I wonder how much if at all a Hydrogen based enerygy system would alter the weather, think of all the cars, sure they are emitting 0 pollutants
Very good question. Even the smallest effect from a Hydrogen car would be multiplied by the millions of vehicles out there. But really, fog from H2 cars is better than smog from gas cars any day.
Also do these vehicles store the water, and plug into the power socket to charge? Or do you need to fill them up with water? Or just with H2
It'd be really silly to have the car store water and then charge from a socket. The whole point is to use H2 as a battery to power the car. How you 'charge' that battery is up for grabs. I imagine that the most efficient thing to do would be do make the hydrogen at industrial or even home-based systems and then fill-er-up with fresh tanks of H2. That way, you can build more efficient water-breaking systems and not worry about making them portable. See the arguments about electric cars charged from the grid vs ones that generate their own oomph from gas or whatever.
However, if solar panels become reasonable useful, it might indeed be feasible to put everything in the car. Start off with a tank full of hydrogen and an empty one of water. As it uses the H2 to drive, the car uses solar power to break up the waste water and fills up the H2 tank. It's not quite a perfect system, since you may do a lot of night driving or park in a garage and thus end up with all water and no hydrogen, in which case you'd have to tank up with H2. The system would also leak a small amount of water, which I supose could be replaced from capturing rainfall. Depeding on the efficiency of the electrolysis and solar cells, it becomes something between a gas mileage enhancer and a true self-contained car. But still, being able to drive for a few thousand miles before having to stop for fuel would kick ass to an amazing degree.
There is a *worldwide* market for satellite launches
Yeah, I thought of that. I'm wondering, how many of them are government run or massively subsidized? Are any of them at all mostly private?
the Shuttle post-Challenger no longer has a monopoly on US launches
I thought that in the US at least NASA still does.
The ISS is the type of huge, bleeding edge, long-term payoff type of R&D effort that the private sector won't touch with a bargepole
I somewhat agree. Space research is currently insanely R & D intensive and unattractive to industry, which was why a government agency was put in charge of it in the first place. Problem is, in 40 years they have done fsck all with it. The ISS doesn't help any since the bottleneck is in launch costs more than anything else and as far as NASA is concerned, they haven't changed in years. If anything, they've gone up by using the Shuttle. If we want to study physiological effects in zero g, there's 10,000 universities that would happily study it. If we want to learn about manufacturing techniques, there's a million companies that would jump for it. Same goes for military applications, planetary probes, tourism, any industry you can think of. We don't need or indeed even want NASA doing that for us. But we're stuck with them because it costs too damned much to get up there and almost all the other players are newcomers themselves. Most all the research that's been done is interesting but of no use since it'd not going to be applied anytime soon.
Maybe NASA could do a good job on launch costs if that's all they worked on, maybe private industry would do it better. It's practically a secondary point; I just think that they've been working on the wrong things for decades. All the extraneous research that's been done so far could be done later but at a fraction of the cost.
Here's a good analogy. Let's say that way back at the dawn of the vaccum tube, building useful electronics of any kind was so insanely expensive and useless that only governments could and would do it. To deal with this, a government agency is put in place to expedite the development of useful electronics. Now, the intelligent thing to do would be to concentrate on making components cheaper to build and letting everyone else put them together and write the software, right? We might get things like transistors which for purposes of computing are far superior to vacuum tubes any day. Why, it might get to the point where every person could have their own PC. What we got was an agency that spent 40 years designing bigger vacuum tubes culminating in the construction of one giant computer that does jack squat. And if anyone tries to use that computer for playing some ADVENT or Hunt the Wumpus on the side, they have to fork over $20 million and fight tooth and nail with two governments to do it. They have done a terrible job with their charter and I for one doubt their ability to ever improve.
"We haven't done anything of significance in space since the moon landings, and we won't in the near future, either."
This doesn't make much sense, frankly. Apollo brought us back some moon rocks, and we learned about lunar geology and some about the space environment and how to survive in it. Within the past 2 years we have discovered evidence of water oceans on Europa and, possibly, Ganymede and Callisto. Since 1990 we have discovered evidence of the movement of water on the Martian surface, we have discovered planets around other stars, imaged black holes, etc. Hubble, Chandra, and a whole host of smaller projects have made significant advances in our understanding of the universe. I haven't even gotten into NASA's Earth Science and Solar Science Programs. In the near future, Cassini/Huygens will get to Saturn and we will learn what is going on on Titan, including gathering evidence for or against the possibility of life in the atmospheric soup.
