We predominatently want Internet content from other English-speaking countries. The real problem is that internet hosting is too expensive here still - compared to the US, so given a choice of a.com.au address or a.com address, chances are most companies will take a.com, hosted in the US, because it's cheaper. This in turn means that even if you want information about a local organisation or other regional content, it's still coming from the US. It's catch 22.
Regarding Telstra: That situation is just stupid. The cable infrastructure should stay in government hands, like roads - and only the services that go through it (like packet switched telephone & internet - the equivalent of trucks & cars on roads) should be allowed to go into private hands. As it is, the only way for the situation to improve is for another company to set up a competing cable/fibre network, which is as ridiculious as having two competing road networks.
No! Allowing a charge of any sort simply opens the way for the powers that be (Microsoft, the government, your ISP etc) charge for all emails.
The only real solution is to prosecute the organisations behind the spam - not just the spammer, but the guy that pays the spammer's bills. Make it illegal for companies to advertise in this way, with *really* heavy penalties for spamming, that will do real financial damage to the organisations that are advertising.
Many companies I am sure would be only too happy to be hit with a small charge for the provelidge of spamming your inbox with their latest crap - many companies already pay to send out catalogues and real junk mail, so what makes you think a small charge would stop them?
As soon as there is a charge per email in ANY form (ie. for either sending or recieving email even if only sometimes) , do you seriously think it will stay as a charge on only mail that you deem spam? Pretty soon there would be a charge for every mail you send - once the charging infrastructure is in place it would be a natural extension - at first justified as only being say, 0.1 cents per email.
I expect that pretty soon, that charge would increase like every other tax since the beginning of time has - 0.2 cents, 1 cent, 5 cents, 10 cents. Next thing you know it costs almost as much to send an email as it does to send a snail mail, and we are all left standing around wondering how we let it happen.
Wake up people! allowing there to be any kind of charge per email, either sending or recieving is just opening up the gateway to charges on all email.
The only long term way to stop spam is: instead of just chasing the spammers, hit the companies/individuals that have their products or services offered for sale via spam. If they accept payment or orders for a service or product then it should be easy for the FBI etc. to trace who is paying the spammers to send the stuff, and make those guys responsible for (hopefully suitably heavy) legal penalties for getting people to send the stuff to your inbox - just like the guy that hires a hit man is also responsible for murder. If some other country is harboring the original organisation behind the spam, then slap the country with sanctions and/or diplomatic penalties, the same way you would do if the country was actively supporting other illegal activities, or just black hole it.
Filtering is useless - it stops spam at the wrong end - even if it is implemented at your ISP.
You said: Doing lots of Pentium-specific tweaks in your code may be zero or negative help when somebody wants to run it on a Macintosh....
The beauty of this technique is that instead of having to be an expert on how the various switches affect the compile on each platform, or do multiple recompiles per platform to try and tweak the compiler by hand, you can use the GA to determine the best switches to use for each platform.
I just hope that this work gets extended to the point where it can do similar tweaks on a per module level so that you can just let the thing run overnight or for a day or two and squeeze the fastest compile options for your code out of the compiler.
Yes, of course using a better algorithm (eg. quicksort vs shellsort for sorting) will potentially improve performance much more than tweaking compile switches ever will, but that is a completely seperate issue and should not be used as an argument against this technique to produce faster code. I'd love to see this work get added to gcc (yes, as another compiler swtich:) )
The problem with auctioning off spectrum to the highest bidder, is that it is basically a variation of the old "window tax" that the UK instituted back in 1696 (not to be confused with MS one where you at least get something for your money). That tax was so unfair it probably resulted in the expression "daylight robbery" as a phrase for being grossly overcharged.
