I have never had a CD become unreadable in spite of being exposed to unprotected sunlight. I presume the only mechanism would be permanent warping of the plastic at high enough temperatures. Probably I don't live in the zone where there's enough solar flux, then.
But back to the original issue, I'd like to look at it from the underlying assumption: do we really care that there's a magnetic storm? Today's media have quite high coercivity -- I'd expect you may get significant damage of steel structures before the magnetic media start being affected?
It's funny that it was the exact situation in Eastern Europe in the late 80s and early 90s. I remember it quite vividly. Suppose you wanted an up-to-date copy of Visual C++ and Windows DDK right around the time when Windows 95 came out. Good luck buying it from official channels -- you were quoted delivery times of months, and overheads in multiples of US prices. IOW: no legitimate way to get it in time allotted for your project. Going to the local pirate, you could get it in an afternoon.
It usually goes like this: if you're an "expert" of such a caliber that the only work that's left for you is in government, you must be an idiot. There are very few experts who work in the government because they chose it over, say, engineering or academic research. The USPTO is a living proof how useless some government "expert" engineers are.
Would YOU like to hire someone who was reviewing the patents often mentioned on Slashdot?
Even if it costs 10 ITERs, it will generate way more electricity -- as in orders of magnitude more. And require way less maintenance than any ITER-like reactor that's currently on peoples' minds.
Of course I'm not encouraging any "schmo" to attempt such a job. First you should read up on the codes, and make sure you understand. I have ME and EE background -- that helps. Also, luckily I live in a place where homeowners can pull electrical/plumbing/HVAC permits for modification jobs and do those things themselves.
The biggest problem I see is that almost *anything* done more than a few years ago is most likely not code compliant, so to sleep well you have to spend more money than is immediately apparent, even if a modification might otherwise not require upgrading the whole circuit to bring it up to code. Those AFCIs aren't cheap, you know...
Even re-insulating the walls is fairly easy once you start doing the whole house, room-by-room. The first room is going to be hard, the second much less so, and the third one will be a non-thinker, almost.
I have recently faced taking off a horrible straw mat wallpaper. After spending 2 hours cleaning up one 4x7' section, it became obvious that taking down the drywall will be much easier. Especially that I had to run some new wire, and I hate unsupported wires just hanging in there; there is a point when patching up drywall takes longer than putting up new sheets.
With a tiny bit of experience (partial gut of a small half-bath), for two people working together I estimate taking down all wall drywall in a 10x20' room in one evening (6pm to 11pm) -- starting with a clean room with no furniture, and ending with a clean room with no drywall. Putting up the drywall would take say two more evenings, plus one evening for hauling the materials home from the store. Another evening for taping the joints and patching up all the screws. Then figure three partial evenings to prime and paint. You could be done in a week, and if you start on Monday, you should even have most of your Saturday and Sunday free -- painting won't take long with a sprayer.
If you have to re-run plumbing/electrical due to the age of the building, I'd figure another 2 evenings per room. So that gives you sort of a baseline to estimate how long things should take. Advance planning is key, and unless you are very close to a home improvement center, you definitely don't want to keep going to the store every day.
Depending on the home's layout, you may want to leave some walls exposed until the job is mostly done, if there are convenient places to run the wires/pipes to a central location.
All the costs you will incur, assuming your time is free, are for materials -- and drywall and insulation are not particularly expensive. Of course I assume that you have all the necessary tools, but if you're clever about it you can get everything you need for such a job, starting with no tools at all, for $1k or so.
Not eventually. That was their plan from day one. The recovery system failed on Falcon 9 flight 1, but it was there. They'll try to recover flight 2, and so on.
NASA's way of doing things hasn't changed one least bit in that quarter century. That's why two shuttles were lost. Feynman is a big genius in my book since he made an analysis of root organizational issues that NASA had, and that analysis is applicable till this day. We should keep our fingers crossed that NASA won't manage to kill a third crew until the Shuttle program is finished.
