Indeed. The illusion of space safety largely comes from the fact that the space shuttle uses only LEO where radiation is only a bit higher than terrestrial (but still higher) and the gullible fantasies of SciFi stories. Get to a higher orbit or deep space and it's radically higher normal radiation levels. The mission profile of Juno is like the Earth's van Allen belts fully charged. Very nasty.
Most commercial semiconductor technology is burned up by the high orbit and deep space radiation levels shortly after being powered up - back in the day we tested off-the-shelf Intel processors and SNL clones of the same and the first small 10KRad dose destroyed the Intel processors dead while the clones (designed from scratch for rad hardness) lasted to MRad doses.
Humans beyond LEO? Don't make me laugh! This is the Achille's Heel of any Mars mission. There is no existing technology that can fix this either. Even the Juno shielding comes at a heavy price: using high Z shielding increases cosmic ray and ion spallation which results in increased total dose that the shielding is nominally trying to reduce - because the process occurs *inside* the shielding material and actually gets worse with Z, it's a trade-off between bad dose levels and really bad dose levels. That's what is alluded to in the article as well. Strictly there is no way to shield down to human-tolerable levels.
As someone who's personally worked in military radiation hardening of electronics let me assure you this is 30-year-old military technology that is being re-used by NASA, not the other way around. You paranoia is admirably but misplaced in this case.
All the women I know say size really does matter. Fortunately I have no problems in that department.
There are limits to speed by the inherent design of HDs though be aware that the raw data rate of most heads today is already in the 2 Gb/sec range. Which if you never seek the head, you'll be a-ok.:-)
For home use, probably a USB oscilloscope is best. They generally perform as well now as legacy/obsolete Tek or HP scopes and are even cheaper new.
In the professional world, Tek has largely been displaced by Agilent's Infinium series (and this with most of the Infinium's UI tricks simply duplicated in Tek and other scopes).
In terms of "how much oscilloscope" is needed, probably the best document to systematically determine this is from Agilent as their app notes (warning all PDF):
I appreciate the film makers revolt on this but I seem to remember that something similar happened when "talkies" came out and when "technicolor" came out. Purist felt the new technology did more harm than good to film making. And that is probably true in many cases though there is schlock enough with 2D color films anyway.
This is simply highlighting the inadequacies of the grid itself and the limitations in the methods of alternative energy source inter-ties. The grid is "tuned" to a particular generator characteristic which alternative energy doesn't possess. Very simply, the grid expects a lower frequency generator variance than alternative energy sources exhibit. This is literally like an op amp with a high frequency instability that hasn't been compensated but has always had only low frequency, band-limited inputs that never "tickle" the point of instability. It can be fixed.
The ways that ads (visual or text) are inserted into the web page tends to be common for any ad type. In information theory circles this is called "high redundancy coding". It's generally easier to create automated tools that find patterns that have high redundancy. This redundancy includes the URL from which the ad is pulled to the specific HTML mark-up used to insert it into the page.
As someone actually deep in the industry (rather than speculators and wannabes), specifically to density and Moore's Law, I'd say not so much. Reason: electromigration. It's electromigration that defines design rule line widths for metal in microelectronics.
The researcher (like most/many academics) is clueless about real life applications and doesn't really understand the driving factors of the technology he claims this could replace. I.e. he's pulling masturbatory fantasies out of his ass when he talks about that 30% improvement. That's the problem with specialization and with ivory tower isolation.
Electromigration is the failure mechanism of very small metal lines and wires in microelectronics. Basically momentum of electrons in a current is transferred to metal atoms and they are forced to move. This results in extrusions and voids in the metal line forming over time. The effect occurs to some degree over time at all temperatures and all currents - only the rate of action is changed. Because voids increase resistance and thus current density, the system has a positive feedback loop.
Making lines smaller raises the current density which raises both the electron flux and the temperature of the metal line which both increase electromigration. It doesn't really matter what technique (to 1st order) you use to make the line; making the lines smaller is the critical 1st order factor affecting failure rates.
If (and only if) this technique can impact the grain boundary orientation could the reliability be improved but even then current thin film deposition techniques mostly have this dialed in already.
