The basic reaction is: 2Al + 3 H20 -> Al2O3 + 3 H2
Aluminium has an atomic mass of about 27, so 54g of Al will produce 6g of H2, i.e. it takes 9kg of Al to produce 1kg of H2. (We haven't been told how much gallium is required in the mix, so I'm ignoring this component.)
According to Wikipaedea, the goal for hydrogen storage in 2015 is 0.09 kg H2/kg. This process rates at 0.11 kg H2/kg before accounting for the gallium - so it is looking pretty good so far.
I've neglected the weight of water used in the reaction. If we include this, it doubles the required mass: 54g Al + 54g H2O to produce 6g H2. We may be able to recycle the engine exhaust to provide the required water. However, this scheme means that you gain weight as you run your car: everytime you use 6g of hydrogen, you turn 54g of Al into 102g of Al2O3, which you are still carrying.
I'm also worried about the efficiency of the fuel cycle, which will require returning large amounts of Al2O3 from fuel stations to a recycling plant, which then uses electricity to convert the Al2O3 back to Al.
P.S. The Wikipedia article gives the first 'leaks' as having occured in 1967 (Wadysaw Kozaczuk, "Bitwa o tajemnice" (Secret War) and David Kahn, "The Codebreakers".)
I agree - the reasons Ultra remained secret don't generally apply to (e.g.) 9/11 or Moon Landing conspiracies, which would also necessarily have thousands of people in the know.
"Third, while official disclosure of Ultra didn't come about until the 1970s, some disclosures about it were made public earlier."
Can you elaborate on this? From the point of view of studying conspiracy theories (as opposed to generating and believing them) the degree to which Ultra leaked is a highly interesting subject.
I remember 160K floppy drives which cost well over NZ$500 (and NZ$10 per disk) and a 5M hard drive was probably over NZ$5000 (I wasn't in the market for one) and hundreds of dollars for a 16K memory upgrade. (I.e. my computing memories go back to about 1980.)
There are others here who will remember when a 5M hard drive was the size of a washing machine and more expensive than a luxury car*, and when having 8k of memory meant you had a main-frame.
* And you could race hard drives - although somewhat slower than the car.
It is worth noting that there is one well documented case where a historically highly significant secret was succesfully kept by thousands of people over a period of decades: "Ultra", the breaking of the Enigma and other codes during the second world war. Thousands of people worked at Bletchley Park, but what they had been doing was only revealed in about 1972.
(Incidentally, I am very much not a conspiracy theorist. I do sometimes derive amusement from them, however. My favourite is that Christopher Marlowe's death was faked by Francis Walsingham, and he then ghost-wrote Shakespeare's work. Here's a summary of Marlowe conspiracy theories.)
It looks to me like MxTabs would have a good chance of winning a libel suit over this (and possibly other stuff like 'interfering with a business relationship' or something.) The letter repeatedly claims they are publishing illegal music, when in fact it is all authorized. Indeed, the letter is trying to convince people not to grant permission to MxTabs, which would be utterly pointless if MxTabs were illegally ignoring permissions. (Other bits might also be libelous, but this is the stand-out obvious one.)
However, the likelihood of winning in court does not guarantee that there is a good business case for suing.
Is there a lawyer in the house who might like to comment?
Possibly the most significant problem with wind power is its variability of availability. If you have a spot-pricing system for electricity, this means when it is windy, electricity is cheap, when it is not, electricity is expensive. If there were some system for economically storing the power, this would help a lot.
Now consider if a large proportion of the population have plug-in hybrids. All it takes is a little IT investment, and they can be mostly recharging when the power is cheap. While creating all of these rechargable batteries purely for smoothing the power availability from wind would (presumably) not be economic, these are pre-existing rechargable batteries already created for a different purpose.
Or, changing the realm of consumption: "Woman is fine for her own satisfaction alone. No man will admire her the more, no woman will like her the better for it. Neatness and fashion are enough for the former, and a something of shabbiness or impropriety will be most endearing to the latter." -- Jane Austen, 'Northanger Abbey'.