Obscure technology? HUH? Optically recorded audio tracks have been in use as long as movies with soundtracks have been around. The easiest way to reproduce the soundtrack was to have it on the film - that's why. Surely there have been magnetic strips in use as well, but optical track on the edge of the film is in widespread use. Even for digital sound! Of course the recordings in question weren't in a standard physical format, but I bet you could coax a contemporary movie projector to play those, as long as you could make an adapter to feed the film, and an optical jig to correctly form the sensing beam.
Generate PDF tickets on the fly. There are plenty of open source and commercial libraries to help you out.
As for a "major" Firefox printing bug etc: you're doing something wrong. I presume that's since you're new. I have an in house monstrosity that prints invoices (think tables, lots of lines and tight alignments) fine across the spectrum: from IE6 to every contemporary browsers. All using CSS and HTML. So it can be done, and I've yet to run into any printing bugs, major or otherwise. There are hacks to be sure, but nothing I consider to be browser bugs, more like specification bugs.
Whoa, whoa, the efficiency of a radiator is proportional to the loop area enclosed by the flowing current, right?
Modern cars don't use distributors, and spark plug current loops are quite small compared to what they used to be. A typical ignition module sits directly over the spark plug, buried in a hole within the aluminum head, and the area of the current loop is a square inch or two. When done correctly, you can't hear it on the AM radio band. I could compare it over 3 different Volvo models, when listening to a local AM station and driving into a concrete parking garage:
- 940: the station starts to fade after you're ~5-10m into the garage, and right then you could hear ignition harmonics (this car had a distributor and humongous spark current loop areas -- on the order of a square meter). - '00 S40: the ignition harmonics appear after the station completely fades out and you'd hear nothing but static + harmonics (this car has ignition modules that drive two spark plugs -- the loop area is maybe 10-15 square inches due to the wire going to adjacent spark plug) - '00 S80: you can't hear ignition harmonics at all, although perhaps you could measure them in the output using a sensitive instrument (loop area is 2-3 square inches)
IOW, the only things on a modern car designed to work in close proximity to ignition currents are the ignition modules, and maybe an occasional sensor somewhere on the head of the engine -- perhaps the camshaft position sensor.
Of course, the ignition modules can be polluting the supply rail with broadband spikes at ignition frequency, but that's just bad design or a sign of component failure, and not a fundamental limitation.
A rudimentary electric car motor controller can be made with things that are relatively EMP-safe. Some relays, dump resistors, motor(s), some wiring and a lead-acid battery. Just the way they did electric cars 100 years ago (yes, they had them back then). Many of the small components could be probably crafted with a foot-powered lathe/mill. For bigger stuff, you'd need a couple horses.
What point is to have a medium that does not survive everyday common conditions, but is specified for something that is impractical?
People leave their CDs in the sun all the time, there's nothing unusual or outrageous about. Heck, direct sunlight on the CD only adds little to the damage since the CD is already inside the car -- a glasshouse, full of hot air. Any temperature rise of a CD due to the heating in direct sunlight is probably small compared to the temperature rise due to heat exchange with hot air. Unless your CD has black silkscreen, that is.
I haven't looked closely at a CDR in a few years, but they used to have the data layer on top of the disc, and it was very easy to damage -- compared to pressed CDs, where the data layer is laminated between two plastic discs. Just a stupid design; I doubt that environmental conditions have much to do with it -- maybe they accelerate delamination/flaking of the data layer, but it wouldn't be a problem had the data layer been protected by substantial plastic on both sides.
I guess I forgot to add that obviously it's all about how good a theory is, and a theory is only as good as its predictive power. I have zero problems with even the most "crackpot" theories (time cube, anyone?), as long as they would be of some use. But the problem is that crackpot theories (including young Earth) are absolutely useless: they predict nothing, they are merely shrines for grandstanding. The people who propose many of those theories somehow expect "serious" scientists to take their work and put it to use: they missed the crux of the matter here -- it's their job to show that a theory is of some use first...
While this line of thinking always makes me chuckle, even if it were true it doesn't matter at all. Yeah, I get your joke.
But seriously, so what that the Universe was made 6000 years ago if it acts like it was made 13.75 billion years ago (not 3.5, duh)?
