In the youtube video you link to, ridicolous claims are repeated: "4000 km on just a single full tank of air". Even accepting their own math, there's no way in hell this will be possible.
Unless you consider 2500 miles on a single gallon of petrol a realistic scenario. On their website where they talk about the energy-content, they mention a 340litre tank holding 50MJ, that was what I based my "90 gallon" on, if you really want to be nitpicky, it's not 90, but 89.82 gallons. Close enough when my point is that their claims are ORDERS OF MAGNITUDE out of the realistic.
I don't car how large a company they are. That doesn't indicate anything. Enron was a big company too.
Agreed, it's not -quite- that bad. You're right that this engine will likely have higher efficiency than an otto, so even though you've got only the equivalent of 0.4 gallons of petrol, you may be able to -do- more with it. 90% however is -not- a "reasonable" assumption. I'd consider it believable that the 0.4 gallons worth of air-pressure may be equivalent to perhaps 1 gallon of petrol in an otto. Which means it needs to be 2.5 times as efficient.
It's still miniscule though, MUCH worse than current electric cars which have so far failed to take off due to inadequate range.
Regenerative braking is actually -not- that much better with such a design. The problem is that when you compress air, the air heats up. If you don't somehow harvest this heat, that energy is lost. Similarily, when you let the air expand again, it cools down. To get any kind of efficiency at all from this, you need to prevent that, by adding heat from the ambient air to the expanding heat via massive heat-exchangers.
Which brings me to my next point, no you won't need cooling for this engine: indeed, you'll need large radiators for the purpose of HEATING the engine. Really. This is included in the CAD-drawings of the company, they imagine a 3-step expansion where the air is allowed to heat to near-ambient by going trough a large heat-exchanger between each stage.
I still agree with you. 100miles or something of that order seems possible. Assuming you're willing to spend 100 gallons or similar for the air-tank, *and* accept a tiny, ligthweigth, aerodynamic, low-performance vehicle.
But that's cheating really, because you can make ligthweigth, low-performance, aerodynamic otto-powered cars too, and those will have very much better mileage than average car. Indeed that has been done repeatedly. VW has a concept one-seater composite car that manages a stunning 250 mpg. People aren't lining up to buy that one, so why should they be lining up to buy this ?
Nope. I'm not. The 90 gallons -are- compressed air. The energy is stored using 90 gallons of air compressed to 300bar. If the air wasn't compressed, then obviously, the energy-content would be zero.
Re:French cooking is like this too
on
Chefs As Chemists
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
-certain- things must be just-so, others can be experimented with without ill effects, or easily be corrected if you get off-track. The reason cooking is hard for beginners is that they're not aware of which things belong in which category, so they stress the stuff that isn't actually that critical, or are too sloppy on the few spots where you really need to do it -JUST- so, or both.
If you're making bread it -matters- if the temperature of your liquids is 30C, 38C or 50C. If you're making lasagne it does -not- matter, well theoretically you may need to leave it for 3 minutes longer in the oven... If you triple the amount of chili in your chili con carne the result may be non-edible for non-dragons, if you triple the amount of estragon on your pizza, you get sligthly-more-estragony pizza, nobody will even really notice. (it'll taste a bit different, but not inedible, probably not even bad)
If you're making buns, they'll in general (up to a point anyway) be better if you work the dough more vigorously, perhaps letting them rise multiple times with workings of the dough between. To the contrary, if you're making any kind of sponge-cake where the airness comes from beaten eggs, then you should stir as little as absolutely humanly possible after adding the flour, since otherwise you'll beat-out all the airiness.
So, in short, cooking ain't in general hard at all. There's certain details that you need to pay attention to. It takes some practice or teaching or both to learn which, precisely, that is. You probably need to mess up these things a few times to really learn them. Most people I know have tried the trick of baking pizza with too-warm water once -- most people don't need to do that more than once to get the idea....
All with you. If my kids came home with RFIDs schoolstuffs I'd personally see to it that they get a nice long visit to the microwave. I dunno about other kids, but my kids are human beings, not animals, and I insist they be treated as such.
First, all they have is blurry cad-drawings, and still they claim it'll be on the market in 2008. That's not possible, if that where to actually be the case they'd have to ALREADY have several completed prototypes of the car at the minimum for safety-testing and similar.
