Ethernet is run over common 50 Ohm coax. Did you ever think of zipping over to the local ham radio store and pick up a 50 Ohm gas lightning trap?
Also... Most people don't bother, but one end of the coax is supposed to have a grounded terminating resistor. Most people just tack on a regular old non-grounded terminator, and wonder why they keep frying boards. You can get away with it in a small room or office, but it is part of the spec... Kind of important when you start to approach the spec limits.
Power plants efficiencies are almost maxed-out : it's a well developed science.
Not so sure I agree with you here. Thermodynamics is going to cost you 50% of whatever you burn... That's just the way it is. But most of the powerplants I'm familiar with top out at around 40%. That's quite a bit of energy to throw away just because "it's a well developed science". There's still some active research being done using mixed fluid processes such as water & ammonia. Basicly you end up using the heat of condensation of one to heat the other... I don't believe much has panned out yet.
The big advantage a powerplant gives you is the effeciency of scale, and control. It's difficult to economically justify all the possible scrubbing technologies on every car. Even if you did, Joe Six-Pack will disconnect it so he can have 10 extra horsepower. But a powerplant... There you have the ability to implement new technologies that you could never implement on a car, and have a staff of trained technicians to operate and maintain it.
The final blow to Solar is simply that it isn't very "dense". If you had a 100% effecient convertion cell, you'd get something like 1200 watts per square foot, or roughly 1.5 horsepower. So my monster 260hp SUV (I drive offroad all the time... My family owns a ranch... whiners & vegans can go to hell... Anyone that thinks 260hp is too much has never towed a trailer in their life, etc..., etc..., fuck off... Yes I feel persecuted because I own a SUV. Did I cover everybody?) would need 174 square feet of collectors pointed at the sun. That's an area roughly equivalent to 5 and a half full sheets of plywood. Of course we don't have a 100% effecient solar panel, the good ones are around 22% - 25%, so multiply the area times 4... Now we're talking about a sizeable chunk of real estate that has to stay pointed at the sun. not going to happen on a moving vehicle. So we end up storing the power generated in batteries (double that area again), and you have to be able to fuel multiple cars at once to make it economically feasable... The charge times have to be low... Suddenly... You're talking about a single gas station that's the size of a city block. Good luck.
This is just plain wrong. Some of the first CD's I bought back in the 1980's are showing signs of degredation. The aluminium reflective layer is starting to oxidize at the outer edge, and causing the plastic layers to delaminate. These CD's will be useless by 2010. Note: I have never owned a car with a CD player. They've never been stored in the sun.
Perhaps CD's of more recent manufacture have better storage characteristics, but the first generation CD's are terrible.
Is this some post generation X thing? We Gen-X'ers don't get it.... But then we seem to have dropped off everyone's radar. Anyhow...
They gave us a new UI to Windows 3.1 and called it Windows 95.
Fluff... Not systems research....
They created NT by adding features of VMS and Unix to Windows 3.1.
Bolted UI fluff onto ancient systems that worked better than NT does. Systems research? Hmmm... No... At Pike's level, this was an engineering exercise. One that reminds me of something Thomas Edison once said... and I have to paraphrase, but it went something like "Why yes, I've learned quite a bit. I know of several thousand things that won't work!".
App, language, app, hardware..., and hardware. You bring up some good examples, but none of these are systems research. Ok, I'll ceede PDA OS development, but that's minor really.... However, all of these should enable new systems research, and I think that's one of the things he's complaining about. We have some really cool new stuff that should enable new and exciting systems reseach. But nobody's doing it.
I guess WWW doesn't count?
I think you've hit the nail on the head. Pike is taking a too narrow view of the definition of "system". Although I can certainly see his points. In the larger picture, and its a bit of a streach, can we consider the WWW as a "system" in and of itself? Of course that would make Taco a "systems researcher"... Hmmm... Gonna have to think about that... does not compute... does not compute... (smoke... flames...):-)
But you could use the small number of truly random numbers to seed your pseudo-random number generator, and have a much larger pool of numbers to use in your simulation. Not perfect but somewhat better.
It shouldn't be too hard to include something like this into the/dev/random device drivers now used by several flavors of u*ix and spice the entropy pool.