It's interesting data, and that's about it. What good is knowing about water on Luna when NASA hasn't had a manned mission there in 30 years and has no plans to do so again? Don't get me wrong, learning about space is one of the most important things we can do with our civilization, but for it to do any good whatsoever it has to be followed up with space colonization. We can learn and learn and learn but if we're not where that knowledge can be applied, what good is it? It's like my getting a Computer Science degree and then never looking at a piece of electronics again. The money spent on my education would be totally wasted.
If we kill NASA in the near future, commercial interests will never take over. Period. The cost of space activity is too high for anything besides communications sats
Yes, it is expensive. But if we kill off NASA, there will still be a market for satellite launches. Now here's the important part: private industries would be less likely to stick with a fuckup like the Shuttle for 30 or 40 years (which NASA plans on doing) and will constantly be trying to lower costs so as to earn greater profits. They would do more for lowering orbital launch costs than NASA ever did.
But the initial R & D costs are amazing and bennefits may not be immediately realized, so yes, companies might be hesitant before jumping in. Fine. Take NASA off every single project of theirs with the sole exception of developing cheap launch methods. That's the bottleneck on our space industry and it's what NASA should have been working on all these years. We can handle the rest, just get us up there.
Did you know that 98% of all species that have ever walked the earth are extinct and not all of them killed themselves? Explain to me why you're so absolutely sure mankind will never be added to that list. Self-destruction is one possibility, but so are asteroidal impacts, ice ages, runaway greenhouse effects, solar flares, plagues, the list goes on and on. On a long enough time scale, it's not safe here, not by any stretch of the imagination. Yes, weapons are a bit more potent in space, but living space is correspondingly easier to come by. No one single goof would be able to wipe us all out.
Its a virus - it hides behind a legitimate program, performs some sort of check, then delivers a payload. If thats not a virus, then i don't know what is. Just because Apple may 'claim' its a mistake, is no excuse. People have gone to prison for less so i say, give them a big fat law suit.
Are you listening to yourself?
He's right to some extent. A bug that causes a program to crash is perfectly ordinary, if annoying. One that 'oops, we just wiped out your entire hard drive, so sorry' is totally unacceptable. Hell, most viruses aren't even designed to be that bad. Software can always be expected to be buggy, but this crossed the line between 'not quite enough debugging' and criminal negligence on Apple's part. Prison is a bit much, but financial liability is quite reasonable.
Who said that? I've beaten it on Transcend level. For the most part it's not too hard, the only cheat they get that's insanely difficult to counter is the free bribing of your cities and units. You have to either defend with tons and tons of spies or stack at least 2 units on every possible route to your cities.
The best new improvement? The game is no longer "city oriented" but NATIONALLY oriented, so support for your units comes from the state, not each city. Much better
It doesn't cost them any extra to get books for loan versus individual use.
Be that as it may for books, this is exceedingly not the case when it comes to magazines and journals and whatnot. Libraries have to pay through the nose to get subscriptions for loan use. Sometimes hundreds to many thousands of dollars for what would otherwise be a $30 yearly subscription. Some of the publishing companies threw a fit when they found out some libraries were using online versions of the serials instead of the dead tree variety since they weren't making anywhere near as much money from it.
In each case, a theory presented taps into the buzzwords of the day
I should point out that antimatter has been known and around for a lot longer than 1965. It was first theorized in 1928 by Paul Dirac. Got him a Nobel Prize.
A mini-black hole would do interesting things to the atmosphere but would not mass enough to suck everything for miles around into it. The shock wave would beat out its gravity. Its event horizon could be anywhere from a few millimeters to a few meters across.
Of course, I don't really know enough about it. Can someone explain to me exactly what would make a mini black hole create a shock wave?
I've always been impressed by things like Tierra. You write an environment where self-replicating programs have to compete with each other for space and runtime. Factor in the occasional mutation and the ancestral program (70 or 80 commands) evolves, after several million generations, into a whole panolpy of organisms. There were simple ones that could replicate using only 30 commands, then there were parasites on those that could do it in 20, ones that could only replicate in the presence of a similar program, parasites on the parasites, all sorts of things.
