Heck, even running an older office version that you're licensed for on Linux under wine may be a genuine improvement! The underlying system is secure and on current maintenance. It's very easy to isolate the office suite with selinux so that unpatched security bugs in the office suite won't affect anything besides a small briefcase used to move files between the compartment and rest of the filesystem.
The positive of running, say, office 2000 under wine is that its hardware requirements are AFAIK lower than for a current version of libreoffice.
Because they are people, just like you and me, you idiot. It doesn't take much for someone to be eluding police, and not necessarily in an initially dangerous way. Suppose you're speeding a bit, get clocked, and illegally have pot in your possession. Some people act irrationally and start fleeing. This is often a reflex reaction that's specifically triggered by the initial, often safe pursuit by police. It's the act of the pursuit that is the cause of ensuing chase. You essentially advocate killing people who have a lowered threshold for a fleeing reflex. I guess we might as well shoot everyone with Down syndrome while we're at it.
In quite a few jurisdictions, you are a criminal if you are eluding police for any reason. So say you're speeding 5mph over the limit -- typically that's a civil infraction. But you don't stop after police clocks you and starts going after you. That, usually, automatically makes you a criminal (guilty of a criminal violation of the law) and makes you, according to yourself, eligible for being killed. Are you pro-life by any chance? Because I expect that sort of hypocrisy from pro-lifers. Sorry, can't resist stereotyping, but I have plenty of anecdotes.
Of course those are often the same people who are adamantly pro-life, as in human life being so valuable and shit. I think that they are just ever so slightly insane, or so I hope. At least insanity is a "reasonable" explanation...
Stimulated emission and coherency are orthogonal to divergence. To have low divergence you need optics -- whether it's collimating optics on a highly divergent beam, or mirrors on the ends of the cavity that are spaced far enough.
Laser diodes have high divergence because they are optically very short resonator cavities. It is possible to make almost any other laser be optically very short, even He-Ne tube can be built in a transverse configuration where the mirrors are long rectangles spaced fairly close together (millimetres apart). Those have divergence more like a fluorescent tube than what you'd expect from a He-Ne laser:)
The only good thing going for laser light sources is that they are quite monochromatic, and that makes it easy to focus them using transmitting optics because chromatic aberrations are negligible. If you have reflecting optics (primary surface mirrors), then monochromaticity plays no big role, but such optics are harder to make because for any practical, multi-element system you need aspherical mirrors as the beam has to zig-zag between them.
There's no magic to lasers, really. It's much easier, technically and cost-wise, to get a high powered, focused beam of light from a high-power LED. If you think 1W lasers are bad, imagine playing with a LED light source that has an order of magnitude higher optical output power...
I think your article must be very lame, because no one looks for qualifications of any sort, because they usually aren't published anyway! Authors normally don't disclose their titles/degrees, and the only thing that is disclosed is affiliation. That shouldn't be taken for much anyway, as you can get crap from any institution.
Yep. Especially that in an energy company's budget, whether it's electric or petroleum, distribution is the big ticket item -- it can, and often does, dwarf mining or generation costs.
This will not work. There's absolutely no reason not to publish such stuff in respected journals -- if it really works, it will pass the muster. The guy is a scam artist with a long history, it's irresponsible to expect anything else from him without a lot of due diligence. Since he doesn't let anyone do their due diligence, I say it's still a scam.
What I've of course ignored is any extra heat transport due to convection. I hope that the magma "blob" is isolated and not in convective transport with the mantle.
A ballon pops because it is a thin membrane, and if you poke a thin hole in it you introduce stress concentration that is enough to tear it apart. Basically, after a hole has been made, the mechanical energy stored in the balloon is used up in creation of new surfaces at the tear, and the effect is self sustaining. If you try that trick with pressure vessels, you'll find that as long as the hole is big enough, or the vessel is thick enough, it won't disintegrate.
Rock is not like that at all. It is not thin, not at all. Whatever stress concentration there would be is grossly insufficient to tear through miles of rock and to keep going. The worst that would happen is an uncontrolled release of steam and other gasses. If you'd get magma backflow, it'd quickly solidify as the pipe is quite thin -- there's lots of surface area per unit of volume.
You'd need to take the energy out of that thing at a certain rate. Let's see what ballpark that rate falls into.
