It seems a shame to waste the oxygen, but there's already enough oxygen in plain air, in a stoichiometric sense.
This isn't like fossil fuels where there are carbon atoms which need to be oxidized along with the hydrogen. If you want to burn more hydrogen per cycle, you simply increase the boost in order to have enough O2 available.
Maybe using the residual oxygen from electrolysis would be more efficient than increasing boost. I guess you need to do an experiment to find out!
Of course, you could always vent the oxygen into the passenger space of the vehicle, to enhance the driver's brain function;-)
Why not use Lithium Polymer batteries that can be recharged from solar cells while the car is parked, or recharged from the power grid anytime.
Why not use hydrogen tanks that can be refilled from electrolysis from solar cells while the car is parked, or from grid power, at any time?
The other advantage of Lithium Polymer batteries is energy can be captured from regenerative braking. Hydrogen cycle is a complete waste of energy.
Uhh, why? You use the regenerative braking current to electrolyze more water to get more hydrogen.
Industry should be concentraing on Lithium Polymer car battery mass production and lower costs, not riding the hydrogen fantasy that will never amount to anything for the mass public!
Batteries of any kind eventually wear out. A quality electrolysis cell, along with a water and hydrogen storage tank, will never wear out. Its efficiency will never decrease. And the components do not contain environmentally hazardous chemicals.
Widespread use of solar would reflect some sunlight, and capture the rest, rather than having it absorbed into the ground. This would, at a certain scale, cool the earth--less enegy being converted to heat.
No. Thermodynamics. All energy eventually ends up as heat. Unless you intend to permanently store the collected energy, it will eventually end up as heat again. We just had the opportunity to do something useful with it before that happened.
Now, let's look at the total energy available from the sun, and compare that to what we use. The earth's radius is 6378 kilometers. Its cross sectional area is therefore 127,800,491 square kilometers. Assuming a solar constant of 1370 watts per square meter, this means that, on average, 175,086 terawatts of solar energy fall on the Earth's surface.
In comparison, the current rate of power consumption by humans (and this includes gasoline and other fuels, not just electric consumption) is about 5.5 terawatts.
Thus, we are only using about 1 part in 32,000 of the available power at the surface of the earth. If we produced the entire 5.5 terawatts using solar energy, we would have to intercept 1/32,000 of the incoming solar radiation -- in other words, we would change the Earth's albedo by 0.003%. Now, given the fact that solar panels are only about 25% efficient, we must multiply by 4. So, ultimately, we change the albedo by 0.012%.
The albedo of Earth fluctuates by much more than 0.012% due to natural causes. Thus, any affect we would have on the solar energy balance at the surface of the Earth would be indistinguishable from natural random variations.
I can't find any reason why they move the whole thing with the car.
Think about it. The exhaust from this vehicle is pure water. Thus, you can recover the water from the exhaust, electrolyze it again, and burn it as fuel again. The real power source is sunlight, and the water is just a hydrogen storage medium (which is, in turn an energy storage medium).
This is better than a battery- or fuel cell-based system because an existing car can be retrofitted without modifying the engine too much, and you get the characteristics of a fuel-burning engine rather than an electric motor.
You could use regenerative braking, like in hybrid vehicles, to improve the efficiency even further.
Re:Intel's past arrogance is killing them!
on
AMD 90nm Evaluated
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· Score: 1
I will never rape an eight year old child. Why is that stupid?
Nice try, but that isn't a "strategy." It is a statement of moral intent. And thanks for reading more into what I said than what I obviously meant.
Moral relativism of the type you are spouting is what is dangerous.
I see. Choosing a CPU based on the relevant factors, instead of braindead rules of thumb, is "dangerous moral relativism." How do I sign up for your philosophy class?
Re:Intel's past arrogance is killing them!
on
AMD 90nm Evaluated
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
I will never buy Intel again!
Even if their chips eventually become cheaper and better, again? That sounds like a stupid strategy. In general, all strategies of the form "I will never/always do X" are stupid.