Mobile phones used to be used by just the privileged wealthy few - who could afford their high costs. For everyone else there was land lines, and public telephone booths for when you needed a phone away from your house. The world has changed now though, and you are practically a hermit in most of the developed world if you don't have one. When the UK auctioned off the spectrum for 3G services to the highest bidder for GBP 22.47bn ($35.4bn) The press and general public seem to think it's a wonderful way of collecting "free" revenue from mobile phone companies etc. Unfortunately, since everyone these days practically had to have a mobile, that's basically a GBP 400 tax per man woman and child - a tax that will have a hefty profit margin added to it also by the mobile phone companies - so you'll probably end up paying something like GBP 600 per person.
It is time that the general public saw spectrum auctions for what they are - a blatant rip off by the government against the public. Yes, spectrum has to be allocated, licensed, or kept localised (as in unlicensed low power short range transmissions only) to prevent total chaos in it's usage, but selling it to the highest bidder is NOT in the interest of the public. Perhaps there should be an OPPOSITE mechanism - where the company that can guarantee the lowest cost service to the public gets the use of the spectrum.
On another note, why don't pound symbols come out in Slashdot posts?
And the people still treat the environment like crap. I remember going to a beautiful Shinto shrine waterfall type place up in the mountains near Hakone - and seeing coke/coffee cans, cigarette butts and chip packets all along the way. Depressing. Shimoda "white sand" beach is depressing too - the nearest thing to a beach you can get withina few hours of Tokyo, and it's covered in litter. The Japanese have many fine qualities, but being environmentally aware/eco friendly isn't one of them unfortunately.
I think the world overall needs more anti-litter campaigns to encourage people to "do the right thing" because the same problem exists in London, New York and most of the other places I have lived. It's not perfect here in Aus either, but I think there is a lot higher level of litter awareness than other countries, and I think that's largely because of the intense campaigns they 20 years or so ago that hammered it into everyones head that you should treat your environment like you treat your lounge - don't just chuck stuff over your shoulder.
Seriously consider your options before buying that Sony. I have bought two sony laptops that have died (or had intermittent power problems), and their warranty support sucks - especially if you travel overseas. They might make great walkmans etc. but they seem to have real reliability issues with computer peoducts.
My last laptop was a PCG Grx416G that cost 2000 pounds UK but started getting narcolepsy (ie. powers down unexpectedly without warning) within about a month of me returning to Ausralia when the laptop was just 4 months old. No warranty support, and no interest in helping fix the problem. Sony bites. Definitely go for the Dell.
You know, it's funny how so many US netizens have been ragging on the french for having the balls to veto the US over Iraq. The funny thing is, out of 150 vetos in the history of the UN, the US were responsible for 76 of them (second only to USSR (118)/Russia (2)).
35 of these were directly in relation to stopping the UN taking a hard line with Israel. France has issued only 18, and the UK 32.(from here).
So before you take the piss out of the French, how about acknowledging that the US is too veto happy as well?
I am not French, and I never agreed with the French veto, but I think it's bullshit how hypocritical the US govt (and citizens). are on this one.
The whole veto system is crap actually - either everyone should get the veto power, (in which case the UN would be even more useless than it is) or no-one should.
Patents supposedly got leaked through IBM's AIX collaboration with SCO
There's nothing to leak - anyone can look it up in the patent office archives. If SCO thinks it's patents have been violated, then there's no need to hide a patent to protect it (like there is with a trade secret), so why don't they point to the infringing sections of code and give us the patent numbers that have been violated?
As far as I can see the only really revolutionary part is the chemical substrate used on the crystals. When I was still an undergrad (in 1991) I did a final year project for Dr David Thiel, Griffith University to build a device very similar to this.
The first version I built and programmed used an MC68HC11E2 microcontroller and two unsealed 10Mhz crystals mounted externally in a ZIF socket, with one crystal coated with chemicals used in gas chromatography. A beat frequency was generated from the two crystals, which was low enough to be sampled using one of the realtime input captures on the controller. This also helped to remove variances caused by temperature and other factors, because both crystals would be affected and cancel those sorts of influences.
As in the device in the article, the chemical substrate would bind to whatever the target type of compound was that you wanted to detect, changing the mass (hence resonant frequency) of the crystal.
