that the power-boost can shutdown and I'd have trouble applying strong braking force. Unless you actually cut the brake lines though (which would trigger all manner of warnings) I would still be able to brake the car.
No one does drive-by-wire brakes, for exactly the reason that there's any number of situations you want the brake to work when the car is not on.
I'd like to conduct an experiment on the car whereby someone manages to show how the brakes - even if they were somehow triggering the accelerator - couldn't have stopped the car, because everytime this comes up it's pointed out that full on brake-force will over-power the engine and stop a car.
There's also no physical way for the brakes to not stop the car - all modern cars brakes are connected hydraulically to the actual pads, and power-boosted so you can get more braking power. There isn't a mechanical means by which you can push the brake and somehow accelerate the car - unless you're hitting the accelrator.
This sounds way more like he left the cruise control on and kept stepping on the accelerator, then panicked about it - because pressing the accelerator in most cars won't disengage cruise control.
You could use kilometers wide mylar sheeting to build solar furnaces, and provided you didn't spin it or over-tension it it would be just fine.
At a pressure of about 10Pa in LEO, drag would be non-negligible.
In LEO yes - but you're not going to bother with asteroid mining in LEO to start with. That's the operational altitude of the space shuttle, not our satellites and not anything we're putting up seriously in the near future (i.e. the James Webb telescope, which is all the way out at a La Grange point).
There's no real reason to do things in LEO, and with asteroids it'd be a hell of a lot simpler (and safer) to transfer them to a relatively high Earth or Lunar orbit.
Actually I think you're applying a lot of conventional earth-bound thinking to an enterprise which is not.
Earth mining has a lot of constraints which space doesn't. For one thing, solar power is perpetual and constant. There's no gravity - so structures don't need to support their own mass, only the forces they experience due to their own accelerations/rotations. You could use kilometers wide mylar sheeting to build solar furnaces, and provided you didn't spin it or over-tension it it would be just fine.
Building volume is practically limitless, there's no environmental issues or clean up to worry about (though not scattering debris in the orbital regions would be important). There's also no convection - anything you heat up is only going to lose heat by inefficient radiative cooling. Keeping hot things hot would be ridiculously easy.
The single biggest problem with space mining is refining - and it's not a problem, we've just never thought about how to do it in that environment. The goal of the mining/refining process is to use as few depleteable items as possible - i.e. you'd want to do as much as you could with free-floating masses of material and focussed sunlight as you could.
Factories, refineries, mining picks/drills/whatever - all these ideas are irrelevant in such an environment. And all this can be done in an area less then a light-second away from Earth - so no need for any humans to be in space whatsoever.
The outer space treaty says that nations can't "claim ownership" of space bodies and they can't use them for weapons testing. But AFAIK that doesn't prohibit commercial exploitation of an asteroid
But many (all?) launching nations have laws that any meteorites, space-craft, or space debris belongs to the government. Which would include any metals you return from space. And even if you drop them into international waters, and you don't get to them first, normal salvage rules probably apply. So you'll need a large landing/crashing area in a desert which you own mineral rights to, in a country that doesn't regulate the trade in meteorites.
In a world where record companies have been buying laws, it seems unlikely that any company capable of engaging in space mining wouldn't quickly be able to get the laws changed to something more up to date. Only in this instance, it would actually be a positive change to allow actual free enterprise.
*sigh*. If you're going to quote the scientific literature in support of your argument, you need to at least make some effort to understand it first.
The paper says that cosmic rays strongly correlate with ozone depletion. The data point to cosmic-ray driven reactions of halogenated molecules as being the cause of the correlation. The *only* halogenated molecules present in the stratosphere in any significant concentration are CFCs. I'll repeat that: where the paper talks about "halogenated molecules", it's talking about CFCs, HCFCs and other man-made chemicals.
"Coastal waters of the tropical Western Pacific produce natural halogenated organic molecules involving chlorine, bromine and iodine atoms that may damage the stratospheric ozone layer. "
"Micro-organisms such as macro-algae and phytoplankton form natural halogenated organic molecules, which are released into the air, where they eventually find their way into the stratosphere."
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/02/120201093105.htm
And yet - as was pointed out in the paper - the concentration of CFCs in the atmosphere is carefully monitored these days, and has been static since about 1992 which correlates with treaties and provisions phasing out CFC use in industry. The quantities man put up are staggering compared to any natural production.
Most American appliances can use 120 or 240 without any need for conversion these days - companies make everything all over the world, so it's a lot easier to simply change the power-cords then the transformers and drive electronics.
Well, except for the fact that ozone is an important GHG -- one of the three most important ones, from the spectroscopic data -- albeit one that is most common in the stratosphere where it warms the tropopause from above, rather than in the troposphere...
rgb
It's also in staggeringly low quantities there. The ozone-layer is about the reduction of UV-irradiation, and in the troposphere it has a very short half-life because it's no reactive (hence why depletion in the stratosphere is a problem).
