A budget equivalant to many billion dollars can support a rather large and dedicated team of geniuses. Getting the info from a partly melted platter sounds like a fun challenge.
So it sounds like the best way to wipe out your political/business opponents would be to fill a hard drive full of interesting looking but bogus information, do a thermite erasure and arrange for it to fall into their hands. Then all you have to do is sit back and cackle with glee as they spend huge amounts of resources to get bogus information.
We all win because (in theory) the money collected in this way reduces our taxes. I applaud the sentiment, but don't you realise that the more a company pays in taxes, the more charges they pass on to you the consumer?
For that matter, the same thing applies to selling off the airwaves. When they are sold for a huge amount of money, making the govornment money, that money ultimately comes from you, the consumer, in the form of higher mobile phone rates etc. to pay for the financing of the original purchase of those same airwaves that used to be free. I'd personally rather they were sold for less and we got cheaper phone rates.
More charges on patents would not help the patent office at all - it only gets allowed to spend a fraction of what it already collects - the rest goes elsewhere. Far better if the money for patents was actually used to fund the patent office, instead of "reducing your taxes" ( read: more money for them to flush down the toilet). I personally believe that they should bring back the "working model" principal - where you had a working prototype of the patent before you could get rights to it.
I did a similar thing for a mostly unmanned community radio station. They had a sattelite feed reeiver that would drop out at inconvenient times, so I wrote an X10/tcpip "bridge" that could receive a command vis tcpip to talk to the serially connected CM11A computer module, and a program that would monitor the sattelite feed for silence for more than some threshold amount, then send an apporpriate command to the bridge to power cycle the receiver. It worked, and the software I wrote has been running with no problems (or surprising, any memory leaks right from the first version) for the last 3 years, but it really is a crappy technology.
The problems I had with the protocol was that it is just too primitive. No way to query yhe existing state of a device, no acknowledgment of a device having even received a packet, and the response time was terrible - it takes a few seconds for the appliance modules to switch state. To try and make it mode reliable, the protocol alledgedly sends the packets twice at some fixed interval, but apparently computer power supplies can suck up the signal, so naturally, having the module plugged in right next to the computer probably doesn't help things. At $AU50 a pop for the modules, it's hardly a bargain basement technology either. It'd probably be better to roll your own tech using relays and PICs. It could hardly be worse than the X10 crap.
I would be happy if there was a protocol that just implemented one thing: the ability to query the state of a particular device. If the protocol can do that, then all error correction, retransmissions etc. can be done in software. Even if a particular transmission had only a 50% chance of working, as long as you can query the state of a device, you can keep querying (qith appropriate fallbacks between queries) and possibly retransmistting the required state until you get the desired result. Without some means of getting a device's state, any protocol will be useless for reliable home automation. Given you can get a 100mbit network card these days for less than ten bucks, the electronics involved really shouldnt be that expensive. A network card has to be able to work a hell of a lot faster and do more things than than one of these things have to be able to do.
That's basically right. Up to now, I have usually worked for companies that paid me well to write in-house systems (in banks) - not for general public consumption. However, If I ever get a product out the door that I have written independently, and has commercial potential, depending on the type of product, I intend to either:
a) keep releasing better versions of the app and keep getting paid for it, (eg. for an accounting system or business system) b) if I dont want to do any more improvements, release it under some kind of open licence and let others run with it. (eg. a game) or possibly c) release it as open source from the outset, if I figure out how to get paid for providing additional services - eg. a business system that needs to be tailored to each individual business for it to work well, or something like that.
I love the idea of writing open source apps, but I do have to pay my electricity bills and eat occasionally. If I could find someone that would pay me to write open source software, I'd happily code away all day & night. The point is, I'd still be writing new code, not sitting on my arse and expecting to be paid forever for something I released 5 years ago.
Simple. Copyright is a social contract between the artist and society. Society provides an incentive to the artist to produce works by gauranteeing the artist can have rewards sufficient to justify his labour. In return, society gets new creative works.
The problem with having infinitely long copyright is that there is no longer the same incentive for artists (or their children for that matter) to create new works.