The place I see this having the most value is in being able to create entirely new wiring schemes such as 3D integration or in planarizing things like wire bonding to get the photolithography advantage. The latter less so - planar alternatives already exist. That's about it.
Yes, diversity is important, but... If the species is so close to the edge, would anything else have done the job eventually as well? You can argue that man put them on the edge but I'm not sure how often that either actually true or simply a matter of coincidence.
In the very long view, I think Carlin pretty much hit the nail on the head.
Have to disagree on maturity critique. Maybe because I used to work in space system architecture and design. Mostly military: I'll leave it to the imagination which programs - actually it was most of them - so never mind.
The biggest assumption made in costing is that semiconductor photovoltaics would be used. Well, those aren't the only solution or even the best. Semiconductor photovoltaics suffer from radiation hardness issues. They do have overhead costs in manufacturing - though that's not really a problem right this moment - plenty of capacity exists already.
An obvious alternative is thermionic power generation which would be a far better choice: it's simpler to manufacture and operate, has better reliability (especially for radiation hardness) and has a broader spectrum (of energy convertibility) than simple light-based photovoltaics because they are heat-driven.
Beaming the power back with better matured microwave-based transmission would be better than using lasers. You get far better beam-forming control with microwaves than with light and the attenuation is lower. You'd use a phased array antenna to transmit the microwaves with retro-reflecting alignment on the ground for beam correction feedback to the satellites. Pin-point beam accuracy with real-time correction is pretty trivial.
And frankly, with Peak Oil now combined with Peak Credit, satellite power is the only technology with the energy density to really replace oil/gas-from-the-ground and assure continuation of civilization and its current pace of technology advancement. I'm an engineer; I think it's important. As much as I've love to see alternative energy take off, they can never really substitute well - world economies still have to decline far more to reach an energy cost-benefit trade-off level that can work well with alternative sources.
So pick your poison: do a satellite system which is practical with current off-the-shelf satellite, electronics and launch technologies, or simply slip back into a Dark Age worse than the post-Roman Empire era.
It's clear we should have been working harder on this during the 1970s when these ideas were first brought up seriously after the Arab Oil Embargo, but the United States, perhaps predictably, completely blew it. Today it really is debatable if the United States has the capital and manufacturing to do the job itself or even as a partner to a larger prime. China could do it - no problem. If you want VC money that's the only place you'll be finding it right now - I know from personal experience. I'd consider joining up with a program for something like this. It's only humanity itself that is at risk.
Male primates have a Y chromosome which is far smaller than the X chromosome so the impact of a constant mutation rate on the Y in contrast to the X should be that Y genes have higher probability of mutation than X over a given period of time. Evolution is partially mutation rate dependent ergo evolution of the Y proceeds faster.
Seems pretty obvious yet why did people imagine the Y was stagnate? Magic DNA in Y that is immune to the laws of chemistry and physics with regard to mutation rates?!
"Contrary to a widely held scientific theory that the mammalian Y chromosome is slowly decaying or stagnating, new evidence suggests that in fact the Y is actually evolving quite rapidly through continuous, wholesale renovation."
There seems to be a lot of stuff in biology that is too superficially examined to pass the laugh test. One-Gene-One-Phenotype is another one of those that was so obviously going to be wrong, simply based on graph theory. Then again, why do many people chose biology as a science major? Avoiding math! That's a good part of the problem right there.
This could be incredible useful for automobiles. In order to increase efficiency you need to drop weight (as in, stop having SUV-like weight). The problem is that that weight creates a certain amount of crash safety (for the SUV driver to some extent - not so much thought, and not at all for anyone driving a smaller car). Given that, being able to use a light-weight energy absorption system like this could solve that problem and allow cars to have weights below 1000 lbs yet still have excellent crash safety.
Looks like a rocket plume to be sure. Seem pretty obvious but I was once a real rocket scientist so obvious is relative.
Remember this is in Norway. As in, a country close to the north magnetic pole of the Earth. What geometric pattern do ions follow in a magnetic field gradient like at the poles? A spiral or helix. Voila! But why two? Two different chemical species in the exhaust with two distinct masses and two distinct ionization recombination emission colors.
> Not to burst your bubble, but you know that LEDs are made from silicon and other semiconductors
> jut like MOSFETS and CPU's, right? They run at _very_ high temperatures - the max junction temperature
> of many MOSFETS can run as high as 175-200C!
