Does anyone know of any attempts to use Rhombic Antennas with WiFi? They're very simple and provide huge gain. Their typical downside is that the length of one leg needs to be 8-12 wavelengths, which means they're the size of a football field when you're dealing with most radio frequencies, but 2 GHz has a 0.15m wavelength. A point-to-point rhombic should easily fit on the roof of a house.
The trouble is that software blurs the distinction between a device (patent) and a work (copyright). The distinction used to be easy. If you had a new type of engine, you got a patent. If you wrote a book, you got a copyright. But software is kinda like writing a book (so it should be copyright), yet it is used to build the internals of an infinitely modifiable machine (so it should be patented).
This is going to get worse as home 3d fabrication like RepRap becomes more common. Software is now being used to build a physical object, thus eliminating the patent/copyright distinction. At a TED conference, an MIT professor talked about a fab method they apparently have going in the lab, where computation is done by arranging molecules; in theory, you could compute yourself a new car. Just imagine what that will do to the patent/copyright distinction.
The end result is that a new form of IP will have to be developed that will combine copyright and patents. In the US, this is probably going to take a constitutional amendment, which almost dooms the effort from the start.
Do you think they'd make a serious effort to kick you out? You'd probably make a mention on CNN, the environmentalists will throw a hissy fit, but it'll all blow over in a week.
Powerglove was developed elsewhere, and built by Mattel. Nintendo only put their official seal of approval on it.
It also uses a system that was simplistic even for the time (due to cost constraints), and internally doesn't resemble the Wiimote at all. As far as straight motion sensing goes, the Wiimote is a huge improvement over the Powerglove, which was universally hated.
While the headline might be good for a light giggle, there's a good reason why it's 10 years behind. Airplane avionics systems must be free of bugs, or people die. That especially goes for a plane that uses a flying wing design (which are historically hard to stabilize without computer control), and potentially carries nuclear warheads.
No more so than Microsoft admitting that the original X-Box controllers were oversized warts by releasing the normal-sized 360 controllers.
This is the first time anyone has made a serious attempt at a motion-sensitive controller (there are other examples, but nothing that was widely used). It should not be expected to be perfect.
That said, the current controller is useful for some games despite its limits. Sword fighting isn't going to work very well, but it's arguably even better than keyboard+mouse for fps games.
"Cost" is just an abstract quantity that the market uses as a judge of the availability of a resource. The Invisible Hand works remarkably well when it comes to commodities like copper.
Soot from diesel is a combination of NOx (which create nasty short-term pollution, e.g. smog) and carbon monoxide (which is both more poisonous and a stronger greenhouse gas than CO2). A diesel that produced only CO2 would be a reason to break out the fine wine.
The self-serving thing would have been to cast off Wright as soon as the videos started hitting YouTube, just like other politicians who claim they "did not inhale".
Instead, he said the Wright was mistaken, but that it's important why many African Americans of that generation (and even the current generation) think that way. He didn't blame modern white people for past sins they themselves did not commit, didn't blame African Americans for being too lazy to solve their own problems, and called out recent issues that have trivialized the problem, like the OJ Simpson case. Nobody who matters has talked like that since the '60s.
It strikes me as amazing that people who generally followed Obama's calling out of political distractions are now failing to understand the reasons why he voted for this bill. For instance, the speech he gave on race relations after the Rev. Wright controversy was the best speech given on the subject in recent history, and arguably the best one ever from major politician. The idea is that we're supposed to look past sound bites that are turning the US into a nation of imbeciles and see underlieing reasons.
But now so many people that stuck with him over Wright are now willing to hear the sound bite "voted for telecom immunity" and stop at that.
But the summary (and other criticisms of this bill) imply that such a grant by congress is unconstitutional. I'd like to know the argument for this, or if it's just unfounded nonsense.
Can somebody explain the constitutional argument here? I can understand the illegal nature of warrentless wiretapping, but not the retroactively granting amnesty part. That seems like something that'd be within congress' power to grant, should it so choose.
No, the prosecution has to make the case. They can't just put the defendant under oath and demand they tell the truth. The Fifth Amendment is very clear in this regard.
