Another problem is the fact that they MUST use hydrogen -- as someone else pointed out in another thread, it's the only fuel that can combust and expand fast enough to do it while it's still in the engine.
And hydrogen is a pain in the ass. It has a higher specific impulse (thrust per mass of fuel) than any other fuel. That's why NASA is addicted to it. But it's density impulse (thrust per volume) sucks. Plus it's a hard cryogen. So you have to have a BIG, well insulated tank. That translates into major weight and major drag. This is OK on the ground, but it's really not such a great aerospace fuel. NASA insists on using it, as far as I can tell, mostly for reasons having to do with internal politics and organizational culture. (The Russians use kerosene or alcohol, which don't have as good a specific impulse but have a much, much better density impulse.)
There are people who honestly, truly do not appear to subject to jealousy or feelings of posessiveness. They are rare, but I know a couple.
To quote a former girlfriend (one of the aforementioned people that don't get sexually jealous): "It's all about expectations". As long as everybody involved is clear about what the terms of the relationship are, and they are either free of jealousy or able to control it, then open relationships can work.
Of course, I doubt that even one person in a hundred has the communication skills and the emotional makeup required for such a thing to work. It's not easy. But it is possible.
Ok, there's probably something here that I'm not getting, and maybe someone can explain it to me. But after reading their description, I don't really understand why they went to the trouble to digitize the signal at all.
If you're going to have to produce and distribute "noise key" records in the first place, why not simply combine the two signals (the voice and the noise) in an analog fashion before transmission, and then do the same process in reverse at the other end? This would have been MUCH simpler (meaning they could have deployed it sooner).
Granted, they get an extra degree of security by digitizing the signal, simply because the enenmy must then reverse engineer all the digitzation hardware. So rather than simply needing to steal a copy of the noise key, the Axis would have had to steal 55 tons of equipment to use it. Still, I don't see how the system is made fundementally more secure by digitizing the signal. And I'm sure they were in a big hurry to get this system in place, so I can't see them making it more complicated than they absolutely had to.
I'm not talking about boycotts. I'm talking about dropping out, to whatever degree you deem appropriate. That may mean shooting your TV. It may mean going to live in a cabin in the woods. That's really up to you, and what you feel is an appropriate response.
I guess you could look at it as a boycott, but it's one thing to boycott a particular company (and yes, I agree, it's almost impossible to do that effectively in today's economy). It's another thing to boycott an entire segment of an industry (e.g. mass media, or the movie biz). It's the difference between a specific, targetted action and a choice of lifestyle.
Yeah, you'll probably still be putting some money in their pockets buying something that you really need that's totally unrelated (like food). Nevertheless, it can have an impact. For example if Bigevil Inc owns a movie studio and a grocery store chain, and enough people get digusted and stop going to the movies, Bigevil Inc won't go out of business (because people still buy groceries) but they'll sure as hell notice that their studio is taking a loss.
The thing that so many of us don't remember is that capitalism is based on the idea of companies *competing*, not cooperating.
That statement indicates a profound but very common misunderstanding of capitalism.
Competition between companies is good for the consumer if and only if that competition takes the form of attempting to succeed by producing a better product. But corporate competition often becomes a matter of trying to destroy each other, and then the customer is usually the loser.
For example: Creative Labs sues Aureal; Aureal wins but is depleted by the effort; Creative buys Aureal. Consumers lose a choice, and and access to a superior product.
Likewise, cooperation is can be a good thing: when companies coordiate efforts, they can cut costs, increase efficiency, and learn useful techniques from each other. The end result is a better product, usually at a lower cost to the customer. Even if the end-user cost is not reduced, efficiency is increased and waste is reduced, which is better for the system as a whole in the long run.
Now I completely agree with your implication that AOL is a company that favors destructive competition and collusion, rather than constructive cooperation. I'm not at all pleased by this merger. But I couldn't just let your blanket statement lie without comment.
