you would suddenly have craft who were on approach lose all control and by the time authorities tracked down the van and shut it off who knows how many planes would have crashed.
1. Pilot error is very specifically, the pilot not doing what pilot training says they're supposed to do - and what a computer would have done - in the given, predefined, pre-analyzed situation. Unanticipated situations are not classed as pilot error.
For example, Lauda Air Flight 004. There was a procedure for recovering in the event of an unanticipated thrust reversal event (which occurred on the flight). The pilot carried it out to the best of their ability but was unable to recover before the plane broke apart. Further analysis showed that the procedure was insufficient to actually recover (it was analyzed for a plane flying lower and slower, but didn't work at high / fast speeds). The crash was not classified as pilot error because they followed the procedure. In a different thrust reverser incident, TAM Flight 3054 had the thrust levers set all wrong. Even though the crew setting it wrong and in violation of the manual was the far likeliest explanation, they still didn't classify pilot error as more than a hypothesis because they couldn't prove that the thrust lever was actually set to a wrong position, rather than a malfunction in the thrust lever itself.
2. Boeing is behind Airbus when it comes to fly-by-wire.
No, pilot error means that they didn't do what they were supposed to do in a given predefined situation. And even many of the others were human error, on the ground side. Actual hardware faults as a whole are a very small minority of plane crashes.
Right, because system designers are idiots who are going to design the system suchly that a single rogue operator can take control of a dozen planes in a couple minutes time with nobody noticing and being able to stop him?
Even regular ATC centers are secure facilities with dozens of people - let alone any special "emergency situation" centre. Any attempt to take control of a plane from a pilot due to a thread that the pilot may be suicidal or a terrorist would be a Really Big F'Ing Deal that not only would bare minimum require shiftsup authorization, but is something that bloody everyone not just in the centre would hear about, but potentially all the way up to world leaders. It's not going to be Johnny Sneakymouse hitting the "crash" button a dozen times when nobody is looking. Because system designers aren't bloody morons.
You think he was steering that thing like the Wright Flier? The A320 is a highly automated plane. The decision to land in the Hudson was his, but everything else was fly-by-wire - yes, in glide mode too. You can't overrule it on the A320. Everything involved in keeping the wings level and nose at the gentlest possible angle that wouldn't stall was managed by the flight computer - which is why the plane didn't flip when it hit the water.
The chief engineer of the A320 project actually referred to the plane as "pilot-proof". If Sully had done absolutely nothing from the time the plane lost power, you know what would have happened? Apart from the plane heading to the Hudson, everything else would have been the same. The plane would have done its best to maintain its original trajectory and kept itself stable as long as it could without losing altitude. Then it would automatically have lost just enough altitude to keep it from stalling, keeping itself flying level for as long as physically possible. If Sully in such a situation had started jerking up on the controls trying to get altitude that the plane wasn't capable of achieving, you know what would have happened? Nothing. The plane would have ignored him.
The pilot in a modern plane like the A320 doesn't manage, and isn't even allowed to manage, the finer details of flying. The plane does that. The pilot is only there for general overarching strategy. The plane makes it happen.
80% of accidents are pilot error. I think the further we move toward automation, the better. Getting the pilot physically out of the plane is a major hurdle that one has to step over in that regard.
Such as the pilot's control hardware, indicators, windscreens, oxygen supply....
And I know some people will just go, "Well, what if the pilot or copilot on the ground goes rogue and takes over?" The obvious response is that they'd be operating in a secure facility with dozens of other people and extensive supervision; nobody is ever going to just let any random person secretly take over a plane without anyone else knowing. And no, ATC systems are not net connected. I work in an ATC center, when I need to look something up online while trying to debug a problem I have to use my cell phone or go back to my office.
Probably the simplest solution to all of this would just be an additional entry to the CPDLC standard, and the hardware changes necessary to support it: one that locks out the pilot from all control and switches the autopilot on, set to the last flight plan agreed to by both ground and the pilot. One would of course have to make sure that there's no way for the pilot, while he's still in control, to sneakily break the datalink communication stream fast enough that ground wouldn't have time from the onset of suspicious activity to send the command.