It would be like you getting paid forever because of the first years work you did (as say, a doctor or something). There's hardly any incentive for you to keep going to work and making more stuff/fixing problems, and that hurts society. What if a doctor kept getting paid forever by every patient that he had cured? or a plumber got paid for every litre of water that went down your pipes? You can see that you would be paying way too much for the benefit received, which prevents you being able to afford other things.
The third problem is that works can be lost forever.
In summary, there are three problems with infinite copyright: 1) Leaves you with less cash to spend on new creative works. 2) Gives artists less incentive to make additional new creative works. 3) old works can be lost because they are not allowed to be copied, yet have gone out of print (because they are not seen as commerially viable, or the publishing company wants to promote some other product they own - perhaps one that they have the artists even more screwed over on than normal). Result: Everyone looses.
The heirs have no right to expect revenue from work their parents did. If you loose a parent, their old boss doesnt keep paying you, does he? That's what life insurance/investments are for. The children still have the legacy of having hugely famous parents, plus all their (presumably now valuable memorabilia).
I don't understand why it is so neccesary to expect someone's kids to be able to skim through life off their parent's work, without doing anything themselves.
One possible exception: Perhaps if there were children that are still actually children ( ie. under 18 / 21 or whatever is considered an adult where you are) then I can see it would be right that they should still receive benefit from their parent's work.
The bulk of their profits will be in the first few years, after that it is time to get busy and try to make something that someone wants.
great point! This is exactly what is outrageous about the current system. The amount of effort required to produce an album is greatly out of balance with the return on that work, even if you count in the risk associated with created works succeeding or not. How would it be if the whole world worked like that:
Imagine if a builder got paid based on the number of people that walked into his building. Economically, it would only make sense if the end return was about the same as what he would get compared to being paid normally - say, a years wages - mabey $50000, plus whatever materials are used.
Currently record companies (and to a lesser extent movie studios and book publishers) are getting outragous amounts of cash from the public for what they produce - it is completely disproportionate to the effort that went into creating the product in the first place. Sure, you can argue that marketing costs money, but by the same token, the builder could argue he has to spend millions on advertising his building to get people to come in. The simple fact is, if the building is useful and has merit, people will use it. It is wasteful of resources to have huge marketing campaigns for a product that is crap. It may make money, but society as a whole would be better if the builder had just made a better building in the first place. Marketing in general, is a leech on society actually - every dollar that is spent on it in the things I buy is a dollar that could be in my pocket (which I would spend on more products I actually need/want, or invested in companies that make better products). Sorry if you are in marketing.
Ok, so there is risk in making a creative work - but there is in building a building too - what if the brickie is crap, and the thing falls down in a year, or he makes the thing so damn ugly no-one wants to go in? Well that's the risk you take. If you are good at what you do, your product will sell. If you aren't, then it will tank. Creative content producers actually have a huge advantage over the builder in the example above, because by and large, most of their investment is in time spent on producing a work, rather than in actual physical resources.
For all those starving artists out there - get better at what you do, or start making something that doesnt suck. Either way, the public has been getting shafted for too long with overly long copyright, with financial rewards that by far outweigh the value of the product they produce.
No-one should expect to be able to live for the rest of their life on a few years worth of good work, with no additional value added. As a programmer, I certainly dont. If I write something that sells well, I can expect to get a couple of years out of it at the most. Id better be keeping it maintained and up to date if I want to keep earning from it!
Just offer a bounty for them and they'll be extinct faster than you can say "Tasmanian Tiger."
Australians are a bit more enterprising than that. Within a month of a bounty on cane toads being offered, there wold be cane toad farms in every back yard. People can be remarkably resourceful when it comes to clawing back tax dollars from the govornment.
I am 35 years old now I read a lot of books, at least 30 - 40 or so a year, and often in lighting that people insist will make me go blind. I have also been hacking around on computers since I was 13 or so, in the days of the old Apple II, and am now a programmer that spends at least 10 hours a day in front of a PC - these days mostly a laptop, but often an old crusty CRT. One thing I have noticed: I am much more sensitive to screen flicker than I used to be - I notice instantly now if a CRT has too low a refresh rate, though it doesn'tseem to cause me eye strain - it's just very annoying. I just had my eyes checked yesterday after I got a small spec of stone dust in one while laying Cat6 cable around my house (wear those safety goggles!) and according to the optometrist, I still have better than 20/20 vision. He told me to come back in 10 years or so. He also told me that the reading in the dark will make you blind story is bollocks - if anything your eyes might get a bit tired, but after a few hours your eyes are the same as ever.