(No, not the right to carry ridiculously powerful assault weapons. Yes, we know they're for "hunting" purposes only.)
Hunting isn't a constitutionally protected right. Far from it.
The 2nd amendment you allude to is there for one reason. Most people don't like to talk about it. It's there so the people hold the threat of violence over those who govern. Not for hunting, not for home defense, not for target shooting with ESR. It's there for waving at those who hold power, and saying "you work for us, remember?"
BTW - Statistically, weapons with military use/value have a better chance of getting 2nd amendment protection from the courts than those with marginal military value. At least those cases heard before the 1960's.:-)
Exams that test for knowledge should be the ONLY things that make up a final grade mark.
Nope. Sorry, thanks for playing.
In advanced classes, the material is far to complicated to pack into a final exam. I once took a graduate geology class involving water chemistry. One day, we got a problem something to the effect of "a puddle of water rests on an outcrop of dolomite at 25 deg. C. Assume equilibrium, what is the concentration of calcium in the water?" Man... if that had been on the final, the entire class would have failed. The derivation was something like 4 pages long, and took me 2 days.
Now maybe I'm slow... But I feel there's a case for homerwork credit in many upper division and graduate classes.
Two minutes late though sounds like she used to be a BOFH.
I find it amusing how many people on Slashdot rip on MCSE's.
Some of us rip on ALL certifications.
When a shop requires certifications (MCSE, Cisco, Novell, Solaris... don't care which), you can count on the following:
1. You will have a pointy haired boss. This person will be a "manager", and have little technical skill. He/She will not be able to actually evaluate your work at a technical level. He/She will use "industry standard" metrics to evaluate your performance. The fact that you have a $CERTIFICATE makes you a safe bet for them to hire, since they probably can't tell the difference between someone walking in off the street and lying their ass off, and a seasoned 10 year IT vet.
2. You will make roughly "industry standard" wage, since your boss will really have no idea what you may or may not be worth.
3. Your chances of getting promoted to management are close to nil. After all, you can't go promoting the people that do all the work. They're too hard to find!
4. Your shop will get dragged, kicking and screaming into new technologies, since these likely have no certifications, and therefore no way for management to evaluate their worth. Your positive opinion towards new technologies will be considered an attempt to fill your resume in a vain attempt at escape or promotion.
Get certified... Work for the clueless.
Temkin - Not Solaris certified... But US++++$ none the less.
Did anyone catch the paragraph on the second page about taking away protections of journalists & publishers? The last line of the paragraph states that the report will recommend "reduced privacy rights for cable modem users."
You must drive with the gas pedal floored continuously, otherwise your truck only uses a fraction of that amount of energy. At highway speeds you're probably using about 30 kw.
I take the fifth!:-)
But seriously... It might be a better approach to calculate it from the mileage. I get about 24 mpg in my truck. Gasoline has roughly 18,000 Btu per pound, something like 6.5 pounds per gallon...(from memory again...) so... 4875 Btu per mile... Of which I get to send about 15% to the pavement, due to the conversion effeciency of the engine/transmission. The rest is lost as heat. I wish I had the conversion factor handy to get from Btu's to watts. That would at least make this interesting... We could take this to the next step, by comparing it to hydrogen, but I don't have the data for hydrogen. I think it's like 40,000 Btu/lb. but I may be wrong. I'll bet that nobody will simply burn it in an internal combustion engine, and even then, I don't know what kind of mileage I'd get. So I'll stop here.
Because the first thing I'd do is try and improve the yield. The second thing I'd do is improve the process. In short, on #1, we disagree. Counter thought: Why are they investigating other algae? because they want to see which one works better, and gain insight into the mechanisms involved.
2. Watts are already a measure of energy (or work) per unit time.
Go read your electric bill. They charge you by Kwh. That's Kilo-watt-hours. For the rest of #2, I agree. I was feeling generally pessemistic yesterday.:-)
3. Not an issue
Exactly. Though I didn't make that clear in my original post. Nice thing is, you can do this with salt water. This will give arid regions something to do. They can pipe in ocean water, or use municipal effluent.
Oil is hard to find. This makes it valuable. Water and algae are not. This is bad for OPEC et al.