Having highly reliable communications would be critical for any pilot-override or remote piloting system. In each case, any cutoff in communications should force on the autopilot as per above until communications could be reestablished.
The fault in Prague isn't even near an injection well. There's no way it was directly caused by wastewater injection. Now, the smaller quake that led up to it was near a wastewater injection well, and there are some who think that was the trigger, while others disagree. But that's just an example of what I mentioned in my first post, the possibility of starting a cascade. But that's not as likely even if one wasn't trying to avoid triggering sizeable faults, something that the fact that there have been so even few moderate quakes in areas with injection wells despite the vast, vast amounts of wells that have been doing this for many years.
And lets not pretend like these are the only human activities that cause earthquakes. Draining aquifers causes earthquakes. Building and filling large dams causes earthquakes. Even fluctuating reservoir levels cause earthquakes. Building very large skyscrapers causes earthquakes. Large mining projects cause earthquakes. Everything we do that adds or substracts weight from an area can trigger earthquakes. So why the focus on this particular cause? Do you mistakenly believe that this is somehow unusually severe? You talk about the merely cascaded 5,6 Prague quake that caused some damage. The 6,3 1967 Koynanagar Earthquake caused by Konya Dam killed 180 people and took out power to Bombay. Vajont Dam in Italy caused earthquakes, eventually destabilizing the slopes and sending a landslide into the filling reservoir and killing 2000 people. The 8,0 2008 Sichuan earthquake which killed 68.000 people, injured 376k people, left 5-11 million homeless was probably caused by Zipingpu Dam. Where's your outrage over this? Why all this outrage over these tiny quakes and the occasional moderate quake possibly triggered by a tiny quake, when there's far bigger induced seismicity causes out there?
Simple: it's your political view coloring your analysis of the situation.
The USGS and Oklahoma Geological Survey say that the quake was natural, but one study argues that 18 years of cumulative injection triggered a lesser fault, which started a cascade that led up to the major fault. Aka, the "you hit a rock, it hits a bigger one, etc" scenario I outlined in my initial post.
The energy is the internal energy of billions upon billions of gallons of water.
1) Gallons are not a unit of energy. 2) A billion gallons of water is about the mass of a cube of rock 77 meters per side. The sort of fault that can unleash a major earthquake is hundreds of kilometers long and extends a good way through the crust.
It is the boulder. You're hitting at it with a mallet. It doesn't care.
In fact, it is significant with respect to fault forces - as demonstrated by the clear empirical link between disposal wells drilled into basement rock and seismic activity.
Link with minor quakes They are the little rocks and occasional moderate sized rock that you can actually budge with your mallet.
Everyone automatically talks about "fracking" in relation to the quakes. Fracking is just a brief pulse. Wastewater injection in disposal wells is a far more likely culprit if these are human-induced.
No, it's a ridiculous claim, which is why it got so much incredulous coverage. The Yellowstone Caldera is not undergoing any unusual activity, just its normal random fluctuations, and nor is it something that even a hundred Tsar Bombas could readily destabilize.
I look at it like being on a mountain and whacking at rocks with a big mallet. Little ones, you'll almost certainly send rolling down the slope. Ones that are several dozen kilograms, it'll be hit or miss whether you'll make enough of an impact to send them down the mountainside. But giant multi-tonne boulders? You're irrelevant to them, even if they're already precariously balanced.
On the other hand, there's always the possibility that you might hit a smaller rock, sending it cascading into a bigger rock, etc, and ultimately trigger a chain reaction that was already sitting there on a knife's edge. But the odds of this, just hitting rocks at random (let alone deliberately trying to avoid precariously balanced rocks), is very low.
The amount of energy people are putting into the ground compared to the scale of the forces involved in major faults is pretty much irrelevant. Even if the fault is "ready to go", you're still hardly affecting it. There's always the chance you might start a cascade of slips... but that's unlikely, even if you weren't deliberately trying to avoid working near major faults - and drillers do try to avoid working near major faults.