On a side note, this is one reason Clinton couldn't technically be charged with lieing under oath for his impeachment. It wasn't a valid question for the prosecution to ask.
As far as weights/armor/etc. goes, it's mostly useful because depleted uranium (U-238) is far more prevalent in uranium ore than the useful stuff (U-235). The result is that the nuclear industry creates a lot of excess U-238 that they can't use and have to store somewhere. They almost pay you to take the stuff away and use it in something. Trying to get U-238 for the sake of U-238 would be uneconomical without a nuclear industry to use the U-235.
The fact that the nuclear fuel he'd had for years is completely unenriched just tells you how little cash he had to spend on the program.
Nailed it.
Further, keep in mind Iraq's position during the time period. There was a big war with Iran that was never officially undeclared. Then there was the Kuwait invasion and withdrawal that decimated the military, followed by economic sanctions and UN inspectors watching every move. Additionally, purifying uranium into anything useful takes a lot of industrial output.
Under those conditions, we could only hope that Saddam would be stupid enough to pursue a nuclear program.
Is there any radioactive material that is potent enough for a dirty bomb? Wouldn't blowing the material up just spread it out so that it's doesn't emit enough rem to do damage?
Yup. A dirty bomb is unlikely to have significant direct impact. However, it would have a big secondary psychological impact of causing mass panic. So it's a terror weapon rather than anything a legitimate military would use.
Fischer-Tropsch net CO2 emissions depend on what kind of biomass you're using. Coal would be a high net CO2 emitter, but that's exactly why you shouldn't use coal. The only reason anybody is suggesting coal is because the US has a large coal reserve. Algae may not be quite as convenient, but it has very high yield/acre and would produce no net CO2.
The real problem is energy input to do it. For large scale production, it would pretty much require several nuclear plants all to itself, or alternatively, high-efficiency solar plants in the desert.
Oh, I don't expect it to be commercially-funded. It wouldn't be a good investment unless we already had a large demand for cheap space travel, but we're not going to have a large demand for cheap space travel until something like this exists. That puts in into the sort of infrastructure the government would invest in so as to stimulate a new industry.
No! Apparently you are not aware that a private individual from Seattle recently purchased a vintage 1959 modified Opel w/ a modified carburetor which sat at the Taladega Raceway since it won the world's record for fuel efficiency in 1973. The record was 376/mpg!!
I do know that car. They stripped out weight to the point where the driver's seat was a lawn chair; shortened the rear axel, which will ruin the handling; used a chain drive that is more likely to break (and do so violently); popped on some superhard tires that will be useless for stopping and starting. Then top it all off by driving around an oval track at 30 mph.
It's no secret that you can get 300+ mpg out of a car using impractical methods like these. Doing it under realistic conditions with considerations towards saftey and comfort is much harder.
It's not all that centralized. It takes Nickel mined in Canada (a dirty business all its own), shipped to Europe for refining, then to China to make the actual batteries, to Japan to be put in Priuses, and then to wherever people want to buy Priuses, assuming they are predilected towards buying a Prius, which I would suggest against.
Further, millions of internal combustion engines can be serviced with Fischer-Tropes gas if we have to.
A rough estimate (pdf link to presentation slides, estimates towards end) puts it around $10 billion for a small system, and $30 billion for a larger one. Add on an order of magnitude to the price for government waste, and it's still pretty good. Better than the most optimistic estimates for a space elevator, and way better than rockets.
Building over an ocean (or rather, starting from an uninhabited island and extending over the ocean) isn't really a big deal. Baker Island will do as long as we can deal with the pesky environmentalists trying to save its status as a wildlife refuge.
Launch loops can be built without any unobtainium. Though it is still in government-funded territory.
Space elevators might have a higher cool factor than a launch loop, but I don't think it's going to be even theoretically cheaper by any significant amount compared to a launch loop. And a launch loop is still pretty cool.
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Does anyone know of any attempts to use Rhombic Antennas with WiFi? They're very simple and provide huge gain. Their typical downside is that the length of one leg needs to be 8-12 wavelengths, which means they're the size of a football field when you're dealing with most radio frequencies, but 2 GHz has a 0.15m wavelength. A point-to-point rhombic should easily fit on the roof of a house.
