Yeah, having a good answer to the standard who's-going-to-stop-me question -- "You and what army?" -- always helps;) The army usually gets their way in congress. I found one site that listed near that spectrum:
406-420 Military trunked systems, VA Hospitals, U.S. Postal Service, Federal prison trunked systems, U.S. Forest Service links, FBI links, Federal court house security, DEA, State Department, HIDTA, BLM links, Federal Protective Service, Weather Service links, & telemetry data.
Since it's King pushing this, I can only assume that he believes that ham radio operators are secretly recruiting for al-Qaeda?
EEStor is entirely different from digital quantum capacitors. EESTOR relies on materials with ultra-high permittivity (there are a lot of problems with this which I won't go into here). Digital quantum capacitors (misleading called "digital quantum batteries" in the paper that introduced them) are a new concept, first proposed in late 2009. Here's the paper:
The paper suggests producing them with lithography, although I think there's some potential for molecular self-assembly. But either way, the question is, obviously, will they work? Who knows; nobody has ever attempted something like this. They work in *theory*, but....
So your argument is that, at best, it'd gain the IR absorption capability of a tiny amount of water vapor? Hardly impressive, even if it was fully saturated with liquid water. As for carbon aerogel, you probably just looked at that claim on Wikipedia that carbon aerogel only transmits 3% of IR radiation -- as though transmission is independent of thickness;) It's not really that impressive.
The best way to deal with IR is mutlilayered reflective foil (reflection is always better than absorption, plus they do an *excellent* job of it*). An ideal insulator is foil/high R value/foil/high R value/ and so forth, in as many layers as possible. So, for example, spacecraft insulation is excellent, consisting of many layers of gold foil separated by vacuum. Here on earth, vacuum is much harder to come by, but aerogel is close enough.
Want to talk about socialist policies? I think they've also tried that in Norway, how's that working for them? Two can play at the "Pick and Choose Socialist Countries" game. So let's ditch the red herring. If you really want to argue "Soviet Russia", argue that a music fee must inevitably be paired with communal land reforms and a planned economy.
As for food, could you please point to me where food can be duplicated at no cost, and the overwhelming majority of food that people eat is illegal duplicates? We're talking IP licensing, not tangible assets. A much closer analogy would be to basic research conducted by government agencies. We pay for it with our tax dollars, and all of the IP from their work enters the public domain.
No, you do not have the legal right to download music you don't own in Canada, even with the tax on blank CD-rs. You simply get screwed over by that one. This is different.
There is no practical difference between supply unreliability and demand reliability. You don't have to have one of them being stable. Your net unreliability is the sum of the unreliability of one plus the unreliability of the other.
"Demand outpacing supply" is what peakers are for. "Supply outpacing demand" is what standby is for.
Current supercaps are levelling out at a level below lead-acid, let alone li-ion. To get capacitance that beats li-ion batteries, you pretty much need to incorporate quantum effects. That is, at tiny scales, your discharge curve starts to take a stairstep appearance because power can't be broken down indefinitely. This lets you charge nano-capacitors to way higher voltages than macro-scale capacitors. They're limited only by the compressive strength of their walls and the tensile strength of their electrodes.
What types of batteries are you thinking of? The main stumbling blocks in high-energy forms of traditional li-ion batteries are electrode pulverization during intercalation. Li-ion batteries with a lithium metal anode have difficulties with dendrite formation.
How about other advanced batteries? Lithium-sulfur batteries have the stumbling blocks of polysulfide formation and migration across the membrane. Lithium-air batteries are limited by dendrite formation and electrode clogging. In fact, NAFION membranes are tricky in general (they're used for other advanced chemistries such Nickel-lithium batteries). And you can also look at some of the really out-there ideas, such as digital quantum capacitors, whose main stumbling blocks are unknown because it's such a crazy idea nobody has even started the most basic steps at trying to build them;)
One of my favorite things you could potentially do with aerogel is to make solid lighter-than-air structures. The best evacuated aerogels are about 20% lighter than air. Keeping them evacuated, of course, means sealing off their edges (aerogels are, unsurprisingly, gas-permeable), but the mass of such a seal rises proportional to the radius squared while the buoyant volume rises proportional to the volume cubed.
My reaction exactly. It's awful. And they didn't even mention that they're not talking about what is generally meant by "aerogel" -- silicon dioxide aerogel. They're talking about a less common form, carbon aerogel.