Or perhaps I'm misunderstanding the concept. I was picturing that it was not taking spacial information into account, that it was just recording the spectral information for whatever was in front of the sensor. But I went to the Wikipedia page for hyperspectral imaging and it sounds like it records a full spectrum for each pixel of a whole detailed image.
Now I think I understand what's going on here and why the data recorded would be so large. But I don't think the limitations are as great as you make them out to be. If you really need a large number of pixels spectrally imaged, then you probably have some very specific task in mind, rather than trying to pick out rare compounds' spectral signatures from a complex mixture, and so can afford to be selective on what spectral components you observe. If you're trying to identify some particular compound, then you probably don't need highly detailed positional information and can just throw it away, bin everything together, and rapidly reduce your SNR.
I can also readily envision all sorts of hybrid approaches between these two endpoints. For example, one could gather more detailed spectrums for a small number of pixels and less detailed spectrums for a greater number of pixels, and associate the two together. This could be done generally, just by having your "detailed" pixels scattered evenly across the scene, or intelligently, by having the results from your lower spectral resolution / higher spatial resolution scan influence the selection of pixels for your higher spectral resolution / lower spatial resolution points (or vice versa). For example, if you're looking for a very precise spectral signal in a scene that will exist in only a few pixels, you could provide to the chip some sort of descriptive format that describes the spectral signature you're looking for, and the chip would start out with a scan that rules out "clearly the wrong spectrum" pixels, keep collecting data on the scene, rule out "okay, now I'm pretty sure these are wrong too" pixels, and so forth until it's only collecting data on a very small number of pixels.
But honestly, most of the sort of applications that I would have interest in have no need for spatial resolution of any kind. I'd prefer to have the object take up the full sensor, or choose what portion of the sensor to use and bin it all together.
Okay, that doesn't really answer the question (not doubting your personal experience here). The question was:
" why would it be producing GB/s of data?"
And the time component is obvious... you don't wand to look at the same object without moving with your handy for 2 hours to get the required SNR to be able to do a spectral analysis.
Again, I don't see how that explains a "per second" aspect. If you need X bytes of data, you need X bytes data, why would one be sitting around for shorter or longer than necessary? And how does improving your SNR increase your data flow? You only need one value per frequency, what could possibly be the purpose of repeatedly reporting new data for a given frequency rather than just the final result?
And again, not really getting how this could possibly be gigs of data, let alone "gigs per second times 2 hours". If you're scanning - I don't know what wavelengths are typical, so lets say 100-5100nm. And lets say each measurement is 8 byte double precision. 2 gigs per second for two hours is 600 TB, or 74 trillion spectral readings. That means your spectral resolution precision is 6,8e-11nn. There's no way you're seriously recording that high of a precision, is there?
Out of curiosity, why would it be producing GB/s of data? First off, I don't even see why there would be a "per second" component in that, wouldn't there be a fixed data size per scan based on the spectral resolution? And even if that was too much the chip could pre-process that into a compressed form - while there's a lot of "noise" in some regions, spectrums also have huge regions of constant or near-constant slope.
Where does the GB/s come from?
BTW, there are now dozens of cell phones that record 4k video. Next gen chips can do so at 120p. That's over 3 GB/s raw if 24-bit color - processed in realtime into H264 video.
* I'm somewhat of a rockhound. The ability to ID an unfamiliar mineral would be great.
* I like mushroom hunting. The problem is that one has to ignore the vast majority of mushrooms because there's just so vastly many species and some can only be distinguished microscopically. But the list of dangerous mycotoxins is actually surprisingly short. The ability to accurately detect whether there's a dangerous amount of a mycotoxin in a sample would help alleviate a lot of doubts. Those who like mushrooms for their recreational uses rather than cullinary uses would also like to know how high the psilocybin levels are.