For potential energy, if we assume average crust density of 2.7g/cm^3, radius of 35km, 10km thick, then 2*pi*(35km)^2*10km*2.7g/cm^3 = 6E15kg. That rising 1cm a year means energy flow of 6E14J/year = 18MW. That's the minimum you'd have to extract, methinks.
The heat flow from the mantle over this area is 65E-3 W/(m^2) * (2*pi*(35 km)^2) = 500MW, so it's an order of magnitude more.
Even if the assumptions are quite off, you're still looking at dozens to hundreds of megawatts. So in terms of handling the thermal power, it's well within our capabilities. As for engineering reality, I don't know how easy of a project it would be. My worry is that it may need a lot of water just to get going, and I don't know how those rocks are at absorbing water.
But my worry is something else: our biosphere has came to be in presence of such "destructive" events. The question is, thus, if we protect ourselves from all major eruptions, what unintended consequences will it have?
If everyone had insurance, I'd agree with you. With so many uninsured that the insured have to pay for -- I'm bothered. Perhaps a middle ground would be that you can drive without seat belts if you have health insurance that's not subsidized more than say 50% by some level of government.
The LIDAR that they use already has a reflected waveform analysis: it does not depend on a single echo, but on a variable-in-space reflection coefficient. It analyzes that to determine location of the ground and canopy top, and perhaps also canopy bottom, or multiple canopy levels. I'm sure that they are storing raw data, so the analysis can be as extensive as one wants: the flyover is expensive, so you can't really afford to throw away useful data and everything is collected. Data reduction is done later.
Since their LIDAR works at 1um, there is unfortunate water absorption there (about 0.14 at 1064nm vs. 3 orders of magnitude less at 400nm - blue light), but I'm sure that they can choose their weather wisely -- after all, they do flyovers. They have to pull weather reports anyway, and one doesn't do expensive flyovers without doing one's meteo homework I'm sure.
Your visual system does NOT do 3D mapping of anything. It does some model fitting from a stereoscopic image, and cannot do most of what their sensor platform does. You're either horribly misinformed or just trolling.
The forest they looked at would be about as accessible in terms of location accessibility to a human eye as it is to their platform: they fly a plane over the forest. Their sensor platform is mounted on a plane.
Alas, it's silly to think a human could be as effective as their sensor platform, because their platform has access to way more data than human visual system does. Not only do the spectrometers sense well into the infrared (2um), but the LIDAR system also measures 3D distribution of biomass, and the relief of the underlying terrain. They can see freaking old riverbed right through the trees, while also seeing the tree canopies. The latter image is not a photograph, mind you. It is a visualization, or reconstruction, of the LIDAR and spectral data.
In the "good old days", when all you had was your eyes and a theodolite, you'd need a lengthy and risky expedition on the ground to acquire all that 3D data manually -- and that works well only for ground relief. We're not monkeys.
I always imagined those old articles to be beautifully typeset. Looking at first article in first issue of Philosophical Transactions A (from 1887) doi: 10.1098/rsta.1887.0001 (On the Luni-Solar Variations of Magnetic Declination and Horizontal Force at Bombay, and of Declination at Trevandrum), there are several tables with values set with a bunch of leading zeroes taking up most of the space (tables are full of values on the order of 10^-5 typeset like +0.000016). What a disappointment!
As I understand it vaccines are typically a weakened form of a virus so the body gets exposed to the virus with our catching it. But from what i have seen with flu vaccines about half the people get a mild flu and about 5% get a full blown flu.
That's the silliest thing in this whole thread. I've had a "full blown flu" once, and it's not something one forgets easily. If 5% of people who get vaccinated got flu due to being vaccinated, there'd be a huge public outcry. You've got your orders of magnitude messed up, at best.
Compulsory insurance should be there for another reason: so that the coverage cannot be denied on the argument that people will buy insurance, get a procedure done, then drop it.
I don't think that varying premium based on seatbelt use is a ludicrous rule. The biomechanics of it are fairly well understood. Smokers do pay higher insurance rates, and nobody scoffs at that. As for lardasses eating cheetos: good life insurance will have a huge health questionnaire, and belive me, they will slap you with higher premiums if you're a lardass. If you lie to them, you can be jailed for it, and for a good reason IMHO.
Slashdot Mirror
Heck, even running an older office version that you're licensed for on Linux under wine may be a genuine improvement! The underlying system is secure and on current maintenance. It's very easy to isolate the office suite with selinux so that unpatched security bugs in the office suite won't affect anything besides a small briefcase used to move files between the compartment and rest of the filesystem.