One thing I do always do while using a computer is look up every half hour or so and focus on something on the horizon or as far away as possible, usually while I am thinking about a problem or thinking of what needs to be done next.
Steam engines can be made to be up to 90% efficient - but they generally have sucky throttle response, unlike the internal combustion engine which has excellent throttle response, but is less efficient. This makes the solution obvious: Use an ultra high efficient steam engine in a hybrid configuration, instead of an internal combustion engine. The mechanical engine should only have an electric transmission - ie. steam engine -> generator/batteries -> electric motor -> wheels with relatively small batteries to provide the power at initial startup and instantaneous throttle response needed in a vehicle. There could possibly be a clutch that would provide a direct steam engine -> wheels engagement when in highway cruising, to maximise efficiency but this might could make things too complex.
While the steam plant is cooling down when the engine is "turned off", the steam plant could still be running the generator, to use this otherwise wasted heat to top up the charge on the batteries ready for the next start.
The other advantage is that the vehicle could take a much wider range of fuels without modification, because the fuel is just heating water rather than being burnt in a carefully controlled way like in an internal combustion engine. The same steam plant could therefore just as easily run on deisel, metho, petrol, (unmodified) old chip oil, and mabey even pellet based fuel ( like compressed paper pellets etc.)
The internal combustion engine is dead! long live the steam electric hybrid!
As much of a hell hole Somalia might be, small buisinesses started by locals have actually been able to set up communications networks - mobile phone and internet services over there. This proves that government regulation isn't neccesary to set up a communications network - but is sure makes it easier to get to work if you know you dont have to worry about getting kidnapped or have your competitor decide to take out a hit on you.
In the case of biodiesel (and petroleum, for that matter), it comes for "free" from plants and photosynthesis. What we really have to look at is the efficiency of biofuel production for energy vs direct solar energyh collection.
In both cases, the upper limit on the amount of energy that can be generated in this manner is limited by the solar flux density per meter - about 1.3kW per square meter at the equator.
So the case for biofuels vs solar/electric/hydrolosis comes down to how efficient it is to grow a crop for oil, and convert that crop into fuel, compared to having the same area covered by a more direct solar collector such as solar panels or solar furnaces / solar towers to create electricity/hydrogen. Solar panels are about 20% efficient now, with room for improvement and almost no further capital or labor investment after they have been set up, for at least 20 years. Solar towers and other solar/thermal methods are possibly more efficient. What are the capital and labor investment requirements and efficiency of growing corn, and converting it to fuel then to electricity? The other consideration is that of course biofuels require the use of productive land, which should be accounted for in the capital cost comparison.
I am grateful indeed that my laptop's been going out with a whimper insterad of a bang. So there were actually shrapnel like fragments flying from the thing?
Don't do it. I bought a high end sony laptop (for £1900 in Aug 2001) and had no end of problems. Mobo died after 4 months, and the default warranty didn't cover it. ( I was in Aus, I bought it in the UK. So much for an "international" company, which was one of the reasons I bought the VAIO in the first place.) I git it repaired 7 months later on a return trip to the UK, leaving me with 1 month warranty. The screen backlight died 3 months later. Sony told me it would cost over AU$1000 to replace the screen (which is 16.1" UXGA 1600x1200 res), as the backlight and ascreen are all one unit. I eventually found a local guy in Sydney that could dissasemble the screen & replace the neon tube. Cost:200.
I bought a mem upgrade, to kick ram up to 512Mb. 5 months later,I am back to 256Mb again - but it's not the ram, it's the second controller or something - both sticks work, when put in slot one.
