You got to know when to hold 'em, know when to fold 'em,
Know when to walk away and know when to run.
You never count your money when you're sittin' at the table.
There'll be time enough for countin' when the deathstar's done.
Sorry to be confusing. The ocean-based generator is stationary. It doesn't move. Instead, the kite moves around taking up and letting out cable, which spin gears connected to a generator on the surface of the ocean. The bouys act as a counter weight to drag excess cabling back in when the jetstream's fury is reduced.
The reason you go with a bouy system is that it is extremely scalable. You could just have a huge weight going down a hole, but then when the jetstream's force pulls the weight all the way up to the top of the hole, you've reached maximum capacity and the kite will likely suffer. With bouys, you could have a thousand or more on a multi-mile lenghth of cable spaced out from one another. They all are floating, and as the kite pulls out cable, the close ones are pulled down towards the pulley at the bottom of the ocean. As the wind relaxes, the bouys raise back to the surface of the ocean pulling the cable back down. The generator is geared to also harness this motion. Electricity is produced on the pull of the kite and the recoil of the bouys.
Seth
Instead of putting the generators in the air, perhaps they could just put a big kite up there with carbon nano-fibers connecting it to a base station on the surface of the ocean. The cables could connect to a pulley system at the bottom of the ocean. As the jetstream yanks the kite about, the cable turns wheels connected to a generator on the ocean surface. They also submerge huge bouys that go to the bottom of the ocean.
The idea of the bouys is to capture the energy that would exceed the generator's ability to capture energy from the cable that is feeding out to the kite. Then when the jetstream is less strong, the bouys are released from the bottom of the ocean to reel the kite back in closer to the base station. Then the process begins again.
If this could work, let me know. I'll order the carbon nano-cable get to work building it on monday.
I run a website with more than 6gb of photos and video that I have created from scratch. My hosting provider is generous, but there is a finite limit to my bandwidth. Like the TurnItIn bot, this digimarc bot will be an uninvited pest that repeatedly spiders the site downloading all my content to sniff it.
Since these visits are of no benefit to me, I'll block it by user-agent in htaccess and IP address once people figure out where this beast lives. Obviously, robots.txt depends on client-side cooperation, which this thing likely won't obey if it intends to be as promiscuous as possible.
Poo,
Chill with the hostility. No need to call people stupid. We're just discussing some ideas here.
I agree that it would seem to be the same CO2. But consider that the trees / plants that are burned or devoured by animals to create energy are ceasing to scrub CO2 out of the atmosphere. The global trend is less-and-less foliage as the jungles and forests are being cleared. For each tree that's no longer scrubbing, it would be better if it weren't burned and contributing CO2.
It's a very complex formula. I appreciate the thought you've given it.
Methane is a gas created by animals and insects (termites). Currently it mostly escapes into the atmosphere where it damages the ozone layer. As other posters have responded, it can be harvested from pig farms or garbage dumps. Methane and other natural gas hydrates are also found frozen at the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico in massive quantities.
Unlike traditional fossil fuels like petroleum, methane can be generated in very short time spans and as a byproduct to other production activities (bacon). The problem remains that burning anything is not a clean energy source. Natural gas cars will still emit carbon dioxide, which is one of the main problems we're grappling with in terms of global warming. The plus side is that this fuel source might help Americans put fewer of their dollars in Middle Eastern pockets.
Perhaps in this age of multi-million dollar TV shows, where fully 1/3 of your average TV show is commercials, the public has forgotten that it used to be possible to produce quality entertainment for much less, even when inflation is accounted for.
The media companies don't look at this topic as a zero-sum game (commercial segments OR product placement). Instead, the greedheads typically pile product placements into their content IN ADDITION to commercial breaks. Check a hit show like 30 Rock or The Office. The characters are swarmed with logos and spouting references to corporate brands throughout the dialogue. It would be nice if a media company thought to remove the commercial breaks and attract viewers through a less-disjointed viewing experience such as you recommend.