The arbitrary "young" age of our "old" Universe, namely 6000 years or WTH other number someone posits, has zero value. It does not let us predict anything, it matches no observations, it's merely an idol. The age of Universe as currently estimated by scientific method lets us predict things about said Universe -- it's not merely an idol, it has real uses and can be verified and further corrected as our knowledge expands.
Only if you do it silly. Here silly is using the kernel's built-in filesystem. You see, the problem is that the kernel does not let you iterate a filesystem in disk order. It can only iterate according to however the metadata is ordered, and that has nothing to do with how things are stored on the drive itself.
To do it right, you have to: 1. Have a capability to obtain self-consistent snapshots. ext3/4 and xfs provide that out of the box with lvm, so no problem there. 2. Write a client that parses all the filesystem structures itself, buffers things appropriately, and reads things in a linear order.
Just look at it. The design has abysmal panel coverage. Do note that there seems to be a couple mm of margin around the solar panel within the area covered by the clear plastic meniscus. They could have rather trivially increased the panel coverage by a factor of two, and with a bit more sweat it could have been 3x larger. I'd also like to see how they waterproofed the switch's operator (the black button protruding on top). It's not a trivial task, as not only you get water going straight down onto the switch, but also you get dirt from your fingers that will act to eat away any O-ring-like seal arrangements.
I'd also like to know what sort of power conditioning electronics do they use to charge the rechargeable cells, and to extract power from them. Designing efficient micropower power converters is quite an undertaking if you don't have an engineer who has done that once or twice (and done it well).
Having seen the abysmal design of common solar-powered garden lights, I don't really have high hopes. Now if anyone wonders: your typical $3.99 garden light sucks at power conversion efficiency. And by sucks I mean it's underperforming by 60%+. And the cell life is shortened as well: it's hard to maintain cell life without a power converter when all you have for energy source is PV cells.
Jim Williams should tackle that one and write it up in an app note;)
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I have never had a CD become unreadable in spite of being exposed to unprotected sunlight. I presume the only mechanism would be permanent warping of the plastic at high enough temperatures. Probably I don't live in the zone where there's enough solar flux, then.
But back to the original issue, I'd like to look at it from the underlying assumption: do we really care that there's a magnetic storm? Today's media have quite high coercivity -- I'd expect you may get significant damage of steel structures before the magnetic media start being affected?
Floating div elements are not really meant to be split across pages, right?
In most browsers, you can adjust those printing settings programmatically AFAIK.
Seconded.
It's funny that it was the exact situation in Eastern Europe in the late 80s and early 90s. I remember it quite vividly. Suppose you wanted an up-to-date copy of Visual C++ and Windows DDK right around the time when Windows 95 came out. Good luck buying it from official channels -- you were quoted delivery times of months, and overheads in multiples of US prices. IOW: no legitimate way to get it in time allotted for your project. Going to the local pirate, you could get it in an afternoon.
I stand corrected. Thanks.
It usually goes like this: if you're an "expert" of such a caliber that the only work that's left for you is in government, you must be an idiot. There are very few experts who work in the government because they chose it over, say, engineering or academic research. The USPTO is a living proof how useless some government "expert" engineers are.
Would YOU like to hire someone who was reviewing the patents often mentioned on Slashdot?
Even if it costs 10 ITERs, it will generate way more electricity -- as in orders of magnitude more. And require way less maintenance than any ITER-like reactor that's currently on peoples' minds.
Of course I'm not encouraging any "schmo" to attempt such a job. First you should read up on the codes, and make sure you understand. I have ME and EE background -- that helps. Also, luckily I live in a place where homeowners can pull electrical/plumbing/HVAC permits for modification jobs and do those things themselves.
The biggest problem I see is that almost *anything* done more than a few years ago is most likely not code compliant, so to sleep well you have to spend more money than is immediately apparent, even if a modification might otherwise not require upgrading the whole circuit to bring it up to code. Those AFCIs aren't cheap, you know...
Heck, even as a European-born grammar nazi, I didn't catch that. Thanks for pointing it out. Seriously.
Even re-insulating the walls is fairly easy once you start doing the whole house, room-by-room. The first room is going to be hard, the second much less so, and the third one will be a non-thinker, almost.
