TFA refers to a single coil of magnesium weighing 220 pounds (100kg) and states that it provides a range equivalent to one third its weight in gasoline (73 pounds or 33kg.) It's quite apparent the authors haven't given any thought whatsoever as to how to deliver these giant coils of metal, assuming everyone would happily just wind in a 100kg spool once a week and suck ash out with a grimy vacuum hose. But as you correctly point out, dealing with these giant unwieldy coils and the resultant mess would make many people unhappy.
But the metals are flexible, and there's no reason a feeder system couldn't be designed to feed metal from more than one coil. So I figured why not break it down into five easy-to-handle interchangeable boxes each containing a factory-rolled 20kg coil? And from there it was easy to add a recycle tank to the boxes to collect the oxides. No muss, no fuss, just change a box or five.
And 20kg isn't just a number I plucked from the air; it happens to be the approximate weight of a bag of water softener salt, which most people are able to manage on their own. I figured that way most people could lug their own in and out of their cars. 20kg is not magical or written in stone, but 5 x 20kg square boxes is a lot easier to deal with than a clumsy 100kg coil and a stupid hose.
There are other ways to deal with the fuel management, too. Small commuter vehicles might have space only for two or three boxes, while SUVs could hold ten. The boxes could have built-in urethane wheels and extendable handles, like little luggage carts. Or the fuel-box-holders on the cars could have small ramps that extend to the ground, perhaps allowing each box to hold 40kg instead of 20kg. Or there's the "Buick" edition, which would have an automatic winch system that would automatically load the boxes for your grandmother.
Reread my post. Each container would have two sections: one part containing the metal coil, and a collection part for reclaiming the oxides. The two sections would not mix, and I know the oxide would be collected in a powdered state (I had forgotten it would be wet, which would certainly be detrimental to the coiled magnesium if they did mix.)
Your point about structural fires is valid (and no, I don't know how to extinguish a magnesium fire, either. Perhaps a liquid nitrogen spray?) It's possible that these fuel containers would be restricted to "licensed vendors" who would be certified and equipped to handle them. Actually, given the current political climate here in the U.S., it's more than likely that the petroleum lobby would push hard to make service stations be the only licensed handlers.
And filament-wound tanks were used for exactly this purpose in the hydrogen powered fuel cell buses that Daimler-Chrysler was testing in Germany. Know where they put them? In the roof, where they felt they were least likely to be ruptured in the event of an accident. But in a passenger car, that's a less than optimal location, and a less than safe assumption.
There are passenger vehicles powered by propane today, and they use steel tanks quite successfully. I'm sure there's a way to make it happen, if it's the only way to cheaply deliver energy.
I'm not saying that pressurized gas isn't a viable fuel, but I am saying that the cost of building an infrastructure to produce, store, and deliver a compressed flammable gas is a very high barrier to developing a commercially viable consumer passenger vehicle. For example, even though hydrogen is the most efficient fuel to use with a PEM fuel cell, Daimler decided that moving from a gaseous to a liquid fuel was deemed vital to consumer acceptance. Not even that automotive giant could find a way to build enough hydrogen pumping stations to support anything but fleet vehicles. Consumers and delivery networks can deal with liquids. But they're not ready for gasses.
I don't have to pretend. We already have this problem with gasoline fueled engines emitting water vapor onto the roadways. (You didn't think the exhaust was simply carbon monoxide, did you?) All that hydrogen on those octane molecules does go somewhere after combustion, mostly into water vapor that comes straight out the tailpipes. It freezes on bridge decks where there is no thermal mass to keep the road temperature above 0 F (the temperature where salt becomes ineffective.) We call it "black ice" and it's notoriously dangerous on the cold mornings. Sent me skidding toward a bridge railing several years ago, scared the crap out of me.
The obstacles TFA is referring to are obstacles dealing with gaseous hydrogen.
There is currently not a distribution system for delivery of gaseous fuels direct to consumers at the scale required to power our cars. There are some small-scale delivery systems (propane, for example) but those still require a trained handler and other special steps -- you typically can't pump your own propane, propane needs to be stored outdoors in a ventilated cabinet, etc. And the infrastructure for propane is small: a couple hundred gallons per homeowner per winter up here where it's cold, maybe a few tanks for cooking in the summer, that's it. There aren't nearly enough trucks and tanks required to provide fuel for all vehicles if they were suddenly converted to propane.
Even if the safety issues were handled technologically, neither propane nor natural gas are ready for "the final mile". Most homeowners don't have an existing gas "tap" where they can hook a hose up to their car, so they'd require new plumbing. For that matter, home delivery of natural gas is pretty much restricted to metro areas in northern states: it's not currently available in the far south or in rural areas. To make it available everywhere else would require a huge investment in pipes.
Then there's the problem with the storage of hydrogen or any gaseous fuel. For there to be enough energy to power a vehicle for any useful distance, a fairly large quantity of it needs to be highly compressed. Where do you put a large pressure vessel in a car so that if it's in an accident it has the lowest risk of rupturing? If you've ever seen even a small tank of high pressure gas rupture, you'll realize some of the danger. Now, make that gas highly flammable, and you'll be even more unhappy.