The danger would be if you couldn't get ahold of a real pizza delivery outfit for some reason
Easy. I worked at Papa Johns for quite a while and they always had old shirts and hats sitting around. You could sneak in and grab some or just get a job for a week and never take yours back. I still have mine, for instance. The hot bags and car tops would be a tougher deal, though you could steal some from a delivery car when the driver's not looking. They really hate that, lemme tell you.
would be if a company were to pay to sabotage a competitor's web site. I suppose that whole illegal thing gets in the way. Alternatively, it sure would be nice to be paid to test a company's security
I can imagine a scenario where two competitors that are on good terms with one another (or even two totally unrelated companies) might 'ritualize' assaults on one another's security. Set up rules, designate targets, award prizes to the team or individual that carries out the sneak, that sort of thing. It's fun and points out flaws in security. Much better than a lousy 'Employee of the Month' award.
Probably applies to college dorms everywhere, but it was the same at Georgia Tech. Getting into someone else's building was easy as pie. The exception of course is guys getting into the girl's dorm buildings. Other way around, we'd roll out the red carpet for the lovely ladies...
Theory is a wonderful thing, but often it has nothing to do with real life. Lemme rephrase my question. Do you have any figures on how high frequency rays affect solar cells that we manufacture today? I know they receive more light, but I'd like some stats on the 'quality' of that light affecting performance. To say it theoretically improves it, while true, doesn't quite cut the mustard. Graphs, charts, statistics, anything.
Slashdot Mirror
I wonder how much if at all a Hydrogen based enerygy system would alter the weather, think of all the cars, sure they are emitting 0 pollutants
Very good question. Even the smallest effect from a Hydrogen car would be multiplied by the millions of vehicles out there. But really, fog from H2 cars is better than smog from gas cars any day.
Also do these vehicles store the water, and plug into the power socket to charge? Or do you need to fill them up with water? Or just with H2
It'd be really silly to have the car store water and then charge from a socket. The whole point is to use H2 as a battery to power the car. How you 'charge' that battery is up for grabs. I imagine that the most efficient thing to do would be do make the hydrogen at industrial or even home-based systems and then fill-er-up with fresh tanks of H2. That way, you can build more efficient water-breaking systems and not worry about making them portable. See the arguments about electric cars charged from the grid vs ones that generate their own oomph from gas or whatever.
However, if solar panels become reasonable useful, it might indeed be feasible to put everything in the car. Start off with a tank full of hydrogen and an empty one of water. As it uses the H2 to drive, the car uses solar power to break up the waste water and fills up the H2 tank. It's not quite a perfect system, since you may do a lot of night driving or park in a garage and thus end up with all water and no hydrogen, in which case you'd have to tank up with H2. The system would also leak a small amount of water, which I supose could be replaced from capturing rainfall. Depeding on the efficiency of the electrolysis and solar cells, it becomes something between a gas mileage enhancer and a true self-contained car. But still, being able to drive for a few thousand miles before having to stop for fuel would kick ass to an amazing degree.
There is a *worldwide* market for satellite launches
Yeah, I thought of that. I'm wondering, how many of them are government run or massively subsidized? Are any of them at all mostly private?
the Shuttle post-Challenger no longer has a monopoly on US launches
I thought that in the US at least NASA still does.
The ISS is the type of huge, bleeding edge, long-term payoff type of R&D effort that the private sector won't touch with a bargepole
I somewhat agree. Space research is currently insanely R & D intensive and unattractive to industry, which was why a government agency was put in charge of it in the first place. Problem is, in 40 years they have done fsck all with it. The ISS doesn't help any since the bottleneck is in launch costs more than anything else and as far as NASA is concerned, they haven't changed in years. If anything, they've gone up by using the Shuttle. If we want to study physiological effects in zero g, there's 10,000 universities that would happily study it. If we want to learn about manufacturing techniques, there's a million companies that would jump for it. Same goes for military applications, planetary probes, tourism, any industry you can think of. We don't need or indeed even want NASA doing that for us. But we're stuck with them because it costs too damned much to get up there and almost all the other players are newcomers themselves. Most all the research that's been done is interesting but of no use since it'd not going to be applied anytime soon.
