What's the most efficient laser tech, in terms of watts of electrical power in to watts of laser power out? Are there any all-optical laser devices in the high efficiency (>80%, or eve >50%) class, that are powered by incoming non-coherent light (like sunlight) but emit coherent light?
If they spent that time and money making their cops do their jobs better, and commit less of their own crimes (bribery, brutality, neglect), they'd get a more crime reduction, more public safety, more public trust, and for a lot smaller budget.
They should start with 100% cop surveillance. Every cop gets 100% of their time on-duty (minus their protected bathroom breaks, when their partner logs their removing their badge for the duration) recorded in 360-degree video. Then, instead of typing paperwork, they can just voice-annotate their video records, on fast-forward to the important parts. All the good cops will have easier jobs, especially when sending the videos as evidence instead of testifying in most cases (and seeing their word supported by video). The bad cops will have a harder time. And the police department will still get to play with expensive hi-tech toys, if not quite the science-fiction ones that cost more and do less, while violating our privacy rights.
How about this Honeywell Windgate "personal" turbine, under 6 feet across and under 100 pounds, generating power at as little as 2MPH (about 6W), up over 45MPH (over 2.4KW). It's $4500 at Ace Hardware, but the IRS will refund 30% of its price under the Obama Stimulus programme, $1350 for a net $3150 price (and your state might rebate another 20-50%+). In NYC (average wind speed 12.2MPH at LGA producing about 200W), $3150 takes about 7.5 years to break even. Which is about how long all these consumer-grade energy generation or efficiency products take to break even, except CFLs which pay off after about 8 months.
That means the Windgate is the watershed: it marks the price:generation efficiency point past which harnessing wind through your hardware store is affordable. Further improvements will be in reference to today's breakthroughs.
I'm surprised that there are no small and low wattage CFLs to fit your sockets. Maybe if you could find the technical name for that size socket and google for it and CFL, you might find some, since they're a niche most retailers probably aren't getting around to serving yet. If not, then indeed you do have a niche that these new incandescent ones might fill. If they don't have the same "low hanging fruit" delay in their own rollout, as CFLs are evidently going through now. By the time these new incandescent bulbs are selling in a wide variety of sizes, I expect a CFL will be available for every residential requirement anyway.
I had a dozen CFLs burning for over 2 years in my last apartment, where (at NYC $0.24:KWh) they paid for themselves in under 8 months. But the dimmable ones in a track light lasted only 6 months, so I switched those back to incandescent (3 of about 30 bulbs in the home). And one on/off ceiling light also killed its CFLs in under a year, but had also killed incandescents in under 2 years. The wiring in the 150 year old building was notably bad (needed ground lifters to reduce buzz in the TV, every electronic device needed a surge protector on both power and signal, etc). CFLs are more sensitive. But really one should fix the wiring - the CFLs are just the canary in the coal mine. I moved to a new place which I totally rewired, and took my CFLs with me.
The Home Depot where I bought my latest round of bulbs also takes back old ones for recycling. The amount of mercury they put into landfills is smaller than the amount of mercury that coal burning electric plants would have put in the air to power the equivalent average life in higher wattage (but equally bright) incandescent bulbs. And since the CFLs mostly last so much longer than incandescent, the recycling system has some time to catch up before there's a lot of CFLs going into landfills.
Yeah, these new incandescents are 30% more efficient, but my CFLs are 400% more efficient than the latest "normal" bulbs they compete with. They're therefore 3x as efficient as these new incandescents. And these new ones, at $5 apiece, cost 8.75x what my CFLs cost in a box of 12. The CFLs will last something like 10 years, instead of about 2 for incandescents (maybe 5 for these new, less hot ones). But at such high efficiency, the CFLs add very little heat to the room to be cooled with my air conditioning - even more overall system efficiency. As for the spectrum, my CFLs side by side a new GE incandescent at the same luminosity show the CFL with a slightly yellower light, which is the "warm" light we like to associate with homey incandescent.
If we didn't have good CFLs, these new incandescents would be welcome. They might have some applications, given their small size, and cheap dimmability (dimmable CFLs cost 2-3x as much, last half as long, at least during their own early days). But within a couple years LEDs with 1300-1900 lumens will cost less than CFLs now, and can run directly on DC power - thereby increasing solar PV efficiency driving them by eliminating the 30-50% now lost on DC/AC/DC conversion. The LEDs will have a more tunable spectrum, last longer, and fit smaller fixtures, with even less heat inefficiency to cool (or disperse in enclosures).
CFLs today, LEDs tomorrow. Incandescents in movies about the 20th Century.