Second, there's just not enough energy there.
If you believe the claims of the aircar-makers themselves, (which ain't a safe thing to do, because they assume near termic equilibrium, among other things, but nevermind) then, and I'm here quoting their website: 300 litres at 300 bars results in 46 MJ (Y 52.1 MJ with 340 litres at 300 bars ).
Okay, so a 340lite (90 gallon!) air-tank can hold the same amount of energy as 0.4 gallons of petrol. Really
So, after you've refilled this gargantuan 90 gallon tank with air, you'll have the equivalent of 0.4 gallons petrol worth of energy. Thereafter you have to refuel again. Who wants to refuel every 10 miles ? This think makes electric cars look EXCELLENT by comparison.
Everyones opinion is equally valid, if it's a question of opinion.
Does lasagne or pizza taste better ?
Not if it's a question of fact though. If the question is how warm it is today, I'm going to trust the guy that just checked 3 independent carefully calibrated termometers over the guy who held his finger in the air.
I think it's interesting that the denial seems to be very US-centric. You don't get it over here. Yes, sure, the people -exist- they always do. But it's like perhaps 1-2% of the people here doubt that human activity is the major factor in global warming, while my impression is that thats atleast an order of magnitude higher in the US.
I think part of it is, it's hard to accept that you personally are to blame for something. We Europeans are too, offcourse, but atleast we can thump our chests and go, well we may pollute too, but atleast we manage to be richer than the Americans while still polluting like 1/3rd of what they do pro capita.
Certainly. Noone ever said research was easy. Much less -good- research.
However, by the mid-1960ies enough good research had been made on the connection between smoking and lung-cancer that one could with good confidence say that yes, indeed, people who smoke regularily have a much higher risk of developing lung-cancer than people who do not.
My point was that it took 3 decades from the time where the research was (really!) conclusive, and until the courts recognized and acted on this. Yes, some details about -how- where trashed out later. But the basic fact: smoking increases lung-cancer was known.
Research is today similarily conclusive on global warming. Yes, the scientists are still quite fuzzy on the details, I expect that'll take another decade or more to trash it out. But there really is well-documented consensus on the basics: CO2-concentration in the atmosphere is increasing. The increase is largely caused by human activity. Higher CO2-concentrations increases the average temperature on earth.
Waiting 3 decades for the courts to recognize this, and trashing it out in a monster global legal battle strikes me as particularily ineffective. Even if it worked, it'd mean wasting -decades- before even starting, which will make the pain that much greater.
You're a bit confused. "beyond reasonable doubt" is only the standard if you're talking criminal law.
If you're talking other law, like for example contract-disputes or restitution of damages, then it comes down to most-likely.
class-action lawsuits is the -least- of the problem. You're neglecting here that we're talking literally hundreds of different jurisdictions, all over the planet. Many of those (most even, I'd guess) doesn't even/have/ the concept "class-action". And even if they did, filing individual class-action lawsuits in 173 jurisdictions ain't precisely an easy thing to do, it doesn't help if you're a subsistence farmer with zero education and may not even know how to read.
It may have been practical if this was a USA-problem. It isn't. It's a -global- problem.
You don't need to know -how- something works to be able to say that it -does- work. So your argument makes no sense.
If you inject a certain substance in rats, and the develop cancer much more than equal rats injected with a placebo, you can say with fair confidence that the substance increases cancer-rates in rats.
You can say that even if you have no fucking clue whatsoever -HOW- that happens on a cellular or molecular level.
The surgeon General in the 1960ies based statements on a lot more than "anecdotal evidence", like I said, his warnings where based on 7000 peer-reviewed scientific studies.
Really, there was rock-solid scientific consensus that smoking increases risk of lung-cancer DECADES earlier than the 1990ies.
It's much less than that actually. As I said, it's 50 million -accounts-
I don't know, and neither does anyone except Facebook, but my guess would be that perhaps 10 million of those are current, active, nonduplicate accounts.
That's a lot from a certain perspective offcourse, but it still means that something like 1% of all internet-users use Facebook, 99% don't.
No they don't. They have 50 million -accounts- which completely fails to be the same thing.
