Carbon is an electrical conductor (at least when it's in the form of graphite). The foam in the article you mention is talking about a graphite foam. Hence I would be willing to bet it would cause all sorts of havoc with the electronics in the system...
Now what would be cool would be someone running a system in a fish tank full of pure de-ionized water (hint : that doesn't conduct electricity)
Everyone's forgetting the battery also generates heat, which you want to capture and use...
Batteries are not very efficent, but thanks to our friend thermo-dynamics those losses are converted to heat...
... Now the reason you want active heating is simple, many of the tasks they are talking about fall under the category of hurry up and wait.
A bit of background, one of my hobbies is caving in the northeast. The caves year round are mid 40's, wet, 100% humidity. When things go wrong you and the injured party can be stranded for long periods of time sitting arround while things are done to extract said party. The cold rocks and mud will just suck the heat out of your body faster than you can generate it. Tricks we use are, use 'space blankets (aluminized mylar, trash bags work just as well)', minimize physical contact with the cold rock (roll them on there side, sit on your helmet, on a pack, foam pad, ect), try to move the injured party out of any standing water, put a wool or fleece cap on (a large percentage of your non contact heat loss), use active heating if possible (candles, carbide (old miner's) lamps, heat packs (reusable, single use ones eat O2), remove any wet items that do not hold heat (wet COTTON!!, it will kill you faster than you can get out of the cave). A large percentage of an extraction involves waiting for the right tools to end up in the correct position... ie you are ready to go, but the injured party is not on the stretcher, or the rope for raising the stretcher is not in position, or the rope is rigged, but the party has not arrived yet, ect...
Why do you need active heating, becuase an enviroment like this will suck the heat out of you faster than you can generate it. As for a battery powered heater, I suppose if you could get the battery life up there. But then you have to lug arround extra weight, and if you are doing that, Carbide is lighter... and has a nice yellow flame.
We the people provide our spectrum to the broadcast industry for use. We provide access rights to lay the cable that snakes through our streets. By providing this they provide us a 'service' that has value to use. By telling us how to use it, they act like they own what we provided them in exchange for this 'valuable' benifit.
Besides, radio waves containing bad shows hurts my karma and they need to pay me for the copper sheild on my head to block the garbage and damages... TastesLikeHerringFlavoredChicken
A simple solution would be for the TV Network's to make the shows avaliable (with adds) on a bunch of fast servers. For pay per view type programming, have a subscription style service... All they need to do is follow the p0rn industries model and they will be rolling in the dough
Trying to enforce at what time a person watches a show is silly. Not to mention controlling and repressive.
Notice they said they where releasing these flies after poisoning the other flies. I wonder if the sterilized flies are healthier, therefore better mates than the poisoned flies.
It might give them a slight advantage, do you want the fly that glows in the dark or the one that smells like the pesticide that knocked off your sister...
Ummm... hate to break this to you but they have been doing this kind of stuff since I was a kid. It is one of the standard method used to control fruit flies in florida...
The new twist here is that they are doing it on a new type of insect that apears to have a fairly long life.
A company that is supposed to to protect our private financle interests answering to the common stock holder... So when it tanks does this mean they will dip into our credit cards/bank accounts to stay afloat and please the share holders?
I smell cover-up, we are running a deficit, the SEC is putting up fraudulent web sites. I suspect they will take the users money and balance the budget.
> I don't know of many satellites that don't include manuvering thrusters.
The Hubble Space Telescope comes to mind. It completely lacks thrusters. All pointing of the observatory is done through the spinning up and down of the gyro's (reaction wheels). Do you remember SolarMax? It also lacked thrusters.
Thrusters are usually used for station keeping, not pointing. If the shape and tilt of the orbit does not matter, the sat. does not need thrusters. Of course NASA has started requiring end of life planning for all new birds that many survive re-entry.
Funny I saw an article about this on infoworld last monday... I guess slashdot can't keep up with the pace;-) I'm sure the article is cached somewhere on google:-O
They are talking about using an EUV (13nm) light source to illuminate the photomask's that transfer the 'chip' image onto the photoresist that is then etched off and the exsposed silcone is then doped to create the electronic components that make up the chip.