What are you smoking? The energy derived from oil makes it valuable. The lubricating properties of hydrocarbons are valuable. The fact that it is hard to find rates way down on the chart. Walking from California to New York is hard work. Guess what... Nobody is going to pay me for it.
Uh, am I the only one who failed to see any difference in opinion here? (Other than a refinement from general to specific?)
For starters, your cut/paste edit alters the meaning. In effect, you've misquoted me. The first line should have kept the "you're assuming".
Think of it this way. Evil requires intent. The oil companies are simply indifferent. It's kinda like the difference between murder and manslaughter, although that's probably being too easy on them.
I wonder how long before they get an "offer" from the oil industry in exchange for them moving their research in a "slightly different direction" (read: give up).
I think you're assuming the oil companies are inherently evil. When in fact they're just ruthless moneygrubbing companies. They're in the business of supplying energy. This sounds like it will be right up their alley. It will require automated production facilites on a vast scale, with highly trained staff, skilled in handling highly flammable material. Hmmmm... Sounds like a refinery to me.
But the thing that will attract them is the release from liability. Hydrogen doesn't pollute, so they'd have a golden opportunity to go from "most hated industry" to something kinder. It would be a major PR coup. No more drilling for oil. No more uncertain, expensive exploration. And to top it off, they'd get to lock in their profits.
There's a downside of course... I'd expect them to move to maintain their profits during conversion. This would probably look like foot dragging, but let's face it, we're talking about billions of dollars playing musical chairs, and this pulls a couple seats out and stops the music. It will take time for them to figure out how to make this work financially without upsetting too many apple carts.
Other potential problems:
1. Assuming they end up genetically engineering some algae to improve yield, or eliminate the "rest" phase, what impact will this have on the environment if/when it gets released? You can pretty much be assured that anything done on this scale will end up getting released to the environment. (imagine the atmoshere slowly getting reduced to nitrogen and water vapor via "feral" sea algae!)
2. What's the conversion effeciency? You get something like 1200 watts (from memory, don't roast me) of energy per hour per square foot of land via sunlight. How many square feet of land do we need to cover with algae ponds? Let's see... My truck has 143 hp, 745 watts per hp, that's 106Kw... divide by 1200... allow for 50% loss... we're talking 178 square feet. Assuming my numbers are close. So a 10 foot by 18 foot pond would produce enough hydrogen to run my truck for say 8 hours a day. Not bad. Somehow I suspect the losses will be higher. Solar panels are at 22%, so that's the lowest acceptable return. Assuming 200 million similar cars in America, that's 35.6 billion square feet, or 817,264 acres. As amazing at that sounds, it's only something like 1/30th of the farmland in California alone.
3. What environmental impact will the creation of 900,000+ acres of ponds have? (In the U.S. alone, just for cars...)
But back to "what goes through an oil baron's head"... That's easy... "Can I make more money off this than oil, what's the cost of conversion, and can I convert profitably?" Sadly, that's pretty much it.
Now hold on there... These things last at most days. I can't imagine that having that large an impact on CB sales. Perhaps you're thinking of the mid-seventies solar minimum? That lasted several years. The low sunspot numbers would have shut down skip propigation on 11 meters (CB).
As for shortwave... All this will do is move the "maximum useable frequency" (MUF) up. It will close down the 41m shortwave band, and cause great propigation for amateur radio operators on 12, 10, and 6 meters. Far from being a shame, this is when you take your 2m (144Mhz) rig up to the top of some hill, and try for those 1000+ mile contacts.:-)
In a case like this UCITA would be ruled unconstitutional.
Congress shall make no law...
Five immortal words.
Ahhh... But... Congress didn't pass any law prohibiting your speech. You agreed to a binding contract when you opened the box. If this contract limits your speech, it's your fault, not congress. That's why this is so bad. It's an end run around the constitution, and one that actually has some legal footing. All that's required is to recognize a "shrink wrap" contract license.
What worries me is if they're successful at this, what else can they use it for. Could this be extended to a full fledged contract? Something like "if you open this box, you agree to use only Micro$haft approved software for the remainder of your life". Sure, it sounds silly, but isn't UCITA getting just a bit too close to something like this? If other industries see this as a success, are they going to start selling their wares contingent on your agreeing to a contract?