I think your point is well-taken in the desktop computer model, but on my G4 Powerbook 15" I don't have the luxury of adding a bunch of big hard drives. At least not in a portable mode. I shoot a LOT of 5mb photos using my Nikon D70. Each day, I generate perhaps a half-gig of photos. My puny 60gb drive in the laptop gets filled fast. Sure, I edit and discard tons of photos, but I need to retain bunches and currently, DVD-R is the best media for exporting these archives. I'd like it if Spotlight could index my DVD-Rs so I could do searches for photos on those discs.
Thanks for posting this sentiment. There's no hypocrisy here. Steve J. is simply re-directing heat over DRM onto the people who have demanded DRM: the content providers.
Yes, it probably should be illegal for HP to make their printers only work with ink cartridges from HP--or at least it should be legal for competing companies to make HP-compatible cartridges.
Think about what you're saying. If HP has developed proprietary printhead technology that they've patented, you want them to abandon their patent so everyone else can make printheads to their specification.
Why oppose battlefield (or riot zone) use of the ADS,....?
There are international bans on using light or energy-based weapons against humans in war. Otherwise, it would be quite simple to fight at night and use strobes to blind the enemy. Friendly soldiers could wear goggles calibrated to blank at the moment of the strobe.
Another nonlethal weapon that's banned would be using lasers to blind enemy pilots, etc. This heat/microwave thing probably would be prohibited by the same laws.
Ok. How about you tell me a way to accomplish the convenience of MeasureIt within Safari. No Applescript is going to do be able to give me the X & Y dimensions of anything within a web page.
I can't think of any "hardcore Mac users" who don't regard Firefox as an abomination
Think of me, then. Safari is great, but it doesn't have nearly the selection of free extensions available that Firefox boasts. Sure, there might be shareware adblocking workarounds. But how about MeasureIt? How about Colorzilla? How about DownloadThemAll? How about themes? I'd happily use Safari if I could load Firefox extensions.
I don't have kids yet, but I'll respond based on the consideration I've given to this topic and my experience as a teenager doing things I wasn't supposed to do.
It's extremely difficult to be a 'good parent' and reasonable monitor your child's behavior on the Internet these days.
The technology to allow parents to do a 'reasonable' job without being 'Big Brother' (as another poster put it) is simply not there.
Keep the computer in a public area such as the kitchen or living room. Limit usage to when parents are home. Cases with keyed locks are the same price as those without.
It's getting better (with MacOS X and Vista parental controls and better filters, etc) but it's still a LONG way off from what needs to be done.
Failing the ability to keep the computer in a public area, I'd caution parents against relying on OS-level tools such as you reference. These can easily be bypassed by a bootable linux distro CD or DVD-R such as Knoppix. On the plus side, circumventing internet filters could be a great way to increase LINUX adoption among the next generation of users.
This alone sold me on the phone. I don't even use voicemail because I don't want to wade through 25 messages to get to the one from the caller I just missed. I just call the person up who I see on my caller ID and ask them "what's up?" Being able to mass-delete voicemails instead of having to navigate voice menus is a killer-app as far as I'm concerned.
To support this feature, Cingular had to retool their own voicemail system. I am betting you're going to see this functionality added to the other providers, too. Hate the company for one-button mice and DRM as much as you like, you've got to give Apple credit as being a minority player in an industry forcing innovation on the rest of the players. They did this with USB, too. When the first iMac came out, Steve Jobs refused to include serial ports. It was the first computer to be USB-only. There were no USB printers or scanners at the time, but the strong sales of the iMac inspired peripheral developers to implement USB connectivity to make their products work with the #1 selling computer model.
If Mac OS X is truly the foundation of the iPhone, buggy apps shouldn't be able to do the things you and Steve are warning against. Stability of the phone or network shouldn't be jeopardized by renegade user-installed applications because the OS and the networking protocol should lock them down to acceptable behavior.
I was fully going to switch to this phone in June. No joke. But this statement by Jobs has certainly installed boundaries for my imagination running wild with this device's potential. Specifically, I'm betting Apple will restrict 3rd-party-apps to prevent skype-like apps from being installed. Don't want to give the consumer TOO good of a deal.
I know when you start spouting off unrequested advice, you run the risk of condescending the other person. I mainly wanted to take advantage of the post to illustrate to readers that it's scenarios like that where people go 'ah-hah!' and strike it rich by putting their own company together. By no means do I want to tell people what to do with their lives. Whatever company that Terje works for is lucky to have him.