If we're going to get technical about the terms, 'agnosticism' is the belief that the existence/non-existence of god is inherently unknowable.
The position that the probability* that (a/some) god exists is non-zero but very low is generally included in 'atheism'. (Especially by self-described atheists, as it is the position that most of us hold.) (You inclusion of this position in 'agnosticism' is, however, also fairly common.)
Similarly, the position that P(god) is non-negligably different from both zero and one is commonly considered 'agnosticism', although this is not the original meaning of the word.
The possibility of an imminent Borg attack could be non-zero but very, very small. In that case, we wouldn't be able to prove anything and we wouldn't be justified in building weapons.
I.e. the probability of Borg attack is negligable (i.e. may be neglected). I would define atheism as the position/belief that P(god) is negligable.
* For the mathematical philosophers among you, I'm using the Baysian concept of probability here.
If not, clearly you are a member of the Disbelievers In Invisible Pink Unicorns religion. You are probably also a member of the My Car is Not Going To Be Hit By A Diamond-Encrusted Meteorite On The Way To Work Tomorrow religion.
Trust me, we're sick to the back teeth of the "Atheism is a religion too" argument.
All religions I've come across have (in my estimation) such a low probability of being true that the only logical response is to live my life on the assumption they are false. Therefore I am an Atheist.
Here's the Molly guard story - although the term is pretty much self explanatory.
(And while we're at it, BRS.) "It is alleged that the emergency pull switch on an IBM 360/91 actually fired a non-conducting bolt into the main power feed."
They can be updated with a correct ballot much easier than actually printing ballots. They can randomly display the list of candidates, eliminating the 'first ballot position' advantage.
Both of these could be cheaply achieved by using a computer and printer to print the ballots on the spot at the polling station.
GP's sig: "The quickest way to become an atheist is to study the Bible thoroughly."
Actually, I became an atheist quicker than that method, as I was incapable of studying the bible thoroughly at age of about 7. My reasoning then was "I don't believe in magic and ghosts. God is magic, so I don't believe in god." I'm still pretty happy with the line of reasoning, although I could now express it more eloquently.
Curiously, John Wesley (founder of the Methodist church) reasoned very similarly, but with the opposite conclusion: "Giving up [belief in] witches is, in effect, giving up [belief in] the Bible". (Quoted from memory.)
Old text adventure games were often like this. You'd type in an entire sentence, but the computer would only look at the first three letters of the first two words. I remember using "drink white paint" to drink the whiskey. (This was back when the final resting place of outdated computer games was not the $10 bargain bin, but rather having the entire source printed in a computer games magazine so people could type it into their Apple II.)
I think that Infocom, being the class act of text adventures, didn't suffer this "feature".
There is an excellent, if little known SF novel about this: "Recalled to Life" by Robert Silverberg. The only "SF" element is a medical procedure for resuscitating people dead for up to about an hour (assuming the cause of death didn't preclude this - i.e. good for heart attack and drowning victoms, but not useful against cancer.) The book is about the social, religious and political backlash.
There used to be free[beer] MuPad, but now that I look it up to post this comment, I see it is no longer free (beer or speach.)
(I looked at it about 3-4 years ago, but after a while I got frustrated with it and got my boss to buy me Mathematica 5. I no longer remember what it was that frustrated me.)
My understanding is that the generally accepted date for humans reaching the Americas is about 12000 years ago, although there are persistent controversial claims for evidence of human habitation back to about 30000 years ago. I don't think your 50000 year figure is supportable.
In my opinion, no. The grounds for impeachment were not relevant to his performance as president.
The "demanded FBI files of former Republican administration office holders" thing (I don't recall the exact details) would have been suitable grounds, if proven.
I've briefly studied the mathematics of voting systems a few years ago. There is a desirable property that I don't recall seeing in any of the lists:
* If a voter changes their vote in a way contrary to their preferences, any resulting change in the outcome of the election will not be advantageous to that voter.
