You could say the same thing for programmers/developers as well. One one monitor, you have the code you're working on, and maybe a second window with another code file if you enforce column limits on your code. On another monitor, you have your compiler output, and a debug terminal. On a third, you have header files for use with the code you're actively working on documentation, etc... The more pertinent information you can display on screen at once, and simply move your head instead of having to tab around, the more efficiently you can program.
It comes right back to whether a large desk is more productive than a small cramped desk for any task. If you're juggling books and notes in your lap, or have stacks piled up, you're suffering.
Once you get away from the R&D costs, solar panels are simply damned expensive to produce. You're looking at several hundred thousand dollars just to fill that wing with panels, and another hundred thousand for the batteries. Beyond that, large composite structures take a lot of time and money to manufacture. I wouldn't be surprised if the thing cost upwards of a million per unit in volume.
A ducted fan hooked up to a 50-100MW electric motor. All the hard part has been done. Just take an existing high bypass turbofan and replace the core with a (big ass) electric motor.
You seem to be woefully ignorant in the scale of what you propose. This aircraft has a wing area of some 200m^2, or roughly that of an old 757. With that wing area, allowing for reduced dispersion in the atmosphere, and high efficiency commercially available cells, you might expect as high as 50kW peak generating capacity. For 450knot+ flight speed, you're looking to replace two turbofans with an output likely somewhere around 50MW each. Under the best conditions, you're three whole orders of magnitude off where you need to be. On a big airliner, 50kW wouldn't even come close to enough to run the avionics, lighting, and air supply.
There is NO commercial worth to solar powered airliner. There really is no worth to manned solar powered research aircraft, as the needs of a pilot are far greater than that of any worthwhile payload. This is nothing more than a $100M publicity stunt.
No, the method of propulsion is easy. The hard part is the power source. Even small turboprop aircraft operate in the megawatt range. Any airliner is going to operate in the hundred megawatt range or better. We have no battery storage technology that can provide anything like the needs of high speed flight for any significant duration.
No offense, but wouldn't it make more sense to use that gallon or two of fuel it would take for a cessna to make the trip in a quarter the time? Surely fuel prices could never be high enough to make up for the millions of dollars difference in cost between the two aircraft.
My point is, there should be some serious repercussions for filing patent suit and having it overturned. Considerably more so if the patent itself is invalidated in the process.
You would be surprised. Look at all the injury lawsuits where someone trips at a construction site. On major jobs, the foreman is allowed to dole out fairly large sums of money, to settle claims on-the-spot. It's worth a few thousand dollars, no questions asked, rather than court and lawyer fees to fight it off. Look at areas of the country where entire fields of medical practice cannot be found, because bogus malpractice suits have driven up insurance to the point you can't possibly run a solvent business.
All sorts of large, beneficial companies would love for reform. The status quo only serves to allow for parasitic business models.
Anyone can sue anyone for any reason, no matter how stupid and baseless it is, and unless extremely grievous, there are generally no repercussions. There won't be a change in the system until the plaintiff's attorneys have some real liability on the case to protect the defendant. Until that happens, it will be cheaper in the short term to settle out of court than to win a court case, and there will be lawyers looking to make a quick buck that are all too willing to facilitate.
Consider this chain... You start out with a patent for shareware software. You distribute a 'light' version of the software for cheap or free, and once you get to a certain level, or want to access a certain feature, it prints out a phone number or address to the DOS terminal to mail order a more complete version. A few years later, the internet, browsers, and graphical OSs become common. In place of the terminal printout, you hook into your OS's defined browser, and open a webpage from which you can order a more compete version on CD. Internet speeds increase, and a few years later your webpage offers a digital download. Next, you implement a secure API into your website, and allow credit card purchases from directly within your application, combined with the previous digital download, and the program now self-updates without ever exiting it. Next, you tie your website into some digital wallet service that allows a single configuration shared against multiple applications and services.
Each step along this path is a logical procession as technology and methods improve around it, the original patent from the early '90s has lapsed, so other can distribute such shareware, but your latest patent covers the latest incarnation where the software is updated internally using funds from a shared marketplace.
In this case, 'pilot-optional' makes sense. One of the primary uses for it and the Proteus craft before it is a development platform. You can develop systems and hardware for autonomous and remotely operated vehicles, but still have someone in the cockpit ready to take control if needed.
Unmanned drones can be made cheaply because they're small, and do not need the volume and life support systems needed to house a pilot. Something intended for cargo is going to be large and expensive. Satellite links don't have the latency for reliable remote operations, and autonomous flight control systems are not yet particularly good at adverse conditions. You're not going to risk the supplies and aircraft unless they are vital to survival of the outpost/mission, and then you're going to want a veteran pilot in the cockpit who can adapt to whatever situation that arises.
