...now we'll see if we can get him to change his policy on Nuclear Power (a necessity for cleaner power)
No it isn't. Why do so many intelligent people insist on that?
Quick'n'dirty calculation on the area needed to provide the USA's complete energy using photovoltaics
(which is of course not the way to go, but a very good example for the scale):
Numbers used:
- USA's Yearly energy comsumption (2005): 29,000 TWh
- sun hours per year: 2,200h, or ~6h per day
- photovoltaic power output: 120W/m^2 (optimistic but feasible value)
=> Area needed: 29,000 * 1e12 Wh/(2,200h * 120 W/m^2) = 1.09848485e11 m^2, or about 110,000 square kilometers.
That sounds like a lot, but is just a square 330km a side, or roughly 16% the size of Texas.
The USA have the additional advantage of nearly being a whole friggin' continent, having lots
of places with lots of sun, so even this "all out solar" would be feasible.
In practice, this would of course be a bit more, since you cannot pack solar cells seamless on this scale,
but even 250,000 or 300,000 km^2 wouldn't actually be that much.
That energy consumption BTW inludes oil, gas, coal etc.
Now tell me, why exactly do you need nuclear power if there is so much wind, water, sun, biomass etc. around?
And don't start with cost, a nuclear power plant costs billions to build and operate (nuclear waste disposal
is not cheap at all - a factor that is often forgotten), has to be built at once (vs. modular expandability of wind or solar
fields), and produces all of its energy in one place (vs. easy distribution of lots of small areas in the case of solar),
losing quite a bit of the energy on transit.
Oh, and uranium is a limited resource as well, so this would just offset the problem. And not even by long, a couple of decades
to a century max. Less, if others get the same idea.
For reading BD+ BRs on Linux, the problem is they had to use patched firmware. This doesn't bode well for widespread adoption on Linux by non-technical users.
The fact that BD playback works with unpatched drives on Windows means that this
limitation will probably fall in the not-so-distant future.
Cross-bank transfers via a website are still pretty dicey and untrusted or not supoprted by banks at all.
That's what I don't get. WTF is wrong in the country of Silicon Bloody Valley?
I made my last non-electronic money transfer around ten years ago (my first electronic one being made in 1996, if I remember correctly) - with one notable exception:
Paying someone in the US, six months ago.
*WANT* to tell you to put some ubuntu on there and tweak it up a bit.
The only real reason that this isnt the best option is that Linux (and BSD) are heavier on battery life than WindowsXP. I run linux on my laptop and have on other laptops and linux sucks down the battery faster.
With a tickless kernel (since around 2.6.20, iirc), this shouldn't be an issue anymore. And with 'powertop' being a
nice tool to assign blame, a lot of applications are fixed to support this as well. It really makes a huge difference.
OMG - I really know lots of IT and CS related TLAs (and even longer ones, only very few are shorter AFAIK),
but couldn't resolve "PoC" without RTFAing.
WTF is this, some kind of trick to make us read TFA?
You seem to have inexplicably skipped over four words in the sentence you quoted.
That was intentional. I thought about add ing "...", but considered it unnecessary, as it doesn't affect my point.
What exactly makes electricly powered kinetic sculptures "unmechanical"?
Skipping the "maglev is cool" phase and immediately building a system that is orders of magnitude
(well, about one) cheaper and integrates well with existing infrastructure sounds like a good deal.
Well, as much as I am amazed by maglev technology: It's more or less useless by now.
Tracks are hugely expensive, can only be used by custom-built trains, and
cannot interconnect with the existing rail network.
And speed also isn't a valid argument any more:
An experimental version of the french TGV last year achieved 575km/h (and could probably have reached
600, but ran out of track;-) on a "plain old (very high tech) steel track" which is used for regular
330km/h service.
Advantage: Those tracks interconnect with the rest of the network (that also means no need for new tracks or
stations in the towns), can be used by existing trains as well (e.g. by freight trains at night) and are considerably
cheaper to build.
Maglev technology is - I say it again - fascinating, and I'm in awe of the engineers that actually made it work.