And by that I mean people who don't sit on slashdot all day wondering why everyone else isn't building robots.
That comment, sir, got you added to my friends list.
Your other observations about the importance of market research in determining a product's feature set are stating the obvious, but valuable nonetheless. Extremely granular market research that determines who will pay how much for this product over that product because of which features is what should have sent the Zune designers back to their drafting tables.
I work for a multinational corporation with more than 10 K laptops
Just wanted to give you a reality check:
If you work for a company like that and know this technology to the level you are describing in this post, you should leave your employer to start your own company providing this solution. There's no way you're getting paid at a multinational corporation as much as you would make in your own (successful) company. If you had launched your company back when you had performed the aformentioned evaluation, you'd probably have enough progress with your own product to pitch it in this govt. bidding process.
Not trying to criticize you. Just trying to inspire people.
And having seen pictures from around ground zero of big plane chunks, including a whole, twisted jet engine, I look at the area around that pentagon impact, and frankly, there's just a few flakes... looks like something blew up allright, but it doesn't look like the "plane hitting a building and then exploding" debris from New York.
Suspicion of the government is a good thing and that's why I don't lambaste 9-11 conspiracists. Instead, I discuss with them their theories to stress-test my own understanding of reality.
Here's my thinking on why a missle is an unlikely culprit in the Pentagon explosion:
A missle would have been seen on civilian radar screens. Even the heat signature of its launching would be captured by civilian satellite imagery. No air traffic controllers have stepped forward saying they tracked a UFO that day. Instead, these controllers have unanimously supported the tracking that showed it run straight into the Pentagon.
So why was the impact different at the Pentagon as compared to the WTC? As a mental experiment, consider taking a cherry pie in an aluminum pie tin and throwing it at a chainlink fence. The fencing represents the WTC structure. The pan stays kind of on the outside of the fence, while the goey contents both get stuck all over the fence and a lot of it goes through the fence. If the cherry pie were highly flamible, the energy released by the explosion would be spread out. Now throw a cherry pie against a very solid brick wall. In both experiments, the pie needs to be thrown super-hard. When the pie hits the solid wall (the Pentagon), it's energy is focused. Some of the wall is damaged, but there's no dispersal of the energy. The pie tin is basically flattened against the wall and the heat melts the tin into a pool of aluminum that forms around on the ground. At 300+ MPH, an aluminum tube like an airplane body hitting a solid wall of the Pentagon would telescopically crush like an aluminum can that you stomp with a boot.
Finally, if a plane didn't hit the Pentagon, then what happened to that third plane full of people? Was it shot out of the sky somewhere else? If that were the case, the afformentioned air traffic controllers and civilian satellite imagery would be able to document its disappearance / heat signature.
Why is the video footage of the Pentagon explosion hidden from the public? Well, not that I support it, but if the other team had scored a touchdown using a weakness in your defense, you'd probably want to do your best to hide the nature of that weakness from other potential enemies. Even if you've repaired the blind spot in the defenses, keeping it secret helps prevent copy-cats from thinking they might exploit the same weakness and causing all kinds of messes. In all reality, there are probably mini-guns all over the Pentagon that are computer controlled to take out projectiles approaching the building. They were probably blazing like all hell on that plane, but even 2,000 rounds-per-second can't stop a passenger jet. They would work better against shoulder-fired missles or the such and that's probably what they were installed for.
Do I distrust the Bush neocons? You betcha. Those dimwits don't play a game of chess more than one move ahead. That's why we're stuck with our hands tied up in this Iraq tarbaby while genuine threats like North Korea and Iran are free to do as they nuclear please.
Slashdot Mirror
You got to know when to hold 'em, know when to fold 'em,
Know when to walk away and know when to run.
You never count your money when you're sittin' at the table.
There'll be time enough for countin' when the deathstar's done.
Sorry to be confusing. The ocean-based generator is stationary. It doesn't move. Instead, the kite moves around taking up and letting out cable, which spin gears connected to a generator on the surface of the ocean. The bouys act as a counter weight to drag excess cabling back in when the jetstream's fury is reduced.