If you really are interested in how this aspect of capitalism works, read some of Dr. Deming -- he's the guy who essentially invented quality as a process, and taught it to the Japanese (because American corporations didn't want to hear about it), which allowed them to kick our ass in the auto industry in the 80's. He understands what makes a business effective. And he's remarkably enlightened: he understands that spending money on your employees is good for your bottom line, and that cutting corners to save a bit of cash is bad, etc. Most of his ideas (other than statsitical process control, which is a hairy mathematical method) seem like common sense to me, but they are anything but common in American business.
The big corporations are doing their best to become the new liege lords of us peasents
There's a very important difference between the current situation and the one to which you are alluding: If you don't like their policies, or their product, DON'T BUY IT! The dogs don't have to eat the dogfood. Yeah, you might have to give up some of the luxuries that you currently take for granted. Tough shit. It's not like you have a right to music, or a computer, or games, or net access, or any other goddam thing that you can't produce yourself.
Hi,
I'm in a similar boat, except that I haven't committed to a particular receiver yet (see my post).
I would very much like to know anything you learn (or may have already learned) in terms of answering this question, whether here or elsewhere. Would you do me the favor of sending me email if you get any major insights on this?
I am also upgrading my sounds system, and I have a similar question.
I have a set-top machine that I use as an MP3 jukebox and a DVD player. Currently I have the sound going out through an old soundblaster into the AUX input on my cheapass all-in-one-box mini stereo system.
I would like to upgrade to a soundcard and receiver that can connect digitally, and do the decoding in the reciever (so that the signal is not analog inside the box with all that electrical noise). I want the system to support true 5.1 output.
I would appreciate recommendations for soundcards and recievers to use in a setup like this. I have been told that the Soundblaster Live series has a digital output, but that it folds all the 5.1 channels into a stereo signal before sending it to the digital output, thus destroying the 5.1 effect. So I would like to find another option.
I like your ideas, and I hope that you get enough support from other experienced users to get them implemented. Unfortunately, I cannot offer help myself: I tried Linux and gave up, at least temporarily. The effort/time required is just not justified at this stage of the game. And I definately share the feeling that you expressed, that you have to know linux before you are in a position to learn linux. Grrr. For me to make the shift, it will either have to become easier/quicker to learn, or it will require some overwhelming motivation (I get put in charge of a server, or M$ succeeds in making all their users actually pay for their lousy software).
At any rate, I did have one thought about learning Linux. I posted this, but it's way down the page and you probably haven't seen it. So jump down to this comment if you want to read it.
I am in very much the same position as Aciel:
I'm a longtime, experienced DOS/Winblows user. I would like to make the transition to Linux, but the learning curve is steep and my free time is limited.
I tried to make the switch a while back and retreated in frustration and for lack of time. But I found that there were really TWO things that I wanted:
1) A good primer on the basic principles and structure of *nix OS's.
2) A set of condensed HOWTOs designed to get a clueful windows user up to speed quickly with Gnome/KDE.
These are really two very different things, but I think they would be complementary and they are both necessary: A "Monkey-see, monkey-do" starter gets you up and running quickly, while the *nix principles book gives you a basis for understanding what you're really doing when you go throug the motions outlined in the HOWTOs.
This technology would make so much sense for a server farm: produce the power locally, and you don't have to depend on the grid or on massive and expensive battery backup systems. Maybe the answer is simply to require power users over a certain density to generate their own power.
But until they reveal more about their business model, it's too late to cry foul, bemoan corporate sellouts, cheer victory, or predict demise.
One thing I think we can predict with confidence is that the record companies will still be getting the lion's share of the fees (they "own" the creative work, after all), and the artists who sign with the majors will still get screwed.
Personally, I'll switch to Gnutella and use Fairtunes.
Whatever you do, don't let empirical evidence mess up your beautiful theory.