I.e. electoral systems should not reward 'lying' by voters. First Past the Post fails spectacularly in this criterion - forcing people to vote for "the lesser of two evils" and so enforcing a two party system.
Is this a recognized criterion? How easy is it to achieve? Are there weakened forms which are more achievable? (e.g. given that the voter has imperfect information about how others will vote, lying cannot *on average* improve the outcome?)
I have an Acousticase from QuietPC, Silverstone fanless PSU, Athlon 64 3000+, Ninja heatsink, passive 7600GS vid card, 120mm Nexus as the sole fan in my system, which normally runs at 40-60% speed, controlled by SpeedFan.
The multi-billion dollar "Big Pharmaceutical corporations" are evil, lying and care for nothing but profit, whereas the multi-billion dollar "alternative medicines" industry is love, truth and fluffy bunnies?
How about Matthias Rath? He has convinced many in the South African government that AIDS is not caused by HIV, AIDS should be treated by vitamin supplements (which he just happens to sell) and antiretroviral medicines are a worse than useless, and advocating their use is genocide.
AIDS is killing 900 people per day in South Africa. A sizable fraction of those deaths can be laid directly at the door of "alternative medicine" in general, and the South African government and Rath in particular.
Big Pharma need someone to stand over them with a big stick to try to keep them honest. So do alternative medicine peddlers. The difference is that, occasionally, the big stick gets used on Big Pharma, but the snake-oil salesmen opperate with impunity in Alternative Medicine, playing Russian Roulette with other people's lives for their own profit.
Don't ban the 'remedies' - but do ban the lies and unsupported wishful-thinking published about them.
Slashdot Mirror
The basic reaction is:
2Al + 3 H20 -> Al2O3 + 3 H2
Aluminium has an atomic mass of about 27, so 54g of Al will produce 6g of H2, i.e. it takes 9kg of Al to produce 1kg of H2. (We haven't been told how much gallium is required in the mix, so I'm ignoring this component.)
According to Wikipaedea, the goal for hydrogen storage in 2015 is 0.09 kg H2/kg. This process rates at 0.11 kg H2/kg before accounting for the gallium - so it is looking pretty good so far.
I've neglected the weight of water used in the reaction. If we include this, it doubles the required mass: 54g Al + 54g H2O to produce 6g H2. We may be able to recycle the engine exhaust to provide the required water. However, this scheme means that you gain weight as you run your car: everytime you use 6g of hydrogen, you turn 54g of Al into 102g of Al2O3, which you are still carrying.
I'm also worried about the efficiency of the fuel cycle, which will require returning large amounts of Al2O3 from fuel stations to a recycling plant, which then uses electricity to convert the Al2O3 back to Al.
P.S. The Wikipedia article gives the first 'leaks' as having occured in 1967 (Wadysaw Kozaczuk, "Bitwa o tajemnice" (Secret War) and David Kahn, "The Codebreakers".)
I agree - the reasons Ultra remained secret don't generally apply to (e.g.) 9/11 or Moon Landing conspiracies, which would also necessarily have thousands of people in the know.
"Third, while official disclosure of Ultra didn't come about until the 1970s, some disclosures about it were made public earlier."
Can you elaborate on this? From the point of view of studying conspiracy theories (as opposed to generating and believing them) the degree to which Ultra leaked is a highly interesting subject.
I remember 160K floppy drives which cost well over NZ$500 (and NZ$10 per disk) and a 5M hard drive was probably over NZ$5000 (I wasn't in the market for one) and hundreds of dollars for a 16K memory upgrade. (I.e. my computing memories go back to about 1980.)
There are others here who will remember when a 5M hard drive was the size of a washing machine and more expensive than a luxury car*, and when having 8k of memory meant you had a main-frame.
* And you could race hard drives - although somewhat slower than the car.
It is worth noting that there is one well documented case where a historically highly significant secret was succesfully kept by thousands of people over a period of decades: "Ultra", the breaking of the Enigma and other codes during the second world war. Thousands of people worked at Bletchley Park, but what they had been doing was only revealed in about 1972.
