It sounds as if the cells has a high quantum efficiency as well. From the article:
The silicon wire arrays created by Atwater and his colleagues are able to convert between 90 and 100 percent of the photons they absorb into electrons—in technical terms, the wires have a near-perfect internal quantum efficiency. "High absorption plus good conversion makes for a high-quality solar cell," says Atwater. "It's an important advance."
Almost too good to be true, but if it is (and it scales well), invest in some desert land area, because solar has just become viable.
Mod parent up: *rant* Hollywood has totally violated the laws of physics with fictional law enforcement agencies that can use IR to see through walls. Unless the walls are transparent to IR (and not even glass is transparent to micrometer range IR), there is no way to peer through walls with FLIR.*rant over*
3.5GHz translates to a ~8cm wavelength (maybe a bit less with the speed of light being slower in air). Resolving features that vary in amplitude of say less than 2cm (breathing and swaying) requires VERY accurate phase detection and time measurement equipment. Which translates to some very fast hardware doing phase correlation etc.
From the article:
Instead, the L-3 CyTerra device sends pulses on 200 different frequencies, one at a time, ranging in sequence from 3101 to 3499 MHz at 2 MHz intervals.
and
The system is sensitive enough to detect the chest motions of a person who is unconscious but breathing, or the slight swaying of a person trying to stand perfectly still
Now combine this with some wire mesh (to form a Faraday-cage when you've papered the whole room (including the ceiling)) and the tinfoil-hat-crowd will go mad for it!
Take away all the immigrants (especially the highly skilled ones) and the UK economy will collapse. The technological centers of innovation in UK, e.g. Cambridge, will shrink or simply disappear without an influx of foreign workers. London will grind to a halt if you remove the foreign workers (they keep the place together, clean and in functioning order). Note that ex-Imperial colony immigrants have to jump through exactly the same hoops as other people to obtain the right to stay in the UK.
Imperialism might have ended 50 years ago, but the effect of imperialism will be felt for a long time to come, especially in Africa. All the artificial borders that the imperialist rule imposed on regions (notice all the straight artificial borders on the map in Africa), have to be corrected. Usually this comes in the form of civil war, Sudan being an excellent example of this. I refer you to Parag Khanna's TED talk. I'm not saying the UK should throw open its borders for ex-imperialist colony immigrants, but do realize that the effect of imperialism is still felt in regions of the world today.
220 decibels of sound can travel very far (especially underwater), I bet the submarine can be quite far away and will still be able to pick up the sound signal. IF (and this 'if' is a very handwavey kind of if) the range of this is say more than a few tens of kilometers, it would be hard to find the submarine anyway in a volume that large.
Someone asking marriage advice on Slashdot (of all places) -> who else can we ask something important? Mmm, probably asking George Bush about achieving world peace!
Then chuck out the propriety code and make it work with open standards. Or if that does not exist, create an open standard and do the first reference implementation. I'm assuming e-bay has the right to distribute the executable under the Skype name.
This might be a case of the kaizer's clothes. The friggin' laser probably vaporized the aluminium in the first place, leaving it transparent because it is not really there! Mmm, only *really* intelligent people can actually feel the aluminium...
The warm up time of CFLs is probably the biggest issue for me (I know there are CFLs that claim to have short warm up times). This is most annoying at dusk, when you keep looking up at the light to check if it is actually on! Not a reason not to have CFLs, but still annoying.
No matter how many wiki's, handbooks, websites, etc. there are, chances are that I will get the DTE/DCE thing wrong! Probably the most confusing pinout scheme ever invented... Getting your serial cable right first time, requires triple high bio-rhythms and planetary alignmnent!
This is definitely an issue... When it comes to archiving, the critical thing really is the lifetime of the storage medium and readers. We seem to be developing storage with higher and higher capacities, but with shorter and shorter life spans. The papyrus medium developed by the Egyptians are still readable today (although the information density is low, and the number of readers are few and far between!), compared to DVD-RWs that can hold a few GBs of data, but only has a shelf life of a few years.