* The same applies to usefulness for identifying dangerous or useful compounds in unfamiliar plant species
Hypochondriacs would kill for a device like this, if it worked - aka checking for various contaminants on every product they buy and everything they put into their body. I'm sure environmental groups would love to just be able to walk around the outskirts of a chemical facility that they're protesting and take and analyze samples with their phones rather than having to send them at significant cost into the lab. Plant growers breeders could check to see whether their fruits, vegetables, etc have a unique nutritional / etc profile, or how that changes depending on climactic conditions, soil, and fertilization practices - again without taking huge numbers of samples. Vegetarians could check for chemicals only found in meat in their food. And on and on.
Really, there's no shortage of things one could do if they could ID chemical compositions without the effort and cost of laboratory testing today. So long as the system works well enough, that is. I have a suspicion that even if such a thing hits the market, it's probably going to only be able to pick out really pronounced spectral signatures - one might not have so much luck at detecting say an arbitrary protein at ppm quantities.
Still, even a very limited system would be useful.
Well, there's also the fact that it's easier to put pressure on Indiana than on Saudi Arabia.
It's easy to demand that companies step into the foreign policy realm, and I'm sympathetic to that argument - but as a general rule, a company taking a foreign policy stance has no effect other than simply giving up the market altogether. It's on the domestic side that they have a lot more influence.
If one wants pressure on countries with these sort of behaviors, it should come from the top: the White House. However, things like womens' and gay rights are usually seen as "interfering in the domestic affairs of other countries", and they're often hesitant to do that., preferring instead fo keep relations friendly to maintain support for issues that they consider of greater geopolitical import, such as containing rogue states, preventing proliferation, stopping terrorist groups, etc. Of course, this opens them up to charges of hypocrisy.
First off, what the heck is going wrong in your life that makes you feel the need to tell strangers "Suck it" and "you alcoholiic piece of shit" when talking about plastics? Even without knowing what it is, I honestly feel sorry and am worried for you.
Secondly, we're not talking about plastic milk jugs. You mentioned camelback water pouches. They're quite clearly not the same thing - one is highly rigid, the other is highly flexible. Camelback water pouches are not all made the same. Search on the net and you'll find PVC, polyurethane, and polyethylene-with-plasiticizers camelbacks - on the ones that say what they're made out of. Most don't.
I just pulled out my camelback to see what type of plastic it's made out of. It's not labeled. But there are clearly at least three different plastics (body, cap, tube) involved - they look and feel different in many regards.
It's just a very bad idea to take a camelback and fill it with a potentially corrosive liquid that it's not rated to handle, as you suggested. Of course there exist plastics that tolerate pure ethanol. Your best bet to avoid dissolution, leaching, and leaks would be precisely what I said in #3: the bottle that the alcohol itself came in (despite the fact that it's bulky and not flexible). I definitely would not advise using a camelback as you suggested.
Of course, even on that downside, while alcohol bottles are designed to handle the potentially corrosive properties of ethanol, they're not designed to handle the rigors of backpacking. I think it most cases one would survive okay, but backpacking can be pretty hard on one's supplies.
Beyond all this, though, I must stress... get some sleep, or take care of whatever else is going wrong over there. I hope you're okay...
Trying... so far I've only gotten little strips to work, not enough to make a coherent whole. But I've been doing it during the winter where there was snow, aka reflection... I'm hoping I'll have better luck the next time I try now that the snow is melted.
Well, yes, that's what it does in water.;) But as you can smell dissolved ammonia in water, it clearly outgasses. I wonder if there would be an effective, portable way to thoroughly outgas it. Or catalyze its decomposition it for that matter - 4 NH3 + 3 O2 -> 2 N2 + 3 H2O.
Oh hey, apparently a number of bladders are made of polyurethane. Yeah, have fun storing ethanol in that, it's even less compatible with ethanol than PVC. Other ethanol-incompatible materials include natural rubber, polyamide, and many types of fiberglass. Strong ethanol corrodes aluminum, too.
Again, just driving the point home: everclear and water are not the same thing. Don't treat them the same.
