Funny examples, I think any terrorist group would want both accountants and journalists. Accountants because they do have money, and need to hide it very well and probably keep a lot of it in cash thats being held by unsavory individuals. For sure, they want to keep good books.
And journalists? Terrorisim is fundamentally a journalistic act--the destruction is not the primary goal, it's the media coverage of the destruction. That's the difference between a terrorist and a guerrilla. Very few, if any, terrorist groups are pure nihlists. Most are part of a larger organization with political or social goals, and every group larger than the Unibomber needs to recruit. Journalists are going to be a lot more useful at that than engineers.
If I had points, I'd mod that insightful. Our reaction to terrorisim is so much more damaging than the actual attack. I'm reminded of people who are allergic to bee stings: sure, the sting hurts, but it's your own immune system overreacting that kills you.
The beauty of Feigel's idea is that it can be easily tested. He suggests building an addressable array of magnetoelectric nanoparticles, perhaps made of a material such as FeGaO3 which has a magnetoelectric constant of 10^-4 in a weak magnetic field.
So is he saying that just by fliping the bits in some old core memory (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetic_core_memory), you can produce thrust?
Ya know, I always wondered why the Spam Vigilante concept never caught on--using the power of Slashdotting for good! If everyone who's running something@home was also willing to open just 1 connection/seccond to a community selected "site of the day," I bet we'd be able to shut down a lot of malware/spam sites.
It could even be automatic--just have some background task that every second opens up a connection to a random link choosen from your spam folder. If everyone did it...
More and more, you can't. Of course, I was painting the cartoon version, but I think there is a real problem with how easy it is for us to surround ourselves with like-minded people.
One hard data point I've seen is that, even though the number of districts going Republican or Democrat doesn't change that much, individual districts are tending to go more decisively in one direction or the other, and the number of districts that change from election to election is decreasing.
Someone wrote a book last year saying how more and more of the polarization in the U.S. is because people are segregating themselves into neighborhoods based on politics. Do you want to leave someplace with Whole Foods and yoga studios, or with megachurches and gun shops? This Google move seems to be taking this same segregation on-line.
Google "climate change"....hmmm, I see this person's been to Fox News recently...better send 'em to a denial site. Or, more generally, once you get stuck in an affinity group, Google results are going to tend to keep you there. Seems like this is just going to amplify the echo chamber effect that lets so many people veer off into idiotic extremism.
It's mostly from simply flying into the wires. Some birds get electrocuted when they somehow manage to touch two wires at once.
http://www.treesearch.fs.fed.us/pubs/32105
I think the confusion might be from different definitions of efficiency and loss. A coal-fired generator will end up converting about 35% of the chemical energy in the coal into electricity. I belive that's the source of the Delaware number (70% losses). It also creates room for fudging the numbers--if you want to make a technology seem more efficient, you quote its losses in terms of the input coal, rather than in terms of the actual electrical losses.
Transmission and distribution losses in the U.S. are 7.2%, meaning that 92.8% of the generator output reaches consumers. Of that, about 2/3rds are line losses, and 1/3 is in the transformers. I don't know if superconductors would make for more efficient transformers or not.
The 2% loss from bwea says in the "national grid" which means in the high voltage part of the transmission system (the long haul wires), as opposed to the lower voltage distribution system (the ones on wooden poles).
That "one third lost in transmission" factoid seems to get around, but I don't know where it comes from---sometimes you'll see losses like that in less developed nations, but it usually means that people are tapping in and getting free electricity, not 'genuine' transmission loss.
Part of the general Internet phenom, "I just read the headline of an article, and my first thought will be a brilliant insight that people who devote their lives to this subject won't have thought of."
Elivated to an art form in left-wing critiques of millitary affairs, and right-wing attacks on evolution and climate science.
Ahh, thanks for explaining this. I've wondered about "Free Public WiFi" for a while, and had some of the same musings you've had. While reading this thread, I was on the verge of sending a question about "Free Public WiFi" to Ask Slashdot.
Right, right, I completely agree if we're talking about interplanetary travel. In that case, you want to get your specific impulse as high as possible, so maximizing the energy per unit of reaction mass is the most important thing. But the comment I was responding to was talking about getting to orbit, and for that, raw thrust is important. E =.5mv^2, but momentum = mv, so thrust scales as the square root of energy. Trying to lift off the ground with a low-reaction mass engine likely requires unreasonable amounts of energy.
Of course, anything that gives you more energy does help.
IMHO (and I am not a rocket scientist), this misses on two fronts: the difficult thing with rocket propulsion is reaction mass, not energy, and nuclear energy states are more energetic than electron states because of the higher binding energies of the strong (or is it weak?) force compared with electromagnetic forces, not because of the greater masses of protons and neutrons.
Except that false positives are a security risk. Every time the end user gets a message "Something you've never heard of is trying to do something you don't understand. Ok or Cancel?", they're trained to mindlessly click OK.
I agree that 'ram defragmentation' software is probably snake oil, but there is such a thing as RAM fragmentation. Try writing a program that allocates a bunch of small blocks of memory, then go and deallocate every odd one, then try and allocate a big block. Things will slow way down. If your malloc() can't get the congigious block of memory it needs, it either fails or has to invoke a garbage collector. Ran into this on some network software I worked on some years back...in my youth and ignorance, I malloc()'ed a buffer whenever we got a packet, took quite a while to figure out why the thing kept getting slower.
Now that I think about this (it's been a while...), I remember there used to be legit memory defraggers, at least as developer tools. The were libraries you'd link with that would replace the OS's memory management with their own better ones.
Slashdot Mirror
All right, you out-old skooled me with that...what do those four POKEs do?
I always wondered by PEEK and POKE still worked in QBASIC.
