I never said that silica was the only material to make aerogels out of. I said that aerogels are usually made of silica, and silica aerogel is still the most common type used today. And I never said that CNTs can never be in a gel, I said they are never in a gel. And actually, after I went out and actually looked around to be sure of myself, it looks like I might be wrong, and someone might have already made a true CNT aerogel using critical-point drying: http://www.physics.upenn.edu/yodhlab/papers/2007/AdvMat_2007.pdf
Apparently, as far back as 2007, some researchers, using single- and few-wall carbon nanotubes in a suspension, used critical-point drying to create a true CNT aerogel. The aerogel was fragile by itself, but they were able to reinforce it with polyvinyl alcohol so that it could hold up to 8000 times its own weight.
I can't speak to the material in the article, but aerogels are made from all kinds of materials, not just silica. Silica aerogel was possibly the first aerogel. Carbon aerogels are real aerogels, and made by baking organic aerogels. They can be further altered under steam and pressure. That is the normal process for making superconducting capacitors (ultracapacitors).
They still don't make aerogel out of carbon nanotubes. Very lightweight, strong masses of carbon nanotubes (which look and feel similar to aerogel) are never in a "gel" state, and are therefore not really aerogel. Therefore, the article, which states "aerogel contains multi-walled carbon nanotubes," is wrong.
Oh, and BTW, "superconducting capacitor" is not the same thing as "ultracapacitor." An ultracapacitor, as you said, often uses carbon in various forms (graphene, carbon aerogel (not carbon nanotube aerogel!), carbon nanotubes, or even activated carbon) and can hold kilojoules. A superconducting capacitor, by definition, would involve the use of superconductors, and might theoretically hold somewhere on the order of terajoules.
Aerogel is usually formed from silica gel, or sometimes from a sort of carbon fiber paper. The material that the article talks about, which is an airy mass of carbon nanotubes produced by vapor deposition is not an aerogel. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aerogel#Carbon
Actually, Switzerland is a direct democracy. In some cantons, voting is even compulsory. Any citizen can call a referendum on any law. In addition, parties aren't nearly as strong as they are in the US. If there ever was a "real" democracy on this earth, I think that'd be it.
...only outlaws will have flash drives. After all, if you're going to leak sensitive information, and you get caught, you're going to get much worse than a court-martial. I think the directive will end up doing more harm than good.
Agreed. There are at least 25 people who've done it, maybe a lot more. Here's a guide to the whole process if you want to do it yourself: http://brian-mcdermott.com/fusion_is_easy.htm
Article 11, paragraph 2 of the Moon Treaty states:
"The moon is not subject to national appropriation by any claim of
sovereignty, by means of use or occupation, or by any other means."
Of course, England hasn't signed or ratified the Moon Treaty, so it all kinda depends on the international reaction whether or not his claim is valid.
...it's hacked in a month. Probably wouldn't be too hard, either. Just run the current OS in a controlled environment to figure out what makes it so special, then make a Linux distro to duplicate that. Install the new distro on the hard drive through a regular computer, then transplant into the PS3.
Amen. Everything that can't be put on a list like this, including details of a treaty in the works that could severely hurt our freedom, should be made open.
A lot of todays "young people" somehow find classical music boring. This, I do not understand. Boring is listening to the exact same riff or chord over and over and over throughout an entire song without any variation. Classical music might do the same theme many times throughout a piece, but it's usually varied every time. Bach, for example, would take one theme and vary it a step at a time until it turned into a completely different theme.
Actually, there's a lot of good, free classical music out there. I have several symphonies, sonatas, and concertos from classiccat.com that are pretty good quality.
I agree with most of these Anonymous Cowards here: it all depends on the job. If the job is technology-related, I'm less likely to trust someone with an AOL address than someone with a Gmail address.
I think we should laugh in Mexico's face and say, "forget about it." Archaeological images are always and have always been easily available to the public.
You could also argue that those pictures are Aztec writing, so the stuff on the cups are an original written work.