"Here's your cup of scalding hot coffee, oops, wait a minute, you need to click here before I can give this to you.
One little problem for your assertion there... HNO3 dissociates in water to H+ and NO3-. NO3-, otherwise known as nitrate, is an essential nutrient for plants. It isn't plant-killer, it's plant food.
Close, but wrong, here's why.... NO3- is indeed plantfood, as is SO4--. But it's the hydrogen you have to worry about. pH is proportional to log[H+], or the activity of hydrogen ions (hydronium ions actually, H3O+) in solution. So while the anions are plant food, they exist in concert with highly reactive hydrogen ions, which lower the pH of water enough to cause damage to plant tissue. In most natural waters, this effect is buffered by CO2. CO2 forms carbonic acid when disolved in water and has a couple stages to its disassociation that resist the drop in pH. As pH drops ([H+] activity increases) the disassociation reaction shifts equilibrium towards H2CO3, which is volitile, and causes CO2 to exit the solution. Once the CO2 is gone the pH drops below 4 towards the really acid range.
This is why you see farmers put ammoinum nitrate and ammonium sulfate on their land rather than nitric or sulfuric acid.
Said SO2, NO2, and H2O all combine in the atmoshere to form H2SO4 and HNO3 and promptly rain down on some forest somewhere, killing it. CO2, is much less water soluble, and accumulates in the atmosphere much easier. CO2 does have the distinction of being the primary control of pH in most bodies of water on the planet.
The problem with burning fuel in an air atmosphere is that you can't exclude nitrogen from the combustion chaimber (I.C.E., not a fuel cell) and always seem to end up with a teeny bit of NO2.
The concept of a "horseshoe" orbit is laughable. If it is in a closed orbit, that orbit must be an ellipse (see Kepler's first Law).
Ahhh... Newtonian mechanics. BTW - Newton got thoroughly beaten by this little theory published by some guy named Einstein earlier this century.
But seriously... Newton's law's don't work very well for "n" bodies problems, where n > 2. Furthermore, there are some serious non-linear differential equations that come into play for something as complex as this. Think of it this way:
The asteroid would follow an elliptical orbit if all the other bodies acting on it stood still. Since the Earth, Mars, Venus, etc... are all moving, and in doing so act on each other, the "ellipse" gets smeared into this weird kidney bean shape. The stability of this orbit is questionable, and certainly this solution to the problem of co-existing with all the other planets/planetoids is rare. But it is certainly possible.
So just where on the disc does this layer live? If it's on the surface, can I polish it off and replace it with a inert layer? Chemically alter it? Does it become opaque across a broad spectrum, or just the few nm specified by the DVD standard?
It's not software, does DMCA and UCITA apply? I'll probably get a court summons for thinking these thoughts....
I just double checked the SLA/AUP available externally on @Home's website, and it still includes the server restriction. The one available from my house via "http://www" does not contain the server restriction. YMMV!
As I hinted above, servers are against the rules with @home.
Actually... You should go pull up the service agreement and read it again. It seems they've amended it recently. I was looking at it over the weekend, and all I could find was a section in "Service Characteristics" subsection "b" that basicly says "If you run a http or ftp server, someone may hack your box. Don't blame us." This surprised me, because it used to say "No servers of any kind. Period!". I'd post my SLA/AUP but it specificly restricts me doing this.
Your service agreement may read differently. In my area, @Home has lots of bandwidth. I've hit 550Kb/sec. on ftp downloads. (There's like 3 of us on the segment...:-) There's a 128k upload cap, which may account for the server restriction being removed. YMMV.
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Ethernet is run over common 50 Ohm coax. Did you ever think of zipping over to the local ham radio store and pick up a 50 Ohm gas lightning trap?
Also... Most people don't bother, but one end of the coax is supposed to have a grounded terminating resistor. Most people just tack on a regular old non-grounded terminator, and wonder why they keep frying boards. You can get away with it in a small room or office, but it is part of the spec... Kind of important when you start to approach the spec limits.
Temkin
Power plants efficiencies are almost maxed-out : it's a well developed science.