LOL. Classic example of "fractal wrongness".
I work in semiconductor device physics and device reliability for a living. I've been involved in the design analog circuits and ICs professionally for 30+ years.
Silicon devices can not operate at high temperatures and still work for long. 200C is the standard temperature we use to accelerate silicon devices to rapid failure for the purposes of determining room temperature failure times. Typical failure in such testing occurs within seconds to hours at 200C depending on the electrical bias used.
No LED is made from silicon. All LEDs are and always have been III-V compound semiconductor devices. wLEDs are all of the minimal geometry heterojunction variety - they are really LEDs that produce blue, indigo, violet or UV light which stimulates a phosphor either on the LED device itself or in the plastic encapsulate to produce white light through simple fluorescence (exactly the same as a CFL or ballast-fired fluorescent bubble but lower power).
III-V semiconductor devices are far more sensitive to heat than silicon devices. This is due to the higher mobilities combined with the tendency toward positive temperature coefficients in many. These make them more sensitive because current increases with temperature and can even have a positive feedback loop that makes them inherently unstable thermally (worst case they burn out and burn out far too quickly). It's not unusual for a laser diode (a III-V device) to have 3 terminals: one "ground", one for power bias, and one for temperature monitoring output to attempt to control the thermal runaway that tends to occur for the above reasons.
Temperature, voltage and current accelerate failure mechanisms in all semiconductors. In the case of III-V, the temperature sensitivity issue radically enhances the life time degradation (III-V fails quicker at the same temperature and geometry than silicon in most cases). This is due to the above thermal reasons but also because heterojunctions are far smaller and more sensitive to damage than the homojunctions used in silicon. The smaller you make anything, the shorter the life time it will have - defects have more impact when you reduce the number of atoms in the device - a very concerning feature of nanoelectronics.
I would never recommend any commercially sold product use just resistor biasing, for example, in a wLED product for the above failure risk. There's a story floating around about SCEdison fielding wLED street lights and having 60% failure in 6 months. I wouldn't be surprised if it were true - I'd bet resistor bias was used in said wLED modules. You are opening your company up for massive lawsuits if not failure. This is why companies like National Semi, Linear Technologies, Texas Instruments and Analog Devices all have "Switching Power Supply LED Bias ICs" - it's the only way to reliably operate any LED circuit under high power for long life. The only way.
The diagram of junction voltage vs. junction temperatures only show what the junction voltage is to achieve a given current or light output with temperature. It says absolutely nothing about whether you should ever operate at those junction temperatures. The short answer is you never should do so. Considering ambient temperature effects on heat dissipation combined with life time degradation due to temperature acceleration, prudent engineering design would keep the junction temperature well below 40C-50C for maximum life time. Since very little empirical data exists for wLED device reliability, a conservative design would be best. Anything else and you are lying (deluding yourself) about your products longevity with your customers. That tends
Actually you bring up a good point. In general, the artists are no longer the copyright holders any more and RIAA typically owns the non-performance rights. This seems like an interference or restraint of trade in a lot of ways that RIAA might decide to pursue based on their natural predilections.
This is really about the batshit crazy/unreal structure of music copyright which separates artificially the source code, the executable and the execution as three separate chargeable entities. ASCAP "owns" the execution portion. RIAA generally "owns" the source and executable portions. This could blow the current static legal arrangements out of the water because you can't clearly separate all three as well on the intertubes which is why you have the issues with file sharing. It's a stupid system.
ASCAP is the entity that threatens Brownies, Blue Birds and Girl Scouts for singing songs to little grandmothers in nursing homes.
ASCAP also often demands performance fees from clubs or venues that play music that ASCAP doesn't even have a right to claim such as indie artists who write and perform their own original works and who still hold all copyrights themselves. I'm really hoping someday they cross the wrong indie artist who throws DMCA back at ASCAP for false claimed rights. Karma's a bitch and they have bad karma on back-order.
ASCAP is as evil, unprincipled and immoral as the RIAA any day of the week. It wouldn't bother me to see them self-destruct themselves in a war with RIAA or a suicide attack on Apple. You don't go up against the dominant distributor of your own product without expecting to come away without a severe limp afterward. Didn't they learn that with the early RIAA experience in the late 1940s? Or do they imagine Apple is somehow weak right now? Mental midgets down at ASCAP.