The idea of a magnesium coil as a fuel source is a good one. It could distributed in user-replaceable reusable metal boxes, each containing a humanly-portable 20kg of fuel, and having room for an equal amount of oxidized waste. Assuming a well-designed non-sparking container it would require no special handling, and would be remarkably inert. It would also be quite safe in most accidents, even those involving the fuel containers themselves.
These boxes can be carried by ordinary trucks. They would not require specialized tankers like propane or even gasoline. Any existing trucking firm could safely handle boxes of this product as is. And you could buy and sell them anywhere, not just fuel stations: a grocery store, discounter, convenience store, wherever. They would have no foul or toxic smells or hazardous liquids, and would run the same risk of accidental ignition as any other flammable metal, which is to say: not a lot. If you've ever tried to ignite magnesium or aluminum, you're probably aware of the amount of heat required to get it to sustain flame.
The part of the story that requires the most handwaving is the "mining" of the fuel. Both aluminium and magnesium are naturally found in the oxidized state (much like the spent fuel from the vehicle itself.) The amount of energy required to refine the metal is immense. Keep in mind that you cannot get something for nothing; that means the energy required to refine it must be higher than the amount of energy retrieved from the metal when it is burned. And that means huge amounts of electrical energy will be needed to produce a fuel stream. With an emphasis on reducing costly oil consumption, with today's technology that would basically mean lots of new nuclear reactors will be required.
Think of the magnesium more like a "rechargeable battery", storing electrical energy in the form of unoxidized metal. It's still going to require energy that comes from somewhere else.
I'm too lazy to google for it, but there's a company selling a nanomotor coated window glass for office buildings. You can buy it today.
The idea is that the tiny motors rotate when powered by the sun. When the glass is dirty (spots from the rain, mineral deposits, bird "deposits", spider webs, etc.,) in a few hours the rotation will sweep the dirt from the glass. It's supposed to pay for itself by avoiding window-cleanings, especially on high-rise buildings.
And I believe someone is using something similar to make a nanotech-based fog-free snowmobile visor. If you've ever ridden a snowmobile for more than a few hundred yards, you're probably familiar with the fogging problem. The first guy to market with this will have a solid lock on a big pile of money.
And let's not forget our old buddy, DLP. While it's not technically "nanotech", it's still "microtech."
What I think is neatest about the glass treatments is that they have nothing to do with computers or even technology! Some creative person just came up with a damn clever idea. There will undoubtedly be more.
The device you described is called an astrolabe. It's a different device, and much, much simpler. You don't need any gears to make an astrolabe, just the positions of some major stars for night observations, and of the sun for day observations. And note that with an astrolabe you either need to know "what time it is" or "where you are", and with one of those pieces of information (and an astrolabe) you can find the other.
This clockwork planetary displaying device is (today) properly called an orrery, although it predates the Earl of Orrery by about 18 centuries. It also predates the astrolabe by about a thousand years, too.
Not that you can't use an orrery to occasionally tell the date, but much of the time you won't have enough information to get a valid reading. It's completely useless during the day, and even at night some of the planets are usually "too near" the sun to be visible. Occasionally, the planetary alignment is such that none of the "visible" planets can be seen for weeks at a time.
Also note that an orrery doesn't necessarily provide "altitude" information. I'm unaware of any hand-held clockwork orreries that do (including modern ones.) While you can base the date on azimuth readings of the planets, many of them move so slowly across the night sky that it could be difficult to make an accurate reading; especially with the tools of 87 B.C. The fixed stars are much easier to locate, and altitude is much, much easier to read than azimuth (gravity is a much easier reference to use than some concept of north.)
No, the "current"/. TFA is dated September 19th, 2002. Just a few more years and it'd be the Antikythera article. There's no unveiling taking place this week. It was unveiled three years ago.
That said, it's still a cool device. Creating a mechanical clockwork that recreates an earth-centric viewpoint of the planetary motion is a remarkable feat in virtually any age.
Oh, he's one of my senators as well, and I can assure you he's thoroughly capable of looking like a complete idiot at any time. As a matter of fact, I think it's pretty tough for him to do much else.
As far as I can tell, he's voted in a direction I considered appropriate only twice, and then only because of some piece of tasty pork lured him away from his party line. Otherwise, he's been a model toady of the Bush administration. He really knows how to kowtow when it's required, and can lick cowboy boots better than Neville Chamberlain licked jackboots.
You just described DGPS, or Differential GPS. DGPS is a local GPS receiver placed in a precisely surveyed location that transmits a "correction" signal on an FM band. Because each station is local, it automatically corrects for local atmospheric conditions.
WAAS is almost the same thing. The difference is that instead of transmitting local corrections on the FM band, the local receivers all uplink the correction data to an FAA satellite located in a geosynchronous orbit above the U.S. This satellite then transmits the correction data in the same band as the GPS signals. That's useful because now your receiver doesn't need a separate radio to tune in the differences as it did with DGPS. It just needs to know how to interpret the WAAS data.
