Do you know some secret method for separating oxygen and hydrogen out of water that doesn't require energy? If so, please share it with me, I want to get rich:^)
But to address the question raised in the article: It most certainly did consume more energy to produce the hydrogen and oxygen than the fuel cell can recover from them. To do otherwise would be to break the laws of thermodynamics -- you can't get more energy out of a system than was already in it to start with.
The only reason people think otherwise is because they are so used to fossil fuels, where all the energy has been "put in" to the fuel for them, by millions of years of natural processing.
Sorry folks, that's the exception, not the rule. But the good news is, there is a (for all practical purposes) infinite supply of energy available to us. It's just a matter of capturing the energy as it falls from space.
Can you? If anything about the government-installed backdoor ever became public knowledge, IBM would be facing all kinds of lawsuits from anyone who ever bought that chip, would probably have to refund or replace every copy of the chip they ever sold, and it would be a long, long time before anyone would seriously consider buying a "secure" chip from IBM again.
I like a crypto-fascist conspiracy as much as the next guy, but wouldn't that be an awfully big marketing risk for IBM to take?
To get Venus straightened out for human habitation, you would have flat out get rid of something like 89 parts out of 90 in the Venutian atmosphere, and there's really no place to put that much air.
Pipe it over to Mars, and kill two birds with one stone?
You have a point, but I think it's clear why people don't think of Venus as a suitable planet: from every description, the surface of Venus sounds exactly like the description of Hell. Who would want to live in Hell? Mars, on the other hand, just looks a bit rocky and barren (you can't see the lack of gravity or atmosphere in the pictures). Granted, with sufficient terraforming they could both be completely different, but in the popular imagination, Mars looks a lot closer to the ideal than Venus is. Plus, the fact that we can put probes on Mars and drive them around without having them melt into sludge gives people a lot more confidence about Mars.
Even the Anthrax in the mail scare caused no more damagae than the unibomber, and that anthrax may have been top grade US governement
Indeed. Not to get all tin-foil-hat about it, but what was the deal there? Why was (what appeared to be) the US government's anthrax being mailed to people in the months after 9/11? And why did the government investigations of it turn up absolutely nothing? Seems awfully fishy to me.... like perhaps it was part of a "psy-ops" operation to scare the public into supporting anything labelled "anti-terror", which was halted after it had served its purpose.
I personally don't lose sleep over the threat of a terrorist attack.
I lose sleep over the political/societal reaction to the terrorist attack. You think that civil rights in this country were damaged by 9/11? Imagine what the response would be like to, say, Chicago getting hit by a tactical nuke. Sealed borders? Concentration camps? Apocalyptic cults? Economic crash? Fundamentalist/reactionary politics? I think the secondary damage would almost certainly outweigh the primary damage by an order of magnitude. For an example, compare the money and lives that were lost on 9/11 to the money and lives that were lost to the political reaction to 9/11.
Fear makes people (and societies) do stupid things.
The simple truth with gentech is, its not needed with one exception: Cash for Monsanto, Syngenta et. al.
"The simple truth with computer tech is, its not needed with one exception: Cash for Apple, Microsoft, Dell, et al."
Of course it's not "needed"... everything can in principle be done the traditional way. The question is, are there benefits that can be realized through the use and development of the technology? If not, then people will figure that out, nobody will buy the technology and it will go away. If so, then it's likely something worth developing, even if it isn't "necessary" (whatever that means).
Note that I'm not saying it shouldn't be watched closely, or that the current products of GM are necessarily useful or beneficial; only that the entire field shouldn't be dismissed out of hand as "useless" or "evil" or whatnot.
I would espect these designs to speed up as the engineers begin to work out how to shorten the physical paths between functional units.