There are many times more people graduating from schools with skills more advanced than "the 4 Rs", yet the audience for drivel like reality shows is no larger than it has ever been. That increase in education is because of "the 1960s".
Besides, if an acceleration in society's decay exactly correlates with the rise of rightwing "conservatism", then it's more clearly "conservatism's" fault than the liberalism that predated such "conservatism" by many generations. And the audience for drivel more closely correlates to considering oneself "conservative" than to liberalism. Conservatism, whether rightwing, religious or otherwise, has demonstrated a hatred for science that is natural to science's power to change society.
But you go ahead believing whatever you heard from Rush Limbo or on Fox News. The world is getting worse every day, it's all the "liberals'" fault, "because of the 1960s". Education and knowledge will only be slowed, not stopped, by the dead weight of that kind of thinking, as the last decade's "golden age" of total "conservative" power has proven beyond doubt.
the thrust of VASMIR is expected to be ~5000 mN of thrust when tested at 200 kW of power.
5000 mN, 5N, is enough force to lift a 1lb melon 1 meter every dozen seconds, increasing by a meter every dozen seconds, away from our 1G Earth (F=ma). 200KW (268HP) is about triple the redline output of a big car engine. We clearly have a lot of efficiency improvements to look forward to in our climbs into space.
This story is tagged "democrats". But the story says:
Rep. Mack "Bodi" White, R-Denham Springs, said he sponsored the bill for Attorney General Buddy Caldwell, to raise money to finance a division in Caldwell's office that investigates Internet crimes, particularly online sex crimes against children.
That "R-" means the sponsor is a Republican, for a Republican Attorney General. All over the story it's got Democrats opposing it on an anti-tax basis. As for Jindal, a Republican who therefore wants to be a cop without paying for it:
The bill presented a conflict for Gov. Jindal, who has repeatedly pushed for tougher penalties against sex offenders but also has opposed any proposal that could be considered a tax increase.
"While we absolutely support cracking down on sex offenders that prey on our children, we're opposed to raising taxes on the people of Louisiana," Jindal press secretary Kyle Plotkin said in a statement Thursday.
This story might say something about Republicans. It doesn't at all say anything about "Democrats". Except that there's nothing a Republican tagger won't try to blame on Democrats, even when it's Republicans doing it.
How about a version of this project that targets 1080p HDTV/DVR instead of gaming? To run Linux of course - for the horsepower, and the thrill of finding drivers:).
Zigbee modules were supposed to be better than WiFi or Bluetooth because they were supposed to cost $1 or less to build into a device. But they're not. There should be a $5 Zigbee USB base, or at least satellite device for a $10 hub, but there aren't. Why can't they make these cheap parts for sale cheap?
Except Prof Dalziel chronicled 7 actual cases. Which resulted in only 3 deaths: less than 50% of cases resulted in even one death. But it's not like people didn't actually poison the supply, like skyscraper planebombing prior to 9/11/2001. We have actual data.
All you have is snark, and a profound incomprehension of risk. Hollywood loves you, but Homeland Security should ignore you.
Which is all exactly why these chemical corps would want the testing to be calibrated to ignore all their "normal" pollution, while the testing satisfies everyone that their water is "pure, perfectly safe".
Meanwhile, Bruce Schneier exposed the threat of "poisoning the water supply" as yet another "movie plot threat" that isn't at all a realistic priority for spending time, money, effort and credibility defending:
G.R. Dalziel, at the Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, has written a report chronicling every confirmed case of malicious food contamination in the world since 1950: 365 cases in all, plus 126 additional unconfirmed cases. [...] There are very few incidents of people contaminating the actual food supply. People deliberately contaminated a water supply seven times, resulting in three deaths.
Just because we have the budget and the products to buy doesn't mean that's how we should be spending our necessarily finite resources defending the public. We'd do a lot better at least protecting our babies and pets from poisonous food exported from China.
I'm using one of the most common motherboards ever made, still widely in use, a P4/2.6 that should easily run Google Earth, like many millions of people are (though none of us can use the latest Ubuntu with GE).
Don't cry, Baby Jesus. Your abacus is miraculous, so it should run GE. Or just go ahead and use the real Earth as your plaything.
Geothermal heat pumps use the ground as a heat sink, usually letting electric powered circulation pumps and compressors move 4-5x as much heat energy as electric power consumed when water (or a fluid like antifreeze) is the circulating medium. Generally they sink heat in the ground, which has only so much capacity (room heating/cooling apps get the heat back in the colder weather). But they could transfer the heat to sewage water that flows out of buildings, taking heat with it. Such a system could be 4-5x as efficient as air fans cooling computers.