Nice strawman, but your argument doesn't hold water.
First, when did you discover their priority list? And second, just because George Bush is one of the biggest liars ever to disgrace the White House, and Donald Rumsfeld is by far the biggest liar ever to hold the Secretary of Defence chair DOES NOT mean the lies extend to our military. (It's really sad, when you think of it, that we can trust our Army to tell us the truth far more than we can trust our elected officials.)
Anyway, it's very simple. It's a helluva lot easier to deal with math and physics than with terrorists and fundamentalists. Computers and rockets make a lot more sense than people since they have no incentive to lie, which makes the experiments a lot more repeatable. Launching a half dozen satellites a year is a cakewalk compared to hunting a psychotic murderer hidden in someone else's mountain range. And Delta rockets aren't planting IEDs or driving car bombs into recruitment centers -- stupid, gullible fanatics are.
Iamweezman was absolutely right in analyzing this economically: the military has too much invested in GPS to allow it to fail. They'll find maintenance money for it even if they have to cut other essential services. Without GPS, JDAMs and JSTARs won't find their targets, tanks will have to fall back to manual control, and even artillery firing systems will probably be messed up. Not that they couldn't wage a war, but they'd be far less effective without GPS.
Don't worry about GPS. They'll find money to spend to keep it in orbit. "Trust me."
GPS satellites transmit two different signals: Precise Positioning Service (PPS) and Standard Positioning Service (SPS). PPS is carried on the dual frequency 'P code' (Precise) and the decryption keys are only present in U.S. military receivers. SPS is carried on the single frequency 'C/A code' (Coarse / Acquisition) used by civilian receivers.
It's incorrect to say the new satellites are "more accurate" -- the satellites themselves are as accurate as they ever were, (unless you're comparing them to the time they still had Selective Availability (SA) turned on. SA was an intentional dithering of the signal intended to deny civilian receivers the highest precision, but SA was turned off in 2000.) The difference is they have raised the transmitter power and added a couple of frequencies. That means that your existing ordinary GPS receivers should deliver more accurate readings, since they will be able to receive better signals from more satellites in more places.
Re:A very cool site, but it's been around for a wh
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Dilbert Hiding On Your CPU
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Very nicely done!
I've always just had various ancient memory boards dangling from paper clip chains and wire-wrap wire in my cube. I've got a long time span of stuff, from the 1977 vintage 16K core to about 8 MB worth of 4KB, 16KB, and 64KB 16-pin DIP chips (which had to be individually socketed, 72 to a 512KB board, and God help you if you bent a pin and didn't spot it), some 256KB SIMMs (oooh, SIMMs!), then some 1MB, 2MB and 4MB cards from some old PS/2s. I don't have nearly as many old PC100 DIMMs hanging around, perhaps a few 16MB and 64MB sticks, an oddly shaped stick of laptop RAM, and a few RAM chips from some old video buffers. One of the three 256Kx3 RAM chips is where I found the eagle that I sent to the photographer.
But I don't have your eye, so mine is much more of a random collection of junk that used to store bits. I bet framing or mounting select pieces would help much.
What I'd really like to do is frame the core and nicely mount a magnifying glass over the frame so visitors could see the individual cores.
A very cool site, but it's been around for a while
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Dilbert Hiding On Your CPU
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· Score: 4, Interesting
It was new to me about six years ago, anyway. I had purchased a $5.00 Radio Shack microscope so I could take in the craftsmanship of an old piece of core memory I'd come across. (It was 16KB and the core took up about 8" x 10" on the card). I have been collecting old memory, and had discovered I could easily pry the aluminum cans off of IBM chips with my Swiss Army Knife. I was looking at a late 1980s vintage chip and discovered a design! Later on after discovering a link to the Silicon Zoo I contacted the author. We exchanged notes, I dropped the chip in the mail, and he photographed it beautifully, and put it up on his site. I thought it was really cool.
I've looked at a lot of chips since then, but the old 100x pocket microscope can't make out any details on these new high density chips. When they started cramming billions of transistors 60nm apart, there's very little chance of spotting anything optically.
That's at least one little bit less I can hate Motorola software now.
Actually, I'm still fed up enough that I'm going to hit the modders web sites and start looking for upgraded software to reflash this thing. Maybe they won't make the applications more usable, but they may at least fix some of the bugs.
What's funny is that neither AT&T Wireless or Cingular deliberately crippled the Bluetooth on their phones, yet still turn a handsome profit on the "sale" of ringtones and graphics. Why? Because most consumers are as ignorant as the day is long, and don't realize they have the option. They buy a phone with Bluetooth but have no idea what that means or what it can do, other than let them use a Borg-styled cordless headset. The default behavior when you hit the menu button twice for my V3 RAZR was to browse to the Cingular web site where you can purchase ringtones. (Not to mention browsing there rapidly chews through the cheap 1MB / month data allowance.)