A later version that I built when working in the lab as a research assistant after I graduated incorporated a multiplexer, a serial port, and several more oscillators, so that up to 4 differently coated crystals could be used at once. Later work afer I left to go and work overseas plugged the device into an expert system on a PC so that it could recognise different things ( like apples & bannanas etc) from the different chemical sugnatures from the combind sensors. One of the major problems with the device was relative insensitivity due to the relatively small recepotor surface area, but I believe there was other work going on to research different base coatings and etching etc. that would increase the surface area of the crystal and hence give a larger surface area for the coating chemicals. Another problem was that the coatings used to saturate with whatever chemical they bonded to, and the base signal would drift as a result. Also, after a reading it would take a while for the sensor to release whatever chemicals had been detected, so the response of the device was slow.
Sounds like these guys have done some great work - especially in finding signature chemicals for cancer that can be detected, but the underlying technology isn't that new at all. Unfortunately I left science behind to ride a desk in banking, writing boring ass databases, and I haven't had as interesting a job since.
Easiest thing to do would be to use something like IR Remote or alternatively for a more home brew approach set up a web server or even a perl httpd process (only accesible by your network) on your PC connected to the sterio, and have some web pages set up that run one of the several command line mp3 players. Then you can use the browser on your pocket PC to control what's getting played.
I think it would be a lot simpler to spray/inject/drip a few cc of liquid nitrogen on the weed. That should pretty much bugger any weed plant plus destroy a good chunk of it's root system I would think. I think the stuff is cheap enough to buy in bulk - but not sure how well you could keep it thermally insulated/liquid on a robot in a hot field.
My stepfather used to have one of those - every time he'd yell "Vivian!" (which meant I had to run up 2 flights of stairs to the lounge) it usually turned out to be a request to change the channel. The remote was usually just out of reach on the other end of the cofee table. Still, it did serve to tear me away from my computer song enough to get som excercise...
Actually there are three main religions in Japan - Shinto, Christianity and Buddism. There is also a very high level of tolleration between different religions - something many other societies in this sorry world could learn from.
Many Japanese count themselves as being in two or more of the above religions -(ie. a poll on religions while I was there in 1995 had a total much higher than 100%). There is a saying I heard once, "Japanese are born Shinto, Marry Christian and die Buddist." See Survey - Religion in Japan for more info.
Ok, IANA Physicist but if this new found effect is found to really hold true, does it mean that we could build electric motors with much higher RPM than is currently possible?
Consider the following: As I am sure you all know, electric motors are limited in speed by the generated back EMF, and physically by how much current can be pumped through them without melting down and in DC motors by the friction from the brushes touching commutator on the motor (AFAIK). If this ball setup was put on a frictionless bearing (say a magnetic bearing in a vacuum) then as long as you could keep the constant charge getting delivered to the ball - which presumably bleeds away or something in order for there to be no violation of thermodynamics, it should just keep spinning faster and faster as long as the charge could be maintained until it catastrophically failed, showering all unfortunates near by with chunks of steel ball.
Have they yet to find some kind of "back Electrostatic field" equivalent to back EMF in magnetic motors that would stop the thing just getting faster, or is there already some other sound principal in physics that would stop this thing spinning up to destruction?
Even though the force generated might be tiny, if the force was constant independant of the speed of rotation, what would be opposing this from happening? Could you use an electron gun or something to deliver the electrons to it instead of a wire?
Yes, 2500 km^2 is a lot of land - but this is land that is otherwise unproductive - desert area. There are concerns regarding environmental impacts on these areas, but then how much land is required to drill the oil, build the pipelines and dig the coal/uranium for conventional energy production, not to mention the actual powerplants themselves, and also environmental problems from transporting and handling all the wastes. (slag heaps for coal, expensive radioactive waste storage areas for nuclear) I for one never want to see them start drilling the Great Barrier Reef - but unless someone starts producing a real alternative to oil it is just a matter of time until some corporate lobby gets enough power to make this happen.