Do consider:
1) The wavelength is wrong to resonate the molecule (ala microwaves and water), but that does not mean that no energy is adsorbed.
2) The amount of energy available is going to depend on both the wavelenth and the intensity of the field (which will be proportional to the power of the field source). Personally, I doubt cellphones have enough power to make a real impact. High tension powerlines, on the other hand, I am less copacetic about.
3) This statement: "there is a biological effect of the energy imparted by extremely low frequency EMF (ELF-EMF) on living systems" is probably making inappropriate assumptions about the mechanism of effect (or, more likely, the PI was dumbing it down for the reporter). There are other ways in which a magnetic field could interact with living tissue, other than simply heating it. Biological mechanisms are subtle, strange, and poorly understood. We certainly don't know enough to categorically rule out the possibility.
Related to this discussion, recent work has found what is as far as I know the first definitive evidence that EMF can have a negative effect on cells. Of course, this work is focussing on 60 Hz radiation so the results are not conclusive one way or the other on the cell phone issue. But it is worth knowing that the EMF scare may be something more than hysteria.
Ah, no, you see, I'm an engineer. I'm supposed to at least pretend to work during those hours.
For your work, your situation is ideal. For me, the opposite would be ideal: give me a project, and give me goals, and if so long as I make my deadlines and produce good work, leave me the hell alone.
It may be possible to inset widget A into slot B for eight hours a day, plus an hour for lunch and two fifteen minute breaks to be taken at exactly 9:30 and 3:00. But it sure as hell isn't possible to do creative work in that environment.
My boss once said to me, in not quite so many words, "I don't care how much time you spend surfing the net, just make sure you're at your desk by 8AM every day." At the time, I just barely stopped myself from pointing out to him what he had just said. Needless to say, I'm looking for another job.
The problem is that managers and business people talk about increasing productivity and efficiency, but really they care more about control than anything else. They will do anything at all to increase productivity except give their people respect and freedom and treat them like human beings. I don't know if this is a holdover from the early days of factory business, or just a reflection on the weak egos of the individuals who tell others what to do for a living. But it's clearly true, and it's so common and standard that nobody questions it or really notices it.
This is a guess, but I'm pretty sure that I'm right: The magnetic field does not get more intense, it gets larger: the gas blows it up like a balloon. I would assume that the per-unit-area intensity decreases as the size increases, which means that, for a given field power, there would be an upper limit on field size: at some point, the field will become so large (and thus so weak) that the gas leaks out faster than you can replace it.
As I explain in my other post, you CAN get home with this thing. Unless you have enough power to thrust continuously at high acceleration (which would require a fusion motor, at the least), travel between planets is done by establishing yourself in an eccentric orbit (or spiral) that includes your origin and destination. So to return from Mars, you can use the sail to accelerate out away from the sun, then turn it off (or turn off the plasma generator, allowing the sail field to shrink) while you fall back in, towards home. Turn turn it on again as you approach Earth, so that you are moving slow enough to be captured into orbit by Earth's gravity. After that you probably have to use rockets to deorbit, but that doesn't take much delta-V.
The same approach would let you fly from Earth to, say, Mercury.
The report is obviously dumbed down for the layman, so it's hard to really pass judgment on this thing. (I would really like the read the whitepaper, if anyone has a link to it.) But if the description is accurate, this could be an incredibly cool way to get around, once you're in orbit.
Of course, we still don't have a cheap way to get to orbit. Thanks, NASA.
At any rate, to answer a few questions I've seen posted here:
1) Yes, the basic concept of a solar sail is sound. It has been tested, and it works.
2) Yes, the acceleration is low, but it is continuous. That fact, plus the fact that you don't have to carry (much) fuel, put's you WAY ahead of any chemical rocket solution.
3) The magnetosphere wouldn't hurt the crew or the onboard electronics: you just put the lifesystem inside a Faraday cage.