Some of these are held by people who have two or more accounts. Some are held by spammers, and a great many are held by people who at some point or other signed up out of curisoity, but haven't actually used the site even once the last month. These aren't "users" of the service.
Cheap and good audio-equipment won't make -you- a better musician, but it will indeed lead to more good musicians overall. Because when the barriers to entry into a field are lower, more people get a chance at seriously trying it out. Which mean the overall talent-pool is larger.
Back when only 1% of the people ever had a chance at trying their hand at photography, not many discovered they had the passion and talent for it.
Today everyone gets to try. True, most have no particular talent for it, or no interest, or both. But a few are brilliant. Including a few that would never even -discover- that they're good at it, if entry into the field of photography required say $10.000 worth of gear and $5 worth of consumables for every photo you take.
I didn't say there's real doubt that global warming is real, and is atleast largely the result of human activity. There is scientific consensus on this and has been for a while. (despite the fact that there exist isolated scientists who think otherwise)
My point is, there are strong forces who see it as beneficial to nurture and fuel what little uncertanities exist, and it's likely it'll take a long time before the scientific consensus is universally accepted as real.
There wheren't any real doubt about the dangers of tobacco-smoking in 1970 either, indeed the Surgeon General released a thorough report on it in 1964, based on more than 7000 published papers showing a very clear risk. Nevertheless only in the mid 1990ies, 3 DECADES later was the same facts established in court.
Actually tons of Norwegians have guns at home too. For one of three reasons.
Either they're hunters, which tend to mean rifles and-or double-barreled break-action shotguns.
Or, they do shooting for sports, which tend to mean small-calibre rifles or pistols, or pump-action shotguns.
Or they're in the "home army", a rapid-mobilization part of the army where many people have basic gear stored locked-down in their homes, in which case you're talking automatic HK416 assault-rifles. (for some reason criminals tend to avoid breaking into homes where those people live, go figure...)
But you're rigth, neither of these are the type of weapon favoured by criminals, or indoors security-guards for that matter, they're not ideal for close-quarters, and not small enough to be easily carried all the time or concealed.
In practice, the tricky part is establsihing what portion of what harm came from humanly generated carbon-emissions.
It took literally -decades- for courts to even establish that yes, smoking is directly related to lung-cancer, and yes, if a person has been smoking for decades and develop lung-cancer, it is likely that smoking is the cause. (it's not certain, you can very well develop lung-cancer even without smoking, it's just less likely) That's decades *after* it was scientifically consensus.
Currently, there's people claiming there exist no global warming at all. You've got others arguing it exists, but the net-effect is *positive* not negative. Yet others claiming it exists, but sunspot-activity is the reason. Yet others arguing that it exists, but some other terrestrial reason is the cause. And so on and so on.
There's also the sligth problem of jurisdiction. I somehow don't think it'll be practical for farmers in Brazil to sue 39522 companies in 179 jurisdictions for their share of the blame for this years drougth. Even if it could be proved that it was caused by global warming. (which is doubtful: you may well be able to prove that the weather is on -average- drier in some region due to global warming, but proving that this spesific drougth is caused by that is another matter alltogether.)
In short, no, I don't think the courts will be able to trash this out.
This may or may not be the case but is completely beside the point.
You may argue that the UK (or any other country) *SHOULD* have laws like that. The article is however claiming that they *DO* have such a law, which they do not, so, the claim is, quite simply, wrong.
It also fails to be the case in Germany, Finland, Norway and Spain. I doubt it is the case -ANYWHERE- in Europe, but I can't say for absolutely sure.
That's not the only bullshit in this article. I don't know -any- site that stores credit-card numbers, expiration-dates and control-numbers as *cookies* (i.e. client-side), certainly Ebags, the site he claimed scammed his wife, does not. (I just tested. They -DO- set a cookie, but this cookie is just a hash that presumably indexes a server-side storage for variables.)
Coldfusion, Java, PHP, ASP and.Net all do it this (safe) way by default. It is hard to believe that lots of sites went to a lot of trouble to store client-state in an insecure way rather than using the built-in default in their development-environment, that is sane.
In short, I don't doubt shady bussiness-practices for a second, but I -do- doubt the reporting of this fella.
Higher power is one. Some devices don't want 2W for 3 hours, they want 2000W for 10 seconds.