An interconnected mesh of carbon nanotubes is not a storage mechanism. It's not a capacitor. It's not a battery. It could perhaps be used as a scaffolding to store active anode or cathode materials -- but they haven't done that. And I have no clue how they'd go about making that into a capacitor, since a capacitor requires that your positive and negative sides *not* be interconnected -- but either way, they haven't done that either.
Aerogel is starting to make its way into backpacking gear -- for example, ground rolls. Of course, some designers stupidly just assume "High R value = Keeps you warm" and ignore the infrared aspect.
There's also "spinning standby", where you keep the boilers hot and the generator turning over but not producing power so that you can produce power on short notice. The grid has to be able to respond quickly, since there's not exactly a ton of capacitance in the wires to buffer demand fluctuations.
That's one of the things that I find so amusing about the people who rail against wind and solar power: "You'll ruin the grid by making production unstable!" Um, hello, *demand* is already unstable, which is effectively the same thing; this is nothing new. You do increase the need for peaking capacity, but this is overall an issue already very familiar to grid operators.
Why would you pay royalties *twice*? By paying the fee, you no longer need to pay for the music directly. It's included in the fee. That's the point of the fee.
I know this is about Canada, but in typical American fashion, I'll pretend it's about us.
A third of America opposed the Iraq war. We still had to pay ten thousand dollars per-person for it (via the WP's estimate of direct costs and economic damage of $3T). And you're complaining about ten dollars because you're one of an extreme minority of people who don't like music?
There's no way everyone will agree on every tax or expenditure levied by the government. But when it saves the majority of law-abiding citizens money while increasing individual freedoms AND encouraging content creation, I'd call that win/win/win.
It's very important from a practical standpoint. The more "legitimate" the uprising can present itself, the more it can come across as an alternate government, the easier it becomes to lend them military aid without coming across as an occupying power and motivating anti-American sentiment. Aka, US and other sympathetic governments recognize the government of east Libya, US allies with the government of east Libya, the government of east Libya registers a formal complaint about the occupation of western Libya by a militia formed primarily of foreign fighters and requests assistance to drive them out: military trainers and advisers, a no fly zone, a shipping blockade, perhaps even airstrikes. The US complies, while the rebels remain the public face, advancing and taking over western Libya. It's much better diplomatic cover than just coming in and taking out Qaddhafi and having it look like Yet Another US-Overthrown Government and fueling further anti-American sentiment among those who are already sceptical of our motives.
There are lots of ways you can deal with this equitably. The simplest would be to distribute it proportional to their conventional music sales. There are other approaches that could be done, however -- for example, they could create opt-out or opt-in add-ons to be shipped with popular music players that collect statistics about who listens to what, and use that to weigh receipts. I think most listeners would opt-in, wanting the artists they like to be rewarded.
One neat thing that could be done which you can't do with conventional sales is that you could use a non-linear distribution formula -- that is, support small artists to a greater degree than big artists proportional to their audience (something like, "SharesOfRevenue = FansWho'veRecentlyListenedToThem ^ 0.5". To greatly oversimplify, if there were two artists, A and B, and A has 1 million recent fans and B has 10 thousand recent fans, and there's $1m to go around, a linear distribution would say that A gets $999,010, and B gets $9,990. Under the above formula, A gets 1000 shares and B gets 100 shares, meaning A gets $909,090 and B gets $90,909.. Artist A hardly suffers, but artist B can now live on their work.
I've long supported ideas like this, so I really hope it comes into practice. It's a way for new to allow new artists to truly make a living without having to contractually give away the overwhelming majority of what they earn to leaching record labels. Take the labels out of the equation, and it takes a lot total less money to give equal compensation to the artists. Also, it's a way to stop people who actually pay for and compensate artists for their work from having to pick up the slack for those who leach.
Nope. Tor uses onion routing; the gateways have no clue who they're actually talking with. You have to use a Sybil attack (or, with lower success rates, one of a number of other types of attacks) to pull that off. A Sybil attack means basically taking over the whole network.
Well, one can always use Tor. All they'll see is the IP of a Tor gateway.
Now, it's not like Tor is invulnerable. Both Tor and I2P (Tor's prodigal sibling) have weaknesses -- the most difficult to address being Sybil attacks. Both need to do a lot more to fight against Sybil attacks, including some sort of Hashcash system to increase the cost of attacks, and automated data replication/caching in order to make the analyzing the results for who transferred what data/requests and what was simply an automated transfer/request harder to determine.
But the key thing is, you have to be doing the attack *before* the violation you want to investigate occurs; otherwise, who knows who it was who sent that message to the gateway?