As far as wavelengths go
~253 nm (UV) is what everyone is currently using.
193nm (VUV) is what everyone is moving to (state of the art).
157nm (VUV) is what is currently under development, but all the hurdles have not been overcome.
The big issue is the shorter the wavelength, the harder it is to find materials that can support the photomasks. Glass stops light at less than 300nm, CaFl at less than 120 (what they us instead of glass), water vapor at less than 200nm, O2 at less than 193nm, N2 at less than 120nm. That's air (N2,02,H2O) boys and girls.
The 'plan' for the 13nm stuff is instead of etching the samples by passing the light through the photomask in an N2 purged enviroment is to reflect the image off of a photomask in a High Vacuum (less than 10^-5 Torr).
Tell me one small company that distributes work on CD-R that would not be able to better invest the money they would be forced to pay to the RIAA for material the company wrote and owns the rights to...
Anything beyond the current situation would add to our costs.
1. Pay a levy to RIAA, wasted money
2. Get an Exemption, wasted money in spending the time to do it.
3. Get a refund, wasted money on the time spent to do it.
TastesLikeHerringFlavoredChicken
It will be a wonderful day when Open Source gets all the resources it wants and the RIAA has to hold a bake sale to hire a lawyer
This is not new, microsoft has been telling device driver writters for years that they where going to do this.
Driver Certifications was recomended in NT 4.
Driver Certifications was optional, with a nasty dialog for unsigned drivers in W2K.
Now it looks like it is going to be required under XP.
It looks like they have included technologies to go after applications they don't like. No shock, you crash our system and customers complain we cut your revenue stream.
I just hope they keep really good records, a few of the victims will take them to court. I know if I found my companies drivers in apphelp.sdb, it would be grounds for a lawsuit.
This is going to make life unconfortable for the major software players, but what it will really do is weed out the little guys. Driver Certification is expensive and time consuming. When you have low volumes with low margins it hurts.
As case in point the company I work for a company that makes high end research grade digital imaging systems. Price range, $12K to $75K, volume low, margins low, competition fierce, domestic sales force morons. Most of our costs are engineering and material costs. We can not eat the certification costs, we must pass them on to the end user who will then buy from our competitors.
One small ray of hope for us is most of the time the customers do not add extra hardware, extra software, and network the computers they attach these systems to. (networking a computer attached to a $20K detector in a test cell that can cost a couple of $100K does not sit well with most researchers). No network, no crash logs, no black listing:-)
Overall I have been looking foward to the XP release, It means I can finally drop win 9X support once and for all (Good Riddance). Except for a few bumps, my XP RC1 experince has been pretty good. Other than refusing to support a second ATI video card (does support the Matrox daul headed cards) and a mustek scanner it has played nice. I have not had the time to check out RC2 yet.
Atmospheric O2 levels are not dropping, just the level of pollutants are rising. As long as the O2 levels stay the same the H2 + O2 -> H20 reaction will occur at the same rate with the same energy, so the scram jet will fly the same.
If O2 levels drop, you die...
Remember the most damaging pollutants (Particulate, Ozone, Sulfides) are only found in the lower atmosphere.
Because the risk of an out of control rocket hitting one of the support aircraft, a ship, or someone's condo on land is to great. In the History of the US space launch ranges no un-involved civilian has ever been hurt or killed by an out of control rocket.
The Pegasus uses a solid rocket booster, meaning once you light the fuse it burns until all the fuel is consumed. The only way to stop a rocket that veers off course is to blow it up.
In the newer kinder NASA a setback is the same as killing the program. I really feel sorry for Orbital, first the X-34 was canceled (a reusable pegasus clone, through faults of Lockheed Martins management of the X-33) and now they botched the X-43A launch. Betcha the the stock (ORB) takes a nose dive monday.
My money is still on orbital, if anyone can figure out how to make a low cost reusable launch vehicle, it will be them.