But considering today's state of readily available "plain old rail" technology - and its expected progress in the
next couple of years - maglev is a solution in search of a problem.
Even in their most recent plan for this Mars descent, their first mode of descent is to drop the module like a stone, using elaborate and expensive heat shielding to protect the even-more-expensive gear. But maybe -- just maybe -- they could take a lesson from Spaceship One and just take their time getting this thing down to the ground.
Sorry - but you have no clue. Mars' atmosphere at the surface has about 1% of the Earth's density, making something like aerodynamic flying impossible.
There simply isn't any other way than "dropping like a stone" - even on their parachutes, the rovers did exactly that. Those parachutes were supersonic, and their
main purpose was trajectory stabilization (although they did of course contribute to the braking).
Go read this article already linked above for a well written explanation about why landing on Mars is actually very hard and cannot in any way be compared to landing on Earth.
Actually, Google Maps uses the same image database as Google Earth
No they don't. They use the same image data, but new image data is always added
to google earth first, and takes a couple of days up to more than a week to propagate to
google maps.
It is a neat idea, and is very stylish - but its simplifications go way too far, making some of the stated "facts" just plain wrong. Some come close to conspiration theories.
The "computer facts" make me cringe.
Unfortunately, this makes it very attackable even where it is right, making it completely worthless to illustrate any kind of point.
how can I guarantee against illegal activities on my internet connection?
You can't. The probability for it to happen is rather low though (especially if you are not
the only one doing it), and (IMHO) that risk is way outweighed by the advantages for the
commonality - and that's where the need for a sane political and legal environment comes in:
To protect the AP owner from being liable for everything that goes on over said AP.
Laws like that don't prevent anything, someone determined will still find a way to do whatever
would have been possible over an open AP via some other mean - but those laws make life less nice
for everybody.
I recently toured Skandinavia. In every reasonably big city (that means "more than 15 houses" over there), you can nearly be sure to find some open access point. Of course, some of those are cluess users using lousy default configs - but quite a lot are deliberately open, with SSIDs like "welcome_to_stockholm".
One even ran a guestbook on the AP's port 80, accessible only from the inside. Lots and lots of grateful people from all over the world had left a message before mine:-)
That's the kind of culture I would like to see encouraged in other places as well, not this "OMG terrorists" bullshit being used as an excuse for more and more control in way too many parts of the world.
As it's quitting time, I really don't feel like explaining how very wrong that is. I'm sure someone else will.
Actually, he is completely right. Buoyancy comes from density differences, and nothing
is less dense than a vacuum - so if you manage to enclose a notable volume of vacuum,
this thing would be a great lifting body. Unfortunately, vacuum has a rather low intrinsic
pressure (yes, that's an understatement...;-), so there is nothing in there able to counteract the
atmospheric pressure. And no material would be solid enough to be built around a vacuum. So such
a "balloon" would just be crushed and never lift a bit.
BTW, walls "filled" with vacuum would be great as housing insulation as well. Same problem: Huge
forces due to the atmospheric pressure. Instant crush.
Slashdot Mirror
Have a cite for the 92 number? The usual number given is a fraction of that, 11.
I'm sorry, I mixed up "known lost bombs" and "US bombs" - the 92 includes (a lot of) sowjet ones:
http://www.genecurtis.com/LostNuclearBombs.htm
It probably is more than 11 though, don't confuse "number of incidents" with "number of warheads",
one of the acronyms to look up here is MIRV.
To this day, the USA alone have admitted losing 92 nuclear bombs.
This doesn't count those that were recovered in sometimes very expensive operations:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palomares_hydrogen_bombs_incident
a dark solar cell absorbs much more heat than a white dessert
True. On the other hand, the dessert probably tastes much better.
...now we'll see if we can get him to change his policy on Nuclear Power (a necessity for cleaner power)
No it isn't. Why do so many intelligent people insist on that?