I think asynchronous logic could make a nice complement to 3D chip design (e.g. making a processing "cube" rather than the current "plane"). The 3D structure would make it much easier to place components very close to each other, and the lack of clock pulses would help cut down on heat generation (heat dissipation problems are one reason why 3D layouts aren't currently practical)
For too long [...] readability and human interest were sacrificed to a false god of objectivity
Yes, and now the only thing sacrificed to the false god of objectivity is basic reason and logic. "NASA scientists say that the sky is blue and the Earth orbits around the sun, but not all agree: here is an opposing view from Mr. P. Gumby about how the sun is actually a piece of brightly colored yellow paper taped to a giant eggshell that surrounds the Earth. Which is correct? We'll report both sides and leave it to our viewers to decide."
it's the love and insight that were poured into delivering a computer that thinks the way we Mac users think. [...] That is Apple's focus, and it hasn't changed a bit since 1976.
Okay, I just can't let that one pass... this is what Apple was selling in 1976. They were marketing the Apple I to hobbyists who were not only expected to write their own software, they even had to design and build their own case. Ask Mac users to do either of those things and they will run screaming from the room.
So I'd say that yes, Apple's focus has changed a bit since 1976. Maybe "since 1984" would be a better argument...:^)
A near-future release of MacOS/X will ship with VMWare-style virtualization software built in, so that any Mac user who wants to run windows software can just insert a WinXP install CD and half an hour later have a Mac that runs both Windows and Mac software simultaneously. The virtualization software will feature a firewall / security layer / sandbox for the Windows OS to run in, allowing Apple to proclaim (perhaps rightly, perhaps not) that this is "the safest way to run Windows".
Now all I need is a blogger to challenge me to a bet about it, and I'll have reached the big time....
The period before WWII - and WWII itself - showed us the dangers of appeasement, and what can result from ignoring evil in the world. And make no mistake - the only difference between Hitler, Stalin and Saddam is...
One difference you missed: Hitler was annexing neighboring countries, and "appeasement" was an ineffective strategy to stop him from expanding further. After the end of the first Gulf War, Saddam was not threatening his neighbors (and indeed could not, since his military and economy were no longer strong enough to do so). So the "appeasement" argument is invalid, because Saddam was not threatening any other countries. In fact, if you want to talk about appeasement not working, I'd say that's true, but the roles were reversed: Saddam tried to "appease" George W. by allowing inspections, etc, but George W. invaded Iraq anyway.
Did you forget that it requires an act of Congress to declare war, or do you just prefer to let the legislative branch delude you so they can get re-elected?
Of course, the Legislative branch was told in no uncertain terms by the Executive branch that Saddam definitely had WMDs, he was definitely planning to use them against the US, and that Iraq was definitely an immediate, significant, and growing threat to our country's population.
So if you want to accuse the legislature of believing what the Bush administration told them and not doing their own independent research to verify it all first, go ahead. But imagine you were in their position... the President of the U.S., who has access to all classified U.S. intelligence, is telling you over and over again that according to his extremely credible sources, all of the above is true, and that if we don't invade right now "the smoking gun may be a mushroom cloud". This, two years after September 11th. What would you have done in that scenario?
I'd say the legislature got punked, along with the rest of us.
Try allocating 100kb of Kernel memory in a while(1) loop. That'll fuck up the system real fast.
Maybe not... on many OS's, the memory isn't actually allocated until you read or write it. So e.g. in Linux/Unix, your task would quickly run out of address space and be killed, but the rest of the OS wouldn't notice much difference.
Now if you were to allocate and clear memory in a loop, that would cause more trouble.
One famous case of tampering was by the CIA; control software for a Soviet oil pipeline purchased in the West was modified to fail upon a remote command causing a massive explosion.
Shouldn't the CIA be held responsible for criminal behavior like this?
When you are 1" away from the curb, slowly bring the wheel back to rest state
That is the tricky part there. How do you know how close to the curb you are? If you have a good sense of spatial reasoning, you may have a "feel" for it, but a lot of people don't have that skill. The view shown in your mirrors is misleading. If the curb isn't too tall, you can do it "by feel"... you know you're at the curb when the back right tire pushes up against it. On the other hand, if you are parking next to a wall, that's a good way to scrape up your rear fender.