I'm appalled by the whole concept of choosing your file size to fit on a CD or single layer DVD. Considering hard drive storage is cheaper than both of those recordable mediums, why bother?
If using a pirated piece of software (such as WinRar) is not a problem for such individuals, why go through the effort of writing an open source library as a replacement?
WinRar does better for some filetypes, 7-Zip does better for other filetypes, but in general they're pretty comparable. Given the option between programs comparable in capability and usability, one being free and the other costing $30, why would you choose to pirate the payware one? Is there some stigma that the program you refuse to pay for is somehow inherently better?
The closed source and payware distributors use executable installers. The Linux community uses tar, compressed using gzip, bzip, or lzma. The legitimate Windows community uses WinZip (because they don't know otherwise) or 7-Zip (because it's free). The hugely overwhelming use of WinRar is just to split files for distribution on antiquated mediums like FTP and Usenet, which don't natively support multi-part uploads and downloads, and have file size limits. Since this is generally multimedia content that cannot be further losslessly compressed, these archives use store mode, and the only thing the rar format is used for is integrated checksumming, which rar is just one of many formats that will perform that job equally well.
Content distributed in that manner is almost always in violation of copyright, which makes the entire concept of developing an open source library to access a proprietary format, rather than simply using another format, or pirating WinRar as well, is comical. It's either a waste of effort when other tools are available, or a downright confusing inconsistency in ethics on someones part.
It's for an entirely different application. AES-NI is one application specific set of instructions. While encryption and decryption is an application in which dedicated hardware can have tremendous gains, introducing dozens of application specific hardware modules into a CPU is going to fall to diminishing returns, and just result in an oversized, expensive, and power hungry CPU. It's an inherently limiting design methodology. Introducing GPU access to the kernel opens up a very powerful piece of hardware to be used for a wide range of applications, enhancing any process that is suitable for the architecture found on a GPU.
Think of GPUs like picking up a new math co-processor 20 years ago.
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Do you really want to mix your 100DPI computer monitors with a TV at half that density? Personally, the scaling differences would screw me up.
The Swordfish guy was retarded. Seriously, who would want a huge chasm in the center of their wall of monitors?
You could say the same thing for programmers/developers as well. One one monitor, you have the code you're working on, and maybe a second window with another code file if you enforce column limits on your code. On another monitor, you have your compiler output, and a debug terminal. On a third, you have header files for use with the code you're actively working on documentation, etc... The more pertinent information you can display on screen at once, and simply move your head instead of having to tab around, the more efficiently you can program.
It comes right back to whether a large desk is more productive than a small cramped desk for any task. If you're juggling books and notes in your lap, or have stacks piled up, you're suffering.
Once you get away from the R&D costs, solar panels are simply damned expensive to produce. You're looking at several hundred thousand dollars just to fill that wing with panels, and another hundred thousand for the batteries. Beyond that, large composite structures take a lot of time and money to manufacture. I wouldn't be surprised if the thing cost upwards of a million per unit in volume.
A ducted fan hooked up to a 50-100MW electric motor. All the hard part has been done. Just take an existing high bypass turbofan and replace the core with a (big ass) electric motor.
You seem to be woefully ignorant in the scale of what you propose. This aircraft has a wing area of some 200m^2, or roughly that of an old 757. With that wing area, allowing for reduced dispersion in the atmosphere, and high efficiency commercially available cells, you might expect as high as 50kW peak generating capacity. For 450knot+ flight speed, you're looking to replace two turbofans with an output likely somewhere around 50MW each. Under the best conditions, you're three whole orders of magnitude off where you need to be. On a big airliner, 50kW wouldn't even come close to enough to run the avionics, lighting, and air supply.
There is NO commercial worth to solar powered airliner. There really is no worth to manned solar powered research aircraft, as the needs of a pilot are far greater than that of any worthwhile payload. This is nothing more than a $100M publicity stunt.
No, the method of propulsion is easy. The hard part is the power source. Even small turboprop aircraft operate in the megawatt range. Any airliner is going to operate in the hundred megawatt range or better. We have no battery storage technology that can provide anything like the needs of high speed flight for any significant duration.
No offense, but wouldn't it make more sense to use that gallon or two of fuel it would take for a cessna to make the trip in a quarter the time? Surely fuel prices could never be high enough to make up for the millions of dollars difference in cost between the two aircraft.
My point is, there should be some serious repercussions for filing patent suit and having it overturned. Considerably more so if the patent itself is invalidated in the process.