Not so sure I agree with you here. Thermodynamics is going to cost you 50% of whatever you burn... That's just the way it is. But most of the powerplants I'm familiar with top out at around 40%. That's quite a bit of energy to throw away just because "it's a well developed science". There's still some active research being done using mixed fluid processes such as water & ammonia. Basicly you end up using the heat of condensation of one to heat the other... I don't believe much has panned out yet.
The big advantage a powerplant gives you is the effeciency of scale, and control. It's difficult to economically justify all the possible scrubbing technologies on every car. Even if you did, Joe Six-Pack will disconnect it so he can have 10 extra horsepower. But a powerplant... There you have the ability to implement new technologies that you could never implement on a car, and have a staff of trained technicians to operate and maintain it.
The final blow to Solar is simply that it isn't very "dense". If you had a 100% effecient convertion cell, you'd get something like 1200 watts per square foot, or roughly 1.5 horsepower. So my monster 260hp SUV (I drive offroad all the time... My family owns a ranch... whiners & vegans can go to hell... Anyone that thinks 260hp is too much has never towed a trailer in their life, etc..., etc..., fuck off... Yes I feel persecuted because I own a SUV. Did I cover everybody?) would need 174 square feet of collectors pointed at the sun. That's an area roughly equivalent to 5 and a half full sheets of plywood. Of course we don't have a 100% effecient solar panel, the good ones are around 22% - 25%, so multiply the area times 4... Now we're talking about a sizeable chunk of real estate that has to stay pointed at the sun. not going to happen on a moving vehicle. So we end up storing the power generated in batteries (double that area again), and you have to be able to fuel multiple cars at once to make it economically feasable... The charge times have to be low... Suddenly... You're talking about a single gas station that's the size of a city block. Good luck.
Temkin
CD's last 100 years
This is just plain wrong. Some of the first CD's I bought back in the 1980's are showing signs of degredation. The aluminium reflective layer is starting to oxidize at the outer edge, and causing the plastic layers to delaminate. These CD's will be useless by 2010. Note: I have never owned a car with a CD player. They've never been stored in the sun.
Perhaps CD's of more recent manufacture have better storage characteristics, but the first generation CD's are terrible.
Temkin
Is this some post generation X thing? We Gen-X'ers don't get it.... But then we seem to have dropped off everyone's radar. Anyhow...
They gave us a new UI to Windows 3.1 and called it Windows 95.
Fluff... Not systems research....
They created NT by adding features of VMS and Unix to Windows 3.1.
Bolted UI fluff onto ancient systems that worked better than NT does. Systems research? Hmmm... No... At Pike's level, this was an engineering exercise. One that reminds me of something Thomas Edison once said... and I have to paraphrase, but it went something like "Why yes, I've learned quite a bit. I know of several thousand things that won't work!".
streaming media? Java? Voice recognition? PDAs? Crusoe?
App, language, app, hardware..., and hardware. You bring up some good examples, but none of these are systems research. Ok, I'll ceede PDA OS development, but that's minor really.... However, all of these should enable new systems research, and I think that's one of the things he's complaining about. We have some really cool new stuff that should enable new and exciting systems reseach. But nobody's doing it.
I guess WWW doesn't count?
I think you've hit the nail on the head. Pike is taking a too narrow view of the definition of "system". Although I can certainly see his points. In the larger picture, and its a bit of a streach, can we consider the WWW as a "system" in and of itself? Of course that would make Taco a "systems researcher"... Hmmm... Gonna have to think about that... does not compute... does not compute... (smoke... flames...) :-)
Temkin
But you could use the small number of truly random numbers to seed your pseudo-random number generator, and have a much larger pool of numbers to use in your simulation. Not perfect but somewhat better.
It shouldn't be too hard to include something like this into the /dev/random device drivers now used by several flavors of u*ix and spice the entropy pool.
Temkin
So is this going to cause my stratum 1 GPS linked NTP server to step time at midnight, or just slew? I'm thinking it'll just slew the clock.
Temkin
The question I'm asking is... Did they do it on purpose to identify the idiots in the herd?
Temkin
(No, not the right to carry ridiculously powerful assault weapons. Yes, we know they're for "hunting" purposes only.)