It's not terribly hard with practice, but it does take some skill and if you're not good at it you risk damaging your car, someone else's car, or pissing people off as they wait to pass while you mess it up and have to try again. That's more stress than many people want to have, so I can see why they might like this device.
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Do you know some secret method for separating oxygen and hydrogen out of water that doesn't require energy? If so, please share it with me, I want to get rich
But to address the question raised in the article: It most certainly did consume more energy to produce the hydrogen and oxygen than the fuel cell can recover from them. To do otherwise would be to break the laws of thermodynamics -- you can't get more energy out of a system than was already in it to start with.
The only reason people think otherwise is because they are so used to fossil fuels, where all the energy has been "put in" to the fuel for them, by millions of years of natural processing.
Sorry folks, that's the exception, not the rule. But the good news is, there is a (for all practical purposes) infinite supply of energy available to us. It's just a matter of capturing the energy as it falls from space.
Please tell me that "predisser" is an obscure legal term, and not an attempt at "predecessor" gone horribly wrong.
I see the results of the test are already coming in...
Can you? If anything about the government-installed backdoor ever became public knowledge, IBM would be facing all kinds of lawsuits from anyone who ever bought that chip, would probably have to refund or replace every copy of the chip they ever sold, and it would be a long, long time before anyone would seriously consider buying a "secure" chip from IBM again.
I like a crypto-fascist conspiracy as much as the next guy, but wouldn't that be an awfully big marketing risk for IBM to take?
It's not a question of what I (or anyone) would want. It's merely a question of what the nation would do, and what the effects/costs would be.
Pipe it over to Mars, and kill two birds with one stone?
You have a point, but I think it's clear why people don't think of Venus as a suitable planet: from every description, the surface of Venus sounds exactly like the description of Hell. Who would want to live in Hell? Mars, on the other hand, just looks a bit rocky and barren (you can't see the lack of gravity or atmosphere in the pictures). Granted, with sufficient terraforming they could both be completely different, but in the popular imagination, Mars looks a lot closer to the ideal than Venus is. Plus, the fact that we can put probes on Mars and drive them around without having them melt into sludge gives people a lot more confidence about Mars.
If you were a Nazi, you'd be tense too. All that "sig heiling" and ethnic clensing is really stressful...
Indeed. Not to get all tin-foil-hat about it, but what was the deal there? Why was (what appeared to be) the US government's anthrax being mailed to people in the months after 9/11? And why did the government investigations of it turn up absolutely nothing? Seems awfully fishy to me.... like perhaps it was part of a "psy-ops" operation to scare the public into supporting anything labelled "anti-terror", which was halted after it had served its purpose.
I lose sleep over the political/societal reaction to the terrorist attack. You think that civil rights in this country were damaged by 9/11? Imagine what the response would be like to, say, Chicago getting hit by a tactical nuke. Sealed borders? Concentration camps? Apocalyptic cults? Economic crash? Fundamentalist/reactionary politics? I think the secondary damage would almost certainly outweigh the primary damage by an order of magnitude. For an example, compare the money and lives that were lost on 9/11 to the money and lives that were lost to the political reaction to 9/11.
Fear makes people (and societies) do stupid things.
It's just a line from "Oh Brother Where Art Thou" that I happened to like. It's an excellent movie, be sure to rent it if you haven't seen it already.
What exactly is "$100 worth of infrastructure"? Can that be bought on line? Or maybe at the local co-op?
If you wait for world hunger to be solved before you do anything, you're never going to do anything. Your argument is a cop-out.
"The simple truth with computer tech is, its not needed with one exception: Cash for Apple, Microsoft, Dell, et al."
Of course it's not "needed"... everything can in principle be done the traditional way. The question is, are there benefits that can be realized through the use and development of the technology? If not, then people will figure that out, nobody will buy the technology and it will go away. If so, then it's likely something worth developing, even if it isn't "necessary" (whatever that means).