Hate to break it to you, but the 'pollutant' you get when you combine Hydrogen and Oxygen is H20. Or water for those of you that skipped chemistry 101.
Hydrogen fuel is the holy grail of the enviromentalist, if you could only make and store it in a cheap and safe manner.
Everyone seems to be making the assumption that they are tapping into the actual fiber.
The way these cables are laid out is they contain a fiber pair and a high voltage power transmission line (which is part of the casing and several thousand volts).
Why the power transmission line?
Because, every so many miles they have a repeater in the circuit. It would be time consuming and dangerous to splice through a high voltage case and tap a fiber. It might not be as difficult to break into and reseal the repeater. Drill hole through case here, insert probe tip onto pin XYZ here, repot with epoxy, get the hell out of there...
TastesLikeHerringFlavoredChicken
The Wall Street Journal article was better than the ZDNET article
Slashdot Mirror
Carbon is an electrical conductor (at least when it's in the form of graphite). The foam in the article you mention is talking about a graphite foam. Hence I would be willing to bet it would cause all sorts of havoc with the electronics in the system ...
Now what would be cool would be someone running a system in a fish tank full of pure de-ionized water (hint : that doesn't conduct electricity)
TastesLikeHerringFlavoredChicken
It's called the big lie,
...
Repeat it often enough and loud enough and it becomes truth!
Besides, in academics, people that come up with outrageous claims usually end up with a cult following
TastesLikeHerringFlavoredChicken with GroundGlass seasoning...
Besides, we all know nothing good has come out of the RIAA in the last 15 years ;-)
TastesLikeHerringFlavoredChicken
Everyone's forgetting the battery also generates heat, which you want to capture and use ...
... ie you are ready to go, but the injured party is not on the stretcher, or the rope for raising the stretcher is not in position, or the rope is rigged, but the party has not arrived yet, ect...
Batteries are not very efficent, but thanks to our friend thermo-dynamics those losses are converted to heat...
... Now the reason you want active heating is simple, many of the tasks they are talking about fall under the category of hurry up and wait.
A bit of background, one of my hobbies is caving in the northeast. The caves year round are mid 40's, wet, 100% humidity. When things go wrong you and the injured party can be stranded for long periods of time sitting arround while things are done to extract said party. The cold rocks and mud will just suck the heat out of your body faster than you can generate it. Tricks we use are, use 'space blankets (aluminized mylar, trash bags work just as well)', minimize physical contact with the cold rock (roll them on there side, sit on your helmet, on a pack, foam pad, ect), try to move the injured party out of any standing water, put a wool or fleece cap on (a large percentage of your non contact heat loss), use active heating if possible (candles, carbide (old miner's) lamps, heat packs (reusable, single use ones eat O2), remove any wet items that do not hold heat (wet COTTON!!, it will kill you faster than you can get out of the cave). A large percentage of an extraction involves waiting for the right tools to end up in the correct position
Why do you need active heating, becuase an enviroment like this will suck the heat out of you faster than you can generate it. As for a battery powered heater, I suppose if you could get the battery life up there. But then you have to lug arround extra weight, and if you are doing that, Carbide is lighter... and has a nice yellow flame.
TastesLikeHerringFlavoredChicken
My take ...
We the people provide our spectrum to the broadcast industry for use. We provide access rights to lay the cable that snakes through our streets. By providing this they provide us a 'service' that has value to use. By telling us how to use it, they act like they own what we provided them in exchange for this 'valuable' benifit.
Besides, radio waves containing bad shows hurts my karma and they need to pay me for the copper sheild on my head to block the garbage and damages...
TastesLikeHerringFlavoredChicken
A simple solution would be for the TV Network's to make the shows avaliable (with adds) on a bunch of fast servers. For pay per view type programming, have a subscription style service ... All they need to do is follow the p0rn industries model and they will be rolling in the dough
Trying to enforce at what time a person watches a show is silly. Not to mention controlling and repressive.