The reason you go with a bouy system is that it is extremely scalable. You could just have a huge weight going down a hole, but then when the jetstream's force pulls the weight all the way up to the top of the hole, you've reached maximum capacity and the kite will likely suffer. With bouys, you could have a thousand or more on a multi-mile lenghth of cable spaced out from one another. They all are floating, and as the kite pulls out cable, the close ones are pulled down towards the pulley at the bottom of the ocean. As the wind relaxes, the bouys raise back to the surface of the ocean pulling the cable back down. The generator is geared to also harness this motion. Electricity is produced on the pull of the kite and the recoil of the bouys. Seth
Just wondering aloud here...
Instead of putting the generators in the air, perhaps they could just put a big kite up there with carbon nano-fibers connecting it to a base station on the surface of the ocean. The cables could connect to a pulley system at the bottom of the ocean. As the jetstream yanks the kite about, the cable turns wheels connected to a generator on the ocean surface. They also submerge huge bouys that go to the bottom of the ocean.
The idea of the bouys is to capture the energy that would exceed the generator's ability to capture energy from the cable that is feeding out to the kite. Then when the jetstream is less strong, the bouys are released from the bottom of the ocean to reel the kite back in closer to the base station. Then the process begins again.
If this could work, let me know. I'll order the carbon nano-cable get to work building it on monday.
Seth
I'd like to discuss your work via email. Please contact me (seth[AT]austinpublicskatepark.org).
Seth
Why does everyone here want this not to work?
I run a website with more than 6gb of photos and video that I have created from scratch. My hosting provider is generous, but there is a finite limit to my bandwidth. Like the TurnItIn bot, this digimarc bot will be an uninvited pest that repeatedly spiders the site downloading all my content to sniff it.
Since these visits are of no benefit to me, I'll block it by user-agent in htaccess and IP address once people figure out where this beast lives. Obviously, robots.txt depends on client-side cooperation, which this thing likely won't obey if it intends to be as promiscuous as possible.
Seth
Poo, Chill with the hostility. No need to call people stupid. We're just discussing some ideas here.
I agree that it would seem to be the same CO2. But consider that the trees / plants that are burned or devoured by animals to create energy are ceasing to scrub CO2 out of the atmosphere. The global trend is less-and-less foliage as the jungles and forests are being cleared. For each tree that's no longer scrubbing, it would be better if it weren't burned and contributing CO2.
It's a very complex formula. I appreciate the thought you've given it.
Seth
Drinky,
I am intrigued by your carbon accounting system.
The CO2 to make the plants, which became part of the poop, part of which became methane, came from the atmosphere to begin with.
Isn't the oil and coal we burn part of the same cycle?
Seth
Methane is a gas created by animals and insects (termites). Currently it mostly escapes into the atmosphere where it damages the ozone layer. As other posters have responded, it can be harvested from pig farms or garbage dumps. Methane and other natural gas hydrates are also found frozen at the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico in massive quantities.
Unlike traditional fossil fuels like petroleum, methane can be generated in very short time spans and as a byproduct to other production activities (bacon). The problem remains that burning anything is not a clean energy source. Natural gas cars will still emit carbon dioxide, which is one of the main problems we're grappling with in terms of global warming. The plus side is that this fuel source might help Americans put fewer of their dollars in Middle Eastern pockets.
Seth
Perhaps in this age of multi-million dollar TV shows, where fully 1/3 of your average TV show is commercials, the public has forgotten that it used to be possible to produce quality entertainment for much less, even when inflation is accounted for.
The media companies don't look at this topic as a zero-sum game (commercial segments OR product placement). Instead, the greedheads typically pile product placements into their content IN ADDITION to commercial breaks. Check a hit show like 30 Rock or The Office. The characters are swarmed with logos and spouting references to corporate brands throughout the dialogue. It would be nice if a media company thought to remove the commercial breaks and attract viewers through a less-disjointed viewing experience such as you recommend.
Seth
I think your point is well-taken in the desktop computer model, but on my G4 Powerbook 15" I don't have the luxury of adding a bunch of big hard drives. At least not in a portable mode. I shoot a LOT of 5mb photos using my Nikon D70. Each day, I generate perhaps a half-gig of photos. My puny 60gb drive in the laptop gets filled fast. Sure, I edit and discard tons of photos, but I need to retain bunches and currently, DVD-R is the best media for exporting these archives. I'd like it if Spotlight could index my DVD-Rs so I could do searches for photos on those discs.