Oh, and this laptop was the *second* Vaio I bought. The first I bought from a reputable online shop in the UK. It arrived and died within 15 minutes of firing it up. I sent it back, only to find it would take 3 months to get my full refund, because Sony won't refund the vendor until they have done a full check etc. on the laptop themselves. I wasnt interested in getting it repaired - I just wanted a full refund, so I could go to a bricks and mortar shop and buy a different laptop that would actually work for more than 15 minutes before it had to be repaired under warranty. Unfortunately I still thought Sony was good, and that the first dodgy laptop was just bad luck.
Get a dell or compaq or something. I hear they suck less.
I can't believe how appropriate some of the song titles are:
Our Lady Peace, Healthy in Paranoid Times (Columbia) Van Zant, Get Right with the Man (Columbia) Switchfoot, Nothing is Sound (Columbia) The Coral, The Invisible Invasion (Columbia) Acceptance, Phantoms (Columbia) Horace Silver Quintet, Silver's Blue (Epic Legacy) Dexter Gordon, Manhattan Symphonie (Columbia Legacy) The Bad Plus, Suspicious Activity (Columbia)
almost like they are an extra subliminal warning, given the extra Sony "Bonus" that awaits on the CD.
Wealth comes from productivity not savings. Have a look on the bottom of any 5 items in your house,or the clothing you are wearing, and tell me where they were made.
How do you know that evolution happens smoothly and evenly? There have been some very interesting results rising out of genetic algorithm research, in particular where one guy created virtual life. With evolutionary pressure on simple "organisms, they could evolve to have much more complex behavior than they started with. One of the most interesting observations has been made though, is that the development of the virtual life tends to happen in spurts and jumps, with mutations building up gradually, with little apparent effect, until some critical mutations occured and the "organisms" went through very rapid changes. If you are looking for proof that evolution can give rise to complex creatures, instead of just simple adaptations of existing creatures, this is where you will eventually see it arise from.
Mabey the "Intelligent Designer's" all this is to keep us on our toes with the occasional tsunami and healthy dose of cosmic angst. It seems to help virtual life evolve faster when it's in a stressed environment. It's sure explain why our "Designer" chose to create the many wonderful parasites that plague humanity ( Malaria, ring worm, tape worm, the many many diseases and other scourges of the developed and developing world) What a benevolent creator to have blessed us with these "Intelligent Designs". Bah. I am wasting my time replying to someone that can't follow even basic logic.
Perhaps the fact that you got better marks after supplying additional documentation on the code should tell you something: put clearer comments in the original program. After all, while its all very well to write something like p = ((r>>3)>2)>3); it's a hell of a lot nicer if there is a clear comment that goes with it://Combine masked Red Green and blue byte vals into a 16bit 565 color pixel.
An interesting tidbit - coal is 3-9ppm Uranium. There has been more radioactive material released into the atmosphere by coal plants in the last thirty years than all nuclear accidents and nuclear weapons testing combined. Times ten.
Reference please! I have been looking for a good argumnt against coal every time I argue with a mate of mine who reckons nuclear power is much worse than coal.
we need a media that's not a USB flash drive. we need a media that will go inside the computer and won't stick out akwardly, and something that's dirt cheap for small capacities and a decent price for higher capacities.
Instead of using CDs for disposable media you can give away, what we really need is an updated version of a punch card reader, where you could print data (say using a laser printer) to a small piece of paper that could be read in by another computer reliably. at 300dpi with 16 shades of gray per pixel(4 bits), a 3.5" square piece of paper should be able to hold about the same as a regular 3.5" floppy disk.
If printed at 600dpi, or on bigger pieces of paper and redundant information added for error correction, you could just print your data on paper and dispose of it easily too when done, somewhat more environmentally friendly than CDR's. Plus, paper has a better survival record than any other contemporary media, for long term storage. It would certainly be very cheap for small capacities.
I am sure someone out there with too much time on their hands would love to write software to do this with a regular scanner/printer.
I hope they never get rid of parallel ports. It's a lot harder (and more expensive) to build hardware to hang off your PC from a USB port. You can do all sorts of fun things very easily with a parallel port though, with just a transistor, resistor, diode and relay per bit. If you want to be more cautious you might throw in a latch or optocoupler there too.
Slashdot Mirror
What about that Greek fire death-ray thing they used to torch enemy ships? I thought it was speculated to be a parabolic mirror.