I've had one for a few months now, and I'm at least as disappointed with it as my buddy is with his Verizon V710. First, and most on-topic with this discussion, the bluetooth stack is incredibly buggy! If I try to use OBEX to browse its files, I can sometimes get files in and out of the phone, and sometimes not. And virtually any time I use OBEX or connect from any Windows XP machine (three different machines, three different manufacturer's Bluetooth devices) the Bluetooth on the phone goes south, and it will refuse to even acknowledge a headset afterwards. I need to pull and replace the battery to get it to come back.
And my complaints go much further. The phone does not support OBEX browsing of other phones (like my Sony-Ericsson T637 could do.) It does not support 24/7 discoverability, restricting it to 60 seconds max. It does not support an "advanced headset profile" (again like the T637) where it doesn't establish the Bluetooth headset connection until a call is made, allowing me to use Bluetooth networking even in the presence of a powered up headset. That's a very important feature with a hands-free car kit. Overall, bluetooth functionality on this phone is on a par with the V710 - a lot of promise, but nothing delivered.
And then it suffers from all the other endemic Motorola problems. It has the world's worst address book application, which cannot handle the simple task of storing multiple numbers per contact, instead creating new contacts for each number. It also suffers from a byzantine one-touch speed dial reconfiguration mechanism. Their whole speed dial thing is still based on the "order" in which numbers are stored, so if you want to change speed dials you have to first renumber the old record, then renumber the new record into its place. And it takes it about a minute to boot -- I have no idea what can be taking it so long. Finally, even though the phone is perfectly capable of shooting video, (there are mods to turn it on) it's not available out of the box.
There are some really good features on the phone though that I do like: battery life is very, very good. Audio quality is excellent. The camera is a crisp 640x480. Voice dial recognition has impressive performance, especially in the noisy environment of my car using the handsfree kit. And of course it's small and light. But overall, it's far short of a "great" phone. I was much happier with my T637.
Thanks, that's precisely the kind of mindless hysteria needed to get people all worked up over this.
Hospitals going dark? Patients dying without power? I'm sorry, you must have missed the last couple of decades where virtually every hospital and almost all major clinics in the country have standby diesel generators. Hell, not only the ordinary office buildings and hotels around here but even the freakin' PARKING RAMPS have generators now, lest the power should go out and trap Jim-Bob in an elevator for an hour without air conditioning!
And exactly which powerstations are going down because of a "cyber attack"? What kind of "cyber attack" are you imagining? Little electrons armed with tiny guns, sneaking in the wires and shooting the generators from within? Are you aware that the internal control networks are dedicated to that one function and are completely isolated? They're not hooked to the public internet.
Fortunately, the nation's utilities aren't as stupid and sloppy as you give them credit for. As far as I know they all have regulations or policies prohibiting having their controls online. And all the ones I'm aware of have security professionals whose job includes auditing that policy.
That means no online electric powergrid control, no municipal water control, no chemical/petroleum plant control is on the internet. The closest they usually get is to make "status" information available online. The east coast blackout was due to a monitoring (not control) system being on the public internet, becoming virus infested, and failing to propagate alerts, allowing a critical link to break without a redundant link being triggered. That was a wakeup call to the industry to keep mission critical gear off the internet completely.
But here you are trumpeting, "Beware! Osama bin Hacker is going to cause fire, floods, famine! Only an appointed CyberTzar can save us now!" I ask you, what is he going to do differently that the industry won't do instantly anyway? It's not like Cisco was going to sit there on their thumbs once the router breach was published.
Your pennance for your chicken little statement is to go back and watch "Hackers" again. Make sure that when he "hacks" a "virus" to cause "ecological disaster" that you look around and say to yourself, "Hey, it's only a movie. And a crappy one at that." Only then do you have permission to fast forward to the Angelina Jolie breast scene.
TFA writes: Kahuna is a huge improvement over Hotmail [...] and GMail, the Google-owned service with which it is clearly competing.
Wow, I have no idea where he pulled the "huge improvement over GMail" from. This HotMailEx just seems to be GMail with an annoying entry portal page that keeps you from your mail.
Unless he was talking about how great it is to have a right click menu. Wow, yeah, that's big.
Seriously, the intarweb has been little more than a stew of viruses, zombies and DOS attacks for years now. Yet we all manage to show up and do our jobs. How bad could a "cyberattack" really be, if we're living through the current levels of crap?
And what good is a "federal overseer" when they have no jurisdiction over half of the network?
I say that we're no worse off for not having a top-dog. It's a meaningless, ineffective position. Why spend the money on it, much less promote the position to a direct report under the DIRHSA?
I would tend to say this would be a topic best suited for a one-time seminar
Wow, that's exactly the opposite of how I saw it. As I was going through the list in my mind I was thinking there's no way this could be taught in a one-credit course -- there is so much to cover that three or four credits would likely be required to explore everything to a useful level. And then I went back and read some of the other poster's suggestions, and started wondering how it could all be taught in less than a dozen credits!
