Of course, you must realize that the distance from El Paso (Texas) to Beaumont (still Texas...we're just in one state!!!) is farther than the distance from Edinburgh to Rome.
Texas is huge, but you're off by quite a bit. It's roughly 850 miles from Beaumont to El Paso (the I-10 milage sign in Orange, closer to the Louisiana border, reads 867, iirc). Edinburgh to Rome is something like 1200 miles (straight line).
I'm no naval engineer, but wouldn't it make sense for the onboard computer to surface the sub if communication to the ship above is lost? Then, once it surfaces, have it emit a distress signal that the master ship can hone in on
READ THE [CENSORED] ARTICLE
Kaiko is designed to float to the surface and emit a tracking signal if its tether is broken. Although searchers briefly detected the beacon, they were unable to locate the probe and suspected it has either drifted off site or sunk to the bottom.
Re:Had to be first, didn't you?
on
Jaguar is Over
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· Score: 1
Dude, the keynote isn't even over yet, and you're posting to the site about the news. Geez, talk about jumping the gun...
The real mac news sites were posting live updates even before it started. Slashdot is nowhere near being first with the news.
I wonder if Berkely Systems would be tacky enough to bring the song back with the toasters.
Flying out of the sun
The smell of toast is in the air
When there's a job to be done
The flying toasters will be there.
And it's flap! Flap! Flap!
Now help is on the way.
This vict'ry song they sing:
We pop up to save the day
On mighty toaster wings!
You got to use the *Serial* port? Man, you kids had all the goodies. We had to manually switch the bits using our fingers on a LOOM... and computers used to run on 10K volts back then too.
I think my head will explode if I see one more illiterate nitwit typing "for all intensive purposes". Fifty times on the blackboard kid: for all intents and purposes. And 500 more times "I will not repeat a cliche if I don't understand it".
For some reason when I saw the finished unit, I thought of the TV show "Convoy"... Maybe you could have it play the M.C. McCall song during startup.:-)
I think you've got some wires crossed there.
C.W. McCall's song inspired a movie starring Kris Kristofferson as Rubber Duck.
The only TV series (that IMDb has listed) by the name Convoy is about atlantic shipping convoys during WWII.
And while the song amuses me, if your startup lasts long enough to do it justice, you've got a problem.
Anyway, I don't think that I implied that atmospheres cannot refract light.
When you said:
Refraction of light only occurs when it passes from one material to another and the index of refraction of the two materials is different.
I read that as meaning "the atmosphere is all one material, so they have the same index of refraction, so there's no refraction." Obviously I misunderstood.
Anyway, it's pretty much settled that the meaningful distortion in the images came from the wacky lens the Russians were using.
The temperature of Venus is at equilibrium, so there's not going to be any big temperature differences in the atmosphere.
In proper Slashdot fashion, I spouted off before actually taking a look at the photos in question. The distortion there is obviously due to the optics of the camera, and one of the pages explicitly says "The distortion is caused by the Venera imaging system."
All of you are trying to tell me how mirages are created. That's 4th grade stuff, and it should be obvious that I understand it.
This is Slashdot. Assuming somebody has a basic grasp of elementary school science concepts is generally a bad idea. And you did imply that atmospheres in general were incapable of refracting light.
Refraction of light only occurs when it passes from one material to another and the index of refraction of the two materials is different. So, the atmosphere of venus would not distort anything.
You assume the atmosphere is homogenous. Thermal differences between blocks of the atmosphere on Earth can produce refraction. It's how you get mirages.
It's also how you can sometimes "see" heat rising off objects. Warmed air rising off a hot object can have a perceptibly different index of refraction from the ambient air surrounding it. This produces optical distortion of objects viewed through the warmed air.
IBM PC is not standard because of IBM's power but rather because they opened up the architecture for other companies to clone and produce software for.
So, Compaq (and a bunch of others) went through the trouble of reverse-engineering the PC BIOS for no reason? Man, that's news to...well...everybody.
Schlitterbahn in New Braunfels, Texas has had uphill water rides for almost ten years. Sure, there's no nifty Escher tie-in, but it's a lot more fun than a British flower show.
But the original post obviously wasn't referring to tiny incremental changes (like the examples you posted), otherwise, he wouldn't have said to think about where the platform would be by 2005.