This only works if the sequence of letters "enum" does not occur anywhere but in the given variable name. Your "solution" would mutate the word "renumber" into "rmyEnumber"
Having to mass-rename symbols can be a much worse problem than you make it seem. A simple text search and replace isn't smart enough. You need something which actually understands the syntax.
Also, I believe many raw formats include some basic (run-length?) lossless compression.
I highly doubt that. Even if you took a picture of a perfect, uniformly colored surface, changes in illumination angle across the surface, as well as CCD noise in the sensor, will conspire to destroy any large swatches of equal pixel values, making the benefit of RLE dubious at best. More likely, the RLE would actually cause a slight expansion of the data.
You could use a linear predictor along with Huffman or Golomb-Rice coding to (losslessly) reduce the image somewhat, but in general, photographic image data can't be significantly compressed in a perfectly lossless manner.
ANSI.SYS was a device driver that implemented a basic "terminal protocol" on IBM PC screens back in the MS-DOS days. It could manipulate the cursor, show text in colors, and it had a few other features like key redefinition.
An ANSI bomb was a sequence of commands to the ANSI driver. If the commands were somehow written to the terminal, they would redefine the Enter key to do something like "echo y | format c:". Thus, the next time the victim pressed Enter, the C: would be formatted.
There were a few was to trick your target into displaying the ANSI codes. One way was to embed them in the comment section of a pkzip archive, so that when the file was extracted the codes would be printed to the screen.
It's barely a pun. The technical term "dithering" is very closely linked to the traditional meaning.
dictionary.com defines dithering as "To be nervously irresolute in acting or doing." In other words, to flip-flop. This is precisely the case when dithering an image from a large number of colors into a smaller number of colors. Instead of producing an exact pixel color, the algorithm chooses somewhat randomly between alternatives so as to produce an approximate match, at least when viewed from far away. It behaves "irresolutely" (it can't make up it's mind), or, in other words, it "dithers."
I know that somewhere in here lurks a very lame Kerry joke, but I won't be the one to say it.
Re:"Inspired by Konrad Zuse"
on
Mechanical Pong
·
· Score: 1
This guy designed and built the first programmable digital computer in 1936 in his parent's basement!
How exactly does quantum computing allow us to solve impossible encryption programs?
It doesn't. Who ever put that in the article leader was an idiot. First, there are very few truly "impossible" encryption problems. The one-time pad is one example of a cipher that is impossible to break. Quantum computing will not help us to break those types of ciphers. They truly are impossible to crack.
What QC will help with is solving nearly impossible problems. I.e., problems which can only be solved through brute force. A quantum computer can look at many possibilities simultaneously, so it can solve certain kinds of problems much faster than traditional computers. Factoring huge numbers is one example of a very difficult problem that quantum computers are (in theory) extremely good at.
How much time is there to gain from going to 64 bit? Anybody have a clue?
From a theoretical standpoint, considering the kinds of things a compiler does, not much. Most of the compiler's task is navigating and performing transformations on very large, branched data structures. Mostly stuff like, "Follow this pointer. Okay, does this equal that? Okay, follow this pointer. Now, does this subtree look like that one? Well, to find out, we follow this pointer..."
In other words, it's a bunch of navigation in memory with very little actual "computation." As such, it hardly benefits from doubling the width of the arithmetic units, because its task has very little to do with arithmetic.
Sure, in a very abstract sense a 64-bit CPU can do "twice as much" per clock operation, but whether that is actually useful for your intended application depends on a bunch of other factors. Compilation is not something which could benefit from having fatter integers, which is essentially what 64-bit boils down to.
Why make the taxpayers pay for cleaning up the internet of spam?
The same reason we use taxpayer dollars to clean up litter thrown into the streets by assholes. Someone has to clean up the shit. Bitching about "fairness" doesn't magically make trash disappear.