(Incidentally, I am very much not a conspiracy theorist. I do sometimes derive amusement from them, however. My favourite is that Christopher Marlowe's death was faked by Francis Walsingham, and he then ghost-wrote Shakespeare's work. Here's a summary of Marlowe conspiracy theories.)
IANAL.
It looks to me like MxTabs would have a good chance of winning a libel suit over this (and possibly other stuff like 'interfering with a business relationship' or something.) The letter repeatedly claims they are publishing illegal music, when in fact it is all authorized. Indeed, the letter is trying to convince people not to grant permission to MxTabs, which would be utterly pointless if MxTabs were illegally ignoring permissions. (Other bits might also be libelous, but this is the stand-out obvious one.)
However, the likelihood of winning in court does not guarantee that there is a good business case for suing.
Is there a lawyer in the house who might like to comment?
Possibly the most significant problem with wind power is its variability of availability. If you have a spot-pricing system for electricity, this means when it is windy, electricity is cheap, when it is not, electricity is expensive. If there were some system for economically storing the power, this would help a lot.
Now consider if a large proportion of the population have plug-in hybrids. All it takes is a little IT investment, and they can be mostly recharging when the power is cheap. While creating all of these rechargable batteries purely for smoothing the power availability from wind would (presumably) not be economic, these are pre-existing rechargable batteries already created for a different purpose.
X-bit labs always measure power and noise for GPUs, but they don't have a review up yet.
Here's the power-and-noise for the 8600GTS.
Or, changing the realm of consumption: "Woman is fine for her own satisfaction alone. No man will admire her the more, no woman will like her the better for it. Neatness and fashion are enough for the former, and a something of shabbiness or impropriety will be most endearing to the latter." -- Jane Austen, 'Northanger Abbey'.
If we're going to get technical about the terms, 'agnosticism' is the belief that the existence/non-existence of god is inherently unknowable.
The position that the probability* that (a/some) god exists is non-zero but very low is generally included in 'atheism'. (Especially by self-described atheists, as it is the position that most of us hold.) (You inclusion of this position in 'agnosticism' is, however, also fairly common.)
Similarly, the position that P(god) is non-negligably different from both zero and one is commonly considered 'agnosticism', although this is not the original meaning of the word.
The possibility of an imminent Borg attack could be non-zero but very, very small. In that case, we wouldn't be able to prove anything and we wouldn't be justified in building weapons.
I.e. the probability of Borg attack is negligable (i.e. may be neglected). I would define atheism as the position/belief that P(god) is negligable.
* For the mathematical philosophers among you, I'm using the Baysian concept of probability here.
Do you believe in Invisible Pink Unicorns?
If not, clearly you are a member of the Disbelievers In Invisible Pink Unicorns religion. You are probably also a member of the My Car is Not Going To Be Hit By A Diamond-Encrusted Meteorite On The Way To Work Tomorrow religion.
Trust me, we're sick to the back teeth of the "Atheism is a religion too" argument.
All religions I've come across have (in my estimation) such a low probability of being true that the only logical response is to live my life on the assumption they are false. Therefore I am an Atheist.
(P.S. I'm also a scientist.)
Here's the Molly guard story - although the term is pretty much self explanatory.
(And while we're at it, BRS.) "It is alleged that the emergency pull switch on an IBM 360/91 actually fired a non-conducting bolt into the main power feed."
They can be updated with a correct ballot much easier than actually printing ballots.
They can randomly display the list of candidates, eliminating the 'first ballot position' advantage.
Both of these could be cheaply achieved by using a computer and printer to print the ballots on the spot at the polling station.
Not only is the summary accurate, it is complete - there's nothing important in the article that wasn't in the summary.
GP's sig: "The quickest way to become an atheist is to study the Bible thoroughly."
Actually, I became an atheist quicker than that method, as I was incapable of studying the bible thoroughly at age of about 7. My reasoning then was "I don't believe in magic and ghosts. God is magic, so I don't believe in god." I'm still pretty happy with the line of reasoning, although I could now express it more eloquently.