I have recently faced taking off a horrible straw mat wallpaper. After spending 2 hours cleaning up one 4x7' section, it became obvious that taking down the drywall will be much easier. Especially that I had to run some new wire, and I hate unsupported wires just hanging in there; there is a point when patching up drywall takes longer than putting up new sheets.
With a tiny bit of experience (partial gut of a small half-bath), for two people working together I estimate taking down all wall drywall in a 10x20' room in one evening (6pm to 11pm) -- starting with a clean room with no furniture, and ending with a clean room with no drywall. Putting up the drywall would take say two more evenings, plus one evening for hauling the materials home from the store. Another evening for taping the joints and patching up all the screws. Then figure three partial evenings to prime and paint. You could be done in a week, and if you start on Monday, you should even have most of your Saturday and Sunday free -- painting won't take long with a sprayer.
If you have to re-run plumbing/electrical due to the age of the building, I'd figure another 2 evenings per room. So that gives you sort of a baseline to estimate how long things should take. Advance planning is key, and unless you are very close to a home improvement center, you definitely don't want to keep going to the store every day.
Depending on the home's layout, you may want to leave some walls exposed until the job is mostly done, if there are convenient places to run the wires/pipes to a central location.
All the costs you will incur, assuming your time is free, are for materials -- and drywall and insulation are not particularly expensive. Of course I assume that you have all the necessary tools, but if you're clever about it you can get everything you need for such a job, starting with no tools at all, for $1k or so.
But there is an equivalent of Ares V: Falcon 9 heavy.
Not eventually. That was their plan from day one. The recovery system failed on Falcon 9 flight 1, but it was there. They'll try to recover flight 2, and so on.
NASA's way of doing things hasn't changed one least bit in that quarter century. That's why two shuttles were lost. Feynman is a big genius in my book since he made an analysis of root organizational issues that NASA had, and that analysis is applicable till this day. We should keep our fingers crossed that NASA won't manage to kill a third crew until the Shuttle program is finished.
Obscure technology? HUH? Optically recorded audio tracks have been in use as long as movies with soundtracks have been around. The easiest way to reproduce the soundtrack was to have it on the film - that's why. Surely there have been magnetic strips in use as well, but optical track on the edge of the film is in widespread use. Even for digital sound! Of course the recordings in question weren't in a standard physical format, but I bet you could coax a contemporary movie projector to play those, as long as you could make an adapter to feed the film, and an optical jig to correctly form the sensing beam.
Generate PDF tickets on the fly. There are plenty of open source and commercial libraries to help you out.
As for a "major" Firefox printing bug etc: you're doing something wrong. I presume that's since you're new. I have an in house monstrosity that prints invoices (think tables, lots of lines and tight alignments) fine across the spectrum: from IE6 to every contemporary browsers. All using CSS and HTML. So it can be done, and I've yet to run into any printing bugs, major or otherwise. There are hacks to be sure, but nothing I consider to be browser bugs, more like specification bugs.
I'd be worried that low incidence angle lowers the available energy flux to useless levels...
Whoa, whoa, the efficiency of a radiator is proportional to the loop area enclosed by the flowing current, right?
Modern cars don't use distributors, and spark plug current loops are quite small compared to what they used to be. A typical ignition module sits directly over the spark plug, buried in a hole within the aluminum head, and the area of the current loop is a square inch or two. When done correctly, you can't hear it on the AM radio band. I could compare it over 3 different Volvo models, when listening to a local AM station and driving into a concrete parking garage:
- 940: the station starts to fade after you're ~5-10m into the garage, and right then you could hear ignition harmonics (this car had a distributor and humongous spark current loop areas -- on the order of a square meter).
- '00 S40: the ignition harmonics appear after the station completely fades out and you'd hear nothing but static + harmonics (this car has ignition modules that drive two spark plugs -- the loop area is maybe 10-15 square inches due to the wire going to adjacent spark plug)
- '00 S80: you can't hear ignition harmonics at all, although perhaps you could measure them in the output using a sensitive instrument (loop area is 2-3 square inches)
IOW, the only things on a modern car designed to work in close proximity to ignition currents are the ignition modules, and maybe an occasional sensor somewhere on the head of the engine -- perhaps the camshaft position sensor.