Absolutely. For any specific project people will have to learn the mechanics of all the tools involved: the compiler, the source code control system, the build tool, the bug tracker, and a project newsgroup, blog, or mailing list. You should consider dropping them all in a somewhat unfamiliar environment, just so they can learn how to pick up new tools.
You might explore the differences you'll encounter developing an OSS project on an OSS platform vs. building an OSS project on a closed platform with commercial tools. Not every OSS project is a Linux project -- there are some Windows projects built with Visual Studio. That may lead to a discussion of portability, and alternative ways to develop based on portability. Cygwin and MinGW come to mind, and there are dozens of other possibilities to explore.
A couple of case studies might be useful. For example, how did Mozilla / Firefox become so successful? Asterisk is an open source project that has been closely held by the company that wrote it, and was released in conjunction with selling their hardware (although that's certainly not a requirement for using it.) Other smaller projects have been single-person development efforts that have other folk drifting in and out of particpation.
Dealing with people with their own agendas will be the toughest part. Joe may focus on a Mac-only porting effort, while Jack is interested only in Windows driver development. And sometimes people just fall off the map, never to be heard from again. How does a project lead deal with ambiguities like that?
Who gets stuck doing maintenance instead of development? Do they get paid for maintenance issues? How do they get paid? Can you make money on OSS, and how?
Having the students participate in an OSS project, either one of their choosing or perhaps a class collaborative project, will help them learn how such a project is run. Having them particpate in an "outside" project will help them in that learning to work without face-to-face meetings is a trick in its own right. With a classroom-based project students might be tempted to "cheat" and whiteboard with their co-developers. That sort of design process sometimes doesn't get to happen in the real world.
A brief history of OSS (FSF vs OSI, for example) might be interesting, but I'm not sure how useful it will be to today's developers.
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But the metals are flexible, and there's no reason a feeder system couldn't be designed to feed metal from more than one coil. So I figured why not break it down into five easy-to-handle interchangeable boxes each containing a factory-rolled 20kg coil? And from there it was easy to add a recycle tank to the boxes to collect the oxides. No muss, no fuss, just change a box or five.
And 20kg isn't just a number I plucked from the air; it happens to be the approximate weight of a bag of water softener salt, which most people are able to manage on their own. I figured that way most people could lug their own in and out of their cars. 20kg is not magical or written in stone, but 5 x 20kg square boxes is a lot easier to deal with than a clumsy 100kg coil and a stupid hose.
There are other ways to deal with the fuel management, too. Small commuter vehicles might have space only for two or three boxes, while SUVs could hold ten. The boxes could have built-in urethane wheels and extendable handles, like little luggage carts. Or the fuel-box-holders on the cars could have small ramps that extend to the ground, perhaps allowing each box to hold 40kg instead of 20kg. Or there's the "Buick" edition, which would have an automatic winch system that would automatically load the boxes for your grandmother.
So think outside the box. Or the 100kg coil. :-)
Your point about structural fires is valid (and no, I don't know how to extinguish a magnesium fire, either. Perhaps a liquid nitrogen spray?) It's possible that these fuel containers would be restricted to "licensed vendors" who would be certified and equipped to handle them. Actually, given the current political climate here in the U.S., it's more than likely that the petroleum lobby would push hard to make service stations be the only licensed handlers.
There are passenger vehicles powered by propane today, and they use steel tanks quite successfully. I'm sure there's a way to make it happen, if it's the only way to cheaply deliver energy.
I'm not saying that pressurized gas isn't a viable fuel, but I am saying that the cost of building an infrastructure to produce, store, and deliver a compressed flammable gas is a very high barrier to developing a commercially viable consumer passenger vehicle. For example, even though hydrogen is the most efficient fuel to use with a PEM fuel cell, Daimler decided that moving from a gaseous to a liquid fuel was deemed vital to consumer acceptance. Not even that automotive giant could find a way to build enough hydrogen pumping stations to support anything but fleet vehicles. Consumers and delivery networks can deal with liquids. But they're not ready for gasses.
Damn, thanks man!
I don't have to pretend. We already have this problem with gasoline fueled engines emitting water vapor onto the roadways. (You didn't think the exhaust was simply carbon monoxide, did you?) All that hydrogen on those octane molecules does go somewhere after combustion, mostly into water vapor that comes straight out the tailpipes. It freezes on bridge decks where there is no thermal mass to keep the road temperature above 0 F (the temperature where salt becomes ineffective.) We call it "black ice" and it's notoriously dangerous on the cold mornings. Sent me skidding toward a bridge railing several years ago, scared the crap out of me.
There is currently not a distribution system for delivery of gaseous fuels direct to consumers at the scale required to power our cars. There are some small-scale delivery systems (propane, for example) but those still require a trained handler and other special steps -- you typically can't pump your own propane, propane needs to be stored outdoors in a ventilated cabinet, etc. And the infrastructure for propane is small: a couple hundred gallons per homeowner per winter up here where it's cold, maybe a few tanks for cooking in the summer, that's it. There aren't nearly enough trucks and tanks required to provide fuel for all vehicles if they were suddenly converted to propane.