Which is why I included the last sentence about expecting major changes being unreasonable.
Lastly, with the release of the 970 being sometime in the second half of this year , don't you think saying we'll probably have a "990" by 2005 is a little premature?
Actually, this isn't that far-fetched. Look at all the chips that have been called "G4" by Apple.
7400
7410
7450
7451
7455
What is far-fetched is expecting a major redesign rather than minor incremental improvements.
Didn't they teach you not to call people names when you were a child? That's the second ad hominem you've thrown at me.
You're right that's dumb, but I never suggested you do that.
If you don't want people to misinterpret what you say, you should be more specific.
You can generate energy by generating a hot reservoir above the external molten iron temperature and then running a heat engine between it and the outside, and then take the energy from that and run the refrigerator.
In which case you have to maintain a temperature that is significantly higher than molten iron in close proximity to the probe. This will require a bigger refrigeration unit and more effective insulation to deal with the increased heat transfer into the probe. It will also require a large source of power. This is not impossible.
It is however, a bad idea.
In order to get enough power from the transfer of heat from your hotter-than-molten-iron reservoir to the molten iron to power the refrigerator, you're going to need either a huge amount of whatever it is (and an enormous generation system), or it's going to have to be much hotter than molten iron (requiring even more insulation and a bigger refrigerator). And it's going to have to maintain that temperature difference even though the iron is attempting to cancel it out through conduction, requiring an even larger power source. And again, your system would have to be able to operate above the temperature of molten iron.
Your system may not be forbidden, but it certainly isn't very practical.
(And I completely forgot to mention that you're going to have a hard time coming up with a refrigerant that is still compressible at 20 GPa.)
So, if we assume the refrigerator starts out at the same temperature as the rest of the probe, its temperature will rise above that of the probe, causing heat to flow from the refrigerator to the probe.
No. The waste heat flows out to the hot iron outside where it is conducted away.
That paragraph assumed the refrigerator (read: the compressor, because obviously one heat exchanger has to be outside, and the other inside) is inside the insulator. You've got the probe at X degrees, and because it's in operation, the refrigerator is at X+N, where N depends on the efficiency of the refrigerator. Because it is inside the insulator, and presumably operating at a lower temperature than molten iron, the heat flows into the probe, not the iron. Now you have the heat from the iron and the refrigerator going into the probe, and the heat transferred by the refrigerator going out.
No. The infinite series converges to a finite value, because the fraction of heat pumped is larger than the waste heat generated.
You know, you're right about that, but you should have quit while you were ahead. You make a real doozy of a mistake in the next two sentences.
It needs a power source of some kind of course to drive the refrigerator. Because you have a heat sink in the external iron, you can generate plenty of power.
You only have two thermal reserviors, the iron, and the probe. By allowing the transfer of X watts of heat from the iron to the probe, you can generate N <= X watts of usable energy. With that N watts of usable energy, you can transfer Y <= N watts of heat out of the probe. Y <= X. At 100% efficiency, the most heat you can transfer out is the heat you let in to generate the power in the first place. You cannot use heat flowing naturally from A->B to actively transfer a greater amount of heat from B->A. If that were possible, AC units would be self-powering.
Let me guess, you're not real strong on thermodynamics?
I may not be strong in it, but at least I didn't just propose a perpetual motion device.
If molten iron is not a fluid, why do we call it molten?
I didn't mean to imply that it wasn't fluid, only that it wouldn't flow well enough to convect heat away from a probe.
I imagine at the kind of temperatures at the centre of the Earth, molten iron would have very little viscosity, and would convect quite nicely.
You forgot about the incredible pressure, which generally tends to cause materials to solidify.
I don't know terribly much about the properties of molten iron, so I assumed that at mantle temperatures and pressures (remember, this thing has to survive the mantle to get anywhere near the core), it wouldn't flow terribly well. That's what I get for assuming something that I should have checked. So, time for digging.
A five-year-old Nature article pulled from Google's cache says that it is believed that the outer core is mostly liquid iron. It further states that the viscosity estimates vary by 12 orders of magnitude.