Of course, for an agency, DHS, created by centralization, it will probably never occur to them that the best answer is decentralization of the power grid... instead draconian but worse single-point-failure solutions will almost certainly be proposed by DHS.
Will they be utterly predictable or will they actually care about a real solution? I have my bets down on this already based on past DHS performance and what is typical for bureaucracies.
Yeah. Slave owners weren't interested in abusing slaves, they just wanted the labor, and if they could take as much as possible or even all of it, so much the better.
One answer is it get off the grid. You enable them by wanting what they offer, the value of which all an illusion in any case.
The point isn't that you'll fly as a passenger in an unmanned plane.
Rather it's that thousands of unmanned drones will be flying around manned planes with passengers and will do so unintelligently, with enough agility and speed, and with such a minimal observable profile such that no manned passenger plane human pilot could ever hope to evade a collision even if they actually detected the collision risk
The probability of collision will only be made more inevitable by the shear numbers resulting from radically lower cost of unmanned drones.
Slashdot Mirror
http://science.slashdot.org/story/09/10/30/1216230/How-Terahertz-Waves-Tear-Apart-DNA?from=rss
Indeed. The illusion of space safety largely comes from the fact that the space shuttle uses only LEO where radiation is only a bit higher than terrestrial (but still higher) and the gullible fantasies of SciFi stories. Get to a higher orbit or deep space and it's radically higher normal radiation levels. The mission profile of Juno is like the Earth's van Allen belts fully charged. Very nasty.
Most commercial semiconductor technology is burned up by the high orbit and deep space radiation levels shortly after being powered up - back in the day we tested off-the-shelf Intel processors and SNL clones of the same and the first small 10KRad dose destroyed the Intel processors dead while the clones (designed from scratch for rad hardness) lasted to MRad doses.
Humans beyond LEO? Don't make me laugh! This is the Achille's Heel of any Mars mission. There is no existing technology that can fix this either. Even the Juno shielding comes at a heavy price: using high Z shielding increases cosmic ray and ion spallation which results in increased total dose that the shielding is nominally trying to reduce - because the process occurs *inside* the shielding material and actually gets worse with Z, it's a trade-off between bad dose levels and really bad dose levels. That's what is alluded to in the article as well. Strictly there is no way to shield down to human-tolerable levels.
As someone who's personally worked in military radiation hardening of electronics let me assure you this is 30-year-old military technology that is being re-used by NASA, not the other way around. You paranoia is admirably but misplaced in this case.
All the women I know say size really does matter. Fortunately I have no problems in that department.
There are limits to speed by the inherent design of HDs though be aware that the raw data rate of most heads today is already in the 2 Gb/sec range. Which if you never seek the head, you'll be a-ok. :-)
For home use, probably a USB oscilloscope is best. They generally perform as well now as legacy/obsolete Tek or HP scopes and are even cheaper new.
In the professional world, Tek has largely been displaced by Agilent's Infinium series (and this with most of the Infinium's UI tricks simply duplicated in Tek and other scopes).
In terms of "how much oscilloscope" is needed, probably the best document to systematically determine this is from Agilent as their app notes (warning all PDF):
AN 1606 oscilloscope fundamentals - http://cp.literature.agilent.com/litweb/pdf/5989-8064EN.pdf
8 Ways 1 - http://cp.literature.agilent.com/litweb/pdf/5989-6387EN.pdf
8 More Ways 2 - http://cp.literature.agilent.com/litweb/pdf/5968-8756E.pdf
5th Harmonic... - http://cp.literature.agilent.com/litweb/pdf/5990-3600EN.pdf
I appreciate the film makers revolt on this but I seem to remember that something similar happened when "talkies" came out and when "technicolor" came out. Purist felt the new technology did more harm than good to film making. And that is probably true in many cases though there is schlock enough with 2D color films anyway.
Guess it's time to print up some tarpaulins with the image of a swimming pool and stake them up in the backyard just to fuck these bozos.
Yeah, a $1B write-off for product failures seems like my idea of success also...