Quick recharging is another. Most caps can be charged at any rate that doesn't melt stuff. For example, an electrical car that goes 150km on a charge -- and fully recharges in 30 seconds may be superior to one that goes 300km on a charge, but needs 5 hours to fully recharge.
I agree with you that notebooks isn't precisely the most likely application.
Yeah. But there's many kinds of birds. How about a Tomahawk ? Range 2500 miles, speed 800 mph, which means that it is underway for atleast 3 hours. They're -capable- of doing the entire thing independently too, including navigating by a combination of GPS, built-in-maps and gyros.
Yes, sure, they too are typically launched unarmed, and then receive a digitally signed "arm" command shortly before engaging the target. But that's a security procedure, not a -requirement- there's nothing stopping you from arming the missile immediately after launch, and thereafter let it go about its killing on its own.
In short, the GP assertion that no machine should be armed and independently killing humans is naive, and has been so for a long time. It's not as if these are -NEW- weapons.
I don't see how a unmanned boat with a machine-gun is anything fundamentally new when we already have flying robots with nukes.
Sorta. But if you make a game-model of a human, then clothe him/her and ship the game so that this (clothed) state is the only way to see him/her, are you liable for the fact that he/she is "really" naked underneath the clothing ?
It's not as if Natalie Portman ain't/really/ naked under those clothes in Star-Wars...
If you walk over to some girl (let's say she consents) and take her clothes off, can you then sue her for having exposed herself to you ? Is that any different if you're deliberatedly disrobing a video-game female ?
Lots of anti-aircraft missiles, for example, are completely independent after being set loose. And perfectly capable of independently finding, engaging and destroying the target, indeed that's their sole reason for existing.
You against those too ? If not, for how many seconds/minutes is a armed vehicle allowed to go independently hunting for humans ?
Slashdot Mirror
In the youtube video you link to, ridicolous claims are repeated: "4000 km on just a single full tank of air". Even accepting their own math, there's no way in hell this will be possible.
Unless you consider 2500 miles on a single gallon of petrol a realistic scenario. On their website where they talk about the energy-content, they mention a 340litre tank holding 50MJ, that was what I based my "90 gallon" on, if you really want to be nitpicky, it's not 90, but 89.82 gallons. Close enough when my point is that their claims are ORDERS OF MAGNITUDE out of the realistic.
I don't car how large a company they are. That doesn't indicate anything. Enron was a big company too.
Agreed, it's not -quite- that bad. You're right that this engine will likely have higher efficiency than an otto, so even though you've got only the equivalent of 0.4 gallons of petrol, you may be able to -do- more with it. 90% however is -not- a "reasonable" assumption. I'd consider it believable that the 0.4 gallons worth of air-pressure may be equivalent to perhaps 1 gallon of petrol in an otto. Which means it needs to be 2.5 times as efficient.
It's still miniscule though, MUCH worse than current electric cars which have so far failed to take off due to inadequate range.
Regenerative braking is actually -not- that much better with such a design. The problem is that when you compress air, the air heats up. If you don't somehow harvest this heat, that energy is lost. Similarily, when you let the air expand again, it cools down. To get any kind of efficiency at all from this, you need to prevent that, by adding heat from the ambient air to the expanding heat via massive heat-exchangers.
Which brings me to my next point, no you won't need cooling for this engine: indeed, you'll need large radiators for the purpose of HEATING the engine. Really. This is included in the CAD-drawings of the company, they imagine a 3-step expansion where the air is allowed to heat to near-ambient by going trough a large heat-exchanger between each stage.
I still agree with you. 100miles or something of that order seems possible. Assuming you're willing to spend 100 gallons or similar for the air-tank, *and* accept a tiny, ligthweigth, aerodynamic, low-performance vehicle.
But that's cheating really, because you can make ligthweigth, low-performance, aerodynamic otto-powered cars too, and those will have very much better mileage than average car. Indeed that has been done repeatedly. VW has a concept one-seater composite car that manages a stunning 250 mpg. People aren't lining up to buy that one, so why should they be lining up to buy this ?
Nope. I'm not. The 90 gallons -are- compressed air. The energy is stored using 90 gallons of air compressed to 300bar. If the air wasn't compressed, then obviously, the energy-content would be zero.