Hunting isn't a constitutionally protected right. Far from it.
The 2nd amendment you allude to is there for one reason. Most people don't like to talk about it. It's there so the people hold the threat of violence over those who govern. Not for hunting, not for home defense, not for target shooting with ESR. It's there for waving at those who hold power, and saying "you work for us, remember?"
BTW - Statistically, weapons with military use/value have a better chance of getting 2nd amendment protection from the courts than those with marginal military value. At least those cases heard before the 1960's. :-)
Temkin
Exams that test for knowledge should be the ONLY things that make up a final grade mark.
Nope. Sorry, thanks for playing.
In advanced classes, the material is far to complicated to pack into a final exam. I once took a graduate geology class involving water chemistry. One day, we got a problem something to the effect of "a puddle of water rests on an outcrop of dolomite at 25 deg. C. Assume equilibrium, what is the concentration of calcium in the water?" Man... if that had been on the final, the entire class would have failed. The derivation was something like 4 pages long, and took me 2 days.
Now maybe I'm slow... But I feel there's a case for homerwork credit in many upper division and graduate classes.
Two minutes late though sounds like she used to be a BOFH.
Temkin
I find it amusing how many people on Slashdot rip on MCSE's.
Some of us rip on ALL certifications.
When a shop requires certifications (MCSE, Cisco, Novell, Solaris... don't care which), you can count on the following:
1. You will have a pointy haired boss. This person will be a "manager", and have little technical skill. He/She will not be able to actually evaluate your work at a technical level. He/She will use "industry standard" metrics to evaluate your performance. The fact that you have a $CERTIFICATE makes you a safe bet for them to hire, since they probably can't tell the difference between someone walking in off the street and lying their ass off, and a seasoned 10 year IT vet.
2. You will make roughly "industry standard" wage, since your boss will really have no idea what you may or may not be worth.
3. Your chances of getting promoted to management are close to nil. After all, you can't go promoting the people that do all the work. They're too hard to find!
4. Your shop will get dragged, kicking and screaming into new technologies, since these likely have no certifications, and therefore no way for management to evaluate their worth. Your positive opinion towards new technologies will be considered an attempt to fill your resume in a vain attempt at escape or promotion.
Get certified... Work for the clueless.
Temkin - Not Solaris certified... But US++++$ none the less.
Did anyone catch the paragraph on the second page about taking away protections of journalists & publishers? The last line of the paragraph states that the report will recommend "reduced privacy rights for cable modem users."
Just what might these be? This sounds draconian.
Temkin
Doh! - The sound made when someone is beat with a clue stick. :-)
When I said "watts per hour, I was thinking "watthours". Dam my public education...
BTW, the solar energy flux at Earth orbit is about 1360W/m^2.
That's more interesting... That means the area calculation is off by roughly a factor of 9... Serves me right for working from memory.
Temkin
You must drive with the gas pedal floored continuously, otherwise your truck only uses a fraction of that amount of energy. At highway speeds you're probably using about 30 kw.
I take the fifth! :-)
But seriously... It might be a better approach to calculate it from the mileage. I get about 24 mpg in my truck. Gasoline has roughly 18,000 Btu per pound, something like 6.5 pounds per gallon...(from memory again...) so... 4875 Btu per mile... Of which I get to send about 15% to the pavement, due to the conversion effeciency of the engine/transmission. The rest is lost as heat. I wish I had the conversion factor handy to get from Btu's to watts. That would at least make this interesting... We could take this to the next step, by comparing it to hydrogen, but I don't have the data for hydrogen. I think it's like 40,000 Btu/lb. but I may be wrong. I'll bet that nobody will simply burn it in an internal combustion engine, and even then, I don't know what kind of mileage I'd get. So I'll stop here.
Temkin
1. Why bring up the gen-eng bogey-man?
Because the first thing I'd do is try and improve the yield. The second thing I'd do is improve the process. In short, on #1, we disagree. Counter thought: Why are they investigating other algae? because they want to see which one works better, and gain insight into the mechanisms involved.