Wrong. We do know what happens when you smash particles at high energies. Particle accelerators across the globe, Fermilab the most prominent until now, have been doing it for years. The energy the LHC is going to smash at, while much greater than any before, still isn't that much. Divide the energy, 14TeV, by c^2 to get the mass. 14TeV/c^2 is about 15,000amu, the mass of 15,000 hydrogen atoms or 2.5x10^-20 grams. Even if the LHC did manage to create a black hole out of all that mass, it would be too little to draw anything in and would evaporate in less than a second.
And in the event the LHC does cause great damage (more likely to be to the power grid than anything), CERN will be responsible for paying up. The physicists will not go on trial, CERN will, because CERN is responsible for the LHC in the same way Fermilab is responsible for the Tevatron. That's why people start corporations—so they don't become responsible when something goes wrong.
Yeah, I think that someone needs to set up a pi computation BOINC project and just keep calculating. The real question is "would it be feasible?" I guess they'd have to go about it a different way than {SETI,Folding}@Home. Instead of giving the client a "chunk" of instructions, you could just give it one digit. The algorithm for finding a particular digit (the BBP or Bellard's formula) could be stored on the client's computer indefinitely, and the computer could simply be instructed to extract a single digit or a block of digits and send them back to the host.
PiHex already did this, sorta, but in binary and only was after specific ranges of digits. I think the main deciding factor would be speed. How many digits can the average computer (or slightly above average, since that's the kind of people who would sign up) compute in about a second? A minute? An hour? Is it linear? We ought to run benchmarks before doing anything like this.
When I was 12, I actually started teaching myself programming with TI-BASIC on a school-supplied graphing calculator. HTML and GW-BASIC quickly followed, then it was on to Visual Basic and C++. If I were to do it again today, though, I'd probably start with Python—it's easy to learn and can do great stuff. I would certainly steer clear of things like Alice and HTML, which don't really teach the fundamentals of programming very well.
Slashdot Mirror
You can finally have your very own clone ARMy.
Is there any precedent for suing someone over lost potential sales?
Yes: every MPAA and RIAA anti-piracy case in existence.
I never said that silica was the only material to make aerogels out of. I said that aerogels are usually made of silica, and silica aerogel is still the most common type used today. And I never said that CNTs can never be in a gel, I said they are never in a gel. And actually, after I went out and actually looked around to be sure of myself, it looks like I might be wrong, and someone might have already made a true CNT aerogel using critical-point drying: http://www.physics.upenn.edu/yodhlab/papers/2007/AdvMat_2007.pdf
Apparently, as far back as 2007, some researchers, using single- and few-wall carbon nanotubes in a suspension, used critical-point drying to create a true CNT aerogel. The aerogel was fragile by itself, but they were able to reinforce it with polyvinyl alcohol so that it could hold up to 8000 times its own weight.
I can't speak to the material in the article, but aerogels are made from all kinds of materials, not just silica. Silica aerogel was possibly the first aerogel. Carbon aerogels are real aerogels, and made by baking organic aerogels. They can be further altered under steam and pressure. That is the normal process for making superconducting capacitors (ultracapacitors).
They still don't make aerogel out of carbon nanotubes. Very lightweight, strong masses of carbon nanotubes (which look and feel similar to aerogel) are never in a "gel" state, and are therefore not really aerogel. Therefore, the article, which states "aerogel contains multi-walled carbon nanotubes," is wrong.
Oh, and BTW, "superconducting capacitor" is not the same thing as "ultracapacitor." An ultracapacitor, as you said, often uses carbon in various forms (graphene, carbon aerogel (not carbon nanotube aerogel!), carbon nanotubes, or even activated carbon) and can hold kilojoules. A superconducting capacitor, by definition, would involve the use of superconductors, and might theoretically hold somewhere on the order of terajoules.
Aerogel is usually formed from silica gel, or sometimes from a sort of carbon fiber paper. The material that the article talks about, which is an airy mass of carbon nanotubes produced by vapor deposition is not an aerogel. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aerogel#Carbon
Actually, Switzerland is a direct democracy. In some cantons, voting is even compulsory. Any citizen can call a referendum on any law. In addition, parties aren't nearly as strong as they are in the US. If there ever was a "real" democracy on this earth, I think that'd be it.
That's just wrong. If I order my phone to self-destruct, it better damn well self-destruct!
...only outlaws will have flash drives. After all, if you're going to leak sensitive information, and you get caught, you're going to get much worse than a court-martial. I think the directive will end up doing more harm than good.