The positive of running, say, office 2000 under wine is that its hardware requirements are AFAIK lower than for a current version of libreoffice.
Because they are people, just like you and me, you idiot. It doesn't take much for someone to be eluding police, and not necessarily in an initially dangerous way. Suppose you're speeding a bit, get clocked, and illegally have pot in your possession. Some people act irrationally and start fleeing. This is often a reflex reaction that's specifically triggered by the initial, often safe pursuit by police. It's the act of the pursuit that is the cause of ensuing chase. You essentially advocate killing people who have a lowered threshold for a fleeing reflex. I guess we might as well shoot everyone with Down syndrome while we're at it.
In quite a few jurisdictions, you are a criminal if you are eluding police for any reason. So say you're speeding 5mph over the limit -- typically that's a civil infraction. But you don't stop after police clocks you and starts going after you. That, usually, automatically makes you a criminal (guilty of a criminal violation of the law) and makes you, according to yourself, eligible for being killed. Are you pro-life by any chance? Because I expect that sort of hypocrisy from pro-lifers. Sorry, can't resist stereotyping, but I have plenty of anecdotes.
I always thought that a simple way of ending a chase is to, umm, stop chasing?
Of course those are often the same people who are adamantly pro-life, as in human life being so valuable and shit. I think that they are just ever so slightly insane, or so I hope. At least insanity is a "reasonable" explanation...
Stimulated emission and coherency are orthogonal to divergence. To have low divergence you need optics -- whether it's collimating optics on a highly divergent beam, or mirrors on the ends of the cavity that are spaced far enough.
Laser diodes have high divergence because they are optically very short resonator cavities. It is possible to make almost any other laser be optically very short, even He-Ne tube can be built in a transverse configuration where the mirrors are long rectangles spaced fairly close together (millimetres apart). Those have divergence more like a fluorescent tube than what you'd expect from a He-Ne laser :)
The only good thing going for laser light sources is that they are quite monochromatic, and that makes it easy to focus them using transmitting optics because chromatic aberrations are negligible. If you have reflecting optics (primary surface mirrors), then monochromaticity plays no big role, but such optics are harder to make because for any practical, multi-element system you need aspherical mirrors as the beam has to zig-zag between them.
There's no magic to lasers, really. It's much easier, technically and cost-wise, to get a high powered, focused beam of light from a high-power LED. If you think 1W lasers are bad, imagine playing with a LED light source that has an order of magnitude higher optical output power...
I think your article must be very lame, because no one looks for qualifications of any sort, because they usually aren't published anyway! Authors normally don't disclose their titles/degrees, and the only thing that is disclosed is affiliation. That shouldn't be taken for much anyway, as you can get crap from any institution.
First you do the science. You can't run such technology without understanding it. It's irresponsible, even if it did work.
I'm not digging trenches. I'm expecting credible publications, that's all.
Yep. Especially that in an energy company's budget, whether it's electric or petroleum, distribution is the big ticket item -- it can, and often does, dwarf mining or generation costs.
This will not work. There's absolutely no reason not to publish such stuff in respected journals -- if it really works, it will pass the muster. The guy is a scam artist with a long history, it's irresponsible to expect anything else from him without a lot of due diligence. Since he doesn't let anyone do their due diligence, I say it's still a scam.
What I've of course ignored is any extra heat transport due to convection. I hope that the magma "blob" is isolated and not in convective transport with the mantle.
A ballon pops because it is a thin membrane, and if you poke a thin hole in it you introduce stress concentration that is enough to tear it apart. Basically, after a hole has been made, the mechanical energy stored in the balloon is used up in creation of new surfaces at the tear, and the effect is self sustaining. If you try that trick with pressure vessels, you'll find that as long as the hole is big enough, or the vessel is thick enough, it won't disintegrate.
Rock is not like that at all. It is not thin, not at all. Whatever stress concentration there would be is grossly insufficient to tear through miles of rock and to keep going. The worst that would happen is an uncontrolled release of steam and other gasses. If you'd get magma backflow, it'd quickly solidify as the pipe is quite thin -- there's lots of surface area per unit of volume.
You'd need to take the energy out of that thing at a certain rate. Let's see what ballpark that rate falls into.