Quick'n'dirty calculation on the area needed to provide the USA's complete energy using photovoltaics
(which is of course not the way to go, but a very good example for the scale):
Numbers used:
- USA's Yearly energy comsumption (2005): 29,000 TWh
- sun hours per year: 2,200h, or ~6h per day
- photovoltaic power output: 120W/m^2 (optimistic but feasible value)
=> Area needed: 29,000 * 1e12 Wh/(2,200h * 120 W/m^2) = 1.09848485e11 m^2, or about 110,000 square kilometers.
That sounds like a lot, but is just a square 330km a side, or roughly 16% the size of Texas.
The USA have the additional advantage of nearly being a whole friggin' continent, having lots
of places with lots of sun, so even this "all out solar" would be feasible.
In practice, this would of course be a bit more, since you cannot pack solar cells seamless on this scale,
but even 250,000 or 300,000 km^2 wouldn't actually be that much.
That energy consumption BTW inludes oil, gas, coal etc.
Now tell me, why exactly do you need nuclear power if there is so much wind, water, sun, biomass etc. around?
And don't start with cost, a nuclear power plant costs billions to build and operate (nuclear waste disposal
is not cheap at all - a factor that is often forgotten), has to be built at once (vs. modular expandability of wind or solar
fields), and produces all of its energy in one place (vs. easy distribution of lots of small areas in the case of solar),
losing quite a bit of the energy on transit.
Oh, and uranium is a limited resource as well, so this would just offset the problem. And not even by long, a couple of decades
to a century max. Less, if others get the same idea.
For reading BD+ BRs on Linux, the problem is they had to use patched firmware. This doesn't bode well for widespread adoption on Linux by non-technical users.
The fact that BD playback works with unpatched drives on Windows means that this
limitation will probably fall in the not-so-distant future.
Neat, I will finally be able to buy a BR drive.
Cross-bank transfers via a website are still pretty dicey and untrusted or not supoprted by banks at all.
That's what I don't get. WTF is wrong in the country of Silicon Bloody Valley?
I made my last non-electronic money transfer around ten years ago (my first
electronic one being made in 1996, if I remember correctly) - with one notable exception:
Paying someone in the US, six months ago.
*WANT* to tell you to put some ubuntu on there and tweak it up a bit.
The only real reason that this isnt the best option is that Linux (and BSD) are heavier on battery life than WindowsXP. I run linux on my laptop and have on other laptops and linux sucks down the battery faster.
With a tickless kernel (since around 2.6.20, iirc), this shouldn't be an issue anymore. And with 'powertop' being a
nice tool to assign blame, a lot of applications are fixed to support this as well. It really makes a huge difference.
...plans to build a massive one-billion-dollar charging network
Sounds pretty useless. How many australians can be charged one billion dollars?
Is there an acronym for "woooosh"?
IMHO: no.
ITYM "AFAIK"
Is there an acronym for "woooosh"?
OMG - I really know lots of IT and CS related TLAs (and even longer ones, only very few are shorter AFAIK),
but couldn't resolve "PoC" without RTFAing.
WTF is this, some kind of trick to make us read TFA?
You seem to have inexplicably skipped over four words in the sentence you quoted.
That was intentional. I thought about add ing "...", but considered it unnecessary, as it doesn't affect my point.
What exactly makes electricly powered kinetic sculptures "unmechanical"?
He wants to keep this mechanical.
As opposed to...?
Magnetically stabilised plasma girders?
Holographical joints?
Fusion Axles?
Why do we never get to leapfrog technology in the US?
You actually might ;-)
Maglev isn't noticeably faster than wheels-on-rails any more: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dw4zn-qw1oM
Skipping the "maglev is cool" phase and immediately building a system that is orders of magnitude
(well, about one) cheaper and integrates well with existing infrastructure sounds like a good deal.
Well, as much as I am amazed by maglev technology: It's more or less useless by now.
;-) on a "plain old (very high tech) steel track" which is used for regular
Tracks are hugely expensive, can only be used by custom-built trains, and
cannot interconnect with the existing rail network.
And speed also isn't a valid argument any more:
An experimental version of the french TGV last year achieved 575km/h (and could probably have reached
600, but ran out of track
330km/h service.