Slashdot Mirror
Right, as if autoland doesn't exist?
1. Pilot error is very specifically, the pilot not doing what pilot training says they're supposed to do - and what a computer would have done - in the given, predefined, pre-analyzed situation. Unanticipated situations are not classed as pilot error.
For example, Lauda Air Flight 004. There was a procedure for recovering in the event of an unanticipated thrust reversal event (which occurred on the flight). The pilot carried it out to the best of their ability but was unable to recover before the plane broke apart. Further analysis showed that the procedure was insufficient to actually recover (it was analyzed for a plane flying lower and slower, but didn't work at high / fast speeds). The crash was not classified as pilot error because they followed the procedure. In a different thrust reverser incident, TAM Flight 3054 had the thrust levers set all wrong. Even though the crew setting it wrong and in violation of the manual was the far likeliest explanation, they still didn't classify pilot error as more than a hypothesis because they couldn't prove that the thrust lever was actually set to a wrong position, rather than a malfunction in the thrust lever itself.
2. Boeing is behind Airbus when it comes to fly-by-wire.
No, pilot error means that they didn't do what they were supposed to do in a given predefined situation. And even many of the others were human error, on the ground side. Actual hardware faults as a whole are a very small minority of plane crashes.
Right, because system designers are idiots who are going to design the system suchly that a single rogue operator can take control of a dozen planes in a couple minutes time with nobody noticing and being able to stop him?
Even regular ATC centers are secure facilities with dozens of people - let alone any special "emergency situation" centre. Any attempt to take control of a plane from a pilot due to a thread that the pilot may be suicidal or a terrorist would be a Really Big F'Ing Deal that not only would bare minimum require shiftsup authorization, but is something that bloody everyone not just in the centre would hear about, but potentially all the way up to world leaders. It's not going to be Johnny Sneakymouse hitting the "crash" button a dozen times when nobody is looking. Because system designers aren't bloody morons.
You think he was steering that thing like the Wright Flier? The A320 is a highly automated plane. The decision to land in the Hudson was his, but everything else was fly-by-wire - yes, in glide mode too. You can't overrule it on the A320. Everything involved in keeping the wings level and nose at the gentlest possible angle that wouldn't stall was managed by the flight computer - which is why the plane didn't flip when it hit the water.
The chief engineer of the A320 project actually referred to the plane as "pilot-proof". If Sully had done absolutely nothing from the time the plane lost power, you know what would have happened? Apart from the plane heading to the Hudson, everything else would have been the same. The plane would have done its best to maintain its original trajectory and kept itself stable as long as it could without losing altitude. Then it would automatically have lost just enough altitude to keep it from stalling, keeping itself flying level for as long as physically possible. If Sully in such a situation had started jerking up on the controls trying to get altitude that the plane wasn't capable of achieving, you know what would have happened? Nothing. The plane would have ignored him.
The pilot in a modern plane like the A320 doesn't manage, and isn't even allowed to manage, the finer details of flying. The plane does that. The pilot is only there for general overarching strategy. The plane makes it happen.
Even when crashing.
80% of accidents are pilot error. I think the further we move toward automation, the better. Getting the pilot physically out of the plane is a major hurdle that one has to step over in that regard.
Such as the pilot's control hardware, indicators, windscreens, oxygen supply....
And I know some people will just go, "Well, what if the pilot or copilot on the ground goes rogue and takes over?" The obvious response is that they'd be operating in a secure facility with dozens of other people and extensive supervision; nobody is ever going to just let any random person secretly take over a plane without anyone else knowing. And no, ATC systems are not net connected. I work in an ATC center, when I need to look something up online while trying to debug a problem I have to use my cell phone or go back to my office.
Probably the simplest solution to all of this would just be an additional entry to the CPDLC standard, and the hardware changes necessary to support it: one that locks out the pilot from all control and switches the autopilot on, set to the last flight plan agreed to by both ground and the pilot. One would of course have to make sure that there's no way for the pilot, while he's still in control, to sneakily break the datalink communication stream fast enough that ground wouldn't have time from the onset of suspicious activity to send the command.