Paul Conway has an excellent piece on Preservation in the digital world and takes a look not only at the mediums, but also at the surrounding issues (readers, data formats, etc.).
You can filter the tweets by comparing the place name after "Just landed in", with the Long+Lat coordinate results. Add another filter that filters on user name, so that a specific user can not 'retweet' by putting a time delay in excepting a new 'Just landed in' tweet.
The data set looks a bit sparse when considering that it is over quite a long period - I guess not a lot of people actually tweet 'Just landed in'...
There is financial, experience and qualification implications in this discision:
Financially, it makes more sense to start working immediately. A person who studies full time for his/her masters will never make up for the loss of income during the 1 or 2 years it takes to do the masters, compared to someone who starts working right away.
Experience wise, the person who starts working immediately comes out ahead in raw experience count.
Your best bet is actually to work full time and study part time, that way you get the degree, get the income + work experience.
After Mininova implements this fully, how much content will be left?
I guess the open source stuff will still be there, and any software that is in the public domain. How about those e-books that are nowhere else to be found, except on torrents?
When it comes to archiving, the critical thing really is the lifetime of the storage medium. We seem to be developing storage with higher and higher capacities, but with shorter and shorter life spans. The papyrus medium developed by the Egyptians are still readable today (although the information density is low, and the number of readers are few and far between!), compared to DVD-RWs that can hold a few GBs of data, but only has a shelf life of a few years.
Paul Conway has an excellent piece on Preservation in the digital world and takes a look not only at the mediums, but also at the surrounding issues (readers, data formats, etc.).
I've downgraded a few laptops and desktops now to XP, and most of the sound hardware does not work right after install: you actually have to download a few drivers. Might not be the same as installing a brand new OS, I'm just saying that no OS is perfect in its driver support, especially when it comes to laptops.
Slashdot Mirror
Let's hope that they don't apply the M$' software development process to the reactor design! Que If Microsoft built reactor jokes...
The silicon wire arrays created by Atwater and his colleagues are able to convert between 90 and 100 percent of the photons they absorb into electrons—in technical terms, the wires have a near-perfect internal quantum efficiency. "High absorption plus good conversion makes for a high-quality solar cell," says Atwater. "It's an important advance."
Almost too good to be true, but if it is (and it scales well), invest in some desert land area, because solar has just become viable.
At 20 mg lithium per kg of Earth's crust, lithium is the 25th most abundant element. Nickel and lead have the about the same abundance
Not apparently a crisis, although it might be more expensive to mine due to the use of electrolysis.
Mod parent up: *rant* Hollywood has totally violated the laws of physics with fictional law enforcement agencies that can use IR to see through walls. Unless the walls are transparent to IR (and not even glass is transparent to micrometer range IR), there is no way to peer through walls with FLIR.*rant over*
Instead, the L-3 CyTerra device sends pulses on 200 different frequencies, one at a time, ranging in sequence from 3101 to 3499 MHz at 2 MHz intervals.
and
The system is sensitive enough to detect the chest motions of a person who is unconscious but breathing, or the slight swaying of a person trying to stand perfectly still
This is the aerospace industry we're talking about, there is A LOT of red tape surrounding each and every movement, change, purchase, etc.
Now combine this with some wire mesh (to form a Faraday-cage when you've papered the whole room (including the ceiling)) and the tinfoil-hat-crowd will go mad for it!
Take away all the immigrants (especially the highly skilled ones) and the UK economy will collapse. The technological centers of innovation in UK, e.g. Cambridge, will shrink or simply disappear without an influx of foreign workers. London will grind to a halt if you remove the foreign workers (they keep the place together, clean and in functioning order). Note that ex-Imperial colony immigrants have to jump through exactly the same hoops as other people to obtain the right to stay in the UK.
Imperialism might have ended 50 years ago, but the effect of imperialism will be felt for a long time to come, especially in Africa. All the artificial borders that the imperialist rule imposed on regions (notice all the straight artificial borders on the map in Africa), have to be corrected. Usually this comes in the form of civil war, Sudan being an excellent example of this. I refer you to Parag Khanna's TED talk. I'm not saying the UK should throw open its borders for ex-imperialist colony immigrants, but do realize that the effect of imperialism is still felt in regions of the world today.