The trouble is that software blurs the distinction between a device (patent) and a work (copyright). The distinction used to be easy. If you had a new type of engine, you got a patent. If you wrote a book, you got a copyright. But software is kinda like writing a book (so it should be copyright), yet it is used to build the internals of an infinitely modifiable machine (so it should be patented).
This is going to get worse as home 3d fabrication like RepRap becomes more common. Software is now being used to build a physical object, thus eliminating the patent/copyright distinction. At a TED conference, an MIT professor talked about a fab method they apparently have going in the lab, where computation is done by arranging molecules; in theory, you could compute yourself a new car. Just imagine what that will do to the patent/copyright distinction.
The end result is that a new form of IP will have to be developed that will combine copyright and patents. In the US, this is probably going to take a constitutional amendment, which almost dooms the effort from the start.
Do you think they'd make a serious effort to kick you out? You'd probably make a mention on CNN, the environmentalists will throw a hissy fit, but it'll all blow over in a week.
Oh, god, I can just see Clippy trying to help out:
"It looks like you're trying to barrage the enemy line. Would you like to read historical documentation on battles involving barrages?"
Or maybe UAC will kick in:
"Howitzer is trying to launch a shell. Allow or Deny?"
Powerglove was developed elsewhere, and built by Mattel. Nintendo only put their official seal of approval on it.
It also uses a system that was simplistic even for the time (due to cost constraints), and internally doesn't resemble the Wiimote at all. As far as straight motion sensing goes, the Wiimote is a huge improvement over the Powerglove, which was universally hated.
While the headline might be good for a light giggle, there's a good reason why it's 10 years behind. Airplane avionics systems must be free of bugs, or people die. That especially goes for a plane that uses a flying wing design (which are historically hard to stabilize without computer control), and potentially carries nuclear warheads.
No more so than Microsoft admitting that the original X-Box controllers were oversized warts by releasing the normal-sized 360 controllers.
This is the first time anyone has made a serious attempt at a motion-sensitive controller (there are other examples, but nothing that was widely used). It should not be expected to be perfect.
That said, the current controller is useful for some games despite its limits. Sword fighting isn't going to work very well, but it's arguably even better than keyboard+mouse for fps games.
"Cost" is just an abstract quantity that the market uses as a judge of the availability of a resource. The Invisible Hand works remarkably well when it comes to commodities like copper.
Superconductors break down if you put AC through them, so yes. AC might have been the right choice when Tesla was around, but not anymore.
Soot from diesel is a combination of NOx (which create nasty short-term pollution, e.g. smog) and carbon monoxide (which is both more poisonous and a stronger greenhouse gas than CO2). A diesel that produced only CO2 would be a reason to break out the fine wine.
The self-serving thing would have been to cast off Wright as soon as the videos started hitting YouTube, just like other politicians who claim they "did not inhale".
Instead, he said the Wright was mistaken, but that it's important why many African Americans of that generation (and even the current generation) think that way. He didn't blame modern white people for past sins they themselves did not commit, didn't blame African Americans for being too lazy to solve their own problems, and called out recent issues that have trivialized the problem, like the OJ Simpson case. Nobody who matters has talked like that since the '60s.
It strikes me as amazing that people who generally followed Obama's calling out of political distractions are now failing to understand the reasons why he voted for this bill. For instance, the speech he gave on race relations after the Rev. Wright controversy was the best speech given on the subject in recent history, and arguably the best one ever from major politician. The idea is that we're supposed to look past sound bites that are turning the US into a nation of imbeciles and see underlieing reasons.
But now so many people that stuck with him over Wright are now willing to hear the sound bite "voted for telecom immunity" and stop at that.
But the summary (and other criticisms of this bill) imply that such a grant by congress is unconstitutional. I'd like to know the argument for this, or if it's just unfounded nonsense.
Can somebody explain the constitutional argument here? I can understand the illegal nature of warrentless wiretapping, but not the retroactively granting amnesty part. That seems like something that'd be within congress' power to grant, should it so choose.