2. Watts are already a measure of energy (or work) per unit time.
Go read your electric bill. They charge you by Kwh. That's Kilo-watt-hours. For the rest of #2, I agree. I was feeling generally pessemistic yesterday. :-)
3. Not an issue
Exactly. Though I didn't make that clear in my original post. Nice thing is, you can do this with salt water. This will give arid regions something to do. They can pipe in ocean water, or use municipal effluent.
Temkin
Oil is hard to find. This makes it valuable. Water and algae are not. This is bad for OPEC et al.
What are you smoking? The energy derived from oil makes it valuable. The lubricating properties of hydrocarbons are valuable. The fact that it is hard to find rates way down on the chart. Walking from California to New York is hard work. Guess what... Nobody is going to pay me for it.
Temkin
Uh, am I the only one who failed to see any difference in opinion here? (Other than a refinement from general to specific?)
For starters, your cut/paste edit alters the meaning. In effect, you've misquoted me. The first line should have kept the "you're assuming".
Think of it this way. Evil requires intent. The oil companies are simply indifferent. It's kinda like the difference between murder and manslaughter, although that's probably being too easy on them.
Temkin
I wonder how long before they get an "offer" from the oil industry in exchange for them moving their research in a "slightly different direction" (read: give up).
I think you're assuming the oil companies are inherently evil. When in fact they're just ruthless moneygrubbing companies. They're in the business of supplying energy. This sounds like it will be right up their alley. It will require automated production facilites on a vast scale, with highly trained staff, skilled in handling highly flammable material. Hmmmm... Sounds like a refinery to me.
But the thing that will attract them is the release from liability. Hydrogen doesn't pollute, so they'd have a golden opportunity to go from "most hated industry" to something kinder. It would be a major PR coup. No more drilling for oil. No more uncertain, expensive exploration. And to top it off, they'd get to lock in their profits.
There's a downside of course... I'd expect them to move to maintain their profits during conversion. This would probably look like foot dragging, but let's face it, we're talking about billions of dollars playing musical chairs, and this pulls a couple seats out and stops the music. It will take time for them to figure out how to make this work financially without upsetting too many apple carts.
Other potential problems:
1. Assuming they end up genetically engineering some algae to improve yield, or eliminate the "rest" phase, what impact will this have on the environment if/when it gets released? You can pretty much be assured that anything done on this scale will end up getting released to the environment. (imagine the atmoshere slowly getting reduced to nitrogen and water vapor via "feral" sea algae!)
2. What's the conversion effeciency? You get something like 1200 watts (from memory, don't roast me) of energy per hour per square foot of land via sunlight. How many square feet of land do we need to cover with algae ponds? Let's see... My truck has 143 hp, 745 watts per hp, that's 106Kw... divide by 1200... allow for 50% loss... we're talking 178 square feet. Assuming my numbers are close. So a 10 foot by 18 foot pond would produce enough hydrogen to run my truck for say 8 hours a day. Not bad. Somehow I suspect the losses will be higher. Solar panels are at 22%, so that's the lowest acceptable return. Assuming 200 million similar cars in America, that's 35.6 billion square feet, or 817,264 acres. As amazing at that sounds, it's only something like 1/30th of the farmland in California alone.
3. What environmental impact will the creation of 900,000+ acres of ponds have? (In the U.S. alone, just for cars...)
But back to "what goes through an oil baron's head"... That's easy... "Can I make more money off this than oil, what's the cost of conversion, and can I convert profitably?" Sadly, that's pretty much it.
Temkin
Now hold on there... These things last at most days. I can't imagine that having that large an impact on CB sales. Perhaps you're thinking of the mid-seventies solar minimum? That lasted several years. The low sunspot numbers would have shut down skip propigation on 11 meters (CB).
As for shortwave... All this will do is move the "maximum useable frequency" (MUF) up. It will close down the 41m shortwave band, and cause great propigation for amateur radio operators on 12, 10, and 6 meters. Far from being a shame, this is when you take your 2m (144Mhz) rig up to the top of some hill, and try for those 1000+ mile contacts. :-)
Temkin
In a case like this UCITA would be ruled unconstitutional.
Congress shall make no law...
Five immortal words.