Some people have made arguments about climate changes caused by such towers etc. Think about it though - usually this same energy heats up the air and causes thermals (large bubbles of hot air as beloved by hangliding enthusiasts) to form. This is basically the same thing as what is happening in the tower, so the tower is basically like a trapped and tapped thermal in a fixed location.
The land used by solar towers could possibly be even more energy productive by having solar panels under the same heat collection area - but presumably the area under the collector is painted black to maximise conversion of UV to IR. The pastic film roof is supposed to be transparent to UV but block IR, like glass.
I am Australian by the way so the republican/democrat argument means nothing to me.
Australia is looking at making a solar tower which is supposed to prodice enough power to run 100,000 homes, and requires 5 square km of desert or other stupidly hot place. No water required, as it drives turbines rather than boils water. Has anyone looked at the costs of switching to solar towers vs the cost of war, and how much area would be required? I think that the answers actually look both economically and practically viable. First the facts from: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/2628 361.stm Sorry about the formatting - I can't figure out how to get the 2nd col to line up right.
US Population: 300,000,000 average people per houses: 4.0 Approx Houses: 75,000,000 Houses powered per Solar Tower: 200,000 Area required per Solar tower (km^2): 7 Solar Towers needed for US: 375 Area required for US (km^2): 2,625 Length per side of ST area(km): 51 Cost of a solar tower ($US): 560,000,000 Cost of all solar towers ($US): 210,000,000,000 War on terror cost per year($US): 30,000,000,000 Years of war to pay for all towers: about 7
So a TOTAL area of about 51x51 km of desert would be needed to provide all the households in the US with all their power. Since the household power usage figures are for Australia, you'd probably have to double or trebble this figure for US households (higher per capita consumption etc) but even so, you could practically pay for them ALL for the cost of 7 year's war on terror, or about 2/3 of a single year's annual defence budget, assuming you didn't get more efficient at building them - with practive, the costs of putting one up should drop.
You can extrapolate for the world & see that you could provide power for every man woman & child on earth at the Australian rate of consumption for about 20 times this amount.
Best of all, since it's relatively low-tech, ie. not sensitive military capable technologies - just a bloody big tower & turbines, there should be no issues regarding technology transfer. I would imagine it would be a nicely profitable business to be experts at building these things for other countries.
Isn't it time to start building these things all over Texas or something? How much does it cost to set up a new oil drilling site anyway?
Re:Australia hasn't had paper money for 10 years!
on
Cashless Society
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· Score: 2, Informative
Actually it is definitely plastic - the notes don't crease in the same way paper does, they are hard to crumple and very resistant to tearing - they tend to stretch slightly if anything.
Best of all you can go for a surf with $5 in your back pocket and buy a pie & chips for lunch without having to leave a wallet on the beach.
The plastic money is also much harder wearing than paper money, lasting 5 to 10 times as long, and I have yet to see a nasty crumpled and dirty note like you get with paper money. (Dirt & grime doesn't stick to it very well)
The only solution for spamming is that which has been posted previously to this forum - charge the advertisers!
They are the ultimate cause of the spammer's actions, after all, the spammers aren't spamming for the good of their health - they are doing it as a service for their clients.
This should be prosecutable in much the same way that if I try to hire someone to break your legs I am just as responsible for any leg-breaking as the one that actually does it, or if I advertised my product by hiring someone to burn it into the Whitehouse lawn with acid. Since the businesses that are advertised have to be contactable or have some ultimate front that they present to their clients - be it a pr0n page, dodgy surgery or credit enhancing service, there is an enitiy that can be targeted and sued. This has to be easier than trying to chase and prosecute the spam agency that sent spam via some remote server in timbuctoo via a proxy out beyond the black stump.
The cause of, and solution to, all of life's problems - H.S.
But seriously, surely it has to be hard to sterilise the washing machine between brews? Sure, you could run a couple of empty washing loads through it or something, but I don't imagine that would be enough to clean all those little drainage holes of mash, etc. Sounds like a good way to brew up beer that is going to give you a *serious* hangover. Mind you, if that problem could be solved, I'd be first in line to buy an automated home brew kit!