TastesLikeHerringFlavoredChicken
Notice they said they where releasing these flies after poisoning the other flies. I wonder if the sterilized flies are healthier, therefore better mates than the poisoned flies.
It might give them a slight advantage, do you want the fly that glows in the dark or the one that smells like the pesticide that knocked off your sister...
TastesLikeHerringFlavoredChicken
Ummm ... hate to break this to you but they have been doing this kind of stuff since I was a kid. It is one of the standard method used to control fruit flies in florida ...
The new twist here is that they are doing it on a new type of insect that apears to have a fairly long life.
TastesLikeHerringFlavoredChicken
A company that is supposed to to protect our private financle interests answering to the common stock holder ... So when it tanks does this mean they will dip into our credit cards/bank accounts to stay afloat and please the share holders?
All your accounts are ours!
TastesLikeHerringFlavoredChicken
I have always found with Larry you just need to grab a big tub O popcorn and enjoy the show...
TastesLikeHerringFlavoredChicken
I smell cover-up, we are running a deficit, the SEC is putting up fraudulent web sites. I suspect they will take the users money and balance the budget.
TastesLikeHerringFlavoredChicken
> I don't know of many satellites that don't include manuvering thrusters.
The Hubble Space Telescope comes to mind. It completely lacks thrusters. All pointing of the observatory is done through the spinning up and down of the gyro's (reaction wheels). Do you remember SolarMax? It also lacked thrusters.
Thrusters are usually used for station keeping, not pointing. If the shape and tilt of the orbit does not matter, the sat. does not need thrusters. Of course NASA has started requiring end of life planning for all new birds that many survive re-entry.
TastesLikeHerringFlavoredChicken
Funny I saw an article about this on infoworld last monday... I guess slashdot can't keep up with the pace ;-) I'm sure the article is cached somewhere on google :-O
TastesLikeHerringFlavoredChicken
---Not very practical for most users.
Depends, I know several research grade CCD manufactures who would sell a first child for a better Peltier.
If you need to cool a small device (like a CCD camera) to -100 C you can stack several Peltiers or cool with LN.
It's all about signal to noise, how much noise can you tolerate.
TastesLikeHerringFlavoredChicken
Your right, that is a poor article.
They are talking about using an EUV (13nm) light source to illuminate the photomask's that transfer the 'chip' image onto the photoresist that is then etched off and the exsposed silcone is then doped to create the electronic components that make up the chip.
As far as wavelengths go
~253 nm (UV) is what everyone is currently using.
193nm (VUV) is what everyone is moving to (state of the art).
157nm (VUV) is what is currently under development, but all the hurdles have not been overcome.
The big issue is the shorter the wavelength, the harder it is to find materials that can support the photomasks. Glass stops light at less than 300nm, CaFl at less than 120 (what they us instead of glass), water vapor at less than 200nm, O2 at less than 193nm, N2 at less than 120nm. That's air (N2,02,H2O) boys and girls.
The 'plan' for the 13nm stuff is instead of etching the samples by passing the light through the photomask in an N2 purged enviroment is to reflect the image off of a photomask in a High Vacuum (less than 10^-5 Torr).
I think the road map calls for 13nm in 2010?
TastesLikeHerringFlavoredChicken
Tell me one small company that distributes work on CD-R that would not be able to better invest the money they would be forced to pay to the RIAA for material the company wrote and owns the rights to...
Anything beyond the current situation would add to our costs.
1. Pay a levy to RIAA, wasted money
2. Get an Exemption, wasted money in spending the time to do it.
3. Get a refund, wasted money on the time spent to do it.
TastesLikeHerringFlavoredChicken
It will be a wonderful day when Open Source gets all the resources it wants and the RIAA has to hold a bake sale to hire a lawyer
I remember running across that article several years ago. He had that posted when he was on a different server called the virus myths home page.
Circa. 1996?
Makes sense, there was an article on slashdot today about the Next cubes...
TastesLikeHerringFlavoredChicken
Funny, the headline on the monday august 6th, 2001 Electronic News was 'Intel Strongarms the PCI SIG'.