-certain- things must be just-so, others can be experimented with without ill effects, or easily be corrected if you get off-track. The reason cooking is hard for beginners is that they're not aware of which things belong in which category, so they stress the stuff that isn't actually that critical, or are too sloppy on the few spots where you really need to do it -JUST- so, or both.
If you're making bread it -matters- if the temperature of your liquids is 30C, 38C or 50C. If you're making lasagne it does -not- matter, well theoretically you may need to leave it for 3 minutes longer in the oven... If you triple the amount of chili in your chili con carne the result may be non-edible for non-dragons, if you triple the amount of estragon on your pizza, you get sligthly-more-estragony pizza, nobody will even really notice. (it'll taste a bit different, but not inedible, probably not even bad)
If you're making buns, they'll in general (up to a point anyway) be better if you work the dough more vigorously, perhaps letting them rise multiple times with workings of the dough between. To the contrary, if you're making any kind of sponge-cake where the airness comes from beaten eggs, then you should stir as little as absolutely humanly possible after adding the flour, since otherwise you'll beat-out all the airiness.
So, in short, cooking ain't in general hard at all. There's certain details that you need to pay attention to. It takes some practice or teaching or both to learn which, precisely, that is. You probably need to mess up these things a few times to really learn them. Most people I know have tried the trick of baking pizza with too-warm water once -- most people don't need to do that more than once to get the idea....
All with you. If my kids came home with RFIDs schoolstuffs I'd personally see to it that they get a nice long visit to the microwave. I dunno about other kids, but my kids are human beings, not animals, and I insist they be treated as such.
The "air-car" is bullshit.
First, all they have is blurry cad-drawings, and still they claim it'll be on the market in 2008. That's not possible, if that where to actually be the case they'd have to ALREADY have several completed prototypes of the car at the minimum for safety-testing and similar.
Second, there's just not enough energy there.
If you believe the claims of the aircar-makers themselves, (which ain't a safe thing to do, because they assume near termic equilibrium, among other things, but nevermind) then, and I'm here quoting their website: 300 litres at 300 bars results in 46 MJ (Y 52.1 MJ with 340 litres at 300 bars ).
Okay, so a 340lite (90 gallon!) air-tank can hold the same amount of energy as 0.4 gallons of petrol. Really
So, after you've refilled this gargantuan 90 gallon tank with air, you'll have the equivalent of 0.4 gallons petrol worth of energy. Thereafter you have to refuel again. Who wants to refuel every 10 miles ? This think makes electric cars look EXCELLENT by comparison.
Everyones opinion is equally valid, if it's a question of opinion.
Does lasagne or pizza taste better ?
Not if it's a question of fact though. If the question is how warm it is today, I'm going to trust the guy that just checked 3 independent carefully calibrated termometers over the guy who held his finger in the air.
I think it's interesting that the denial seems to be very US-centric. You don't get it over here. Yes, sure, the people -exist- they always do. But it's like perhaps 1-2% of the people here doubt that human activity is the major factor in global warming, while my impression is that thats atleast an order of magnitude higher in the US.
I think part of it is, it's hard to accept that you personally are to blame for something. We Europeans are too, offcourse, but atleast we can thump our chests and go, well we may pollute too, but atleast we manage to be richer than the Americans while still polluting like 1/3rd of what they do pro capita.
You may -think- so. But it's still just plain and simple wrong.
Certainly. Noone ever said research was easy. Much less -good- research.
However, by the mid-1960ies enough good research had been made on the connection between smoking and lung-cancer that one could with good confidence say that yes, indeed, people who smoke regularily have a much higher risk of developing lung-cancer than people who do not.
My point was that it took 3 decades from the time where the research was (really!) conclusive, and until the courts recognized and acted on this. Yes, some details about -how- where trashed out later. But the basic fact: smoking increases lung-cancer was known.
Research is today similarily conclusive on global warming. Yes, the scientists are still quite fuzzy on the details, I expect that'll take another decade or more to trash it out. But there really is well-documented consensus on the basics: CO2-concentration in the atmosphere is increasing. The increase is largely caused by human activity. Higher CO2-concentrations increases the average temperature on earth.
Waiting 3 decades for the courts to recognize this, and trashing it out in a monster global legal battle strikes me as particularily ineffective. Even if it worked, it'd mean wasting -decades- before even starting, which will make the pain that much greater.