To point out the obvious: your assuming that things must move quickly (or move on our timescales) to be useful...
220 decibels of sound can travel very far (especially underwater), I bet the submarine can be quite far away and will still be able to pick up the sound signal. IF (and this 'if' is a very handwavey kind of if) the range of this is say more than a few tens of kilometers, it would be hard to find the submarine anyway in a volume that large.
Someone asking marriage advice on Slashdot (of all places) -> who else can we ask something important? Mmm, probably asking George Bush about achieving world peace!
Which may not be an option, the important parts of the code may be covered by a software patent with USPTO.
SIP is the obvious choice for this, which is an open standard. Integration with any type of telephony service should be much more straight forward.
Then chuck out the propriety code and make it work with open standards. Or if that does not exist, create an open standard and do the first reference implementation. I'm assuming e-bay has the right to distribute the executable under the Skype name.
This might be a case of the kaizer's clothes. The friggin' laser probably vaporized the aluminium in the first place, leaving it transparent because it is not really there! Mmm, only *really* intelligent people can actually feel the aluminium...
The warm up time of CFLs is probably the biggest issue for me (I know there are CFLs that claim to have short warm up times). This is most annoying at dusk, when you keep looking up at the light to check if it is actually on! Not a reason not to have CFLs, but still annoying.
Aahhh, but these houses are AMERICAN houses, probably biggest and the most environmentally non-friendly houses on the planet...
No matter how many wiki's, handbooks, websites, etc. there are, chances are that I will get the DTE/DCE thing wrong! Probably the most confusing pinout scheme ever invented... Getting your serial cable right first time, requires triple high bio-rhythms and planetary alignmnent!
we probe you!
This is definitely an issue... When it comes to archiving, the critical thing really is the lifetime of the storage medium and readers. We seem to be developing storage with higher and higher capacities, but with shorter and shorter life spans. The papyrus medium developed by the Egyptians are still readable today (although the information density is low, and the number of readers are few and far between!), compared to DVD-RWs that can hold a few GBs of data, but only has a shelf life of a few years. Paul Conway has an excellent piece on Preservation in the digital world and takes a look not only at the mediums, but also at the surrounding issues (readers, data formats, etc.).
You can filter the tweets by comparing the place name after "Just landed in", with the Long+Lat coordinate results. Add another filter that filters on user name, so that a specific user can not 'retweet' by putting a time delay in excepting a new 'Just landed in' tweet.
The data set looks a bit sparse when considering that it is over quite a long period - I guess not a lot of people actually tweet 'Just landed in'...
This is not necessarily bad advice...
There is financial, experience and qualification implications in this discision:
Financially, it makes more sense to start working immediately. A person who studies full time for his/her masters will never make up for the loss of income during the 1 or 2 years it takes to do the masters, compared to someone who starts working right away.
Experience wise, the person who starts working immediately comes out ahead in raw experience count.
Your best bet is actually to work full time and study part time, that way you get the degree, get the income + work experience.
After Mininova implements this fully, how much content will be left?
I guess the open source stuff will still be there, and any software that is in the public domain. How about those e-books that are nowhere else to be found, except on torrents?
Your arms are going to get tired very quickly using this interface... Maybe we should rather work on perfecting those mind control interfaces.
When it comes to archiving, the critical thing really is the lifetime of the storage medium. We seem to be developing storage with higher and higher capacities, but with shorter and shorter life spans. The papyrus medium developed by the Egyptians are still readable today (although the information density is low, and the number of readers are few and far between!), compared to DVD-RWs that can hold a few GBs of data, but only has a shelf life of a few years.
Paul Conway has an excellent piece on Preservation in the digital world and takes a look not only at the mediums, but also at the surrounding issues (readers, data formats, etc.).
I've downgraded a few laptops and desktops now to XP, and most of the sound hardware does not work right after install: you actually have to download a few drivers. Might not be the same as installing a brand new OS, I'm just saying that no OS is perfect in its driver support, especially when it comes to laptops.