You would be surprised. Look at all the injury lawsuits where someone trips at a construction site. On major jobs, the foreman is allowed to dole out fairly large sums of money, to settle claims on-the-spot. It's worth a few thousand dollars, no questions asked, rather than court and lawyer fees to fight it off. Look at areas of the country where entire fields of medical practice cannot be found, because bogus malpractice suits have driven up insurance to the point you can't possibly run a solvent business.
All sorts of large, beneficial companies would love for reform. The status quo only serves to allow for parasitic business models.
Anyone can sue anyone for any reason, no matter how stupid and baseless it is, and unless extremely grievous, there are generally no repercussions. There won't be a change in the system until the plaintiff's attorneys have some real liability on the case to protect the defendant. Until that happens, it will be cheaper in the short term to settle out of court than to win a court case, and there will be lawyers looking to make a quick buck that are all too willing to facilitate.
Consider this chain... You start out with a patent for shareware software. You distribute a 'light' version of the software for cheap or free, and once you get to a certain level, or want to access a certain feature, it prints out a phone number or address to the DOS terminal to mail order a more complete version. A few years later, the internet, browsers, and graphical OSs become common. In place of the terminal printout, you hook into your OS's defined browser, and open a webpage from which you can order a more compete version on CD. Internet speeds increase, and a few years later your webpage offers a digital download. Next, you implement a secure API into your website, and allow credit card purchases from directly within your application, combined with the previous digital download, and the program now self-updates without ever exiting it. Next, you tie your website into some digital wallet service that allows a single configuration shared against multiple applications and services.
Each step along this path is a logical procession as technology and methods improve around it, the original patent from the early '90s has lapsed, so other can distribute such shareware, but your latest patent covers the latest incarnation where the software is updated internally using funds from a shared marketplace.
Does this mean that resting your fingers on the home row would be equivalent to mashing down on the keyboard?
In this case, 'pilot-optional' makes sense. One of the primary uses for it and the Proteus craft before it is a development platform. You can develop systems and hardware for autonomous and remotely operated vehicles, but still have someone in the cockpit ready to take control if needed.
Actually, the flight was on May 2. Cool site though.
Unmanned drones can be made cheaply because they're small, and do not need the volume and life support systems needed to house a pilot. Something intended for cargo is going to be large and expensive. Satellite links don't have the latency for reliable remote operations, and autonomous flight control systems are not yet particularly good at adverse conditions. You're not going to risk the supplies and aircraft unless they are vital to survival of the outpost/mission, and then you're going to want a veteran pilot in the cockpit who can adapt to whatever situation that arises.
So it's nagware. Why put up with nagware when there are free alternatives that work just as well?
I'm appalled by the whole concept of choosing your file size to fit on a CD or single layer DVD. Considering hard drive storage is cheaper than both of those recordable mediums, why bother?
If using a pirated piece of software (such as WinRar) is not a problem for such individuals, why go through the effort of writing an open source library as a replacement?
WinRar does better for some filetypes, 7-Zip does better for other filetypes, but in general they're pretty comparable. Given the option between programs comparable in capability and usability, one being free and the other costing $30, why would you choose to pirate the payware one? Is there some stigma that the program you refuse to pay for is somehow inherently better?
I don't understand what relevance a 9yr old compression test is.
So why not use one of the many other open formats that support multi-part checksummed files, or pirate WinRar just like they did the porn.
The closed source and payware distributors use executable installers. The Linux community uses tar, compressed using gzip, bzip, or lzma. The legitimate Windows community uses WinZip (because they don't know otherwise) or 7-Zip (because it's free). The hugely overwhelming use of WinRar is just to split files for distribution on antiquated mediums like FTP and Usenet, which don't natively support multi-part uploads and downloads, and have file size limits. Since this is generally multimedia content that cannot be further losslessly compressed, these archives use store mode, and the only thing the rar format is used for is integrated checksumming, which rar is just one of many formats that will perform that job equally well.
Content distributed in that manner is almost always in violation of copyright, which makes the entire concept of developing an open source library to access a proprietary format, rather than simply using another format, or pirating WinRar as well, is comical. It's either a waste of effort when other tools are available, or a downright confusing inconsistency in ethics on someones part.
Why would you use a proprietary format to store openly distributed files?
It's for an entirely different application. AES-NI is one application specific set of instructions. While encryption and decryption is an application in which dedicated hardware can have tremendous gains, introducing dozens of application specific hardware modules into a CPU is going to fall to diminishing returns, and just result in an oversized, expensive, and power hungry CPU. It's an inherently limiting design methodology. Introducing GPU access to the kernel opens up a very powerful piece of hardware to be used for a wide range of applications, enhancing any process that is suitable for the architecture found on a GPU.
Think of GPUs like picking up a new math co-processor 20 years ago.