Even if the safety issues were handled technologically, neither propane nor natural gas are ready for "the final mile". Most homeowners don't have an existing gas "tap" where they can hook a hose up to their car, so they'd require new plumbing. For that matter, home delivery of natural gas is pretty much restricted to metro areas in northern states: it's not currently available in the far south or in rural areas. To make it available everywhere else would require a huge investment in pipes.
Then there's the problem with the storage of hydrogen or any gaseous fuel. For there to be enough energy to power a vehicle for any useful distance, a fairly large quantity of it needs to be highly compressed. Where do you put a large pressure vessel in a car so that if it's in an accident it has the lowest risk of rupturing? If you've ever seen even a small tank of high pressure gas rupture, you'll realize some of the danger. Now, make that gas highly flammable, and you'll be even more unhappy.
The idea of a magnesium coil as a fuel source is a good one. It could distributed in user-replaceable reusable metal boxes, each containing a humanly-portable 20kg of fuel, and having room for an equal amount of oxidized waste. Assuming a well-designed non-sparking container it would require no special handling, and would be remarkably inert. It would also be quite safe in most accidents, even those involving the fuel containers themselves.
These boxes can be carried by ordinary trucks. They would not require specialized tankers like propane or even gasoline. Any existing trucking firm could safely handle boxes of this product as is. And you could buy and sell them anywhere, not just fuel stations: a grocery store, discounter, convenience store, wherever. They would have no foul or toxic smells or hazardous liquids, and would run the same risk of accidental ignition as any other flammable metal, which is to say: not a lot. If you've ever tried to ignite magnesium or aluminum, you're probably aware of the amount of heat required to get it to sustain flame.
The part of the story that requires the most handwaving is the "mining" of the fuel. Both aluminium and magnesium are naturally found in the oxidized state (much like the spent fuel from the vehicle itself.) The amount of energy required to refine the metal is immense. Keep in mind that you cannot get something for nothing; that means the energy required to refine it must be higher than the amount of energy retrieved from the metal when it is burned. And that means huge amounts of electrical energy will be needed to produce a fuel stream. With an emphasis on reducing costly oil consumption, with today's technology that would basically mean lots of new nuclear reactors will be required.
Think of the magnesium more like a "rechargeable battery", storing electrical energy in the form of unoxidized metal. It's still going to require energy that comes from somewhere else.
I'm too lazy to google for it, but there's a company selling a nanomotor coated window glass for office buildings. You can buy it today.
The idea is that the tiny motors rotate when powered by the sun. When the glass is dirty (spots from the rain, mineral deposits, bird "deposits", spider webs, etc.,) in a few hours the rotation will sweep the dirt from the glass. It's supposed to pay for itself by avoiding window-cleanings, especially on high-rise buildings.
And I believe someone is using something similar to make a nanotech-based fog-free snowmobile visor. If you've ever ridden a snowmobile for more than a few hundred yards, you're probably familiar with the fogging problem. The first guy to market with this will have a solid lock on a big pile of money.
And let's not forget our old buddy, DLP. While it's not technically "nanotech", it's still "microtech."
What I think is neatest about the glass treatments is that they have nothing to do with computers or even technology! Some creative person just came up with a damn clever idea. There will undoubtedly be more.
This clockwork planetary displaying device is (today) properly called an orrery, although it predates the Earl of Orrery by about 18 centuries. It also predates the astrolabe by about a thousand years, too.
Not that you can't use an orrery to occasionally tell the date, but much of the time you won't have enough information to get a valid reading. It's completely useless during the day, and even at night some of the planets are usually "too near" the sun to be visible. Occasionally, the planetary alignment is such that none of the "visible" planets can be seen for weeks at a time.
Also note that an orrery doesn't necessarily provide "altitude" information. I'm unaware of any hand-held clockwork orreries that do (including modern ones.) While you can base the date on azimuth readings of the planets, many of them move so slowly across the night sky that it could be difficult to make an accurate reading; especially with the tools of 87 B.C. The fixed stars are much easier to locate, and altitude is much, much easier to read than azimuth (gravity is a much easier reference to use than some concept of north.)
That said, it's still a cool device. Creating a mechanical clockwork that recreates an earth-centric viewpoint of the planetary motion is a remarkable feat in virtually any age.
As far as I can tell, he's voted in a direction I considered appropriate only twice, and then only because of some piece of tasty pork lured him away from his party line. Otherwise, he's been a model toady of the Bush administration. He really knows how to kowtow when it's required, and can lick cowboy boots better than Neville Chamberlain licked jackboots.
WAAS is almost the same thing. The difference is that instead of transmitting local corrections on the FM band, the local receivers all uplink the correction data to an FAA satellite located in a geosynchronous orbit above the U.S. This satellite then transmits the correction data in the same band as the GPS signals. That's useful because now your receiver doesn't need a separate radio to tune in the differences as it did with DGPS. It just needs to know how to interpret the WAAS data.