Anyway, a friendly reminder: running a darknet like Tor or I2P is a public service. The security of both relies greatly on their number of servers, and if you're worried about it being a big load on your system, you can throttle the available bandwidth on both. And another friendly reminder: keep the file-sharing off Tor; it's not designed for that, and you can hurt the network badly by it (and you're likely to mess up and expose yourself any way). If you must file share, do it on I2P, with tools designed specifically to operate within I2P (iMule, i2psnark, etc). Beyond that, from a practical point of view, Tor is slower even for files transferred entirely within the darknet, Tor gateways are designed to block P2P traffic, and even if you were to work around them, it'd be appallingly slow.
Really? Having the sound change properly as you turn your head is "placebo effect"?
That said, 24 bit sound and absurd bitrates and sample rates are bunk. Honesty, I think adding in better spatial information is probably the only relevant frontier one could pursue in terms of file formats... and it's not very practical at that. I mean, technically, with enough detailed information and a good enough sound system**, one could walk toward where the lead singer of a band is "standing", even in the middle of a room, and hear their voice louder without necessarily increasing all of the sounds from that same "direction". (like the difference between a point light and a directional light in graphics) However, this would require either many speakers, scattered around the room and able to determine each other's location with reasonable accuracy, or a system with fewer speakers which can "throw" sound to localized regions, such as some of the ultrasonic interference-based speakers -- and the benefit is of questionable utility.
Oh, and there could also be some benefit to not pruning out infrasonic sounds during compression as sometimes happens. You can't hear them, but if they're loud enough you can feel them. Now, many subs can't reproduce infrasonic sound loud enough for you to feel, but some can. A particularly neat concept designed especially for infrasonic sound is that of a rotary subwoofer, which is basically a reinforced desk fan which can rapidly change the pitch on its blades from 45 degrees forward to 45 degrees backward. Thus it can reproduce with high amplitude any sound all the way down to zero hertz (direct pressure, no oscillation), and up to however fast the blade angles can be changed. I know of one on the market, but it's way overpriced.
Well, yes, if you want a boosted design. But you pay for the U238 tamper in terms of mass and a dirty burn. The largest nuclear weapon ever detonated, the Tsar Bomba, was actually the cleanest, as they replaced the U238 tamper with a lead one -- cutting its yield in half, but making it so 97% of its yield was from fusion.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, having a good answer to the standard who's-going-to-stop-me question -- "You and what army?" -- always helps ;) The army usually gets their way in congress. I found one site that listed near that spectrum:
Since it's King pushing this, I can only assume that he believes that ham radio operators are secretly recruiting for al-Qaeda?
EEStor? "Abandon All Hope Ye Who Enter Here".
EEStor is entirely different from digital quantum capacitors. EESTOR relies on materials with ultra-high permittivity (there are a lot of problems with this which I won't go into here). Digital quantum capacitors (misleading called "digital quantum batteries" in the paper that introduced them) are a new concept, first proposed in late 2009. Here's the paper:
Link
The paper suggests producing them with lithography, although I think there's some potential for molecular self-assembly. But either way, the question is, obviously, will they work? Who knows; nobody has ever attempted something like this. They work in *theory*, but....
So your argument is that, at best, it'd gain the IR absorption capability of a tiny amount of water vapor? Hardly impressive, even if it was fully saturated with liquid water. As for carbon aerogel, you probably just looked at that claim on Wikipedia that carbon aerogel only transmits 3% of IR radiation -- as though transmission is independent of thickness ;) It's not really that impressive.
The best way to deal with IR is mutlilayered reflective foil (reflection is always better than absorption, plus they do an *excellent* job of it*). An ideal insulator is foil/high R value/foil/high R value/ and so forth, in as many layers as possible. So, for example, spacecraft insulation is excellent, consisting of many layers of gold foil separated by vacuum. Here on earth, vacuum is much harder to come by, but aerogel is close enough.
How are you arriving at that conclusion?
Want to talk about socialist policies? I think they've also tried that in Norway, how's that working for them? Two can play at the "Pick and Choose Socialist Countries" game. So let's ditch the red herring. If you really want to argue "Soviet Russia", argue that a music fee must inevitably be paired with communal land reforms and a planned economy.
As for food, could you please point to me where food can be duplicated at no cost, and the overwhelming majority of food that people eat is illegal duplicates? We're talking IP licensing, not tangible assets. A much closer analogy would be to basic research conducted by government agencies. We pay for it with our tax dollars, and all of the IP from their work enters the public domain.
No, you do not have the legal right to download music you don't own in Canada, even with the tax on blank CD-rs. You simply get screwed over by that one. This is different.