Good job misrepresenting that. Here, let me post the abstract, literally the first thing you'd read:
This Letter reports reliable satellite data in the period of 1980–2007 covering two full 11-yr cosmic ray (CR) cycles, clearly showing the correlation between CRs and ozone depletion, especially the polar ozone loss (hole) over Antarctica. The results provide strong evidence of the physical mechanism that the CR-driven electron-induced reaction of halogenated molecules plays the dominant role in causing the ozone hole. Moreover, this mechanism predicts one of the severest ozone losses in 2008–2009 and probably another large hole around 2019–2020, according to the 11-yr CR cycle.
The paper does not say it's dependent on cosmic rays exclusively, instead it points out that cosmic ray activity seems to play a significant role in determining the activity of halogenated molecules destroying ozone. Guess which one of those parameters we've totally screwed around with from the 1970s onwards?
I'll give you a hint: it's not cosmic ray irradiation.
Key problem: the device doesn't emit microwaves. It's a closed waveguide - microwaves are not emitted, they're eventually absorbed on the walls.
Occam's razor wasn't destroyed.
Quantum theory is a product of applying Occam's razor - it was developed because the Bohr model of the atom, for it's insight, didn't work - it couldn't be extended beyond hydrogen. Thus it was necessary to add more logical entities (in this case a new theoretical framework).
Occam's razor states "do not multiply logical entities beyond necessity".
Just get one of these things and test it under rigorous scientific conditions and scrutiny.
If it works, it works; If it doesn't it's back to the drawing board and we can all move on.
Al this fucking shitbrained arguing over nitpicky sematic points is just maddening. Put up or shut the fuck up, because we don't want to hear your not-based-on-anything-that-counts armchair scientist opinions.
"Just get one of these things"
You know who has one of these things? The people who built it. You know what evidence they can't put up? The type which discredits a very obvious criticism. One would think with that type of headstart and knowledge of its operation and experience with test setups, this type of demonstration would be an obvious one.
Source
"Air currents from whatever source were eliminated in the first Proof of Concept project by testing the experimental thruster mounted in a hermetically sealed box. The experiment was reviewed and accepted by professional government scientists." [The research was being supported by the British government at the time.]
He also points out that real ion drives need much higher voltage and that "Anyone who thinks they can create grammes of thrust from ion wind at the voltages we work at clearly doesn’t understand physics." He does not believe a vacuum chamber test would show anything, as ion drives function in a vaccum and there would still be the question of wehther some ionised material was somehow being ejected. However, the hermetically sealed box test should have negated that possibility.
None of which addresses the problem which is not about ionization but about simple convection - the waveguide gets hot (from having 2.4kW of microwave energy pumped into it) and heats nearby gas asymmetrically, creating a net thrust (which, due to the taper would cause it to move in the direction of the wide end provided the overall surface area / taper angle creates more surface area then the large end has).
The hermetically sealed box is a red-herring too: if you were in a sealed box full of water you'd have no trouble swimming around inside it. The only thing it controls for is external air currents blowing the machine around.
"The thrust is reported to be from the large end towards the small end. "
No, TFA says:
"... experiences a net thrust towards the wide end."
"Thrust towards" is ambiguous. Dig through the website on the proposed theory. The implication is the force is exerted on the large end, so the contraption moves large end first.
Which - again - is the same behavior you'd get from heating air along the length of the taper.
There's a video of it pushing an experimental apparatus, so it's definitely not an instrumentation thing. I'm not saying it works, I'm just saying that's definitely not it.
Again, the reason there's a video is because it's in atmosphere, producing a lot of heat. It's surrounded by reaction mass and has a shape that allows it to generate thrust from the air.
The experiment is not suitably controlled for what they're claiming to show.
But again - they haven't done vacuum chamber tests - which are the only one that really matters and would exclude all the other effects.
Stick it in a vacuum chamber: if it works, then the thrust produced should be the same.
The thrust is reported to be from the large end towards the small end. The entire body of this thing that's heating up from a few kilowatts of microwaves would be warming air that flowed over the surface and thus imparting energy to it and providing a source of thrust. It would easily provide continuous thrust.
The principles behind the EmDrive have serious theoretical problems, and the original builder and designer never tested it in a vacuum chamber.
Taking a sealed container and pumping a few kilowatts of microwaves into it, chances are any thrust developed is actually air that's getting heated up and expanding out of the container. Unless the EmDrive has been put in a vacuum chamber where this can be demonstrated to definitely not be the case (i.e. low enough that their couldn't be enough reaction mass) then it's not actually working.
Not sure you understand how a Faraday cage works - they are not powered.
You don't need a current to sustain the magnetic domain in something like a hard disk, which is the impression I get of what this technology is about.