A budget equivalant to many billion dollars can support a rather large and dedicated team of geniuses. Getting the info from a partly melted platter sounds like a fun challenge.
So it sounds like the best way to wipe out your political/business opponents would be to fill a hard drive full of interesting looking but bogus information, do a thermite erasure and arrange for it to fall into their hands. Then all you have to do is sit back and cackle with glee as they spend huge amounts of resources to get bogus information.
Been done in a few places already:
Kaneda's bike. Here too
We all win because (in theory) the money collected in this way reduces our taxes.
I applaud the sentiment, but don't you realise that the more a company pays in taxes, the more charges they pass on to you the consumer?
For that matter, the same thing applies to selling off the airwaves. When they are sold for a huge amount of money, making the govornment money, that money ultimately comes from you, the consumer, in the form of higher mobile phone rates etc. to pay for the financing of the original purchase of those same airwaves that used to be free. I'd personally rather they were sold for less and we got cheaper phone rates.
More charges on patents would not help the patent office at all - it only gets allowed to spend a fraction of what it already collects - the rest goes elsewhere. Far better if the money for patents was actually used to fund the patent office, instead of "reducing your taxes" ( read: more money for them to flush down the toilet). I personally believe that they should bring back the "working model" principal - where you had a working prototype of the patent before you could get rights to it.
I did a similar thing for a mostly unmanned community radio station. They had a sattelite feed reeiver that would drop out at inconvenient times, so I wrote an X10/tcpip "bridge" that could receive a command vis tcpip to talk to the serially connected CM11A computer module, and a program that would monitor the sattelite feed for silence for more than some threshold amount, then send an apporpriate command to the bridge to power cycle the receiver. It worked, and the software I wrote has been running with no problems (or surprising, any memory leaks right from the first version) for the last 3 years, but it really is a crappy technology.
The problems I had with the protocol was that it is just too primitive. No way to query yhe existing state of a device, no acknowledgment of a device having even received a packet, and the response time was terrible - it takes a few seconds for the appliance modules to switch state. To try and make it mode reliable, the protocol alledgedly sends the packets twice at some fixed interval, but apparently computer power supplies can suck up the signal, so naturally, having the module plugged in right next to the computer probably doesn't help things. At $AU50 a pop for the modules, it's hardly a bargain basement technology either. It'd probably be better to roll your own tech using relays and PICs. It could hardly be worse than the X10 crap.
I would be happy if there was a protocol that just implemented one thing: the ability to query the state of a particular device. If the protocol can do that, then all error correction, retransmissions etc. can be done in software. Even if a particular transmission had only a 50% chance of working, as long as you can query the state of a device, you can keep querying (qith appropriate fallbacks between queries) and possibly retransmistting the required state until you get the desired result. Without some means of getting a device's state, any protocol will be useless for reliable home automation. Given you can get a 100mbit network card these days for less than ten bucks, the electronics involved really shouldnt be that expensive. A network card has to be able to work a hell of a lot faster and do more things than than one of these things have to be able to do.
That's basically right. Up to now, I have usually worked for companies that paid me well to write in-house systems (in banks) - not for general public consumption. However, If I ever get a product out the door that I have written independently, and has commercial potential, depending on the type of product, I intend to either:
a) keep releasing better versions of the app and keep getting paid for it, (eg. for an accounting system or business system)
b) if I dont want to do any more improvements, release it under some kind of open licence and let others run with it. (eg. a game)
or possibly
c) release it as open source from the outset, if I figure out how to get paid for providing additional services - eg. a business system that needs to be tailored to each individual business for it to work well, or something like that.
I love the idea of writing open source apps, but I do have to pay my electricity bills and eat occasionally. If I could find someone that would pay me to write open source software, I'd happily code away all day & night. The point is, I'd still be writing new code, not sitting on my arse and expecting to be paid forever for something I released 5 years ago.
Simple. Copyright is a social contract between the artist and society.
Society provides an incentive to the artist to produce works by gauranteeing the artist can have rewards sufficient to justify his labour. In return, society gets new creative works.
The problem with having infinitely long copyright is that there is no longer the same incentive for artists (or their children for that matter) to create new works.