Slashdot Mirror
We predominatently want Internet content from other English-speaking countries. .com.au address or a .com address, chances are most companies will take a .com, hosted in the US, because it's cheaper. This in turn means that even if you want information about a local organisation or other regional content, it's still coming from the US. It's catch 22.
The real problem is that internet hosting is too expensive here still - compared to the US, so given a choice of a
Regarding Telstra: That situation is just stupid.
The cable infrastructure should stay in government hands, like roads - and only the services that go through it (like packet switched telephone & internet - the equivalent of trucks & cars on roads) should be allowed to go into private hands.
As it is, the only way for the situation to improve is for another company to set up a competing cable/fibre network, which is as ridiculious as having two competing road networks.
Well it's a lot more fun living in a country founded by criminals than a country founded by puritans.
For sure. Time to give up a career as a programmer and go back to school & join the Dark Side (IP law) - if you can't beat 'em, join 'em.
At least they won't ship *that* job ofshore too quickly.
No! Allowing a charge of any sort simply opens the way for the powers that be (Microsoft, the government, your ISP etc) charge for all emails.
The only real solution is to prosecute the organisations behind the spam - not just the spammer, but the guy that pays the spammer's bills. Make it illegal for companies to advertise in this way, with *really* heavy penalties for spamming, that will do real financial damage to the organisations that are advertising.
Many companies I am sure would be only too happy to be hit with a small charge for the provelidge of spamming your inbox with their latest crap - many companies already pay to send out catalogues and real junk mail, so what makes you think a small charge would stop them?
As soon as there is a charge per email in ANY form (ie. for either sending or recieving email even if only sometimes) , do you seriously think it will stay as a charge on only mail that you deem spam? Pretty soon there would be a charge for every mail you send - once the charging infrastructure is in place it would be a natural extension - at first justified as only being say, 0.1 cents per email.
I expect that pretty soon, that charge would increase like every other tax since the beginning of time has - 0.2 cents, 1 cent, 5 cents, 10 cents. Next thing you know it costs almost as much to send an email as it does to send a snail mail, and we are all left standing around wondering how we let it happen.
Wake up people! allowing there to be any kind of charge per email, either sending or recieving is just opening up the gateway to charges on all email.
The only long term way to stop spam is:
instead of just chasing the spammers, hit the companies/individuals that have their products or services offered for sale via spam.
If they accept payment or orders for a service or product then it should be easy for the FBI etc. to trace who is paying the spammers to send the stuff, and make those guys responsible for (hopefully suitably heavy) legal penalties for getting people to send the stuff to your inbox - just like the guy that hires a hit man is also responsible for murder. If some other country is harboring the original organisation behind the spam, then slap the country with sanctions and/or diplomatic penalties, the same way you would do if the country was actively supporting other illegal activities, or just black hole it.
Filtering is useless - it stops spam at the wrong end - even if it is implemented at your ISP.
Man, with all those ducts, your house must look like something out of Terry Gilliam's Brazil
You said: Doing lots of Pentium-specific tweaks in your code may be zero or negative help when somebody wants to run it on a Macintosh....
:) )
The beauty of this technique is that instead of having to be an expert on how the various switches affect the compile on each platform, or do multiple recompiles per platform to try and tweak the compiler by hand, you can use the GA to determine the best switches to use for each platform.
I just hope that this work gets extended to the point where it can do similar tweaks on a per module level so that you can just let the thing run overnight or for a day or two and squeeze the fastest compile options for your code out of the compiler.
Yes, of course using a better algorithm (eg. quicksort vs shellsort for sorting) will potentially improve performance much more than tweaking compile switches ever will, but that is a completely seperate issue and should not be used as an argument against this technique to produce faster code. I'd love to see this work get added to gcc (yes, as another compiler swtich
The problem with auctioning off spectrum to the highest bidder, is that it is basically a variation of the old "window tax" that the UK instituted back in 1696 (not to be confused with MS one where you at least get something for your money). That tax was so unfair it probably resulted in the expression "daylight robbery" as a phrase for being grossly overcharged.