For potential energy, if we assume average crust density of 2.7g/cm^3, radius of 35km, 10km thick, then 2*pi*(35km)^2*10km*2.7g/cm^3 = 6E15kg. That rising 1cm a year means energy flow of 6E14J/year = 18MW. That's the minimum you'd have to extract, methinks.
The heat flow from the mantle over this area is 65E-3 W/(m^2) * (2*pi*(35 km)^2) = 500MW, so it's an order of magnitude more.
Even if the assumptions are quite off, you're still looking at dozens to hundreds of megawatts. So in terms of handling the thermal power, it's well within our capabilities. As for engineering reality, I don't know how easy of a project it would be. My worry is that it may need a lot of water just to get going, and I don't know how those rocks are at absorbing water.
But my worry is something else: our biosphere has came to be in presence of such "destructive" events. The question is, thus, if we protect ourselves from all major eruptions, what unintended consequences will it have?
If everyone had insurance, I'd agree with you. With so many uninsured that the insured have to pay for -- I'm bothered. Perhaps a middle ground would be that you can drive without seat belts if you have health insurance that's not subsidized more than say 50% by some level of government.
The LIDAR that they use already has a reflected waveform analysis: it does not depend on a single echo, but on a variable-in-space reflection coefficient. It analyzes that to determine location of the ground and canopy top, and perhaps also canopy bottom, or multiple canopy levels. I'm sure that they are storing raw data, so the analysis can be as extensive as one wants: the flyover is expensive, so you can't really afford to throw away useful data and everything is collected. Data reduction is done later.
Since their LIDAR works at 1um, there is unfortunate water absorption there (about 0.14 at 1064nm vs. 3 orders of magnitude less at 400nm - blue light), but I'm sure that they can choose their weather wisely -- after all, they do flyovers. They have to pull weather reports anyway, and one doesn't do expensive flyovers without doing one's meteo homework I'm sure.
+1 informative.
So, you mean it doesn't do all that better than human vision? Agreed.
You mean that they sold off their alpha or beta platform?
Your visual system does NOT do 3D mapping of anything. It does some model fitting from a stereoscopic image, and cannot do most of what their sensor platform does. You're either horribly misinformed or just trolling.
The forest they looked at would be about as accessible in terms of location accessibility to a human eye as it is to their platform: they fly a plane over the forest. Their sensor platform is mounted on a plane.
Alas, it's silly to think a human could be as effective as their sensor platform, because their platform has access to way more data than human visual system does. Not only do the spectrometers sense well into the infrared (2um), but the LIDAR system also measures 3D distribution of biomass, and the relief of the underlying terrain. They can see freaking old riverbed right through the trees, while also seeing the tree canopies. The latter image is not a photograph, mind you. It is a visualization, or reconstruction, of the LIDAR and spectral data.
In the "good old days", when all you had was your eyes and a theodolite, you'd need a lengthy and risky expedition on the ground to acquire all that 3D data manually -- and that works well only for ground relief. We're not monkeys.
I always imagined those old articles to be beautifully typeset. Looking at first article in first issue of Philosophical Transactions A (from 1887) doi: 10.1098/rsta.1887.0001 (On the Luni-Solar Variations of Magnetic Declination and Horizontal Force at Bombay, and of Declination at Trevandrum), there are several tables with values set with a bunch of leading zeroes taking up most of the space (tables are full of values on the order of 10^-5 typeset like +0.000016). What a disappointment!
As I understand it vaccines are typically a weakened form of a virus so the body gets exposed to the virus with our catching it. But from what i have seen with flu vaccines about half the people get a mild flu and about 5% get a full blown flu.
That's the silliest thing in this whole thread. I've had a "full blown flu" once, and it's not something one forgets easily. If 5% of people who get vaccinated got flu due to being vaccinated, there'd be a huge public outcry. You've got your orders of magnitude messed up, at best.
Compulsory insurance should be there for another reason: so that the coverage cannot be denied on the argument that people will buy insurance, get a procedure done, then drop it.
I don't think that varying premium based on seatbelt use is a ludicrous rule. The biomechanics of it are fairly well understood. Smokers do pay higher insurance rates, and nobody scoffs at that. As for lardasses eating cheetos: good life insurance will have a huge health questionnaire, and belive me, they will slap you with higher premiums if you're a lardass. If you lie to them, you can be jailed for it, and for a good reason IMHO.