However, it also says that a first principles simulation says that iron would have very low viscocity at the core. Since the "Big Blob of Iron" is experiencing the same conditions, it should behave similarly (assuming the core actually is iron).
However, I still don't have any info on the enormous region from the bottom of the lithosphere all the way down to the core.
Not that this matters. You'd have to build an unmeltable refrigeration unit for it to make any difference.
That's not quite true. Consider a refrigerator. It consists of an insulator layer and a heat pump. When heat leaks past the insulator it gets sucked back out and dumped.
So you could do the same thing in the earths core, use brick as the insulating layer, and run a refrigerator to pump the heat out, and increase the temperature of the molten iron just outside the insulator. Molten iron is a good conductor of heat, so convection would carry the heat away from the probe.
Won't work.
Heat only flows from hot to cold. Refrigerators work by making the exterior heat exchanger warmer than room air, by compressing the refrigerant.
Let's assume the refrigerator is inside the insulator so it won't melt. The refrigerator must also necessarily generate thermal energy during their operation. So, if we assume the refrigerator starts out at the same temperature as the rest of the probe, its temperature will rise above that of the probe, causing heat to flow from the refrigerator to the probe. This will cause the refrigerator to have to transfer more heat, which means more heat generation, and since the heat generated will always outpace the heat transfer, the probe melts. And it melts faster than if there had been no refrigerator at all.
If we assume the refrigerator is outside the insulator (as in a normal kitchen refrigerator), then it must be built to operate above the temperature of molten iron. And if you can do that, why not just build the whole probe the same way?
Molten iron is a good conductor of heat, so convection would carry the heat away from the probe.
ITYM conduction. Convection requires a fluid, which molten iron barely qualifies as.
Slashdot Mirror
Texas is huge, but you're off by quite a bit. It's roughly 850 miles from Beaumont to El Paso (the I-10 milage sign in Orange, closer to the Louisiana border, reads 867, iirc). Edinburgh to Rome is something like 1200 miles (straight line).
Then it's just fun.
READ THE [CENSORED] ARTICLE
The real mac news sites were posting live updates even before it started. Slashdot is nowhere near being first with the news.
I wonder if Berkely Systems would be tacky enough to bring the song back with the toasters.
Past experience.
You've got an extra letter in there.
You had fingers!?
This post brought a tear to my eye.
Keep up the good work.
I nominate SCO's logo.
I think you've got some wires crossed there.
C.W. McCall's song inspired a movie starring Kris Kristofferson as Rubber Duck.
The only TV series (that IMDb has listed) by the name Convoy is about atlantic shipping convoys during WWII.
And while the song amuses me, if your startup lasts long enough to do it justice, you've got a problem.
It's also the ISO standard ordering, and is useful in filenames since sorting by name also sorts by date.
When you said:
I read that as meaning "the atmosphere is all one material, so they have the same index of refraction, so there's no refraction." Obviously I misunderstood.
Anyway, it's pretty much settled that the meaningful distortion in the images came from the wacky lens the Russians were using.
In proper Slashdot fashion, I spouted off before actually taking a look at the photos in question. The distortion there is obviously due to the optics of the camera, and one of the pages explicitly says "The distortion is caused by the Venera imaging system."
This is Slashdot. Assuming somebody has a basic grasp of elementary school science concepts is generally a bad idea. And you did imply that atmospheres in general were incapable of refracting light.
You assume the atmosphere is homogenous. Thermal differences between blocks of the atmosphere on Earth can produce refraction. It's how you get mirages.
It's also how you can sometimes "see" heat rising off objects. Warmed air rising off a hot object can have a perceptibly different index of refraction from the ambient air surrounding it. This produces optical distortion of objects viewed through the warmed air.
What really bothered me about Uplink was the IRC client "upgrade".
Having a real IRC client in the game just blurred the boundary with reality just a little too much.
So, Compaq (and a bunch of others) went through the trouble of reverse-engineering the PC BIOS for no reason? Man, that's news to...well...everybody.
All that, and you seem to have missed the original Street Fighter.
Schlitterbahn in New Braunfels, Texas has had uphill water rides for almost ten years. Sure, there's no nifty Escher tie-in, but it's a lot more fun than a British flower show.
Which is why I included the last sentence about expecting major changes being unreasonable.