It would be like you getting paid forever because of the first years work you did (as say, a doctor or something). There's hardly any incentive for you to keep going to work and making more stuff/fixing problems, and that hurts society.
What if a doctor kept getting paid forever by every patient that he had cured? or a plumber got paid for every litre of water that went down your pipes? You can see that you would be paying way too much for the benefit received, which prevents you being able to afford other things.
The third problem is that works can be lost forever.
In summary, there are three problems with infinite copyright:
1) Leaves you with less cash to spend on new creative works.
2) Gives artists less incentive to make additional new creative works.
3) old works can be lost because they are not allowed to be copied, yet have gone out of print (because they are not seen as commerially viable, or the publishing company wants to promote some other product they own - perhaps one that they have the artists even more screwed over on than normal). Result: Everyone looses.
The heirs have no right to expect revenue from work their parents did. If you loose a parent, their old boss doesnt keep paying you, does he? That's what life insurance/investments are for.
The children still have the legacy of having hugely famous parents, plus all their (presumably now valuable memorabilia).
I don't understand why it is so neccesary to expect someone's kids to be able to skim through life off their parent's work, without doing anything themselves.
One possible exception: Perhaps if there were children that are still actually children ( ie. under 18 / 21 or whatever is considered an adult where you are) then I can see it would be right that they should still receive benefit from their parent's work.
The bulk of their profits will be in the first few years, after that it is time to get busy and try to make something that someone wants.
great point! This is exactly what is outrageous about the current system.
The amount of effort required to produce an album is greatly out of balance with the return on that work, even if you count in the risk associated with created works succeeding or not.
How would it be if the whole world worked like that:
Imagine if a builder got paid based on the number of people that walked into his building. Economically, it would only make sense if the end return was about the same as what he would get compared to being paid normally - say, a years wages - mabey $50000, plus whatever materials are used.
Currently record companies (and to a lesser extent movie studios and book publishers) are getting outragous amounts of cash from the public for what they produce - it is completely disproportionate to the effort that went into creating the product in the first place. Sure, you can argue that marketing costs money, but by the same token, the builder could argue he has to spend millions on advertising his building to get people to come in. The simple fact is, if the building is useful and has merit, people will use it. It is wasteful of resources to have huge marketing campaigns for a product that is crap. It may make money, but society as a whole would be better if the builder had just made a better building in the first place. Marketing in general, is a leech on society actually - every dollar that is spent on it in the things I buy is a dollar that could be in my pocket (which I would spend on more products I actually need/want, or invested in companies that make better products). Sorry if you are in marketing.
Ok, so there is risk in making a creative work - but there is in building a building too - what if the brickie is crap, and the thing falls down in a year, or he makes the thing so damn ugly no-one wants to go in? Well that's the risk you take. If you are good at what you do, your product will sell. If you aren't, then it will tank. Creative content producers actually have a huge advantage over the builder in the example above, because by and large, most of their investment is in time spent on producing a work, rather than in actual physical resources.
For all those starving artists out there - get better at what you do, or start making something that doesnt suck. Either way, the public has been getting shafted for too long with overly long copyright, with financial rewards that by far outweigh the value of the product they produce.
No-one should expect to be able to live for the rest of their life on a few years worth of good work, with no additional value added. As a programmer, I certainly dont. If I write something that sells well, I can expect to get a couple of years out of it at the most. Id better be keeping it maintained and up to date if I want to keep earning from it!
Just offer a bounty for them and they'll be extinct faster than you can say "Tasmanian Tiger."
Australians are a bit more enterprising than that. Within a month of a bounty on cane toads being offered, there wold be cane toad farms in every back yard.
People can be remarkably resourceful when it comes to clawing back tax dollars from the govornment.
I am 35 years old now I read a lot of books, at least 30 - 40 or so a year, and often in lighting that people insist will make me go blind. I have also been hacking around on computers since I was 13 or so, in the days of the old Apple II, and am now a programmer that spends at least 10 hours a day in front of a PC - these days mostly a laptop, but often an old crusty CRT.
One thing I have noticed: I am much more sensitive to screen flicker than I used to be - I notice instantly now if a CRT has too low a refresh rate, though it doesn'tseem to cause me eye strain - it's just very annoying.