4)And YES, you could come back from a mission to, say, Mars, using this technology. Travel between planets is accomplished by establishing yourself in an eccentric orbit that passes through the orbital path of both your origin and your destination. So you can use the magneto-sail to push out away from the planet, establish your orbit, then turn it off when you reach the "top" of your curve, and fall back in. Then turn the sail on again when you need to brake.
Depending on the location of various planets, you could also use the sail to travel out, develop alot of speed, and then slingshot around another planet to turn yourself around and head back home.
If we're going to talk about public vs. private solutions to space access, let's make sure we understand something about the money involved.
Rotary Rocket
Money spent to date: $32 million
Progress to date: A flying atmopsheric test vehicle, and a working cooled combustion chamber design.
Estimated development budget: $200 Million
NASA's X-33 program
Money spent to date: $1 BILLION
Progress to date: A failed fuel tank, and a design that calls for 5000 lbs of lead ballast in the nose. No working hardware.
Estimated development budget: $5 Billion, but realistically, ghod only knows.
I think the numbers speak for themselves. Of course, Rotary is out of business because they couldn't raise any more money. And even if the X-33 program is successful, we won't get an orbital vehicle out of it -- just a suborbital "proof of concept" ship.
Let him know! There is a feedback page here.
I took a few minutes to tell him that his analogy between different print book formats and different electronic formats was bullshit, and to remind him that he's screwing up a precedent-setting experiment by being greedy. God knows if the comment will ever show up on the comments page, but at least somebody will read it. And if enough people express this (or similar) opinion, they might just use some of that money to buy a clue!
Slashdot Mirror
And hydrogen is a pain in the ass. It has a higher specific impulse (thrust per mass of fuel) than any other fuel. That's why NASA is addicted to it. But it's density impulse (thrust per volume) sucks. Plus it's a hard cryogen. So you have to have a BIG, well insulated tank. That translates into major weight and major drag. This is OK on the ground, but it's really not such a great aerospace fuel. NASA insists on using it, as far as I can tell, mostly for reasons having to do with internal politics and organizational culture. (The Russians use kerosene or alcohol, which don't have as good a specific impulse but have a much, much better density impulse.)
To quote a former girlfriend (one of the aforementioned people that don't get sexually jealous): "It's all about expectations". As long as everybody involved is clear about what the terms of the relationship are, and they are either free of jealousy or able to control it, then open relationships can work.
Of course, I doubt that even one person in a hundred has the communication skills and the emotional makeup required for such a thing to work. It's not easy. But it is possible.
If you're going to have to produce and distribute "noise key" records in the first place, why not simply combine the two signals (the voice and the noise) in an analog fashion before transmission, and then do the same process in reverse at the other end? This would have been MUCH simpler (meaning they could have deployed it sooner).
Granted, they get an extra degree of security by digitizing the signal, simply because the enenmy must then reverse engineer all the digitzation hardware. So rather than simply needing to steal a copy of the noise key, the Axis would have had to steal 55 tons of equipment to use it. Still, I don't see how the system is made fundementally more secure by digitizing the signal. And I'm sure they were in a big hurry to get this system in place, so I can't see them making it more complicated than they absolutely had to.
Can anybody explain this to me?
I guess you could look at it as a boycott, but it's one thing to boycott a particular company (and yes, I agree, it's almost impossible to do that effectively in today's economy). It's another thing to boycott an entire segment of an industry (e.g. mass media, or the movie biz). It's the difference between a specific, targetted action and a choice of lifestyle.
Yeah, you'll probably still be putting some money in their pockets buying something that you really need that's totally unrelated (like food). Nevertheless, it can have an impact. For example if Bigevil Inc owns a movie studio and a grocery store chain, and enough people get digusted and stop going to the movies, Bigevil Inc won't go out of business (because people still buy groceries) but they'll sure as hell notice that their studio is taking a loss.
You beat me to the reference! :)
(Sorry, the quote's not quite right, but I don't have time to look it up.)