First, when did you discover their priority list? And second, just because George Bush is one of the biggest liars ever to disgrace the White House, and Donald Rumsfeld is by far the biggest liar ever to hold the Secretary of Defence chair DOES NOT mean the lies extend to our military. (It's really sad, when you think of it, that we can trust our Army to tell us the truth far more than we can trust our elected officials.)
Anyway, it's very simple. It's a helluva lot easier to deal with math and physics than with terrorists and fundamentalists. Computers and rockets make a lot more sense than people since they have no incentive to lie, which makes the experiments a lot more repeatable. Launching a half dozen satellites a year is a cakewalk compared to hunting a psychotic murderer hidden in someone else's mountain range. And Delta rockets aren't planting IEDs or driving car bombs into recruitment centers -- stupid, gullible fanatics are.
Iamweezman was absolutely right in analyzing this economically: the military has too much invested in GPS to allow it to fail. They'll find maintenance money for it even if they have to cut other essential services. Without GPS, JDAMs and JSTARs won't find their targets, tanks will have to fall back to manual control, and even artillery firing systems will probably be messed up. Not that they couldn't wage a war, but they'd be far less effective without GPS.
Don't worry about GPS. They'll find money to spend to keep it in orbit. "Trust me."
It's incorrect to say the new satellites are "more accurate" -- the satellites themselves are as accurate as they ever were, (unless you're comparing them to the time they still had Selective Availability (SA) turned on. SA was an intentional dithering of the signal intended to deny civilian receivers the highest precision, but SA was turned off in 2000.) The difference is they have raised the transmitter power and added a couple of frequencies. That means that your existing ordinary GPS receivers should deliver more accurate readings, since they will be able to receive better signals from more satellites in more places.
I've always just had various ancient memory boards dangling from paper clip chains and wire-wrap wire in my cube. I've got a long time span of stuff, from the 1977 vintage 16K core to about 8 MB worth of 4KB, 16KB, and 64KB 16-pin DIP chips (which had to be individually socketed, 72 to a 512KB board, and God help you if you bent a pin and didn't spot it), some 256KB SIMMs (oooh, SIMMs!), then some 1MB, 2MB and 4MB cards from some old PS/2s. I don't have nearly as many old PC100 DIMMs hanging around, perhaps a few 16MB and 64MB sticks, an oddly shaped stick of laptop RAM, and a few RAM chips from some old video buffers. One of the three 256Kx3 RAM chips is where I found the eagle that I sent to the photographer.
But I don't have your eye, so mine is much more of a random collection of junk that used to store bits. I bet framing or mounting select pieces would help much.
What I'd really like to do is frame the core and nicely mount a magnifying glass over the frame so visitors could see the individual cores.
I liked the version on the sign in Buckaroo Bonzai: "Tresspassers will be violated"
Oh, CISC my ASCII.
I've looked at a lot of chips since then, but the old 100x pocket microscope can't make out any details on these new high density chips. When they started cramming billions of transistors 60nm apart, there's very little chance of spotting anything optically.
That's at least one little bit less I can hate Motorola software now.
Actually, I'm still fed up enough that I'm going to hit the modders web sites and start looking for upgraded software to reflash this thing. Maybe they won't make the applications more usable, but they may at least fix some of the bugs.
What's funny is that neither AT&T Wireless or Cingular deliberately crippled the Bluetooth on their phones, yet still turn a handsome profit on the "sale" of ringtones and graphics. Why? Because most consumers are as ignorant as the day is long, and don't realize they have the option. They buy a phone with Bluetooth but have no idea what that means or what it can do, other than let them use a Borg-styled cordless headset. The default behavior when you hit the menu button twice for my V3 RAZR was to browse to the Cingular web site where you can purchase ringtones. (Not to mention browsing there rapidly chews through the cheap 1MB / month data allowance.)
I've had one for a few months now, and I'm at least as disappointed with it as my buddy is with his Verizon V710. First, and most on-topic with this discussion, the bluetooth stack is incredibly buggy! If I try to use OBEX to browse its files, I can sometimes get files in and out of the phone, and sometimes not. And virtually any time I use OBEX or connect from any Windows XP machine (three different machines, three different manufacturer's Bluetooth devices) the Bluetooth on the phone goes south, and it will refuse to even acknowledge a headset afterwards. I need to pull and replace the battery to get it to come back.
And my complaints go much further. The phone does not support OBEX browsing of other phones (like my Sony-Ericsson T637 could do.) It does not support 24/7 discoverability, restricting it to 60 seconds max. It does not support an "advanced headset profile" (again like the T637) where it doesn't establish the Bluetooth headset connection until a call is made, allowing me to use Bluetooth networking even in the presence of a powered up headset. That's a very important feature with a hands-free car kit. Overall, bluetooth functionality on this phone is on a par with the V710 - a lot of promise, but nothing delivered.