I think that the computer industry would be a great mass market for this technology. Which would probably see dramatic improvement, as computer engineers are some of the most effective in innovating for efficiency. Someday we might see water circuits at power outlets for all kinds of appliances, not just computers in data centers.
My password is probably safe. It might take hours to crack a single password, but what are the odds that it will be my password, of all the billions of them in use now, of all the dozens of passwords I use, each different?
Those benchmarks show that even older ($120-140) nVidia GPU cards can really speed up some processing tasks, especially transcoding video. But what I think is even more exciting than just the acceleration from offloading CPU to GPU is using multiple GPU cards in a single host PC. Stuff a $1000 PC with $1120 in GPUs (like 8 $140 nVidia cards), and that's 1024 parallel cores, anywhere from 16x to 56x the performance at only just over double the price. PCI-e should make the data parallel fast enough to feed the cards. I bet that 8 $1000 cards stuffed into a $1000 PC would be something like 200x to 4000x for only 9x the price.
So what I want to see is benchmarks for whole render farms. I want to see HD video transcoded into H.264 and other formats simultaneously on the fly, in realtime, with true fast-forward, in multiple independent streams from the same master source. This stuff is possible now on a reasonable budget.
If they develop techniques for testing whether an epidemic virus was created in a lab and then sprung on a vulnerable public, we should use them to test the "AIDS conspiracy" allegations along those lines. At the very least to put that conspiracy theory to rest if it's false. If it's not, it'll be well worth it to expose such an evil, and to point out years of coincidence theorists.
Good to hear that you're not ruling out what you claim is pointless.
BTW, I'm talking about powering a home, not powering a car. Scaling up a microfluidic system for stationary application is different from a mobile application.
Even better to hear that research will go on regardless of your attitude.
It took me under 30 seconds to find a methanol fuel cell at 75% efficiency. It's not the scale or form factor for residential use, but it's clear that you're not even up to date on the current performance of methanol fuel cells.
The theoretical max efficiency of fuel cell tech in general is over 85%. 60% from diesel is a reasonable goal, not "magical hope". What's certain is that ruling it out despite demonstrated progress towards it will ensure we never get it.
Anything that improves American car efficiency cuts American oil imports, and is therefore essential for America's national security. We should skip a few $BILLION weapons systems and spend the money on the fuel cells. If we're going to give $BILLIONS to car corps, we should do it by giving them free fuel cell research that we also use for the rest of the country's energy security.
What this country needs is a fuelcell that gets over 60% efficiency turning diesel into electricity. Because diesel is close enough to the "#2 heating oil" that heats millions of American homes that we'd get that, too.
Slashdot Mirror
What's the most efficient laser tech, in terms of watts of electrical power in to watts of laser power out? Are there any all-optical laser devices in the high efficiency (>80%, or eve >50%) class, that are powered by incoming non-coherent light (like sunlight) but emit coherent light?
If they spent that time and money making their cops do their jobs better, and commit less of their own crimes (bribery, brutality, neglect), they'd get a more crime reduction, more public safety, more public trust, and for a lot smaller budget.
They should start with 100% cop surveillance. Every cop gets 100% of their time on-duty (minus their protected bathroom breaks, when their partner logs their removing their badge for the duration) recorded in 360-degree video. Then, instead of typing paperwork, they can just voice-annotate their video records, on fast-forward to the important parts. All the good cops will have easier jobs, especially when sending the videos as evidence instead of testifying in most cases (and seeing their word supported by video). The bad cops will have a harder time. And the police department will still get to play with expensive hi-tech toys, if not quite the science-fiction ones that cost more and do less, while violating our privacy rights.
How about this Honeywell Windgate "personal" turbine, under 6 feet across and under 100 pounds, generating power at as little as 2MPH (about 6W), up over 45MPH (over 2.4KW). It's $4500 at Ace Hardware, but the IRS will refund 30% of its price under the Obama Stimulus programme, $1350 for a net $3150 price (and your state might rebate another 20-50%+). In NYC (average wind speed 12.2MPH at LGA producing about 200W), $3150 takes about 7.5 years to break even. Which is about how long all these consumer-grade energy generation or efficiency products take to break even, except CFLs which pay off after about 8 months.
That means the Windgate is the watershed: it marks the price:generation efficiency point past which harnessing wind through your hardware store is affordable. Further improvements will be in reference to today's breakthroughs.