Having highly reliable communications would be critical for any pilot-override or remote piloting system. In each case, any cutoff in communications should force on the autopilot as per above until communications could be reestablished.
I'm extremely curious, how exactly are you managing to post on Slashdot from the year 1963?
The fault in Prague isn't even near an injection well. There's no way it was directly caused by wastewater injection. Now, the smaller quake that led up to it was near a wastewater injection well, and there are some who think that was the trigger, while others disagree. But that's just an example of what I mentioned in my first post, the possibility of starting a cascade. But that's not as likely even if one wasn't trying to avoid triggering sizeable faults, something that the fact that there have been so even few moderate quakes in areas with injection wells despite the vast, vast amounts of wells that have been doing this for many years.
And lets not pretend like these are the only human activities that cause earthquakes. Draining aquifers causes earthquakes. Building and filling large dams causes earthquakes. Even fluctuating reservoir levels cause earthquakes. Building very large skyscrapers causes earthquakes. Large mining projects cause earthquakes. Everything we do that adds or substracts weight from an area can trigger earthquakes. So why the focus on this particular cause? Do you mistakenly believe that this is somehow unusually severe? You talk about the merely cascaded 5,6 Prague quake that caused some damage. The 6,3 1967 Koynanagar Earthquake caused by Konya Dam killed 180 people and took out power to Bombay. Vajont Dam in Italy caused earthquakes, eventually destabilizing the slopes and sending a landslide into the filling reservoir and killing 2000 people. The 8,0 2008 Sichuan earthquake which killed 68.000 people, injured 376k people, left 5-11 million homeless was probably caused by Zipingpu Dam. Where's your outrage over this? Why all this outrage over these tiny quakes and the occasional moderate quake possibly triggered by a tiny quake, when there's far bigger induced seismicity causes out there?
Simple: it's your political view coloring your analysis of the situation.
The USGS and Oklahoma Geological Survey say that the quake was natural, but one study argues that 18 years of cumulative injection triggered a lesser fault, which started a cascade that led up to the major fault. Aka, the "you hit a rock, it hits a bigger one, etc" scenario I outlined in my initial post.
1) Gallons are not a unit of energy.
2) A billion gallons of water is about the mass of a cube of rock 77 meters per side. The sort of fault that can unleash a major earthquake is hundreds of kilometers long and extends a good way through the crust.
It is the boulder. You're hitting at it with a mallet. It doesn't care.
In fact, it is significant with respect to fault forces - as demonstrated by the clear empirical link between disposal wells drilled into basement rock and seismic activity.
Link with minor quakes They are the little rocks and occasional moderate sized rock that you can actually budge with your mallet.
Everyone automatically talks about "fracking" in relation to the quakes. Fracking is just a brief pulse. Wastewater injection in disposal wells is a far more likely culprit if these are human-induced.
No, it's a ridiculous claim, which is why it got so much incredulous coverage. The Yellowstone Caldera is not undergoing any unusual activity, just its normal random fluctuations, and nor is it something that even a hundred Tsar Bombas could readily destabilize.
I look at it like being on a mountain and whacking at rocks with a big mallet. Little ones, you'll almost certainly send rolling down the slope. Ones that are several dozen kilograms, it'll be hit or miss whether you'll make enough of an impact to send them down the mountainside. But giant multi-tonne boulders? You're irrelevant to them, even if they're already precariously balanced.
On the other hand, there's always the possibility that you might hit a smaller rock, sending it cascading into a bigger rock, etc, and ultimately trigger a chain reaction that was already sitting there on a knife's edge. But the odds of this, just hitting rocks at random (let alone deliberately trying to avoid precariously balanced rocks), is very low.
The amount of energy people are putting into the ground compared to the scale of the forces involved in major faults is pretty much irrelevant. Even if the fault is "ready to go", you're still hardly affecting it. There's always the chance you might start a cascade of slips... but that's unlikely, even if you weren't deliberately trying to avoid working near major faults - and drillers do try to avoid working near major faults.