Of course, the ignition modules can be polluting the supply rail with broadband spikes at ignition frequency, but that's just bad design or a sign of component failure, and not a fundamental limitation.
A rudimentary electric car motor controller can be made with things that are relatively EMP-safe. Some relays, dump resistors, motor(s), some wiring and a lead-acid battery. Just the way they did electric cars 100 years ago (yes, they had them back then). Many of the small components could be probably crafted with a foot-powered lathe/mill. For bigger stuff, you'd need a couple horses.
What point is to have a medium that does not survive everyday common conditions, but is specified for something that is impractical?
People leave their CDs in the sun all the time, there's nothing unusual or outrageous about. Heck, direct sunlight on the CD only adds little to the damage since the CD is already inside the car -- a glasshouse, full of hot air. Any temperature rise of a CD due to the heating in direct sunlight is probably small compared to the temperature rise due to heat exchange with hot air. Unless your CD has black silkscreen, that is.
I haven't looked closely at a CDR in a few years, but they used to have the data layer on top of the disc, and it was very easy to damage -- compared to pressed CDs, where the data layer is laminated between two plastic discs. Just a stupid design; I doubt that environmental conditions have much to do with it -- maybe they accelerate delamination/flaking of the data layer, but it wouldn't be a problem had the data layer been protected by substantial plastic on both sides.
Sorry, I just realized your 3.5by was in reference to Earth's age estimate, not that for Universe.
I guess I forgot to add that obviously it's all about how good a theory is, and a theory is only as good as its predictive power. I have zero problems with even the most "crackpot" theories (time cube, anyone?), as long as they would be of some use. But the problem is that crackpot theories (including young Earth) are absolutely useless: they predict nothing, they are merely shrines for grandstanding. The people who propose many of those theories somehow expect "serious" scientists to take their work and put it to use: they missed the crux of the matter here -- it's their job to show that a theory is of some use first...
While this line of thinking always makes me chuckle, even if it were true it doesn't matter at all. Yeah, I get your joke.
But seriously, so what that the Universe was made 6000 years ago if it acts like it was made 13.75 billion years ago (not 3.5, duh)?
The arbitrary "young" age of our "old" Universe, namely 6000 years or WTH other number someone posits, has zero value. It does not let us predict anything, it matches no observations, it's merely an idol. The age of Universe as currently estimated by scientific method lets us predict things about said Universe -- it's not merely an idol, it has real uses and can be verified and further corrected as our knowledge expands.
Only if you do it silly. Here silly is using the kernel's built-in filesystem. You see, the problem is that the kernel does not let you iterate a filesystem in disk order. It can only iterate according to however the metadata is ordered, and that has nothing to do with how things are stored on the drive itself.
To do it right, you have to:
1. Have a capability to obtain self-consistent snapshots. ext3/4 and xfs provide that out of the box with lvm, so no problem there.
2. Write a client that parses all the filesystem structures itself, buffers things appropriately, and reads things in a linear order.
Just look at it. The design has abysmal panel coverage. Do note that there seems to be a couple mm of margin around the solar panel within the area covered by the clear plastic meniscus. They could have rather trivially increased the panel coverage by a factor of two, and with a bit more sweat it could have been 3x larger. I'd also like to see how they waterproofed the switch's operator (the black button protruding on top). It's not a trivial task, as not only you get water going straight down onto the switch, but also you get dirt from your fingers that will act to eat away any O-ring-like seal arrangements.
I'd also like to know what sort of power conditioning electronics do they use to charge the rechargeable cells, and to extract power from them. Designing efficient micropower power converters is quite an undertaking if you don't have an engineer who has done that once or twice (and done it well).
Having seen the abysmal design of common solar-powered garden lights, I don't really have high hopes. Now if anyone wonders: your typical $3.99 garden light sucks at power conversion efficiency. And by sucks I mean it's underperforming by 60%+. And the cell life is shortened as well: it's hard to maintain cell life without a power converter when all you have for energy source is PV cells.
Jim Williams should tackle that one and write it up in an app note ;)