Curiously, John Wesley (founder of the Methodist church) reasoned very similarly, but with the opposite conclusion:
"Giving up [belief in] witches is, in effect, giving up [belief in] the Bible". (Quoted from memory.)
Old text adventure games were often like this. You'd type in an entire sentence, but the computer would only look at the first three letters of the first two words. I remember using "drink white paint" to drink the whiskey. (This was back when the final resting place of outdated computer games was not the $10 bargain bin, but rather having the entire source printed in a computer games magazine so people could type it into their Apple II.)
I think that Infocom, being the class act of text adventures, didn't suffer this "feature".
There is an excellent, if little known SF novel about this: "Recalled to Life" by Robert Silverberg. The only "SF" element is a medical procedure for resuscitating people dead for up to about an hour (assuming the cause of death didn't preclude this - i.e. good for heart attack and drowning victoms, but not useful against cancer.) The book is about the social, religious and political backlash.
http://reference.wolfram.com/mathematica/guide/Sum maryOfNewFeaturesIn60.html
"Full-featured source-level debugger, including breakpoints, watchpoints and stepping."
If you haven't used Mathematica, you have no idea how badly the debugging sucks (prior to the new version.)
There used to be free[beer] MuPad, but now that I look it up to post this comment, I see it is no longer free (beer or speach.)
(I looked at it about 3-4 years ago, but after a while I got frustrated with it and got my boss to buy me Mathematica 5. I no longer remember what it was that frustrated me.)
My understanding is that the generally accepted date for humans reaching the Americas is about 12000 years ago, although there are persistent controversial claims for evidence of human habitation back to about 30000 years ago. I don't think your 50000 year figure is supportable.
(Disclaimer: all the above is from memory.)
In my opinion, no. The grounds for impeachment were not relevant to his performance as president.
The "demanded FBI files of former Republican administration office holders" thing (I don't recall the exact details) would have been suitable grounds, if proven.
I've briefly studied the mathematics of voting systems a few years ago. There is a desirable property that I don't recall seeing in any of the lists:
* If a voter changes their vote in a way contrary to their preferences, any resulting change in the outcome of the election will not be advantageous to that voter.
I.e. electoral systems should not reward 'lying' by voters. First Past the Post fails spectacularly in this criterion - forcing people to vote for "the lesser of two evils" and so enforcing a two party system.
Is this a recognized criterion? How easy is it to achieve? Are there weakened forms which are more achievable? (e.g. given that the voter has imperfect information about how others will vote, lying cannot *on average* improve the outcome?)
Yes, I'm in Palmerston North.
I have an Acousticase from QuietPC, Silverstone fanless PSU, Athlon 64 3000+, Ninja heatsink, passive 7600GS vid card, 120mm Nexus as the sole fan in my system, which normally runs at 40-60% speed, controlled by SpeedFan.
There is already a name for the almost-chocolate they're trying to redefine: compound chocolate.
References 1, 2, 3
The multi-billion dollar "Big Pharmaceutical corporations" are evil, lying and care for nothing but profit, whereas the multi-billion dollar "alternative medicines" industry is love, truth and fluffy bunnies?
How about Matthias Rath? He has convinced many in the South African government that AIDS is not caused by HIV, AIDS should be treated by vitamin supplements (which he just happens to sell) and antiretroviral medicines are a worse than useless, and advocating their use is genocide.
AIDS is killing 900 people per day in South Africa. A sizable fraction of those deaths can be laid directly at the door of "alternative medicine" in general, and the South African government and Rath in particular.
Big Pharma need someone to stand over them with a big stick to try to keep them honest. So do alternative medicine peddlers. The difference is that, occasionally, the big stick gets used on Big Pharma, but the snake-oil salesmen opperate with impunity in Alternative Medicine, playing Russian Roulette with other people's lives for their own profit.
Don't ban the 'remedies' - but do ban the lies and unsupported wishful-thinking published about them.