Possible - but very unlikely.
Or perhaps I'm misunderstanding the concept. I was picturing that it was not taking spacial information into account, that it was just recording the spectral information for whatever was in front of the sensor. But I went to the Wikipedia page for hyperspectral imaging and it sounds like it records a full spectrum for each pixel of a whole detailed image.
Now I think I understand what's going on here and why the data recorded would be so large. But I don't think the limitations are as great as you make them out to be. If you really need a large number of pixels spectrally imaged, then you probably have some very specific task in mind, rather than trying to pick out rare compounds' spectral signatures from a complex mixture, and so can afford to be selective on what spectral components you observe. If you're trying to identify some particular compound, then you probably don't need highly detailed positional information and can just throw it away, bin everything together, and rapidly reduce your SNR.
I can also readily envision all sorts of hybrid approaches between these two endpoints. For example, one could gather more detailed spectrums for a small number of pixels and less detailed spectrums for a greater number of pixels, and associate the two together. This could be done generally, just by having your "detailed" pixels scattered evenly across the scene, or intelligently, by having the results from your lower spectral resolution / higher spatial resolution scan influence the selection of pixels for your higher spectral resolution / lower spatial resolution points (or vice versa). For example, if you're looking for a very precise spectral signal in a scene that will exist in only a few pixels, you could provide to the chip some sort of descriptive format that describes the spectral signature you're looking for, and the chip would start out with a scan that rules out "clearly the wrong spectrum" pixels, keep collecting data on the scene, rule out "okay, now I'm pretty sure these are wrong too" pixels, and so forth until it's only collecting data on a very small number of pixels.
But honestly, most of the sort of applications that I would have interest in have no need for spatial resolution of any kind. I'd prefer to have the object take up the full sensor, or choose what portion of the sensor to use and bin it all together.
Okay, that doesn't really answer the question (not doubting your personal experience here). The question was:
" why would it be producing GB/s of data?"
Again, I don't see how that explains a "per second" aspect. If you need X bytes of data, you need X bytes data, why would one be sitting around for shorter or longer than necessary? And how does improving your SNR increase your data flow? You only need one value per frequency, what could possibly be the purpose of repeatedly reporting new data for a given frequency rather than just the final result?
And again, not really getting how this could possibly be gigs of data, let alone "gigs per second times 2 hours". If you're scanning - I don't know what wavelengths are typical, so lets say 100-5100nm. And lets say each measurement is 8 byte double precision. 2 gigs per second for two hours is 600 TB, or 74 trillion spectral readings. That means your spectral resolution precision is 6,8e-11nn. There's no way you're seriously recording that high of a precision, is there?
Out of curiosity, why would it be producing GB/s of data? First off, I don't even see why there would be a "per second" component in that, wouldn't there be a fixed data size per scan based on the spectral resolution? And even if that was too much the chip could pre-process that into a compressed form - while there's a lot of "noise" in some regions, spectrums also have huge regions of constant or near-constant slope.
Where does the GB/s come from?
BTW, there are now dozens of cell phones that record 4k video. Next gen chips can do so at 120p. That's over 3 GB/s raw if 24-bit color - processed in realtime into H264 video.
Nice for a lot of things.
* I'm somewhat of a rockhound. The ability to ID an unfamiliar mineral would be great.
* I like mushroom hunting. The problem is that one has to ignore the vast majority of mushrooms because there's just so vastly many species and some can only be distinguished microscopically. But the list of dangerous mycotoxins is actually surprisingly short. The ability to accurately detect whether there's a dangerous amount of a mycotoxin in a sample would help alleviate a lot of doubts. Those who like mushrooms for their recreational uses rather than cullinary uses would also like to know how high the psilocybin levels are.