Mobile phones used to be used by just the privileged wealthy few - who could afford their high costs. For everyone else there was land lines, and public telephone booths for when you needed a phone away from your house. The world has changed now though, and you are practically a hermit in most of the developed world if you don't have one.
When the UK auctioned off the spectrum for 3G services to the highest bidder for GBP 22.47bn ($35.4bn)
The press and general public seem to think it's a wonderful way of collecting "free" revenue from mobile phone companies etc. Unfortunately, since everyone these days practically had to have a mobile, that's basically a GBP 400 tax per man woman and child - a tax that will have a hefty profit margin added to it also by the mobile phone companies - so you'll probably end up paying something like GBP 600 per person.
It is time that the general public saw spectrum auctions for what they are - a blatant rip off by the government against the public. Yes, spectrum has to be allocated, licensed, or kept localised (as in unlicensed low power short range transmissions only) to prevent total chaos in it's usage, but selling it to the highest bidder is NOT in the interest of the public. Perhaps there should be an OPPOSITE mechanism - where the company that can guarantee the lowest cost service to the public gets the use of the spectrum.
On another note, why don't pound symbols come out in Slashdot posts?
Damn, someone finally caught us out about the Fosters. The pub wasn't Paddy Foleys was it? They used to ship the Guuniess out by air I heard.
And the people still treat the environment like crap. I remember going to a beautiful Shinto shrine waterfall type place up in the mountains near Hakone - and seeing coke/coffee cans, cigarette butts and chip packets all along the way. Depressing. Shimoda "white sand" beach is depressing too - the nearest thing to a beach you can get withina few hours of Tokyo, and it's covered in litter. The Japanese have many fine qualities, but being environmentally aware/eco friendly isn't one of them unfortunately.
I think the world overall needs more anti-litter campaigns to encourage people to "do the right thing" because the same problem exists in London, New York and most of the other places I have lived. It's not perfect here in Aus either, but I think there is a lot higher level of litter awareness than other countries, and I think that's largely because of the intense campaigns they 20 years or so ago that hammered it into everyones head that you should treat your environment like you treat your lounge - don't just chuck stuff over your shoulder.
Seriously consider your options before buying that Sony.
I have bought two sony laptops that have died (or had intermittent power problems), and their warranty support sucks - especially if you travel overseas. They might make great walkmans etc. but they seem to have real reliability issues with computer peoducts.
My last laptop was a PCG Grx416G that cost 2000 pounds UK but started getting narcolepsy (ie. powers down unexpectedly without warning) within about a month of me returning to Ausralia when the laptop was just 4 months old. No warranty support, and no interest in helping fix the problem. Sony bites. Definitely go for the Dell.
You know, it's funny how so many US netizens have been ragging on the french for having the balls to veto the US over Iraq.
The funny thing is, out of 150 vetos in the history of the UN, the US were responsible for 76 of them (second only to USSR (118)/Russia (2)).
35 of these were directly in relation to stopping the UN taking a hard line with Israel. France has issued only 18, and the UK 32.(from here).
So before you take the piss out of the French, how about acknowledging that the US is too veto happy as well?
I am not French, and I never agreed with the French veto, but I think it's bullshit how hypocritical the US govt (and citizens). are on this one.
The whole veto system is crap actually - either everyone should get the veto power, (in which case the UN would be even more useless than it is) or no-one should.
</rant>
Patents supposedly got leaked through IBM's AIX collaboration with SCO
There's nothing to leak - anyone can look it up in the patent office archives.
If SCO thinks it's patents have been violated, then there's no need to hide a patent to protect it (like there is with a trade secret), so why don't they point to the infringing sections of code and give us the patent numbers that have been violated?
As far as I can see the only really revolutionary part is the chemical substrate used on the crystals.
When I was still an undergrad (in 1991) I did a final year project for Dr David Thiel, Griffith University to build a device very similar to this.