I just had my eyes checked yesterday after I got a small spec of stone dust in one while laying Cat6 cable around my house (wear those safety goggles!) and according to the optometrist, I still have better than 20/20 vision. He told me to come back in 10 years or so. He also told me that the reading in the dark will make you blind story is bollocks - if anything your eyes might get a bit tired, but after a few hours your eyes are the same as ever.
One thing I do always do while using a computer is look up every half hour or so and focus on something on the horizon or as far away as possible, usually while I am thinking about a problem or thinking of what needs to be done next.
Steam engines can be made to be up to 90% efficient - but they generally have sucky throttle response, unlike the internal combustion engine which has excellent throttle response, but is less efficient. This makes the solution obvious:
Use an ultra high efficient steam engine in a hybrid configuration, instead of an internal combustion engine. The mechanical engine should only have an electric transmission - ie. steam engine -> generator/batteries -> electric motor -> wheels with relatively small batteries to provide the power at initial startup and instantaneous throttle response needed in a vehicle. There could possibly be a clutch that would provide a direct steam engine -> wheels engagement when in highway cruising, to maximise efficiency but this might could make things too complex.
While the steam plant is cooling down when the engine is "turned off", the steam plant could still be running the generator, to use this otherwise wasted heat to top up the charge on the batteries ready for the next start.
The other advantage is that the vehicle could take a much wider range of fuels without modification, because the fuel is just heating water rather than being burnt in a carefully controlled way like in an internal combustion engine. The same steam plant could therefore just as easily run on deisel, metho, petrol, (unmodified) old chip oil, and mabey even pellet based fuel ( like compressed paper pellets etc.)
The internal combustion engine is dead! long live the steam electric hybrid!
As much of a hell hole Somalia might be, small buisinesses started by locals have actually been able to set up communications networks - mobile phone and internet services over there. This proves that government regulation isn't neccesary to set up a communications network - but is sure makes it easier to get to work if you know you dont have to worry about getting kidnapped or have your competitor decide to take out a hit on you.
In the case of biodiesel (and petroleum, for that matter), it comes for "free" from plants and photosynthesis.
What we really have to look at is the efficiency of biofuel production for energy vs direct solar energyh collection.
In both cases, the upper limit on the amount of energy that can be generated in this manner is limited by the solar flux density per meter - about 1.3kW per square meter at the equator.
So the case for biofuels vs solar/electric/hydrolosis comes down to how efficient it is to grow a crop for oil, and convert that crop into fuel, compared to having the same area covered by a more direct solar collector such as solar panels or solar furnaces / solar towers to create electricity/hydrogen.
Solar panels are about 20% efficient now, with room for improvement and almost no further capital or labor investment after they have been set up, for at least 20 years. Solar towers and other solar/thermal methods are possibly more efficient.
What are the capital and labor investment requirements and efficiency of growing corn, and converting it to fuel then to electricity? The other consideration is that of course biofuels require the use of productive land, which should be accounted for in the capital cost comparison.
I am grateful indeed that my laptop's been going out with a whimper insterad of a bang.
So there were actually shrapnel like fragments flying from the thing?
Don't do it.
I bought a high end sony laptop (for £1900 in Aug 2001) and had no end of problems.
Mobo died after 4 months, and the default warranty didn't cover it. ( I was in Aus, I bought it in the UK. So much for an "international" company, which was one of the reasons I bought the VAIO in the first place.)
I git it repaired 7 months later on a return trip to the UK, leaving me with 1 month warranty.
The screen backlight died 3 months later. Sony told me it would cost over AU$1000 to replace the screen (which is 16.1" UXGA 1600x1200 res), as the backlight and ascreen are all one unit.
I eventually found a local guy in Sydney that could dissasemble the screen & replace the neon tube. Cost:200.
I bought a mem upgrade, to kick ram up to 512Mb. 5 months later,I am back to 256Mb again - but it's not the ram, it's the second controller or something - both sticks work, when put in slot one.