I'm surprised that there are no small and low wattage CFLs to fit your sockets. Maybe if you could find the technical name for that size socket and google for it and CFL, you might find some, since they're a niche most retailers probably aren't getting around to serving yet. If not, then indeed you do have a niche that these new incandescent ones might fill. If they don't have the same "low hanging fruit" delay in their own rollout, as CFLs are evidently going through now. By the time these new incandescent bulbs are selling in a wide variety of sizes, I expect a CFL will be available for every residential requirement anyway.
I had a dozen CFLs burning for over 2 years in my last apartment, where (at NYC $0.24:KWh) they paid for themselves in under 8 months. But the dimmable ones in a track light lasted only 6 months, so I switched those back to incandescent (3 of about 30 bulbs in the home). And one on/off ceiling light also killed its CFLs in under a year, but had also killed incandescents in under 2 years. The wiring in the 150 year old building was notably bad (needed ground lifters to reduce buzz in the TV, every electronic device needed a surge protector on both power and signal, etc). CFLs are more sensitive. But really one should fix the wiring - the CFLs are just the canary in the coal mine. I moved to a new place which I totally rewired, and took my CFLs with me.
The Home Depot where I bought my latest round of bulbs also takes back old ones for recycling. The amount of mercury they put into landfills is smaller than the amount of mercury that coal burning electric plants would have put in the air to power the equivalent average life in higher wattage (but equally bright) incandescent bulbs. And since the CFLs mostly last so much longer than incandescent, the recycling system has some time to catch up before there's a lot of CFLs going into landfills.
Yeah, these new incandescents are 30% more efficient, but my CFLs are 400% more efficient than the latest "normal" bulbs they compete with. They're therefore 3x as efficient as these new incandescents. And these new ones, at $5 apiece, cost 8.75x what my CFLs cost in a box of 12. The CFLs will last something like 10 years, instead of about 2 for incandescents (maybe 5 for these new, less hot ones). But at such high efficiency, the CFLs add very little heat to the room to be cooled with my air conditioning - even more overall system efficiency. As for the spectrum, my CFLs side by side a new GE incandescent at the same luminosity show the CFL with a slightly yellower light, which is the "warm" light we like to associate with homey incandescent.
If we didn't have good CFLs, these new incandescents would be welcome. They might have some applications, given their small size, and cheap dimmability (dimmable CFLs cost 2-3x as much, last half as long, at least during their own early days). But within a couple years LEDs with 1300-1900 lumens will cost less than CFLs now, and can run directly on DC power - thereby increasing solar PV efficiency driving them by eliminating the 30-50% now lost on DC/AC/DC conversion. The LEDs will have a more tunable spectrum, last longer, and fit smaller fixtures, with even less heat inefficiency to cool (or disperse in enclosures).
CFLs today, LEDs tomorrow. Incandescents in movies about the 20th Century.
There are many times more people graduating from schools with skills more advanced than "the 4 Rs", yet the audience for drivel like reality shows is no larger than it has ever been. That increase in education is because of "the 1960s".
Besides, if an acceleration in society's decay exactly correlates with the rise of rightwing "conservatism", then it's more clearly "conservatism's" fault than the liberalism that predated such "conservatism" by many generations. And the audience for drivel more closely correlates to considering oneself "conservative" than to liberalism. Conservatism, whether rightwing, religious or otherwise, has demonstrated a hatred for science that is natural to science's power to change society.
But you go ahead believing whatever you heard from Rush Limbo or on Fox News. The world is getting worse every day, it's all the "liberals'" fault, "because of the 1960s". Education and knowledge will only be slowed, not stopped, by the dead weight of that kind of thinking, as the last decade's "golden age" of total "conservative" power has proven beyond doubt.
5000 mN, 5N, is enough force to lift a 1lb melon 1 meter every dozen seconds, increasing by a meter every dozen seconds, away from our 1G Earth (F=ma). 200KW (268HP) is about triple the redline output of a big car engine. We clearly have a lot of efficiency improvements to look forward to in our climbs into space.
Thank you for proving exactly what I said about Republicans. Er, I mean "libertarians", Anonymous partisan hack Coward.
This story is tagged "democrats". But the story says:
That "R-" means the sponsor is a Republican, for a Republican Attorney General. All over the story it's got Democrats opposing it on an anti-tax basis. As for Jindal, a Republican who therefore wants to be a cop without paying for it:
This story might say something about Republicans. It doesn't at all say anything about "Democrats". Except that there's nothing a Republican tagger won't try to blame on Democrats, even when it's Republicans doing it.
How about a version of this project that targets 1080p HDTV/DVR instead of gaming? To run Linux of course - for the horsepower, and the thrill of finding drivers :).