Actually, this isn't that far-fetched. Look at all the chips that have been called "G4" by Apple.
What is far-fetched is expecting a major redesign rather than minor incremental improvements.
Didn't they teach you not to call people names when you were a child? That's the second ad hominem you've thrown at me.
If you don't want people to misinterpret what you say, you should be more specific.
In which case you have to maintain a temperature that is significantly higher than molten iron in close proximity to the probe. This will require a bigger refrigeration unit and more effective insulation to deal with the increased heat transfer into the probe. It will also require a large source of power. This is not impossible.
It is however, a bad idea.
In order to get enough power from the transfer of heat from your hotter-than-molten-iron reservoir to the molten iron to power the refrigerator, you're going to need either a huge amount of whatever it is (and an enormous generation system), or it's going to have to be much hotter than molten iron (requiring even more insulation and a bigger refrigerator). And it's going to have to maintain that temperature difference even though the iron is attempting to cancel it out through conduction, requiring an even larger power source. And again, your system would have to be able to operate above the temperature of molten iron.
Your system may not be forbidden, but it certainly isn't very practical.
(And I completely forgot to mention that you're going to have a hard time coming up with a refrigerant that is still compressible at 20 GPa.)
That paragraph assumed the refrigerator (read: the compressor, because obviously one heat exchanger has to be outside, and the other inside) is inside the insulator. You've got the probe at X degrees, and because it's in operation, the refrigerator is at X+N, where N depends on the efficiency of the refrigerator. Because it is inside the insulator, and presumably operating at a lower temperature than molten iron, the heat flows into the probe, not the iron. Now you have the heat from the iron and the refrigerator going into the probe, and the heat transferred by the refrigerator going out.
You know, you're right about that, but you should have quit while you were ahead. You make a real doozy of a mistake in the next two sentences.
You only have two thermal reserviors, the iron, and the probe. By allowing the transfer of X watts of heat from the iron to the probe, you can generate N <= X watts of usable energy. With that N watts of usable energy, you can transfer Y <= N watts of heat out of the probe. Y <= X. At 100% efficiency, the most heat you can transfer out is the heat you let in to generate the power in the first place. You cannot use heat flowing naturally from A->B to actively transfer a greater amount of heat from B->A. If that were possible, AC units would be self-powering.
I may not be strong in it, but at least I didn't just propose a perpetual motion device.
I didn't mean to imply that it wasn't fluid, only that it wouldn't flow well enough to convect heat away from a probe.
You forgot about the incredible pressure, which generally tends to cause materials to solidify.
I don't know terribly much about the properties of molten iron, so I assumed that at mantle temperatures and pressures (remember, this thing has to survive the mantle to get anywhere near the core), it wouldn't flow terribly well. That's what I get for assuming something that I should have checked. So, time for digging.
A five-year-old Nature article pulled from Google's cache says that it is believed that the outer core is mostly liquid iron. It further states that the viscosity estimates vary by 12 orders of magnitude.
However, it also says that a first principles simulation says that iron would have very low viscocity at the core. Since the "Big Blob of Iron" is experiencing the same conditions, it should behave similarly (assuming the core actually is iron).
However, I still don't have any info on the enormous region from the bottom of the lithosphere all the way down to the core.
Not that this matters. You'd have to build an unmeltable refrigeration unit for it to make any difference.
Won't work.
Heat only flows from hot to cold. Refrigerators work by making the exterior heat exchanger warmer than room air, by compressing the refrigerant.
Let's assume the refrigerator is inside the insulator so it won't melt. The refrigerator must also necessarily generate thermal energy during their operation. So, if we assume the refrigerator starts out at the same temperature as the rest of the probe, its temperature will rise above that of the probe, causing heat to flow from the refrigerator to the probe. This will cause the refrigerator to have to transfer more heat, which means more heat generation, and since the heat generated will always outpace the heat transfer, the probe melts. And it melts faster than if there had been no refrigerator at all.
If we assume the refrigerator is outside the insulator (as in a normal kitchen refrigerator), then it must be built to operate above the temperature of molten iron. And if you can do that, why not just build the whole probe the same way?
ITYM conduction. Convection requires a fluid, which molten iron barely qualifies as.