If you look at a lot of HTSC data, most of the "transitions" seem a little dicey but that's not so surprising based on recent models of the phenomena.
This is simply highlighting the inadequacies of the grid itself and the limitations in the methods of alternative energy source inter-ties. The grid is "tuned" to a particular generator characteristic which alternative energy doesn't possess. Very simply, the grid expects a lower frequency generator variance than alternative energy sources exhibit. This is literally like an op amp with a high frequency instability that hasn't been compensated but has always had only low frequency, band-limited inputs that never "tickle" the point of instability. It can be fixed.
The ways that ads (visual or text) are inserted into the web page tends to be common for any ad type. In information theory circles this is called "high redundancy coding". It's generally easier to create automated tools that find patterns that have high redundancy. This redundancy includes the URL from which the ad is pulled to the specific HTML mark-up used to insert it into the page.
In other words, the NYT system selects for crap writing that has no value or utility.
As someone actually deep in the industry (rather than speculators and wannabes), specifically to density and Moore's Law, I'd say not so much. Reason: electromigration. It's electromigration that defines design rule line widths for metal in microelectronics.
The researcher (like most/many academics) is clueless about real life applications and doesn't really understand the driving factors of the technology he claims this could replace. I.e. he's pulling masturbatory fantasies out of his ass when he talks about that 30% improvement. That's the problem with specialization and with ivory tower isolation.
Electromigration is the failure mechanism of very small metal lines and wires in microelectronics. Basically momentum of electrons in a current is transferred to metal atoms and they are forced to move. This results in extrusions and voids in the metal line forming over time. The effect occurs to some degree over time at all temperatures and all currents - only the rate of action is changed. Because voids increase resistance and thus current density, the system has a positive feedback loop.
Making lines smaller raises the current density which raises both the electron flux and the temperature of the metal line which both increase electromigration. It doesn't really matter what technique (to 1st order) you use to make the line; making the lines smaller is the critical 1st order factor affecting failure rates.
If (and only if) this technique can impact the grain boundary orientation could the reliability be improved but even then current thin film deposition techniques mostly have this dialed in already.
The place I see this having the most value is in being able to create entirely new wiring schemes such as 3D integration or in planarizing things like wire bonding to get the photolithography advantage. The latter less so - planar alternatives already exist. That's about it.
Yes, diversity is important, but... If the species is so close to the edge, would anything else have done the job eventually as well? You can argue that man put them on the edge but I'm not sure how often that either actually true or simply a matter of coincidence. In the very long view, I think Carlin pretty much hit the nail on the head.
I was thinking instead: "We'll nuke it from orbit. It's the only way to be sure."
The biggest assumption made in costing is that semiconductor photovoltaics would be used. Well, those aren't the only solution or even the best. Semiconductor photovoltaics suffer from radiation hardness issues. They do have overhead costs in manufacturing - though that's not really a problem right this moment - plenty of capacity exists already.
An obvious alternative is thermionic power generation which would be a far better choice: it's simpler to manufacture and operate, has better reliability (especially for radiation hardness) and has a broader spectrum (of energy convertibility) than simple light-based photovoltaics because they are heat-driven.
Beaming the power back with better matured microwave-based transmission would be better than using lasers. You get far better beam-forming control with microwaves than with light and the attenuation is lower. You'd use a phased array antenna to transmit the microwaves with retro-reflecting alignment on the ground for beam correction feedback to the satellites. Pin-point beam accuracy with real-time correction is pretty trivial.
And frankly, with Peak Oil now combined with Peak Credit, satellite power is the only technology with the energy density to really replace oil/gas-from-the-ground and assure continuation of civilization and its current pace of technology advancement. I'm an engineer; I think it's important. As much as I've love to see alternative energy take off, they can never really substitute well - world economies still have to decline far more to reach an energy cost-benefit trade-off level that can work well with alternative sources.
So pick your poison: do a satellite system which is practical with current off-the-shelf satellite, electronics and launch technologies, or simply slip back into a Dark Age worse than the post-Roman Empire era.
It's clear we should have been working harder on this during the 1970s when these ideas were first brought up seriously after the Arab Oil Embargo, but the United States, perhaps predictably, completely blew it. Today it really is debatable if the United States has the capital and manufacturing to do the job itself or even as a partner to a larger prime. China could do it - no problem. If you want VC money that's the only place you'll be finding it right now - I know from personal experience. I'd consider joining up with a program for something like this. It's only humanity itself that is at risk.