Ahhh... But... Congress didn't pass any law prohibiting your speech. You agreed to a binding contract when you opened the box. If this contract limits your speech, it's your fault, not congress. That's why this is so bad. It's an end run around the constitution, and one that actually has some legal footing. All that's required is to recognize a "shrink wrap" contract license.
What worries me is if they're successful at this, what else can they use it for. Could this be extended to a full fledged contract? Something like "if you open this box, you agree to use only Micro$haft approved software for the remainder of your life". Sure, it sounds silly, but isn't UCITA getting just a bit too close to something like this? If other industries see this as a success, are they going to start selling their wares contingent on your agreeing to a contract?
"Here's your cup of scalding hot coffee, oops, wait a minute, you need to click here before I can give this to you.
Temkin
One little problem for your assertion there... HNO3 dissociates in water to H+ and NO3-. NO3-, otherwise known as nitrate, is an essential nutrient for plants. It isn't plant-killer, it's plant food.
Close, but wrong, here's why.... NO3- is indeed plantfood, as is SO4--. But it's the hydrogen you have to worry about. pH is proportional to log[H+], or the activity of hydrogen ions (hydronium ions actually, H3O+) in solution. So while the anions are plant food, they exist in concert with highly reactive hydrogen ions, which lower the pH of water enough to cause damage to plant tissue. In most natural waters, this effect is buffered by CO2. CO2 forms carbonic acid when disolved in water and has a couple stages to its disassociation that resist the drop in pH. As pH drops ([H+] activity increases) the disassociation reaction shifts equilibrium towards H2CO3, which is volitile, and causes CO2 to exit the solution. Once the CO2 is gone the pH drops below 4 towards the really acid range.
This is why you see farmers put ammoinum nitrate and ammonium sulfate on their land rather than nitric or sulfuric acid.
Temkin
Said SO2, NO2, and H2O all combine in the atmoshere to form H2SO4 and HNO3 and promptly rain down on some forest somewhere, killing it. CO2, is much less water soluble, and accumulates in the atmosphere much easier. CO2 does have the distinction of being the primary control of pH in most bodies of water on the planet.
The problem with burning fuel in an air atmosphere is that you can't exclude nitrogen from the combustion chaimber (I.C.E., not a fuel cell) and always seem to end up with a teeny bit of NO2.
Temkin
The concept of a "horseshoe" orbit is laughable. If it is in a closed orbit, that orbit must be an ellipse (see Kepler's first Law).
Ahhh... Newtonian mechanics. BTW - Newton got thoroughly beaten by this little theory published by some guy named Einstein earlier this century.
But seriously... Newton's law's don't work very well for "n" bodies problems, where n > 2. Furthermore, there are some serious non-linear differential equations that come into play for something as complex as this. Think of it this way:
The asteroid would follow an elliptical orbit if all the other bodies acting on it stood still. Since the Earth, Mars, Venus, etc... are all moving, and in doing so act on each other, the "ellipse" gets smeared into this weird kidney bean shape. The stability of this orbit is questionable, and certainly this solution to the problem of co-existing with all the other planets/planetoids is rare. But it is certainly possible.
Temkin
So just where on the disc does this layer live? If it's on the surface, can I polish it off and replace it with a inert layer? Chemically alter it? Does it become opaque across a broad spectrum, or just the few nm specified by the DVD standard?
It's not software, does DMCA and UCITA apply? I'll probably get a court summons for thinking these thoughts....
Temkin
I just double checked the SLA/AUP available externally on @Home's website, and it still includes the server restriction. The one available from my house via "http://www" does not contain the server restriction. YMMV!
Temkin
Sludge wrote:
As I hinted above, servers are against the rules with @home.
Actually... You should go pull up the service agreement and read it again. It seems they've amended it recently. I was looking at it over the weekend, and all I could find was a section in "Service Characteristics" subsection "b" that basicly says "If you run a http or ftp server, someone may hack your box. Don't blame us." This surprised me, because it used to say "No servers of any kind. Period!". I'd post my SLA/AUP but it specificly restricts me doing this.
Your service agreement may read differently. In my area, @Home has lots of bandwidth. I've hit 550Kb/sec. on ftp downloads. (There's like 3 of us on the segment... :-) There's a 128k upload cap, which may account for the server restriction being removed. YMMV.
Temkin