There is no practical difference between supply unreliability and demand reliability. You don't have to have one of them being stable. Your net unreliability is the sum of the unreliability of one plus the unreliability of the other.
"Demand outpacing supply" is what peakers are for. "Supply outpacing demand" is what standby is for.
Current supercaps are levelling out at a level below lead-acid, let alone li-ion. To get capacitance that beats li-ion batteries, you pretty much need to incorporate quantum effects. That is, at tiny scales, your discharge curve starts to take a stairstep appearance because power can't be broken down indefinitely. This lets you charge nano-capacitors to way higher voltages than macro-scale capacitors. They're limited only by the compressive strength of their walls and the tensile strength of their electrodes.
What types of batteries are you thinking of? The main stumbling blocks in high-energy forms of traditional li-ion batteries are electrode pulverization during intercalation. Li-ion batteries with a lithium metal anode have difficulties with dendrite formation.
How about other advanced batteries? Lithium-sulfur batteries have the stumbling blocks of polysulfide formation and migration across the membrane. Lithium-air batteries are limited by dendrite formation and electrode clogging. In fact, NAFION membranes are tricky in general (they're used for other advanced chemistries such Nickel-lithium batteries). And you can also look at some of the really out-there ideas, such as digital quantum capacitors, whose main stumbling blocks are unknown because it's such a crazy idea nobody has even started the most basic steps at trying to build them ;)
Er, radius cubed. Blah. :P
One of my favorite things you could potentially do with aerogel is to make solid lighter-than-air structures. The best evacuated aerogels are about 20% lighter than air. Keeping them evacuated, of course, means sealing off their edges (aerogels are, unsurprisingly, gas-permeable), but the mass of such a seal rises proportional to the radius squared while the buoyant volume rises proportional to the volume cubed.
Aerogel does not block IR. It has an excellent R-value, but R-value is not about radiation.
My reaction exactly. It's awful. And they didn't even mention that they're not talking about what is generally meant by "aerogel" -- silicon dioxide aerogel. They're talking about a less common form, carbon aerogel.
An interconnected mesh of carbon nanotubes is not a storage mechanism. It's not a capacitor. It's not a battery. It could perhaps be used as a scaffolding to store active anode or cathode materials -- but they haven't done that. And I have no clue how they'd go about making that into a capacitor, since a capacitor requires that your positive and negative sides *not* be interconnected -- but either way, they haven't done that either.
Aerogel is starting to make its way into backpacking gear -- for example, ground rolls. Of course, some designers stupidly just assume "High R value = Keeps you warm" and ignore the infrared aspect.
There's also "spinning standby", where you keep the boilers hot and the generator turning over but not producing power so that you can produce power on short notice. The grid has to be able to respond quickly, since there's not exactly a ton of capacitance in the wires to buffer demand fluctuations.
That's one of the things that I find so amusing about the people who rail against wind and solar power: "You'll ruin the grid by making production unstable!" Um, hello, *demand* is already unstable, which is effectively the same thing; this is nothing new. You do increase the need for peaking capacity, but this is overall an issue already very familiar to grid operators.
Why would you pay royalties *twice*? By paying the fee, you no longer need to pay for the music directly. It's included in the fee. That's the point of the fee.
I know this is about Canada, but in typical American fashion, I'll pretend it's about us.
A third of America opposed the Iraq war. We still had to pay ten thousand dollars per-person for it (via the WP's estimate of direct costs and economic damage of $3T). And you're complaining about ten dollars because you're one of an extreme minority of people who don't like music?
There's no way everyone will agree on every tax or expenditure levied by the government. But when it saves the majority of law-abiding citizens money while increasing individual freedoms AND encouraging content creation, I'd call that win/win/win.
What part of "the simplest way" (followed immediately by an example of a less simple way) was hard for you to wrap your brain around?
It's very important from a practical standpoint. The more "legitimate" the uprising can present itself, the more it can come across as an alternate government, the easier it becomes to lend them military aid without coming across as an occupying power and motivating anti-American sentiment. Aka, US and other sympathetic governments recognize the government of east Libya, US allies with the government of east Libya, the government of east Libya registers a formal complaint about the occupation of western Libya by a militia formed primarily of foreign fighters and requests assistance to drive them out: military trainers and advisers, a no fly zone, a shipping blockade, perhaps even airstrikes. The US complies, while the rebels remain the public face, advancing and taking over western Libya. It's much better diplomatic cover than just coming in and taking out Qaddhafi and having it look like Yet Another US-Overthrown Government and fueling further anti-American sentiment among those who are already sceptical of our motives.