Funny examples, I think any terrorist group would want both accountants and journalists. Accountants because they do have money, and need to hide it very well and probably keep a lot of it in cash thats being held by unsavory individuals. For sure, they want to keep good books.
And journalists? Terrorisim is fundamentally a journalistic act--the destruction is not the primary goal, it's the media coverage of the destruction. That's the difference between a terrorist and a guerrilla. Very few, if any, terrorist groups are pure nihlists. Most are part of a larger organization with political or social goals, and every group larger than the Unibomber needs to recruit. Journalists are going to be a lot more useful at that than engineers.
If I had points, I'd mod that insightful. Our reaction to terrorisim is so much more damaging than the actual attack. I'm reminded of people who are allergic to bee stings: sure, the sting hurts, but it's your own immune system overreacting that kills you.
From TFA:
The beauty of Feigel's idea is that it can be easily tested. He suggests building an addressable array of magnetoelectric nanoparticles, perhaps made of a material such as FeGaO3 which has a magnetoelectric constant of 10^-4 in a weak magnetic field.
So is he saying that just by fliping the bits in some old core memory (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetic_core_memory), you can produce thrust?
Ya know, I always wondered why the Spam Vigilante concept never caught on--using the power of Slashdotting for good! If everyone who's running something@home was also willing to open just 1 connection/seccond to a community selected "site of the day," I bet we'd be able to shut down a lot of malware/spam sites.
It could even be automatic--just have some background task that every second opens up a connection to a random link choosen from your spam folder. If everyone did it...
Add to windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts:
127.0.0.1 318x.com
And you should be safe, for the moment.
More and more, you can't. Of course, I was painting the cartoon version, but I think there is a real problem with how easy it is for us to surround ourselves with like-minded people. One hard data point I've seen is that, even though the number of districts going Republican or Democrat doesn't change that much, individual districts are tending to go more decisively in one direction or the other, and the number of districts that change from election to election is decreasing.
Someone wrote a book last year saying how more and more of the polarization in the U.S. is because people are segregating themselves into neighborhoods based on politics. Do you want to leave someplace with Whole Foods and yoga studios, or with megachurches and gun shops? This Google move seems to be taking this same segregation on-line. Google "climate change"....hmmm, I see this person's been to Fox News recently...better send 'em to a denial site. Or, more generally, once you get stuck in an affinity group, Google results are going to tend to keep you there. Seems like this is just going to amplify the echo chamber effect that lets so many people veer off into idiotic extremism.
It's mostly from simply flying into the wires. Some birds get electrocuted when they somehow manage to touch two wires at once. http://www.treesearch.fs.fed.us/pubs/32105
I think the confusion might be from different definitions of efficiency and loss. A coal-fired generator will end up converting about 35% of the chemical energy in the coal into electricity. I belive that's the source of the Delaware number (70% losses). It also creates room for fudging the numbers--if you want to make a technology seem more efficient, you quote its losses in terms of the input coal, rather than in terms of the actual electrical losses. Transmission and distribution losses in the U.S. are 7.2%, meaning that 92.8% of the generator output reaches consumers. Of that, about 2/3rds are line losses, and 1/3 is in the transformers. I don't know if superconductors would make for more efficient transformers or not. The 2% loss from bwea says in the "national grid" which means in the high voltage part of the transmission system (the long haul wires), as opposed to the lower voltage distribution system (the ones on wooden poles). That "one third lost in transmission" factoid seems to get around, but I don't know where it comes from---sometimes you'll see losses like that in less developed nations, but it usually means that people are tapping in and getting free electricity, not 'genuine' transmission loss.
Part of the general Internet phenom, "I just read the headline of an article, and my first thought will be a brilliant insight that people who devote their lives to this subject won't have thought of." Elivated to an art form in left-wing critiques of millitary affairs, and right-wing attacks on evolution and climate science.
Ahh, thanks for explaining this. I've wondered about "Free Public WiFi" for a while, and had some of the same musings you've had. While reading this thread, I was on the verge of sending a question about "Free Public WiFi" to Ask Slashdot.
Right, right, I completely agree if we're talking about interplanetary travel. In that case, you want to get your specific impulse as high as possible, so maximizing the energy per unit of reaction mass is the most important thing. But the comment I was responding to was talking about getting to orbit, and for that, raw thrust is important. E = .5mv^2, but momentum = mv, so thrust scales as the square root of energy. Trying to lift off the ground with a low-reaction mass engine likely requires unreasonable amounts of energy.
Of course, anything that gives you more energy does help.
IMHO (and I am not a rocket scientist), this misses on two fronts: the difficult thing with rocket propulsion is reaction mass, not energy, and nuclear energy states are more energetic than electron states because of the higher binding energies of the strong (or is it weak?) force compared with electromagnetic forces, not because of the greater masses of protons and neutrons.
Except that false positives are a security risk. Every time the end user gets a message "Something you've never heard of is trying to do something you don't understand. Ok or Cancel?", they're trained to mindlessly click OK.
I agree that 'ram defragmentation' software is probably snake oil, but there is such a thing as RAM fragmentation. Try writing a program that allocates a bunch of small blocks of memory, then go and deallocate every odd one, then try and allocate a big block. Things will slow way down. If your malloc() can't get the congigious block of memory it needs, it either fails or has to invoke a garbage collector. Ran into this on some network software I worked on some years back...in my youth and ignorance, I malloc()'ed a buffer whenever we got a packet, took quite a while to figure out why the thing kept getting slower. Now that I think about this (it's been a while...), I remember there used to be legit memory defraggers, at least as developer tools. The were libraries you'd link with that would replace the OS's memory management with their own better ones.
Amaturs talk about languages, noobs talk about algrothims, pros talk about version control.
You know, I was going to post the exact same thing, except my goal was to get it modded "funny".