Do you also believe that taxpayer funding of prisons is unfair? Taxpayer funding of police is unfair? Taxpayer funding of the court systems is unfair? After all, why should we pay to have our own laws enforced?
Make the spammers pay out the bounty.
This is deluded. A $100,000 judgement against a spammer is all well and good, but if that person doesn't possess $100,000, you're up shit's creek. Are you aware of the absolute nightmare it is to actually collect on a court judgement, even for small amounts? Just because the judge says it doesn't make it so.
There's absolutely no reason to make taxpayers (you know, citizens) suffer and go further in debt
Uh.. How the hell does it incur debt? The money doesn't vanish into thin air. It is given to the bounty hunter, who will presumably spend that money and pump it right back into the economy again. Every time money moves, the government gets a cut. After a short while, it's all back in the system again.
There are other reasons why the bounty idea sucks, but it isn't because it's "not fair."
I don't see how this can possibly work. The fines levied against spammers are piddly. Imagine this scenario:
1. Send out 1 million spam messages
2. Get my mother to turn me in
3. I'm ordered to pay a $15,000 fine, or something like that
4. My mom gets $100,000 and gives me half
5. PROFIT!!!
6. Go to step 1
Notice the distinct lack of a mystery step in this plan.
So the only way this can possibly work is if the fines/penalties levied against spammers exceed the value of the bounty.
It makes more sense when you format it differently. It's a shell script (sorry to post as text, can't get the indentation to work otherwise):
:() { :|: & } :
Basically, it defines a function called ":" which, when executed, calls itself recursively twice and puts itself into the background. The last ":" actually executes the function. Thus, one shell forks into two shells, those two shells fork into four shells, those four into eight, etc etc etc.
I really hate you fucking Firefox zealots and your 'OMG MY BROUSER IS TEH BESTEST AND TEH MSOT SECURE!!!'-attitude.
And I really hate fuckwits who generalize all people based on the stupid antics of a few people posting on Slashdot. Fuck off, and get thee back to kindergarten, dimwit.
Are the people who write graphics libraries just not trying very hard or something?
Uhhh, no. It is simply "in vogue" to look for vulnerabilities in image format parsers at the moment. Is the trend not obvious?
Soon all the major image libraries will have been examined, all the bugs fixed, and the security gurus will move on to other things. And we'll all benefit from that, because the code will be fixed.
What's going on here? Is this some kind of nexus for comments from alternate universes? I have no idea what the hell half the people here are talking about. It certainly ain't hurricanes!
Slashdot Mirror
The exhaust is water. Just collect it and reuse it. The entire system could be self contained.
Think.
This isn't like fossil fuels where there are carbon atoms which need to be oxidized along with the hydrogen. If you want to burn more hydrogen per cycle, you simply increase the boost in order to have enough O2 available.
Maybe using the residual oxygen from electrolysis would be more efficient than increasing boost. I guess you need to do an experiment to find out!
Of course, you could always vent the oxygen into the passenger space of the vehicle, to enhance the driver's brain function ;-)
Why not use hydrogen tanks that can be refilled from electrolysis from solar cells while the car is parked, or from grid power, at any time?
The other advantage of Lithium Polymer batteries is energy can be captured from regenerative braking. Hydrogen cycle is a complete waste of energy.
Uhh, why? You use the regenerative braking current to electrolyze more water to get more hydrogen.
Industry should be concentraing on Lithium Polymer car battery mass production and lower costs, not riding the hydrogen fantasy that will never amount to anything for the mass public!
Batteries of any kind eventually wear out. A quality electrolysis cell, along with a water and hydrogen storage tank, will never wear out. Its efficiency will never decrease. And the components do not contain environmentally hazardous chemicals.
No. Thermodynamics. All energy eventually ends up as heat. Unless you intend to permanently store the collected energy, it will eventually end up as heat again. We just had the opportunity to do something useful with it before that happened.