And then it suffers from all the other endemic Motorola problems. It has the world's worst address book application, which cannot handle the simple task of storing multiple numbers per contact, instead creating new contacts for each number. It also suffers from a byzantine one-touch speed dial reconfiguration mechanism. Their whole speed dial thing is still based on the "order" in which numbers are stored, so if you want to change speed dials you have to first renumber the old record, then renumber the new record into its place. And it takes it about a minute to boot -- I have no idea what can be taking it so long. Finally, even though the phone is perfectly capable of shooting video, (there are mods to turn it on) it's not available out of the box.
There are some really good features on the phone though that I do like: battery life is very, very good. Audio quality is excellent. The camera is a crisp 640x480. Voice dial recognition has impressive performance, especially in the noisy environment of my car using the handsfree kit. And of course it's small and light. But overall, it's far short of a "great" phone. I was much happier with my T637.
Hospitals going dark? Patients dying without power? I'm sorry, you must have missed the last couple of decades where virtually every hospital and almost all major clinics in the country have standby diesel generators. Hell, not only the ordinary office buildings and hotels around here but even the freakin' PARKING RAMPS have generators now, lest the power should go out and trap Jim-Bob in an elevator for an hour without air conditioning!
And exactly which powerstations are going down because of a "cyber attack"? What kind of "cyber attack" are you imagining? Little electrons armed with tiny guns, sneaking in the wires and shooting the generators from within? Are you aware that the internal control networks are dedicated to that one function and are completely isolated? They're not hooked to the public internet.
Fortunately, the nation's utilities aren't as stupid and sloppy as you give them credit for. As far as I know they all have regulations or policies prohibiting having their controls online. And all the ones I'm aware of have security professionals whose job includes auditing that policy.
That means no online electric powergrid control, no municipal water control, no chemical/petroleum plant control is on the internet. The closest they usually get is to make "status" information available online. The east coast blackout was due to a monitoring (not control) system being on the public internet, becoming virus infested, and failing to propagate alerts, allowing a critical link to break without a redundant link being triggered. That was a wakeup call to the industry to keep mission critical gear off the internet completely.
But here you are trumpeting, "Beware! Osama bin Hacker is going to cause fire, floods, famine! Only an appointed CyberTzar can save us now!" I ask you, what is he going to do differently that the industry won't do instantly anyway? It's not like Cisco was going to sit there on their thumbs once the router breach was published.
Your pennance for your chicken little statement is to go back and watch "Hackers" again. Make sure that when he "hacks" a "virus" to cause "ecological disaster" that you look around and say to yourself, "Hey, it's only a movie. And a crappy one at that." Only then do you have permission to fast forward to the Angelina Jolie breast scene.
Wow, I have no idea where he pulled the "huge improvement over GMail" from. This HotMailEx just seems to be GMail with an annoying entry portal page that keeps you from your mail.
Unless he was talking about how great it is to have a right click menu. Wow, yeah, that's big.
And what good is a "federal overseer" when they have no jurisdiction over half of the network?
I say that we're no worse off for not having a top-dog. It's a meaningless, ineffective position. Why spend the money on it, much less promote the position to a direct report under the DIRHSA?
Wow, that's exactly the opposite of how I saw it. As I was going through the list in my mind I was thinking there's no way this could be taught in a one-credit course -- there is so much to cover that three or four credits would likely be required to explore everything to a useful level. And then I went back and read some of the other poster's suggestions, and started wondering how it could all be taught in less than a dozen credits!
Or maybe I'm just a slow learner :-)
You might explore the differences you'll encounter developing an OSS project on an OSS platform vs. building an OSS project on a closed platform with commercial tools. Not every OSS project is a Linux project -- there are some Windows projects built with Visual Studio. That may lead to a discussion of portability, and alternative ways to develop based on portability. Cygwin and MinGW come to mind, and there are dozens of other possibilities to explore.
A couple of case studies might be useful. For example, how did Mozilla / Firefox become so successful? Asterisk is an open source project that has been closely held by the company that wrote it, and was released in conjunction with selling their hardware (although that's certainly not a requirement for using it.) Other smaller projects have been single-person development efforts that have other folk drifting in and out of particpation.
Dealing with people with their own agendas will be the toughest part. Joe may focus on a Mac-only porting effort, while Jack is interested only in Windows driver development. And sometimes people just fall off the map, never to be heard from again. How does a project lead deal with ambiguities like that?
Who gets stuck doing maintenance instead of development? Do they get paid for maintenance issues? How do they get paid? Can you make money on OSS, and how?
Having the students participate in an OSS project, either one of their choosing or perhaps a class collaborative project, will help them learn how such a project is run. Having them particpate in an "outside" project will help them in that learning to work without face-to-face meetings is a trick in its own right. With a classroom-based project students might be tempted to "cheat" and whiteboard with their co-developers. That sort of design process sometimes doesn't get to happen in the real world.
A brief history of OSS (FSF vs OSI, for example) might be interesting, but I'm not sure how useful it will be to today's developers.