Might be why this is whythe lawyers are involded...
And you thought this was a good thing,
TastesLikeHerringFlavoredChicken
This is not new, microsoft has been telling device driver writters for years that they where going to do this.
:-)
Driver Certifications was recomended in NT 4.
Driver Certifications was optional, with a nasty dialog for unsigned drivers in W2K.
Now it looks like it is going to be required under XP.
It looks like they have included technologies to go after applications they don't like. No shock, you crash our system and customers complain we cut your revenue stream.
I just hope they keep really good records, a few of the victims will take them to court. I know if I found my companies drivers in apphelp.sdb, it would be grounds for a lawsuit.
This is going to make life unconfortable for the major software players, but what it will really do is weed out the little guys. Driver Certification is expensive and time consuming. When you have low volumes with low margins it hurts.
As case in point the company I work for a company that makes high end research grade digital imaging systems. Price range, $12K to $75K, volume low, margins low, competition fierce, domestic sales force morons. Most of our costs are engineering and material costs. We can not eat the certification costs, we must pass them on to the end user who will then buy from our competitors.
One small ray of hope for us is most of the time the customers do not add extra hardware, extra software, and network the computers they attach these systems to. (networking a computer attached to a $20K detector in a test cell that can cost a couple of $100K does not sit well with most researchers). No network, no crash logs, no black listing
Overall I have been looking foward to the XP release, It means I can finally drop win 9X support once and for all (Good Riddance). Except for a few bumps, my XP RC1 experince has been pretty good. Other than refusing to support a second ATI video card (does support the Matrox daul headed cards) and a mustek scanner it has played nice. I have not had the time to check out RC2 yet.
TastesLikeHerringFlavoredChicken
O2: 21%
...
Pollutants: less than 1%
Atmospheric O2 levels are not dropping, just the level of pollutants are rising. As long as the O2 levels stay the same the H2 + O2 -> H20 reaction will occur at the same rate with the same energy, so the scram jet will fly the same.
If O2 levels drop, you die
Remember the most damaging pollutants (Particulate, Ozone, Sulfides) are only found in the lower atmosphere.
TastesLikeHerringFLavoredChicken
Because the risk of an out of control rocket hitting one of the support aircraft, a ship, or someone's condo on land is to great. In the History of the US space launch ranges no un-involved civilian has ever been hurt or killed by an out of control rocket.
The Pegasus uses a solid rocket booster, meaning once you light the fuse it burns until all the fuel is consumed. The only way to stop a rocket that veers off course is to blow it up.
TastesLikeHerringFlavoredChicken
In the newer kinder NASA a setback is the same as killing the program. I really feel sorry for Orbital, first the X-34 was canceled (a reusable pegasus clone, through faults of Lockheed Martins management of the X-33) and now they botched the X-43A launch. Betcha the the stock (ORB) takes a nose dive monday.
My money is still on orbital, if anyone can figure out how to make a low cost reusable launch vehicle, it will be them.
TastesLikeHerringFlavoredChicken
Hate to break it to you, but the 'pollutant' you get when you combine Hydrogen and Oxygen is H20. Or water for those of you that skipped chemistry 101.
Hydrogen fuel is the holy grail of the enviromentalist, if you could only make and store it in a cheap and safe manner.
TastesLikeHerringFlavoredChicken
Everyone seems to be making the assumption that they are tapping into the actual fiber.
The way these cables are laid out is they contain a fiber pair and a high voltage power transmission line (which is part of the casing and several thousand volts).
Why the power transmission line?
Because, every so many miles they have a repeater in the circuit. It would be time consuming and dangerous to splice through a high voltage case and tap a fiber. It might not be as difficult to break into and reseal the repeater. Drill hole through case here, insert probe tip onto pin XYZ here, repot with epoxy, get the hell out of there...
TastesLikeHerringFlavoredChicken
The Wall Street Journal article was better than the ZDNET article
Now if they would only make linux drivers from my HP, HPLC...