Zigbee modules were supposed to be better than WiFi or Bluetooth because they were supposed to cost $1 or less to build into a device. But they're not. There should be a $5 Zigbee USB base, or at least satellite device for a $10 hub, but there aren't. Why can't they make these cheap parts for sale cheap?
Except Prof Dalziel chronicled 7 actual cases. Which resulted in only 3 deaths: less than 50% of cases resulted in even one death. But it's not like people didn't actually poison the supply, like skyscraper planebombing prior to 9/11/2001. We have actual data.
All you have is snark, and a profound incomprehension of risk. Hollywood loves you, but Homeland Security should ignore you.
You can read the rest of Schneier's blog post "Attacking the Food Supply".
Which is all exactly why these chemical corps would want the testing to be calibrated to ignore all their "normal" pollution, while the testing satisfies everyone that their water is "pure, perfectly safe".
Meanwhile, Bruce Schneier exposed the threat of "poisoning the water supply" as yet another "movie plot threat" that isn't at all a realistic priority for spending time, money, effort and credibility defending:
Just because we have the budget and the products to buy doesn't mean that's how we should be spending our necessarily finite resources defending the public. We'd do a lot better at least protecting our babies and pets from poisonous food exported from China.
I'm using one of the most common motherboards ever made, still widely in use, a P4/2.6 that should easily run Google Earth, like many millions of people are (though none of us can use the latest Ubuntu with GE).
Don't cry, Baby Jesus. Your abacus is miraculous, so it should run GE. Or just go ahead and use the real Earth as your plaything.
Ubuntu 09.4 makes Google Earth crash on my Intel/845 video chip, so it's unusable for tracking anything.
Geothermal heat pumps use the ground as a heat sink, usually letting electric powered circulation pumps and compressors move 4-5x as much heat energy as electric power consumed when water (or a fluid like antifreeze) is the circulating medium. Generally they sink heat in the ground, which has only so much capacity (room heating/cooling apps get the heat back in the colder weather). But they could transfer the heat to sewage water that flows out of buildings, taking heat with it. Such a system could be 4-5x as efficient as air fans cooling computers.
I think that the computer industry would be a great mass market for this technology. Which would probably see dramatic improvement, as computer engineers are some of the most effective in innovating for efficiency. Someday we might see water circuits at power outlets for all kinds of appliances, not just computers in data centers.
My password is probably safe. It might take hours to crack a single password, but what are the odds that it will be my password, of all the billions of them in use now, of all the dozens of passwords I use, each different?
Those benchmarks show that even older ($120-140) nVidia GPU cards can really speed up some processing tasks, especially transcoding video. But what I think is even more exciting than just the acceleration from offloading CPU to GPU is using multiple GPU cards in a single host PC. Stuff a $1000 PC with $1120 in GPUs (like 8 $140 nVidia cards), and that's 1024 parallel cores, anywhere from 16x to 56x the performance at only just over double the price. PCI-e should make the data parallel fast enough to feed the cards. I bet that 8 $1000 cards stuffed into a $1000 PC would be something like 200x to 4000x for only 9x the price.
So what I want to see is benchmarks for whole render farms. I want to see HD video transcoded into H.264 and other formats simultaneously on the fly, in realtime, with true fast-forward, in multiple independent streams from the same master source. This stuff is possible now on a reasonable budget.
If they develop techniques for testing whether an epidemic virus was created in a lab and then sprung on a vulnerable public, we should use them to test the "AIDS conspiracy" allegations along those lines. At the very least to put that conspiracy theory to rest if it's false. If it's not, it'll be well worth it to expose such an evil, and to point out years of coincidence theorists.
Good to hear that you're not ruling out what you claim is pointless.
BTW, I'm talking about powering a home, not powering a car. Scaling up a microfluidic system for stationary application is different from a mobile application.
Even better to hear that research will go on regardless of your attitude.
It took me under 30 seconds to find a methanol fuel cell at 75% efficiency. It's not the scale or form factor for residential use, but it's clear that you're not even up to date on the current performance of methanol fuel cells.
The theoretical max efficiency of fuel cell tech in general is over 85%. 60% from diesel is a reasonable goal, not "magical hope". What's certain is that ruling it out despite demonstrated progress towards it will ensure we never get it.
Anything that improves American car efficiency cuts American oil imports, and is therefore essential for America's national security. We should skip a few $BILLION weapons systems and spend the money on the fuel cells. If we're going to give $BILLIONS to car corps, we should do it by giving them free fuel cell research that we also use for the rest of the country's energy security.
What this country needs is a fuelcell that gets over 60% efficiency turning diesel into electricity. Because diesel is close enough to the "#2 heating oil" that heats millions of American homes that we'd get that, too.