Maybe NASA could do a good job on launch costs if that's all they worked on, maybe private industry would do it better. It's practically a secondary point; I just think that they've been working on the wrong things for decades. All the extraneous research that's been done so far could be done later but at a fraction of the cost.
Here's a good analogy. Let's say that way back at the dawn of the vaccum tube, building useful electronics of any kind was so insanely expensive and useless that only governments could and would do it. To deal with this, a government agency is put in place to expedite the development of useful electronics. Now, the intelligent thing to do would be to concentrate on making components cheaper to build and letting everyone else put them together and write the software, right? We might get things like transistors which for purposes of computing are far superior to vacuum tubes any day. Why, it might get to the point where every person could have their own PC. What we got was an agency that spent 40 years designing bigger vacuum tubes culminating in the construction of one giant computer that does jack squat. And if anyone tries to use that computer for playing some ADVENT or Hunt the Wumpus on the side, they have to fork over $20 million and fight tooth and nail with two governments to do it. They have done a terrible job with their charter and I for one doubt their ability to ever improve.
"We haven't done anything of significance in space since the moon landings, and we won't in the near future, either."
This doesn't make much sense, frankly. Apollo brought us back some moon rocks, and we learned about lunar geology and some about the space environment and how to survive in it. Within the past 2 years we have discovered evidence of water oceans on Europa and, possibly, Ganymede and Callisto. Since 1990 we have discovered evidence of the movement of water on the Martian surface, we have discovered planets around other stars, imaged black holes, etc. Hubble, Chandra, and a whole host of smaller projects have made significant advances in our understanding of the universe. I haven't even gotten into NASA's Earth Science and Solar Science Programs. In the near future, Cassini/Huygens will get to Saturn and we will learn what is going on on Titan, including gathering evidence for or against the possibility of life in the atmospheric soup.
It's interesting data, and that's about it. What good is knowing about water on Luna when NASA hasn't had a manned mission there in 30 years and has no plans to do so again? Don't get me wrong, learning about space is one of the most important things we can do with our civilization, but for it to do any good whatsoever it has to be followed up with space colonization. We can learn and learn and learn but if we're not where that knowledge can be applied, what good is it? It's like my getting a Computer Science degree and then never looking at a piece of electronics again. The money spent on my education would be totally wasted.
If we kill NASA in the near future, commercial interests will never take over. Period. The cost of space activity is too high for anything besides communications sats
Yes, it is expensive. But if we kill off NASA, there will still be a market for satellite launches. Now here's the important part: private industries would be less likely to stick with a fuckup like the Shuttle for 30 or 40 years (which NASA plans on doing) and will constantly be trying to lower costs so as to earn greater profits. They would do more for lowering orbital launch costs than NASA ever did.
But the initial R & D costs are amazing and bennefits may not be immediately realized, so yes, companies might be hesitant before jumping in. Fine. Take NASA off every single project of theirs with the sole exception of developing cheap launch methods. That's the bottleneck on our space industry and it's what NASA should have been working on all these years. We can handle the rest, just get us up there.
Did you know that 98% of all species that have ever walked the earth are extinct and not all of them killed themselves? Explain to me why you're so absolutely sure mankind will never be added to that list. Self-destruction is one possibility, but so are asteroidal impacts, ice ages, runaway greenhouse effects, solar flares, plagues, the list goes on and on. On a long enough time scale, it's not safe here, not by any stretch of the imagination. Yes, weapons are a bit more potent in space, but living space is correspondingly easier to come by. No one single goof would be able to wipe us all out.
What were the skies like when you were young?
Where is this from? It sounds very familiar and I can't place it.
Its a virus - it hides behind a legitimate program, performs some sort of check, then delivers a payload. If thats not a virus, then i don't know what is. Just because Apple may 'claim' its a mistake, is no excuse. People have gone to prison for less so i say, give them a big fat law suit.
Are you listening to yourself?
He's right to some extent. A bug that causes a program to crash is perfectly ordinary, if annoying. One that 'oops, we just wiped out your entire hard drive, so sorry' is totally unacceptable. Hell, most viruses aren't even designed to be that bad. Software can always be expected to be buggy, but this crossed the line between 'not quite enough debugging' and criminal negligence on Apple's part. Prison is a bit much, but financial liability is quite reasonable.