Note that I'm not saying it shouldn't be watched closely, or that the current products of GM are necessarily useful or beneficial; only that the entire field shouldn't be dismissed out of hand as "useless" or "evil" or whatnot.
Be honest, now.... does this distro make my kernel look fat?
I think asynchronous logic could make a nice complement to 3D chip design (e.g. making a processing "cube" rather than the current "plane"). The 3D structure would make it much easier to place components very close to each other, and the lack of clock pulses would help cut down on heat generation (heat dissipation problems are one reason why 3D layouts aren't currently practical)
Yes, and now the only thing sacrificed to the false god of objectivity is basic reason and logic. "NASA scientists say that the sky is blue and the Earth orbits around the sun, but not all agree: here is an opposing view from Mr. P. Gumby about how the sun is actually a piece of brightly colored yellow paper taped to a giant eggshell that surrounds the Earth. Which is correct? We'll report both sides and leave it to our viewers to decide."
the way we Mac users think. [...] That is Apple's focus, and it hasn't changed a bit since 1976.
Okay, I just can't let that one pass... this is what Apple was selling in 1976. They were marketing the Apple I to hobbyists who were not only expected to write their own software, they even had to design and build their own case. Ask Mac users to do either of those things and they will run screaming from the room.
So I'd say that yes, Apple's focus has changed a bit since 1976. Maybe "since 1984" would be a better argument...
A near-future release of MacOS/X will ship with VMWare-style virtualization software built in, so that any Mac user who wants to run windows software can just insert a WinXP install CD and half an hour later have a Mac that runs both Windows and Mac software simultaneously. The virtualization software will feature a firewall / security layer / sandbox for the Windows OS to run in, allowing Apple to proclaim (perhaps rightly, perhaps not) that this is "the safest way to run Windows".
Now all I need is a blogger to challenge me to a bet about it, and I'll have reached the big time....
One difference you missed: Hitler was annexing neighboring countries, and "appeasement" was an ineffective strategy to stop him from expanding further. After the end of the first Gulf War, Saddam was not threatening his neighbors (and indeed could not, since his military and economy were no longer strong enough to do so). So the "appeasement" argument is invalid, because Saddam was not threatening any other countries. In fact, if you want to talk about appeasement not working, I'd say that's true, but the roles were reversed: Saddam tried to "appease" George W. by allowing inspections, etc, but George W. invaded Iraq anyway.
Ah, right you are... I missed the word "kernel" in the original post. I need to read more carefully!
Of course, the Legislative branch was told in no uncertain terms by the Executive branch that Saddam definitely had WMDs, he was definitely planning to use them against the US, and that Iraq was definitely an immediate, significant, and growing threat to our country's population.
So if you want to accuse the legislature of believing what the Bush administration told them and not doing their own independent research to verify it all first, go ahead. But imagine you were in their position... the President of the U.S., who has access to all classified U.S. intelligence, is telling you over and over again that according to his extremely credible sources, all of the above is true, and that if we don't invade right now "the smoking gun may be a mushroom cloud". This, two years after September 11th. What would you have done in that scenario?
I'd say the legislature got punked, along with the rest of us.
Maybe not... on many OS's, the memory isn't actually allocated until you read or write it. So e.g. in Linux/Unix, your task would quickly run out of address space and be killed, but the rest of the OS wouldn't notice much difference.
Now if you were to allocate and clear memory in a loop, that would cause more trouble.
Shouldn't the CIA be held responsible for criminal behavior like this?
That is the tricky part there. How do you know how close to the curb you are? If you have a good sense of spatial reasoning, you may have a "feel" for it, but a lot of people don't have that skill. The view shown in your mirrors is misleading. If the curb isn't too tall, you can do it "by feel"... you know you're at the curb when the back right tire pushes up against it. On the other hand, if you are parking next to a wall, that's a good way to scrape up your rear fender.
It's not terribly hard with practice, but it does take some skill and if you're not good at it you risk damaging your car, someone else's car, or pissing people off as they wait to pass while you mess it up and have to try again. That's more stress than many people want to have, so I can see why they might like this device.