You're a bit confused. "beyond reasonable doubt" is only the standard if you're talking criminal law.
/have/ the concept "class-action". And even if they did, filing individual class-action lawsuits in 173 jurisdictions ain't precisely an easy thing to do, it doesn't help if you're a subsistence farmer with zero education and may not even know how to read.
If you're talking other law, like for example contract-disputes or restitution of damages, then it comes down to most-likely.
class-action lawsuits is the -least- of the problem. You're neglecting here that we're talking literally hundreds of different jurisdictions, all over the planet. Many of those (most even, I'd guess) doesn't even
It may have been practical if this was a USA-problem. It isn't. It's a -global- problem.
You don't need to know -how- something works to be able to say that it -does- work. So your argument makes no sense.
If you inject a certain substance in rats, and the develop cancer much more than equal rats injected with a placebo, you can say with fair confidence that the substance increases cancer-rates in rats.
You can say that even if you have no fucking clue whatsoever -HOW- that happens on a cellular or molecular level.
The surgeon General in the 1960ies based statements on a lot more than "anecdotal evidence", like I said, his warnings where based on 7000 peer-reviewed scientific studies.
Really, there was rock-solid scientific consensus that smoking increases risk of lung-cancer DECADES earlier than the 1990ies.
It's much less than that actually. As I said, it's 50 million -accounts-
I don't know, and neither does anyone except Facebook, but my guess would be that perhaps 10 million of those are current, active, nonduplicate accounts.
That's a lot from a certain perspective offcourse, but it still means that something like 1% of all internet-users use Facebook, 99% don't.
No they don't. They have 50 million -accounts- which completely fails to be the same thing.
Some of these are held by people who have two or more accounts. Some are held by spammers, and a great many are held by people who at some point or other signed up out of curisoity, but haven't actually used the site even once the last month. These aren't "users" of the service.
Cheap and good audio-equipment won't make -you- a better musician, but it will indeed lead to more good musicians overall. Because when the barriers to entry into a field are lower, more people get a chance at seriously trying it out. Which mean the overall talent-pool is larger.
:-)
Back when only 1% of the people ever had a chance at trying their hand at photography, not many discovered they had the passion and talent for it.
Today everyone gets to try. True, most have no particular talent for it, or no interest, or both. But a few are brilliant. Including a few that would never even -discover- that they're good at it, if entry into the field of photography required say $10.000 worth of gear and $5 worth of consumables for every photo you take.
I guess that's the same thing you where saying
I didn't say there's real doubt that global warming is real, and is atleast largely the result of human activity. There is scientific consensus on this and has been for a while. (despite the fact that there exist isolated scientists who think otherwise)
My point is, there are strong forces who see it as beneficial to nurture and fuel what little uncertanities exist, and it's likely it'll take a long time before the scientific consensus is universally accepted as real.
There wheren't any real doubt about the dangers of tobacco-smoking in 1970 either, indeed the Surgeon General released a thorough report on it in 1964, based on more than 7000 published papers showing a very clear risk. Nevertheless only in the mid 1990ies, 3 DECADES later was the same facts established in court.
Actually tons of Norwegians have guns at home too. For one of three reasons.
Either they're hunters, which tend to mean rifles and-or double-barreled break-action shotguns.
Or, they do shooting for sports, which tend to mean small-calibre rifles or pistols, or pump-action shotguns.
Or they're in the "home army", a rapid-mobilization part of the army where many people have basic gear stored locked-down in their homes, in which case you're talking automatic HK416 assault-rifles. (for some reason criminals tend to avoid breaking into homes where those people live, go figure...)
But you're rigth, neither of these are the type of weapon favoured by criminals, or indoors security-guards for that matter, they're not ideal for close-quarters, and not small enough to be easily carried all the time or concealed.
Fine, in principle.
In practice, the tricky part is establsihing what portion of what harm came from humanly generated carbon-emissions.
It took literally -decades- for courts to even establish that yes, smoking is directly related to lung-cancer, and yes, if a person has been smoking for decades and develop lung-cancer, it is likely that smoking is the cause. (it's not certain, you can very well develop lung-cancer even without smoking, it's just less likely) That's decades *after* it was scientifically consensus.