They said the same thing about SMAC, too
Who said that? I've beaten it on Transcend level. For the most part it's not too hard, the only cheat they get that's insanely difficult to counter is the free bribing of your cities and units. You have to either defend with tons and tons of spies or stack at least 2 units on every possible route to your cities.
I read once that Mexico was mad at America, because we stole half of their country; and not only that, we stole the half with all the roads
The US took the least populated, least developed territories of 1840's Mexico. I doubt that that was were all the roads were.
The best new improvement? The game is no longer "city oriented" but NATIONALLY oriented, so support for your units comes from the state, not each city. Much better
They did that in Call to Power as well.
It doesn't cost them any extra to get books for loan versus individual use.
Be that as it may for books, this is exceedingly not the case when it comes to magazines and journals and whatnot. Libraries have to pay through the nose to get subscriptions for loan use. Sometimes hundreds to many thousands of dollars for what would otherwise be a $30 yearly subscription. Some of the publishing companies threw a fit when they found out some libraries were using online versions of the serials instead of the dead tree variety since they weren't making anywhere near as much money from it.
Take it to the next level. Interactive movies. At what point does it cease to be a movie and become a very high-res adventure game (ie, software)?
How about the Earth's core, or even just a few miles underneath the ocean floor.
Not likely, since SETI relies on radio arrays and you won't find transmitters on asteroids and comets and whatnot.
In each case, a theory presented taps into the buzzwords of the day
I should point out that antimatter has been known and around for a lot longer than 1965. It was first theorized in 1928 by Paul Dirac. Got him a Nobel Prize.
A mini-black hole would do interesting things to the atmosphere but would not mass enough to suck everything for miles around into it. The shock wave would beat out its gravity. Its event horizon could be anywhere from a few millimeters to a few meters across.
Of course, I don't really know enough about it. Can someone explain to me exactly what would make a mini black hole create a shock wave?
I've always been impressed by things like Tierra. You write an environment where self-replicating programs have to compete with each other for space and runtime. Factor in the occasional mutation and the ancestral program (70 or 80 commands) evolves, after several million generations, into a whole panolpy of organisms. There were simple ones that could replicate using only 30 commands, then there were parasites on those that could do it in 20, ones that could only replicate in the presence of a similar program, parasites on the parasites, all sorts of things.
Actually, it's the CLEA. Copyright Lawyers' Employment Act.
The danger would be if you couldn't get ahold of a real pizza delivery outfit for some reason
Easy. I worked at Papa Johns for quite a while and they always had old shirts and hats sitting around. You could sneak in and grab some or just get a job for a week and never take yours back. I still have mine, for instance. The hot bags and car tops would be a tougher deal, though you could steal some from a delivery car when the driver's not looking. They really hate that, lemme tell you.
would be if a company were to pay to sabotage a competitor's web site. I suppose that whole illegal thing gets in the way. Alternatively, it sure would be nice to be paid to test a company's security
I can imagine a scenario where two competitors that are on good terms with one another (or even two totally unrelated companies) might 'ritualize' assaults on one another's security. Set up rules, designate targets, award prizes to the team or individual that carries out the sneak, that sort of thing. It's fun and points out flaws in security. Much better than a lousy 'Employee of the Month' award.
but there's a lot more time writing up reports about the intrusion than there is actually doing intrusions
I assume you mean their own company's sites. I don't imagine there's that much paperwork to do when conducting industrial espionage...
It-a-not-a-worka-for-some reason
I think there's a glitch in their DNS registration. Try here.
Probably applies to college dorms everywhere, but it was the same at Georgia Tech. Getting into someone else's building was easy as pie. The exception of course is guys getting into the girl's dorm buildings. Other way around, we'd roll out the red carpet for the lovely ladies...
Wasn't there a Seinfeld episode along those lines?
And somehow I just can't justify paying 20$ for something that is the size of a quarter.
How big is your processor? And how much did you pay for it?
Theory is a wonderful thing, but often it has nothing to do with real life. Lemme rephrase my question. Do you have any figures on how high frequency rays affect solar cells that we manufacture today? I know they receive more light, but I'd like some stats on the 'quality' of that light affecting performance. To say it theoretically improves it, while true, doesn't quite cut the mustard. Graphs, charts, statistics, anything.