The first version I built and programmed used an MC68HC11E2 microcontroller and two unsealed 10Mhz crystals mounted externally in a ZIF socket, with one crystal coated with chemicals used in gas chromatography. A beat frequency was generated from the two crystals, which was low enough to be sampled using one of the realtime input captures on the controller. This also helped to remove variances caused by temperature and other factors, because both crystals would be affected and cancel those sorts of influences.
As in the device in the article, the chemical substrate would bind to whatever the target type of compound was that you wanted to detect, changing the mass (hence resonant frequency) of the crystal.
A later version that I built when working in the lab as a research assistant after I graduated incorporated a multiplexer, a serial port, and several more oscillators, so that up to 4 differently coated crystals could be used at once. Later work afer I left to go and work overseas plugged the device into an expert system on a PC so that it could recognise different things ( like apples & bannanas etc) from the different chemical sugnatures from the combind sensors.
One of the major problems with the device was relative insensitivity due to the relatively small recepotor surface area, but I believe there was other work going on to research different base coatings and etching etc. that would increase the surface area of the crystal and hence give a larger surface area for the coating chemicals.
Another problem was that the coatings used to saturate with whatever chemical they bonded to, and the base signal would drift as a result. Also, after a reading it would take a while for the sensor to release whatever chemicals had been detected, so the response of the device was slow.
Sounds like these guys have done some great work - especially in finding signature chemicals for cancer that can be detected, but the underlying technology isn't that new at all.
Unfortunately I left science behind to ride a desk in banking, writing boring ass databases, and I haven't had as interesting a job since.
Easiest thing to do would be to use something like
IR Remote
or alternatively for a more home brew approach set up a web server or even a perl httpd process (only accesible by your network) on your PC connected to the sterio, and have some web pages set up that run one of the several command line mp3 players. Then you can use the browser on your pocket PC to control what's getting played.
I think it would be a lot simpler to spray/inject/drip a few cc of liquid nitrogen on the weed. That should pretty much bugger any weed plant plus destroy a good chunk of it's root system I would think. I think the stuff is cheap enough to buy in bulk - but not sure how well you could keep it thermally insulated/liquid on a robot in a hot field.
My stepfather used to have one of those - every time he'd yell "Vivian!" (which meant I had to run up 2 flights of stairs to the lounge) it usually turned out to be a request to change the channel. The remote was usually just out of reach on the other end of the cofee table. Still, it did serve to tear me away from my computer song enough to get som excercise...
Actually there are three main religions in Japan - Shinto, Christianity and Buddism. There is also a very high level of tolleration between different religions - something many other societies in this sorry world could learn from.
Many Japanese count themselves as being in two or more of the above religions -(ie. a poll on religions while I was there in 1995 had a total much higher than 100%). There is a saying I heard once, "Japanese are born Shinto, Marry Christian and die Buddist."
See Survey - Religion in Japan for more info.
Ok, IANA Physicist but if this new found effect is found to really hold true, does it mean that we could build electric motors with much higher RPM than is currently possible?
Consider the following:
As I am sure you all know, electric motors are limited in speed by the generated back EMF, and physically by how much current can be pumped through them without melting down and in DC motors by the friction from the brushes touching commutator on the motor (AFAIK). If this ball setup was put on a frictionless bearing (say a magnetic bearing in a vacuum) then as long as you could keep the constant charge getting delivered to the ball - which presumably bleeds away or something in order for there to be no violation of thermodynamics, it should just keep spinning faster and faster as long as the charge could be maintained until it catastrophically failed, showering all unfortunates near by with chunks of steel ball.
Have they yet to find some kind of "back Electrostatic field" equivalent to back EMF in magnetic motors that would stop the thing just getting faster, or is there already some other sound principal in physics that would stop this thing spinning up to destruction?
Even though the force generated might be tiny, if the force was constant independant of the speed of rotation, what would be opposing this from happening? Could you use an electron gun or something to deliver the electrons to it instead of a wire?