Male primates have a Y chromosome which is far smaller than the X chromosome so the impact of a constant mutation rate on the Y in contrast to the X should be that Y genes have higher probability of mutation than X over a given period of time. Evolution is partially mutation rate dependent ergo evolution of the Y proceeds faster.
Seems pretty obvious yet why did people imagine the Y was stagnate? Magic DNA in Y that is immune to the laws of chemistry and physics with regard to mutation rates?!
"Contrary to a widely held scientific theory that the mammalian Y chromosome is slowly decaying or stagnating, new evidence suggests that in fact the Y is actually evolving quite rapidly through continuous, wholesale renovation."
There seems to be a lot of stuff in biology that is too superficially examined to pass the laugh test. One-Gene-One-Phenotype is another one of those that was so obviously going to be wrong, simply based on graph theory. Then again, why do many people chose biology as a science major? Avoiding math! That's a good part of the problem right there.
This could be incredible useful for automobiles. In order to increase efficiency you need to drop weight (as in, stop having SUV-like weight). The problem is that that weight creates a certain amount of crash safety (for the SUV driver to some extent - not so much thought, and not at all for anyone driving a smaller car). Given that, being able to use a light-weight energy absorption system like this could solve that problem and allow cars to have weights below 1000 lbs yet still have excellent crash safety.
Remember this is in Norway. As in, a country close to the north magnetic pole of the Earth. What geometric pattern do ions follow in a magnetic field gradient like at the poles? A spiral or helix. Voila! But why two? Two different chemical species in the exhaust with two distinct masses and two distinct ionization recombination emission colors.
Wrong. Biodiesel burns cleanly and is carbon-neutral by definition.
> jut like MOSFETS and CPU's, right? They run at _very_ high temperatures - the max junction temperature
> of many MOSFETS can run as high as 175-200C!
LOL. Classic example of "fractal wrongness".
I work in semiconductor device physics and device reliability for a living. I've been involved in the design analog circuits and ICs professionally for 30+ years.
Actually you bring up a good point. In general, the artists are no longer the copyright holders any more and RIAA typically owns the non-performance rights. This seems like an interference or restraint of trade in a lot of ways that RIAA might decide to pursue based on their natural predilections.
This is really about the batshit crazy/unreal structure of music copyright which separates artificially the source code, the executable and the execution as three separate chargeable entities. ASCAP "owns" the execution portion. RIAA generally "owns" the source and executable portions. This could blow the current static legal arrangements out of the water because you can't clearly separate all three as well on the intertubes which is why you have the issues with file sharing. It's a stupid system.
ASCAP is the entity that threatens Brownies, Blue Birds and Girl Scouts for singing songs to little grandmothers in nursing homes.
ASCAP also often demands performance fees from clubs or venues that play music that ASCAP doesn't even have a right to claim such as indie artists who write and perform their own original works and who still hold all copyrights themselves. I'm really hoping someday they cross the wrong indie artist who throws DMCA back at ASCAP for false claimed rights. Karma's a bitch and they have bad karma on back-order.
ASCAP is as evil, unprincipled and immoral as the RIAA any day of the week. It wouldn't bother me to see them self-destruct themselves in a war with RIAA or a suicide attack on Apple. You don't go up against the dominant distributor of your own product without expecting to come away without a severe limp afterward. Didn't they learn that with the early RIAA experience in the late 1940s? Or do they imagine Apple is somehow weak right now? Mental midgets down at ASCAP.
Will they be utterly predictable or will they actually care about a real solution? I have my bets down on this already based on past DHS performance and what is typical for bureaucracies.
One answer is it get off the grid. You enable them by wanting what they offer, the value of which all an illusion in any case.
Rather it's that thousands of unmanned drones will be flying around manned planes with passengers and will do so unintelligently, with enough agility and speed, and with such a minimal observable profile such that no manned passenger plane human pilot could ever hope to evade a collision even if they actually detected the collision risk
The probability of collision will only be made more inevitable by the shear numbers resulting from radically lower cost of unmanned drones.
See comp.risks