Now, let's look at the total energy available from the sun, and compare that to what we use. The earth's radius is 6378 kilometers. Its cross sectional area is therefore 127,800,491 square kilometers. Assuming a solar constant of 1370 watts per square meter, this means that, on average, 175,086 terawatts of solar energy fall on the Earth's surface.
In comparison, the current rate of power consumption by humans (and this includes gasoline and other fuels, not just electric consumption) is about 5.5 terawatts.
Thus, we are only using about 1 part in 32,000 of the available power at the surface of the earth. If we produced the entire 5.5 terawatts using solar energy, we would have to intercept 1/32,000 of the incoming solar radiation -- in other words, we would change the Earth's albedo by 0.003%. Now, given the fact that solar panels are only about 25% efficient, we must multiply by 4. So, ultimately, we change the albedo by 0.012%.
The albedo of Earth fluctuates by much more than 0.012% due to natural causes. Thus, any affect we would have on the solar energy balance at the surface of the Earth would be indistinguishable from natural random variations.
In short, we don't have jack to worry about.
Think about it. The exhaust from this vehicle is pure water. Thus, you can recover the water from the exhaust, electrolyze it again, and burn it as fuel again. The real power source is sunlight, and the water is just a hydrogen storage medium (which is, in turn an energy storage medium).
This is better than a battery- or fuel cell-based system because an existing car can be retrofitted without modifying the engine too much, and you get the characteristics of a fuel-burning engine rather than an electric motor.
You could use regenerative braking, like in hybrid vehicles, to improve the efficiency even further.
Nice try, but that isn't a "strategy." It is a statement of moral intent. And thanks for reading more into what I said than what I obviously meant.
Moral relativism of the type you are spouting is what is dangerous.
I see. Choosing a CPU based on the relevant factors, instead of braindead rules of thumb, is "dangerous moral relativism." How do I sign up for your philosophy class?
Even if their chips eventually become cheaper and better, again? That sounds like a stupid strategy. In general, all strategies of the form "I will never/always do X" are stupid.
Having to mass-rename symbols can be a much worse problem than you make it seem. A simple text search and replace isn't smart enough. You need something which actually understands the syntax.
I highly doubt that. Even if you took a picture of a perfect, uniformly colored surface, changes in illumination angle across the surface, as well as CCD noise in the sensor, will conspire to destroy any large swatches of equal pixel values, making the benefit of RLE dubious at best. More likely, the RLE would actually cause a slight expansion of the data.
You could use a linear predictor along with Huffman or Golomb-Rice coding to (losslessly) reduce the image somewhat, but in general, photographic image data can't be significantly compressed in a perfectly lossless manner.
"Repressive country?" I've seen this occur in the United States, before my very eyes. Wait a second...
ANSI.SYS was a device driver that implemented a basic "terminal protocol" on IBM PC screens back in the MS-DOS days. It could manipulate the cursor, show text in colors, and it had a few other features like key redefinition.
An ANSI bomb was a sequence of commands to the ANSI driver. If the commands were somehow written to the terminal, they would redefine the Enter key to do something like "echo y | format c:". Thus, the next time the victim pressed Enter, the C: would be formatted.
There were a few was to trick your target into displaying the ANSI codes. One way was to embed them in the comment section of a pkzip archive, so that when the file was extracted the codes would be printed to the screen.
dictionary.com defines dithering as "To be nervously irresolute in acting or doing." In other words, to flip-flop. This is precisely the case when dithering an image from a large number of colors into a smaller number of colors. Instead of producing an exact pixel color, the algorithm chooses somewhat randomly between alternatives so as to produce an approximate match, at least when viewed from far away. It behaves "irresolutely" (it can't make up it's mind), or, in other words, it "dithers."
I know that somewhere in here lurks a very lame Kerry joke, but I won't be the one to say it.
Ahhh! My life has been vindicated!
It doesn't. Who ever put that in the article leader was an idiot. First, there are very few truly "impossible" encryption problems. The one-time pad is one example of a cipher that is impossible to break. Quantum computing will not help us to break those types of ciphers. They truly are impossible to crack.