I didn't realize Hans Reiser was convicted in a German court.
No, the prosecution has to make the case. They can't just put the defendant under oath and demand they tell the truth. The Fifth Amendment is very clear in this regard.
On a side note, this is one reason Clinton couldn't technically be charged with lieing under oath for his impeachment. It wasn't a valid question for the prosecution to ask.
As far as weights/armor/etc. goes, it's mostly useful because depleted uranium (U-238) is far more prevalent in uranium ore than the useful stuff (U-235). The result is that the nuclear industry creates a lot of excess U-238 that they can't use and have to store somewhere. They almost pay you to take the stuff away and use it in something. Trying to get U-238 for the sake of U-238 would be uneconomical without a nuclear industry to use the U-235.
The fact that the nuclear fuel he'd had for years is completely unenriched just tells you how little cash he had to spend on the program.
Nailed it.
Further, keep in mind Iraq's position during the time period. There was a big war with Iran that was never officially undeclared. Then there was the Kuwait invasion and withdrawal that decimated the military, followed by economic sanctions and UN inspectors watching every move. Additionally, purifying uranium into anything useful takes a lot of industrial output.
Under those conditions, we could only hope that Saddam would be stupid enough to pursue a nuclear program.
Is there any radioactive material that is potent enough for a dirty bomb? Wouldn't blowing the material up just spread it out so that it's doesn't emit enough rem to do damage?
Yup. A dirty bomb is unlikely to have significant direct impact. However, it would have a big secondary psychological impact of causing mass panic. So it's a terror weapon rather than anything a legitimate military would use.
Fischer-Tropsch net CO2 emissions depend on what kind of biomass you're using. Coal would be a high net CO2 emitter, but that's exactly why you shouldn't use coal. The only reason anybody is suggesting coal is because the US has a large coal reserve. Algae may not be quite as convenient, but it has very high yield/acre and would produce no net CO2.
The real problem is energy input to do it. For large scale production, it would pretty much require several nuclear plants all to itself, or alternatively, high-efficiency solar plants in the desert.
Oh, I don't expect it to be commercially-funded. It wouldn't be a good investment unless we already had a large demand for cheap space travel, but we're not going to have a large demand for cheap space travel until something like this exists. That puts in into the sort of infrastructure the government would invest in so as to stimulate a new industry.
No! Apparently you are not aware that a private individual from Seattle recently purchased a vintage 1959 modified Opel w/ a modified carburetor which sat at the Taladega Raceway since it won the world's record for fuel efficiency in 1973. The record was 376/mpg!!
I do know that car. They stripped out weight to the point where the driver's seat was a lawn chair; shortened the rear axel, which will ruin the handling; used a chain drive that is more likely to break (and do so violently); popped on some superhard tires that will be useless for stopping and starting. Then top it all off by driving around an oval track at 30 mph.
It's no secret that you can get 300+ mpg out of a car using impractical methods like these. Doing it under realistic conditions with considerations towards saftey and comfort is much harder.
It's not all that centralized. It takes Nickel mined in Canada (a dirty business all its own), shipped to Europe for refining, then to China to make the actual batteries, to Japan to be put in Priuses, and then to wherever people want to buy Priuses, assuming they are predilected towards buying a Prius, which I would suggest against.
Further, millions of internal combustion engines can be serviced with Fischer-Tropes gas if we have to.
A rough estimate (pdf link to presentation slides, estimates towards end) puts it around $10 billion for a small system, and $30 billion for a larger one. Add on an order of magnitude to the price for government waste, and it's still pretty good. Better than the most optimistic estimates for a space elevator, and way better than rockets.
Building over an ocean (or rather, starting from an uninhabited island and extending over the ocean) isn't really a big deal. Baker Island will do as long as we can deal with the pesky environmentalists trying to save its status as a wildlife refuge.
Launch loops can be built without any unobtainium. Though it is still in government-funded territory.
Space elevators might have a higher cool factor than a launch loop, but I don't think it's going to be even theoretically cheaper by any significant amount compared to a launch loop. And a launch loop is still pretty cool.