Yes, 2500 km^2 is a lot of land - but this is land that is otherwise unproductive - desert area. There are concerns regarding environmental impacts on these areas, but then how much land is required to drill the oil, build the pipelines and dig the coal/uranium for conventional energy production, not to mention the actual powerplants themselves, and also environmental problems from transporting and handling all the wastes. (slag heaps for coal, expensive radioactive waste storage areas for nuclear) I for one never want to see them start drilling the Great Barrier Reef - but unless someone starts producing a real alternative to oil it is just a matter of time until some corporate lobby gets enough power to make this happen.
Some people have made arguments about climate changes caused by such towers etc. Think about it though - usually this same energy heats up the air and causes thermals (large bubbles of hot air as beloved by hangliding enthusiasts) to form. This is basically the same thing as what is happening in the tower, so the tower is basically like a trapped and tapped thermal in a fixed location.
The land used by solar towers could possibly be even more energy productive by having solar panels under the same heat collection area - but presumably the area under the collector is painted black to maximise conversion of UV to IR. The pastic film roof is supposed to be transparent to UV but block IR, like glass.
I am Australian by the way so the republican/democrat argument means nothing to me.
Has anyone looked at the costs of switching to solar towers vs the cost of war, and how much area would be required? I think that the answers actually look both economically and practically viable.
First the facts
from:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/262
Sorry about the formatting - I can't figure out how to get the 2nd col to line up right.
So a TOTAL area of about 51x51 km of desert would be needed to provide all the households in the US with all their power. Since the household power usage figures are for Australia, you'd probably have to double or trebble this figure for US households (higher per capita consumption etc) but even so, you could practically pay for them ALL for the cost of 7 year's war on terror, or about 2/3 of a single year's annual defence budget, assuming you didn't get more efficient at building them - with practive, the costs of putting one up should drop.
You can extrapolate for the world & see that you could provide power for every man woman & child on earth at the Australian rate of consumption for about 20 times this amount.
Best of all, since it's relatively low-tech, ie. not sensitive military capable technologies - just a bloody big tower & turbines, there should be no issues regarding technology transfer. I would imagine it would be a nicely profitable business to be experts at building these things for other countries.
Isn't it time to start building these things all over Texas or something? How much does it cost to set up a new oil drilling site anyway?
Actually it is definitely plastic - the notes don't crease in the same way paper does, they are hard to crumple and very resistant to tearing - they tend to stretch slightly if anything.
Best of all you can go for a surf with $5 in your back pocket and buy a pie & chips for lunch without having to leave a wallet on the beach.
The plastic money is also much harder wearing than paper money, lasting 5 to 10 times as long, and I have yet to see a nasty crumpled and dirty note like you get with paper money. (Dirt & grime doesn't stick to it very well)
The only solution for spamming is that which has been posted previously to this forum - charge the advertisers!
They are the ultimate cause of the spammer's actions, after all, the spammers aren't spamming for the good of their health - they are doing it as a service for their clients.
This should be prosecutable in much the same way that if I try to hire someone to break your legs I am just as responsible for any leg-breaking as the one that actually does it, or if I advertised my product by hiring someone to burn it into the Whitehouse lawn with acid. Since the businesses that are advertised have to be contactable or have some ultimate front that they present to their clients - be it a pr0n page, dodgy surgery or credit enhancing service, there is an enitiy that can be targeted and sued. This has to be easier than trying to chase and prosecute the spam agency that sent spam via some remote server in timbuctoo via a proxy out beyond the black stump.
The cause of, and solution to, all of life's problems - H.S.
But seriously, surely it has to be hard to sterilise the washing machine between brews? Sure, you could run a couple of empty washing loads through it or something, but I don't imagine that would be enough to clean all those little drainage holes of mash, etc. Sounds like a good way to brew up beer that is going to give you a *serious* hangover. Mind you, if that problem could be solved, I'd be first in line to buy an automated home brew kit!
The cause of, and solution to, all of life's problems - H.S.