That statement indicates a profound but very common misunderstanding of capitalism.
Competition between companies is good for the consumer if and only if that competition takes the form of attempting to succeed by producing a better product. But corporate competition often becomes a matter of trying to destroy each other, and then the customer is usually the loser.
For example: Creative Labs sues Aureal; Aureal wins but is depleted by the effort; Creative buys Aureal. Consumers lose a choice, and and access to a superior product.
Likewise, cooperation is can be a good thing: when companies coordiate efforts, they can cut costs, increase efficiency, and learn useful techniques from each other. The end result is a better product, usually at a lower cost to the customer. Even if the end-user cost is not reduced, efficiency is increased and waste is reduced, which is better for the system as a whole in the long run.
Now I completely agree with your implication that AOL is a company that favors destructive competition and collusion, rather than constructive cooperation. I'm not at all pleased by this merger. But I couldn't just let your blanket statement lie without comment.
If you really are interested in how this aspect of capitalism works, read some of Dr. Deming -- he's the guy who essentially invented quality as a process, and taught it to the Japanese (because American corporations didn't want to hear about it), which allowed them to kick our ass in the auto industry in the 80's. He understands what makes a business effective. And he's remarkably enlightened: he understands that spending money on your employees is good for your bottom line, and that cutting corners to save a bit of cash is bad, etc. Most of his ideas (other than statsitical process control, which is a hairy mathematical method) seem like common sense to me, but they are anything but common in American business.
There's a very important difference between the current situation and the one to which you are alluding: If you don't like their policies, or their product, DON'T BUY IT! The dogs don't have to eat the dogfood. Yeah, you might have to give up some of the luxuries that you currently take for granted. Tough shit. It's not like you have a right to music, or a computer, or games, or net access, or any other goddam thing that you can't produce yourself.
I would very much like to know anything you learn (or may have already learned) in terms of answering this question, whether here or elsewhere. Would you do me the favor of sending me email if you get any major insights on this?
Thanks much.
I have a set-top machine that I use as an MP3 jukebox and a DVD player. Currently I have the sound going out through an old soundblaster into the AUX input on my cheapass all-in-one-box mini stereo system.
I would like to upgrade to a soundcard and receiver that can connect digitally, and do the decoding in the reciever (so that the signal is not analog inside the box with all that electrical noise). I want the system to support true 5.1 output.
I would appreciate recommendations for soundcards and recievers to use in a setup like this. I have been told that the Soundblaster Live series has a digital output, but that it folds all the 5.1 channels into a stereo signal before sending it to the digital output, thus destroying the 5.1 effect. So I would like to find another option.
Thanks for the help, guys.
At any rate, I did have one thought about learning Linux. I posted this, but it's way down the page and you probably haven't seen it. So jump down to this comment if you want to read it.
I tried to make the switch a while back and retreated in frustration and for lack of time. But I found that there were really TWO things that I wanted:
1) A good primer on the basic principles and structure of *nix OS's.
2) A set of condensed HOWTOs designed to get a clueful windows user up to speed quickly with Gnome/KDE.
These are really two very different things, but I think they would be complementary and they are both necessary: A "Monkey-see, monkey-do" starter gets you up and running quickly, while the *nix principles book gives you a basis for understanding what you're really doing when you go throug the motions outlined in the HOWTOs.
Industrial-scale distributed power generation by fuel cell, commercially available NOW.
This technology would make so much sense for a server farm: produce the power locally, and you don't have to depend on the grid or on massive and expensive battery backup systems. Maybe the answer is simply to require power users over a certain density to generate their own power.
One thing I think we can predict with confidence is that the record companies will still be getting the lion's share of the fees (they "own" the creative work, after all), and the artists who sign with the majors will still get screwed.
Personally, I'll switch to Gnutella and use Fairtunes.
Do consider:
1) The wavelength is wrong to resonate the molecule (ala microwaves and water), but that does not mean that no energy is adsorbed.