Agreed. There are at least 25 people who've done it, maybe a lot more. Here's a guide to the whole process if you want to do it yourself: http://brian-mcdermott.com/fusion_is_easy.htm
Well, I don't know about the rest of you, but the internet makes me smarter. (So long as I stay away from Facebook and I Can Haz Cheezburger.)
Article 11, paragraph 2 of the Moon Treaty states:
"The moon is not subject to national appropriation by any claim of sovereignty, by means of use or occupation, or by any other means."
Of course, England hasn't signed or ratified the Moon Treaty, so it all kinda depends on the international reaction whether or not his claim is valid.
Links:
Wikipedia -- Moon Treaty
Full text of the Moon Treaty
...it's hacked in a month. Probably wouldn't be too hard, either. Just run the current OS in a controlled environment to figure out what makes it so special, then make a Linux distro to duplicate that. Install the new distro on the hard drive through a regular computer, then transplant into the PS3.
Amen. Everything that can't be put on a list like this, including details of a treaty in the works that could severely hurt our freedom, should be made open.
A lot of todays "young people" somehow find classical music boring. This, I do not understand. Boring is listening to the exact same riff or chord over and over and over throughout an entire song without any variation. Classical music might do the same theme many times throughout a piece, but it's usually varied every time. Bach, for example, would take one theme and vary it a step at a time until it turned into a completely different theme.
Actually, there's a lot of good, free classical music out there. I have several symphonies, sonatas, and concertos from classiccat.com that are pretty good quality.
Anyone want to donate to help start a new microstate? Maybe we can make an open-source project out of it: OpenNation.
No, I don't trust Google, but I trust Yahoo/Microsoft even less.
I agree with most of these Anonymous Cowards here: it all depends on the job. If the job is technology-related, I'm less likely to trust someone with an AOL address than someone with a Gmail address.
Free electricity, but your lights display a paid ad in morse code every hour.
I think we should laugh in Mexico's face and say, "forget about it." Archaeological images are always and have always been easily available to the public.
You could also argue that those pictures are Aztec writing, so the stuff on the cups are an original written work.
Thank you! I wish I got here sooner so that I could have gotten that 5, Insightful.
Wrong. We do know what happens when you smash particles at high energies. Particle accelerators across the globe, Fermilab the most prominent until now, have been doing it for years. The energy the LHC is going to smash at, while much greater than any before, still isn't that much. Divide the energy, 14TeV, by c^2 to get the mass. 14TeV/c^2 is about 15,000amu, the mass of 15,000 hydrogen atoms or 2.5x10^-20 grams. Even if the LHC did manage to create a black hole out of all that mass, it would be too little to draw anything in and would evaporate in less than a second.
And in the event the LHC does cause great damage (more likely to be to the power grid than anything), CERN will be responsible for paying up. The physicists will not go on trial, CERN will, because CERN is responsible for the LHC in the same way Fermilab is responsible for the Tevatron. That's why people start corporations—so they don't become responsible when something goes wrong.
RTFM: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pi#Computation_in_the_computer_age
Yeah, I think that someone needs to set up a pi computation BOINC project and just keep calculating. The real question is "would it be feasible?" I guess they'd have to go about it a different way than {SETI,Folding}@Home. Instead of giving the client a "chunk" of instructions, you could just give it one digit. The algorithm for finding a particular digit (the BBP or Bellard's formula) could be stored on the client's computer indefinitely, and the computer could simply be instructed to extract a single digit or a block of digits and send them back to the host.
PiHex already did this, sorta, but in binary and only was after specific ranges of digits. I think the main deciding factor would be speed. How many digits can the average computer (or slightly above average, since that's the kind of people who would sign up) compute in about a second? A minute? An hour? Is it linear? We ought to run benchmarks before doing anything like this.
When I was 12, I actually started teaching myself programming with TI-BASIC on a school-supplied graphing calculator. HTML and GW-BASIC quickly followed, then it was on to Visual Basic and C++. If I were to do it again today, though, I'd probably start with Python—it's easy to learn and can do great stuff. I would certainly steer clear of things like Alice and HTML, which don't really teach the fundamentals of programming very well.