Seth
Thanks for posting this sentiment. There's no hypocrisy here. Steve J. is simply re-directing heat over DRM onto the people who have demanded DRM: the content providers.
Seth
If they award him the prize while he's in space, do US tax laws still apply?
Seth
Yes, it probably should be illegal for HP to make their printers only work with ink cartridges from HP--or at least it should be legal for competing companies to make HP-compatible cartridges.
Think about what you're saying. If HP has developed proprietary printhead technology that they've patented, you want them to abandon their patent so everyone else can make printheads to their specification.
Seth
Why oppose battlefield (or riot zone) use of the ADS,
There are international bans on using light or energy-based weapons against humans in war. Otherwise, it would be quite simple to fight at night and use strobes to blind the enemy. Friendly soldiers could wear goggles calibrated to blank at the moment of the strobe.
Another nonlethal weapon that's banned would be using lasers to blind enemy pilots, etc. This heat/microwave thing probably would be prohibited by the same laws.
Seth
Check the Wikipedia entry for turning lead into gold.
Seth
There's more than one way to do these things
Ok. How about you tell me a way to accomplish the convenience of MeasureIt within Safari. No Applescript is going to do be able to give me the X & Y dimensions of anything within a web page.
Seth
I can't think of any "hardcore Mac users" who don't regard Firefox as an abomination
Think of me, then. Safari is great, but it doesn't have nearly the selection of free extensions available that Firefox boasts. Sure, there might be shareware adblocking workarounds. But how about MeasureIt? How about Colorzilla? How about DownloadThemAll? How about themes? I'd happily use Safari if I could load Firefox extensions.
Seth
2. Kinda-sorta secure connection: nobody else snooping on your IP address.
And you're giving your credit card number to a guy in what country? And you're giving your credit card number to:
1. Someone who you have every reason to trust?
2. Someone who you already know is breaking international laws?
Seth
I don't have kids yet, but I'll respond based on the consideration I've given to this topic and my experience as a teenager doing things I wasn't supposed to do.
It's extremely difficult to be a 'good parent' and reasonable monitor your child's behavior on the Internet these days.
The technology to allow parents to do a 'reasonable' job without being 'Big Brother' (as another poster put it) is simply not there.
Keep the computer in a public area such as the kitchen or living room. Limit usage to when parents are home. Cases with keyed locks are the same price as those without.
It's getting better (with MacOS X and Vista parental controls and better filters, etc) but it's still a LONG way off from what needs to be done.
Failing the ability to keep the computer in a public area, I'd caution parents against relying on OS-level tools such as you reference. These can easily be bypassed by a bootable linux distro CD or DVD-R such as Knoppix. On the plus side, circumventing internet filters could be a great way to increase LINUX adoption among the next generation of users.
Seth
Your excellent list missed this one feature:
8. Random Access Voicemail.
This alone sold me on the phone. I don't even use voicemail because I don't want to wade through 25 messages to get to the one from the caller I just missed. I just call the person up who I see on my caller ID and ask them "what's up?" Being able to mass-delete voicemails instead of having to navigate voice menus is a killer-app as far as I'm concerned.
To support this feature, Cingular had to retool their own voicemail system. I am betting you're going to see this functionality added to the other providers, too. Hate the company for one-button mice and DRM as much as you like, you've got to give Apple credit as being a minority player in an industry forcing innovation on the rest of the players. They did this with USB, too. When the first iMac came out, Steve Jobs refused to include serial ports. It was the first computer to be USB-only. There were no USB printers or scanners at the time, but the strong sales of the iMac inspired peripheral developers to implement USB connectivity to make their products work with the #1 selling computer model.
Seth
If Mac OS X is truly the foundation of the iPhone, buggy apps shouldn't be able to do the things you and Steve are warning against. Stability of the phone or network shouldn't be jeopardized by renegade user-installed applications because the OS and the networking protocol should lock them down to acceptable behavior.