* The same applies to usefulness for identifying dangerous or useful compounds in unfamiliar plant species
Hypochondriacs would kill for a device like this, if it worked - aka checking for various contaminants on every product they buy and everything they put into their body. I'm sure environmental groups would love to just be able to walk around the outskirts of a chemical facility that they're protesting and take and analyze samples with their phones rather than having to send them at significant cost into the lab. Plant growers breeders could check to see whether their fruits, vegetables, etc have a unique nutritional / etc profile, or how that changes depending on climactic conditions, soil, and fertilization practices - again without taking huge numbers of samples. Vegetarians could check for chemicals only found in meat in their food. And on and on.
Really, there's no shortage of things one could do if they could ID chemical compositions without the effort and cost of laboratory testing today. So long as the system works well enough, that is. I have a suspicion that even if such a thing hits the market, it's probably going to only be able to pick out really pronounced spectral signatures - one might not have so much luck at detecting say an arbitrary protein at ppm quantities.
Still, even a very limited system would be useful.
Well, there's also the fact that it's easier to put pressure on Indiana than on Saudi Arabia.
It's easy to demand that companies step into the foreign policy realm, and I'm sympathetic to that argument - but as a general rule, a company taking a foreign policy stance has no effect other than simply giving up the market altogether. It's on the domestic side that they have a lot more influence.
If one wants pressure on countries with these sort of behaviors, it should come from the top: the White House. However, things like womens' and gay rights are usually seen as "interfering in the domestic affairs of other countries", and they're often hesitant to do that., preferring instead fo keep relations friendly to maintain support for issues that they consider of greater geopolitical import, such as containing rogue states, preventing proliferation, stopping terrorist groups, etc. Of course, this opens them up to charges of hypocrisy.
First off, what the heck is going wrong in your life that makes you feel the need to tell strangers "Suck it" and "you alcoholiic piece of shit" when talking about plastics? Even without knowing what it is, I honestly feel sorry and am worried for you.
Secondly, we're not talking about plastic milk jugs. You mentioned camelback water pouches. They're quite clearly not the same thing - one is highly rigid, the other is highly flexible. Camelback water pouches are not all made the same. Search on the net and you'll find PVC, polyurethane, and polyethylene-with-plasiticizers camelbacks - on the ones that say what they're made out of. Most don't.
I just pulled out my camelback to see what type of plastic it's made out of. It's not labeled. But there are clearly at least three different plastics (body, cap, tube) involved - they look and feel different in many regards.
It's just a very bad idea to take a camelback and fill it with a potentially corrosive liquid that it's not rated to handle, as you suggested. Of course there exist plastics that tolerate pure ethanol. Your best bet to avoid dissolution, leaching, and leaks would be precisely what I said in #3: the bottle that the alcohol itself came in (despite the fact that it's bulky and not flexible). I definitely would not advise using a camelback as you suggested.
Of course, even on that downside, while alcohol bottles are designed to handle the potentially corrosive properties of ethanol, they're not designed to handle the rigors of backpacking. I think it most cases one would survive okay, but backpacking can be pretty hard on one's supplies.
Beyond all this, though, I must stress... get some sleep, or take care of whatever else is going wrong over there. I hope you're okay...
Trying... so far I've only gotten little strips to work, not enough to make a coherent whole. But I've been doing it during the winter where there was snow, aka reflection... I'm hoping I'll have better luck the next time I try now that the snow is melted.
Well, yes, that's what it does in water. ;) But as you can smell dissolved ammonia in water, it clearly outgasses. I wonder if there would be an effective, portable way to thoroughly outgas it. Or catalyze its decomposition it for that matter - 4 NH3 + 3 O2 -> 2 N2 + 3 H2O.
Slashdot eats the third-power symbol, along with tons of other unicode characters. :
If you want to recreate an American beer, yes.
Oh hey, apparently a number of bladders are made of polyurethane. Yeah, have fun storing ethanol in that, it's even less compatible with ethanol than PVC. Other ethanol-incompatible materials include natural rubber, polyamide, and many types of fiberglass. Strong ethanol corrodes aluminum, too.
Again, just driving the point home: everclear and water are not the same thing. Don't treat them the same.