Oh, and this laptop was the *second* Vaio I bought. The first I bought from a reputable online shop in the UK. It arrived and died within 15 minutes of firing it up. I sent it back, only to find it would take 3 months to get my full refund, because Sony won't refund the vendor until they have done a full check etc. on the laptop themselves. I wasnt interested in getting it repaired - I just wanted a full refund, so I could go to a bricks and mortar shop and buy a different laptop that would actually work for more than 15 minutes before it had to be repaired under warranty. Unfortunately I still thought Sony was good, and that the first dodgy laptop was just bad luck.
Get a dell or compaq or something. I hear they suck less.
I can't believe how appropriate some of the song titles are:
Our Lady Peace, Healthy in Paranoid Times (Columbia)
Van Zant, Get Right with the Man (Columbia)
Switchfoot, Nothing is Sound (Columbia)
The Coral, The Invisible Invasion (Columbia)
Acceptance, Phantoms (Columbia)
Horace Silver Quintet, Silver's Blue (Epic Legacy)
Dexter Gordon, Manhattan Symphonie (Columbia Legacy)
The Bad Plus, Suspicious Activity (Columbia)
almost like they are an extra subliminal warning, given the extra Sony "Bonus" that awaits on the CD.
Wealth comes from productivity not savings.
Have a look on the bottom of any 5 items in your house,or the clothing you are wearing, and tell me where they were made.
How do you know that evolution happens smoothly and evenly? There have been some very interesting results rising out of genetic algorithm research, in particular where one guy created
virtual life. With evolutionary pressure on simple "organisms, they could evolve to have much more complex behavior than they started with. One of the most interesting observations has been made though, is that the development of the virtual life tends to happen in spurts and jumps, with mutations building up gradually, with little apparent effect, until some critical mutations occured and the "organisms" went through very rapid changes. If you are looking for proof that evolution can give rise to complex creatures, instead of just simple adaptations of existing creatures, this is where you will eventually see it arise from.
Mabey the "Intelligent Designer's" all this is to keep us on our toes with the occasional tsunami and healthy dose of cosmic angst. It seems to help virtual life evolve faster when it's in a stressed environment. It's sure explain why our "Designer" chose to create the many wonderful parasites that plague humanity ( Malaria, ring worm, tape worm, the many many diseases and other scourges of the developed and developing world) What a benevolent creator to have blessed us with these "Intelligent Designs". Bah. I am wasting my time replying to someone that can't follow even basic logic.
I just looked. They seem to have failed to create a linux version of the doucument reader. So much for that being useful.
Perhaps the fact that you got better marks after supplying additional documentation on the code should tell you something: put clearer comments in the original program. //Combine masked Red Green and blue byte vals into a 16bit 565 color pixel.
After all, while its all very well to write something like
p = ((r>>3)>2)>3);
it's a hell of a lot nicer if there is a clear comment that goes with it:
An interesting tidbit - coal is 3-9ppm Uranium. There has been more radioactive material released into the atmosphere by coal plants in the last thirty years than all nuclear accidents and nuclear weapons testing combined. Times ten.
Reference please! I have been looking for a good argumnt against coal every time I argue with a mate of mine who reckons nuclear power is much worse than coal.
Oops -
Already done
we need a media that's not a USB flash drive. we need a media that will go inside the computer and won't stick out akwardly, and something that's dirt cheap for small capacities and a decent price for higher capacities.
Instead of using CDs for disposable media you can give away, what we really need is an updated version of a punch card reader, where you could print data (say using a laser printer) to a small piece of paper that could be read in by another computer reliably. at 300dpi with 16 shades of gray per pixel(4 bits), a 3.5" square piece of paper should be able to hold about the same as a regular 3.5" floppy disk.
If printed at 600dpi, or on bigger pieces of paper and redundant information added for error correction, you could just print your data on paper and dispose of it easily too when done, somewhat more environmentally friendly than CDR's. Plus, paper has a better survival record than any other contemporary media, for long term storage. It would certainly be very cheap for small capacities.
I am sure someone out there with too much time on their hands would love to write software to do this with a regular scanner/printer.
I hope they never get rid of parallel ports. It's a lot harder (and more expensive) to build hardware to hang off your PC from a USB port. You can do all sorts of fun things very easily with a parallel port though, with just a transistor, resistor, diode and relay per bit. If you want to be more cautious you might throw in a latch or optocoupler there too.