2) The amount of energy available is going to depend on both the wavelenth and the intensity of the field (which will be proportional to the power of the field source). Personally, I doubt cellphones have enough power to make a real impact. High tension powerlines, on the other hand, I am less copacetic about.
3) This statement: "there is a biological effect of the energy imparted by extremely low frequency EMF (ELF-EMF) on living systems" is probably making inappropriate assumptions about the mechanism of effect (or, more likely, the PI was dumbing it down for the reporter). There are other ways in which a magnetic field could interact with living tissue, other than simply heating it. Biological mechanisms are subtle, strange, and poorly understood. We certainly don't know enough to categorically rule out the possibility.
For your work, your situation is ideal. For me, the opposite would be ideal: give me a project, and give me goals, and if so long as I make my deadlines and produce good work, leave me the hell alone.
My boss once said to me, in not quite so many words, "I don't care how much time you spend surfing the net, just make sure you're at your desk by 8AM every day." At the time, I just barely stopped myself from pointing out to him what he had just said. Needless to say, I'm looking for another job.
The problem is that managers and business people talk about increasing productivity and efficiency, but really they care more about control than anything else. They will do anything at all to increase productivity except give their people respect and freedom and treat them like human beings. I don't know if this is a holdover from the early days of factory business, or just a reflection on the weak egos of the individuals who tell others what to do for a living. But it's clearly true, and it's so common and standard that nobody questions it or really notices it.
Working Assets Long Distance
This is a guess, but I'm pretty sure that I'm right: The magnetic field does not get more intense, it gets larger: the gas blows it up like a balloon. I would assume that the per-unit-area intensity decreases as the size increases, which means that, for a given field power, there would be an upper limit on field size: at some point, the field will become so large (and thus so weak) that the gas leaks out faster than you can replace it.
The same approach would let you fly from Earth to, say, Mercury.
Of course, we still don't have a cheap way to get to orbit. Thanks, NASA.
At any rate, to answer a few questions I've seen posted here:
1) Yes, the basic concept of a solar sail is sound. It has been tested, and it works.
2) Yes, the acceleration is low, but it is continuous. That fact, plus the fact that you don't have to carry (much) fuel, put's you WAY ahead of any chemical rocket solution.
3) The magnetosphere wouldn't hurt the crew or the onboard electronics: you just put the lifesystem inside a Faraday cage.
4)And YES, you could come back from a mission to, say, Mars, using this technology. Travel between planets is accomplished by establishing yourself in an eccentric orbit that passes through the orbital path of both your origin and your destination. So you can use the magneto-sail to push out away from the planet, establish your orbit, then turn it off when you reach the "top" of your curve, and fall back in. Then turn the sail on again when you need to brake.
Depending on the location of various planets, you could also use the sail to travel out, develop alot of speed, and then slingshot around another planet to turn yourself around and head back home.
Rotary Rocket
Money spent to date: $32 million
Progress to date: A flying atmopsheric test vehicle, and a working cooled combustion chamber design.
Estimated development budget: $200 Million
NASA's X-33 program
Money spent to date: $1 BILLION
Progress to date: A failed fuel tank, and a design that calls for 5000 lbs of lead ballast in the nose. No working hardware.
Estimated development budget: $5 Billion, but realistically, ghod only knows.
I think the numbers speak for themselves. Of course, Rotary is out of business because they couldn't raise any more money. And even if the X-33 program is successful, we won't get an orbital vehicle out of it -- just a suborbital "proof of concept" ship.
Government space programs suck.
Let him know! There is a feedback page here.
I took a few minutes to tell him that his analogy between different print book formats and different electronic formats was bullshit, and to remind him that he's screwing up a precedent-setting experiment by being greedy. God knows if the comment will ever show up on the comments page, but at least somebody will read it. And if enough people express this (or similar) opinion, they might just use some of that money to buy a clue!