Currently, there's people claiming there exist no global warming at all. You've got others arguing it exists, but the net-effect is *positive* not negative. Yet others claiming it exists, but sunspot-activity is the reason. Yet others arguing that it exists, but some other terrestrial reason is the cause. And so on and so on.
There's also the sligth problem of jurisdiction. I somehow don't think it'll be practical for farmers in Brazil to sue 39522 companies in 179 jurisdictions for their share of the blame for this years drougth. Even if it could be proved that it was caused by global warming. (which is doubtful: you may well be able to prove that the weather is on -average- drier in some region due to global warming, but proving that this spesific drougth is caused by that is another matter alltogether.)
In short, no, I don't think the courts will be able to trash this out.
This may or may not be the case but is completely beside the point.
You may argue that the UK (or any other country) *SHOULD* have laws like that. The article is however claiming that they *DO* have such a law, which they do not, so, the claim is, quite simply, wrong.
It also fails to be the case in Germany, Finland, Norway and Spain. I doubt it is the case -ANYWHERE- in Europe, but I can't say for absolutely sure.
.Net all do it this (safe) way by default. It is hard to believe that lots of sites went to a lot of trouble to store client-state in an insecure way rather than using the built-in default in their development-environment, that is sane.
That's not the only bullshit in this article. I don't know -any- site that stores credit-card numbers, expiration-dates and control-numbers as *cookies* (i.e. client-side), certainly Ebags, the site he claimed scammed his wife, does not. (I just tested. They -DO- set a cookie, but this cookie is just a hash that presumably indexes a server-side storage for variables.)
Coldfusion, Java, PHP, ASP and
In short, I don't doubt shady bussiness-practices for a second, but I -do- doubt the reporting of this fella.
Many reasons, it depends on the device offcourse.
Higher power is one. Some devices don't want 2W for 3 hours, they want 2000W for 10 seconds.
Quick recharging is another. Most caps can be charged at any rate that doesn't melt stuff. For example, an electrical car that goes 150km on a charge -- and fully recharges in 30 seconds may be superior to one that goes 300km on a charge, but needs 5 hours to fully recharge.
I agree with you that notebooks isn't precisely the most likely application.
The difference does however grow as capacity grows.
The difference between 2^10 bytes and 10^3 bytes is 2.4%. (kilobyte)
The difference between 2^20 bytes and 10^6 bytes is 4.9% (megabytes)
The difference between 2^30 bytes and 10^9 bytes is 7.4% (gigabytes)
The difference between 2^40 bytes and 10^12 bytes is 10% (terabytes)
In other words, treating 10^(3n) as equivalent to 2^(10n) makes less and less sense as the capacities go up.
Yeah. But there's many kinds of birds. How about a Tomahawk ? Range 2500 miles, speed 800 mph, which means that it is underway for atleast 3 hours. They're -capable- of doing the entire thing independently too, including navigating by a combination of GPS, built-in-maps and gyros.
Yes, sure, they too are typically launched unarmed, and then receive a digitally signed "arm" command shortly before engaging the target. But that's a security procedure, not a -requirement- there's nothing stopping you from arming the missile immediately after launch, and thereafter let it go about its killing on its own.
In short, the GP assertion that no machine should be armed and independently killing humans is naive, and has been so for a long time. It's not as if these are -NEW- weapons.
I don't see how a unmanned boat with a machine-gun is anything fundamentally new when we already have flying robots with nukes.
Sorta. But if you make a game-model of a human, then clothe him/her and ship the game so that this (clothed) state is the only way to see him/her, are you liable for the fact that he/she is "really" naked underneath the clothing ?
/really/ naked under those clothes in Star-Wars...
It's not as if Natalie Portman ain't
If you walk over to some girl (let's say she consents) and take her clothes off, can you then sue her for having exposed herself to you ? Is that any different if you're deliberatedly disrobing a video-game female ?
It's silly.
It's hard to draw the line though.
Lots of anti-aircraft missiles, for example, are completely independent after being set loose. And perfectly capable of independently finding, engaging and destroying the target, indeed that's their sole reason for existing.
You against those too ? If not, for how many seconds/minutes is a armed vehicle allowed to go independently hunting for humans ?
That problem lessens itself if you've got both types of soldiers.