Advantage: Those tracks interconnect with the rest of the network (that also means no need for new tracks or
stations in the towns), can be used by existing trains as well (e.g. by freight trains at night) and are considerably
cheaper to build.
Maglev technology is - I say it again - fascinating, and I'm in awe of the engineers that actually made it work.
But considering today's state of readily available "plain old rail" technology - and its expected progress in the
next couple of years - maglev is a solution in search of a problem.
Even in their most recent plan for this Mars descent, their first mode of descent is to drop the module like a stone, using elaborate and expensive heat shielding to protect the even-more-expensive gear. But maybe -- just maybe -- they could take a lesson from Spaceship One and just take their time getting this thing down to the ground.
Sorry - but you have no clue. Mars' atmosphere at the surface has about 1% of the Earth's density, making something like aerodynamic flying impossible.
There simply isn't any other way than "dropping like a stone" - even on their parachutes, the rovers did exactly that. Those parachutes were supersonic, and their
main purpose was trajectory stabilization (although they did of course contribute to the braking).
Go read this article already linked above for a well written explanation about why
landing on Mars is actually very hard and cannot in any way be compared to landing on Earth.
the Munich olympics didn't stop WWII
That would've sucked. Fortunately, WWII ended way before the 1972 Olympics.
Actually, Google Maps uses the same image database as Google Earth
No they don't. They use the same image data, but new image data is always added
to google earth first, and takes a couple of days up to more than a week to propagate to
google maps.
Reduction of red tape in the form of forms is always a good idea.
Reducing the influence of lobbies is too.
If the internet is filtering lobby forms, it is even
more useful than I already thought it is.
Filter forms used by lobbies now!
thats about as likely as a pig flying without a trebuchet....
I'm pretty sure trebuchets have even lousier flying capabilities than pigs...
I wish I could mod that film "overrated".
It is a neat idea, and is very stylish - but its simplifications go way
too far, making some of the stated "facts" just plain wrong. Some come
close to conspiration theories.
The "computer facts" make me cringe.
Unfortunately, this makes it very attackable even where it is right,
making it completely worthless to illustrate any kind of point.
how can I guarantee against illegal activities on my internet connection?
You can't. The probability for it to happen is rather low though (especially if you are not
the only one doing it), and (IMHO) that risk is way outweighed by the advantages for the
commonality - and that's where the need for a sane political and legal environment comes in:
To protect the AP owner from being liable for everything that goes on over said AP.
Laws like that don't prevent anything, someone determined will still find a way to do whatever
would have been possible over an open AP via some other mean - but those laws make life less nice
for everybody.
I recently toured Skandinavia. In every reasonably big city
(that means "more than 15 houses" over there), you can nearly
be sure to find some open access point. Of course, some of
those are cluess users using lousy default configs - but quite
a lot are deliberately open, with SSIDs like "welcome_to_stockholm".
One even ran a guestbook on the AP's port 80, accessible only :-)
from the inside. Lots and lots of grateful people from all over
the world had left a message before mine
That's the kind of culture I would like to see encouraged in
other places as well, not this "OMG terrorists" bullshit being
used as an excuse for more and more control in way too many
parts of the world.
...and go read Jasper Fforde's "Thursday Next" series.
Hilarious, geeky (lots and lots of literary allusions), british as well, /.ers), ...
includes special features online (good for us
As it's quitting time, I really don't feel like explaining how very wrong that is. I'm sure someone else will.
Actually, he is completely right. Buoyancy comes from density differences, and nothing ;-), so there is nothing in there able to counteract the
is less dense than a vacuum - so if you manage to enclose a notable volume of vacuum,
this thing would be a great lifting body. Unfortunately, vacuum has a rather low intrinsic
pressure (yes, that's an understatement...
atmospheric pressure. And no material would be solid enough to be built around a vacuum. So such
a "balloon" would just be crushed and never lift a bit.
BTW, walls "filled" with vacuum would be great as housing insulation as well. Same problem: Huge
forces due to the atmospheric pressure. Instant crush.