What QC will help with is solving nearly impossible problems. I.e., problems which can only be solved through brute force. A quantum computer can look at many possibilities simultaneously, so it can solve certain kinds of problems much faster than traditional computers. Factoring huge numbers is one example of a very difficult problem that quantum computers are (in theory) extremely good at.
From a theoretical standpoint, considering the kinds of things a compiler does, not much. Most of the compiler's task is navigating and performing transformations on very large, branched data structures. Mostly stuff like, "Follow this pointer. Okay, does this equal that? Okay, follow this pointer. Now, does this subtree look like that one? Well, to find out, we follow this pointer..."
In other words, it's a bunch of navigation in memory with very little actual "computation." As such, it hardly benefits from doubling the width of the arithmetic units, because its task has very little to do with arithmetic.
Sure, in a very abstract sense a 64-bit CPU can do "twice as much" per clock operation, but whether that is actually useful for your intended application depends on a bunch of other factors. Compilation is not something which could benefit from having fatter integers, which is essentially what 64-bit boils down to.
It takes about 20-30 minutes to do a full compile including modules, depending on my system load.
The same reason we use taxpayer dollars to clean up litter thrown into the streets by assholes. Someone has to clean up the shit. Bitching about "fairness" doesn't magically make trash disappear.
Do you also believe that taxpayer funding of prisons is unfair? Taxpayer funding of police is unfair? Taxpayer funding of the court systems is unfair? After all, why should we pay to have our own laws enforced?
Make the spammers pay out the bounty.
This is deluded. A $100,000 judgement against a spammer is all well and good, but if that person doesn't possess $100,000, you're up shit's creek. Are you aware of the absolute nightmare it is to actually collect on a court judgement, even for small amounts? Just because the judge says it doesn't make it so.
There's absolutely no reason to make taxpayers (you know, citizens) suffer and go further in debt
Uh.. How the hell does it incur debt? The money doesn't vanish into thin air. It is given to the bounty hunter, who will presumably spend that money and pump it right back into the economy again. Every time money moves, the government gets a cut. After a short while, it's all back in the system again.
There are other reasons why the bounty idea sucks, but it isn't because it's "not fair."
1. Send out 1 million spam messages
2. Get my mother to turn me in
3. I'm ordered to pay a $15,000 fine, or something like that
4. My mom gets $100,000 and gives me half
5. PROFIT!!!
6. Go to step 1
Notice the distinct lack of a mystery step in this plan.
So the only way this can possibly work is if the fines/penalties levied against spammers exceed the value of the bounty.
It makes more sense when you format it differently. It's a shell script (sorry to post as text, can't get the indentation to work otherwise):
:|: &
:()
{
}
:
Basically, it defines a function called ":" which, when executed, calls itself recursively twice and puts itself into the background. The last ":" actually executes the function. Thus, one shell forks into two shells, those two shells fork into four shells, those four into eight, etc etc etc.
And I really hate fuckwits who generalize all people based on the stupid antics of a few people posting on Slashdot. Fuck off, and get thee back to kindergarten, dimwit.
Son of a BITCH, I was just about to post that! GAH!
(Dear Slashdotters: The command shown above will not harm your computer, but will probably require a reboot to recover from it)
Uhhh, no. It is simply "in vogue" to look for vulnerabilities in image format parsers at the moment. Is the trend not obvious?
Soon all the major image libraries will have been examined, all the bugs fixed, and the security gurus will move on to other things. And we'll all benefit from that, because the code will be fixed.
Bitching is counterproductive, don't you think?
Was my quip about a "fortunate turn northward" not clear enough?!
What's going on here? Is this some kind of nexus for comments from alternate universes? I have no idea what the hell half the people here are talking about. It certainly ain't hurricanes!
Well, hurricane Javier is somewhat near Cali right now. Maybe it'll take a fortunate turn northward? :-)