I was fully going to switch to this phone in June. No joke. But this statement by Jobs has certainly installed boundaries for my imagination running wild with this device's potential. Specifically, I'm betting Apple will restrict 3rd-party-apps to prevent skype-like apps from being installed. Don't want to give the consumer TOO good of a deal.
Seth
I know when you start spouting off unrequested advice, you run the risk of condescending the other person. I mainly wanted to take advantage of the post to illustrate to readers that it's scenarios like that where people go 'ah-hah!' and strike it rich by putting their own company together. By no means do I want to tell people what to do with their lives. Whatever company that Terje works for is lucky to have him.
Seth
And by that I mean people who don't sit on slashdot all day wondering why everyone else isn't building robots.
That comment, sir, got you added to my friends list.
Your other observations about the importance of market research in determining a product's feature set are stating the obvious, but valuable nonetheless. Extremely granular market research that determines who will pay how much for this product over that product because of which features is what should have sent the Zune designers back to their drafting tables.
Seth
I work for a multinational corporation with more than 10 K laptops
Just wanted to give you a reality check:
If you work for a company like that and know this technology to the level you are describing in this post, you should leave your employer to start your own company providing this solution. There's no way you're getting paid at a multinational corporation as much as you would make in your own (successful) company. If you had launched your company back when you had performed the aformentioned evaluation, you'd probably have enough progress with your own product to pitch it in this govt. bidding process.
Not trying to criticize you. Just trying to inspire people.
Seth
And having seen pictures from around ground zero of big plane chunks, including a whole, twisted jet engine, I look at the area around that pentagon impact, and frankly, there's just a few flakes... looks like something blew up allright, but it doesn't look like the "plane hitting a building and then exploding" debris from New York.
Suspicion of the government is a good thing and that's why I don't lambaste 9-11 conspiracists. Instead, I discuss with them their theories to stress-test my own understanding of reality.
Here's my thinking on why a missle is an unlikely culprit in the Pentagon explosion:
- A missle would have been seen on civilian radar screens. Even the heat signature of its launching would be captured by civilian satellite imagery. No air traffic controllers have stepped forward saying they tracked a UFO that day. Instead, these controllers have unanimously supported the tracking that showed it run straight into the Pentagon.
- So why was the impact different at the Pentagon as compared to the WTC? As a mental experiment, consider taking a cherry pie in an aluminum pie tin and throwing it at a chainlink fence. The fencing represents the WTC structure. The pan stays kind of on the outside of the fence, while the goey contents both get stuck all over the fence and a lot of it goes through the fence. If the cherry pie were highly flamible, the energy released by the explosion would be spread out. Now throw a cherry pie against a very solid brick wall. In both experiments, the pie needs to be thrown super-hard. When the pie hits the solid wall (the Pentagon), it's energy is focused. Some of the wall is damaged, but there's no dispersal of the energy. The pie tin is basically flattened against the wall and the heat melts the tin into a pool of aluminum that forms around on the ground. At 300+ MPH, an aluminum tube like an airplane body hitting a solid wall of the Pentagon would telescopically crush like an aluminum can that you stomp with a boot.
- Finally, if a plane didn't hit the Pentagon, then what happened to that third plane full of people? Was it shot out of the sky somewhere else? If that were the case, the afformentioned air traffic controllers and civilian satellite imagery would be able to document its disappearance / heat signature.
- Why is the video footage of the Pentagon explosion hidden from the public? Well, not that I support it, but if the other team had scored a touchdown using a weakness in your defense, you'd probably want to do your best to hide the nature of that weakness from other potential enemies. Even if you've repaired the blind spot in the defenses, keeping it secret helps prevent copy-cats from thinking they might exploit the same weakness and causing all kinds of messes. In all reality, there are probably mini-guns all over the Pentagon that are computer controlled to take out projectiles approaching the building. They were probably blazing like all hell on that plane, but even 2,000 rounds-per-second can't stop a passenger jet. They would work better against shoulder-fired missles or the such and that's probably what they were installed for.
Do I distrust the Bush neocons? You betcha. Those dimwits don't play a game of chess more than one move ahead. That's why we're stuck with our hands tied up in this Iraq tarbaby while genuine threats like North Korea and Iran are free to do as they nuclear please.Seth