There are lots of ways you can deal with this equitably. The simplest would be to distribute it proportional to their conventional music sales. There are other approaches that could be done, however -- for example, they could create opt-out or opt-in add-ons to be shipped with popular music players that collect statistics about who listens to what, and use that to weigh receipts. I think most listeners would opt-in, wanting the artists they like to be rewarded.
One neat thing that could be done which you can't do with conventional sales is that you could use a non-linear distribution formula -- that is, support small artists to a greater degree than big artists proportional to their audience (something like, "SharesOfRevenue = FansWho'veRecentlyListenedToThem ^ 0.5". To greatly oversimplify, if there were two artists, A and B, and A has 1 million recent fans and B has 10 thousand recent fans, and there's $1m to go around, a linear distribution would say that A gets $999,010, and B gets $9,990. Under the above formula, A gets 1000 shares and B gets 100 shares, meaning A gets $909,090 and B gets $90,909.. Artist A hardly suffers, but artist B can now live on their work.
I've long supported ideas like this, so I really hope it comes into practice. It's a way for new to allow new artists to truly make a living without having to contractually give away the overwhelming majority of what they earn to leaching record labels. Take the labels out of the equation, and it takes a lot total less money to give equal compensation to the artists. Also, it's a way to stop people who actually pay for and compensate artists for their work from having to pick up the slack for those who leach.
Nope. Tor uses onion routing; the gateways have no clue who they're actually talking with. You have to use a Sybil attack (or, with lower success rates, one of a number of other types of attacks) to pull that off. A Sybil attack means basically taking over the whole network.
Well, one can always use Tor. All they'll see is the IP of a Tor gateway.
Now, it's not like Tor is invulnerable. Both Tor and I2P (Tor's prodigal sibling) have weaknesses -- the most difficult to address being Sybil attacks. Both need to do a lot more to fight against Sybil attacks, including some sort of Hashcash system to increase the cost of attacks, and automated data replication/caching in order to make the analyzing the results for who transferred what data/requests and what was simply an automated transfer/request harder to determine.
But the key thing is, you have to be doing the attack *before* the violation you want to investigate occurs; otherwise, who knows who it was who sent that message to the gateway?
Anyway, a friendly reminder: running a darknet like Tor or I2P is a public service. The security of both relies greatly on their number of servers, and if you're worried about it being a big load on your system, you can throttle the available bandwidth on both. And another friendly reminder: keep the file-sharing off Tor; it's not designed for that, and you can hurt the network badly by it (and you're likely to mess up and expose yourself any way). If you must file share, do it on I2P, with tools designed specifically to operate within I2P (iMule, i2psnark, etc). Beyond that, from a practical point of view, Tor is slower even for files transferred entirely within the darknet, Tor gateways are designed to block P2P traffic, and even if you were to work around them, it'd be appallingly slow.
Really? Having the sound change properly as you turn your head is "placebo effect"?
That said, 24 bit sound and absurd bitrates and sample rates are bunk. Honesty, I think adding in better spatial information is probably the only relevant frontier one could pursue in terms of file formats... and it's not very practical at that. I mean, technically, with enough detailed information and a good enough sound system**, one could walk toward where the lead singer of a band is "standing", even in the middle of a room, and hear their voice louder without necessarily increasing all of the sounds from that same "direction". (like the difference between a point light and a directional light in graphics) However, this would require either many speakers, scattered around the room and able to determine each other's location with reasonable accuracy, or a system with fewer speakers which can "throw" sound to localized regions, such as some of the ultrasonic interference-based speakers -- and the benefit is of questionable utility.
Oh, and there could also be some benefit to not pruning out infrasonic sounds during compression as sometimes happens. You can't hear them, but if they're loud enough you can feel them. Now, many subs can't reproduce infrasonic sound loud enough for you to feel, but some can. A particularly neat concept designed especially for infrasonic sound is that of a rotary subwoofer, which is basically a reinforced desk fan which can rapidly change the pitch on its blades from 45 degrees forward to 45 degrees backward. Thus it can reproduce with high amplitude any sound all the way down to zero hertz (direct pressure, no oscillation), and up to however fast the blade angles can be changed. I know of one on the market, but it's way overpriced.
False. It's the tritium in the warheads that decays into He3.
Well, yes, if you want a boosted design. But you pay for the U238 tamper in terms of mass and a dirty burn. The largest nuclear weapon ever detonated, the Tsar Bomba, was actually the cleanest, as they replaced the U238 tamper with a lead one -- cutting its yield in half, but making it so 97% of its yield was from fusion.