The dark side of the moon? It isn't. Think about it - the moon is locked such that the same face looks to Earth at all times. Thus, by definition, the far side of the moon MUST be lit by the sun some of the time - for example, during a lunar eclipse.
But when you say "Heat energy", do you mean infrared waves? Do you mean the actual reality of what heat is (molecular kinetic energy)? Did you bother to remember that you can't extract work from heat, only from heat differentials?
Using heat waves to move a current on a quantum level... what a bunch of bullshit.
The reason is very simple: To make a copy of software so that one more user can use it - you just have to download it. To make a copy of hardware so that one more user can use it - you have to actually manufacture a piece of hardware.
I grew up in Michigan; hard to buy foreign cars when you do that. DCX is definitely well on its way to removing itself from the Big 3. I wound up with a Mazda assembled up in Flat Rock; yes, Ford owns it, but so far it seems like the same sort of deal - Mazda develops with Ford financing, and Ford takes the platform and makes a Ford car based on it (e.g. the 500).
But DCX seems to have taken German pricing and combined it with the worst parts of both of their engineering. If Chrysler had managed to retain any control, maybe it would have been different, but it was definitely a buyout, not a merger.
Haven't really been all that impressed with the WRXs I've driven, but each to their own.
I'm not even really thinking about elemental transmutation, which is what you seem to be discussing. There, you're basically worried about your energy transition and barrier energies; unfortunately, barrier energies tend to be pretty high for most of the desirable reactions. Remember that you don't gain energy for many fission reactions, pretty much all the lighter element feedstocks wouldn't be worth fissioning, and fusion ceases to be energetically favorable once you're past carbon. All of these are going to be incredibly energy-expensive, and trying to recover the thermal energy released isn't that easy if you're also trying to do usable work in the same space. I don't know that, if we can achieve controlled fusion, its even worth trying to recover energy gained in fission/fusion; the extra complexity of the machine would probably more than outweigh the energy savings given how cheap controlled fusion would be if we can achieve atomic-level assembly.
1) Food co-ops sometimes, farmer's markets, or calling farms that grow it are best bets. I've seen it at major grocery stores, but its rare. You do have to work to track it down. If you have a local kosher or halal butcher, they often have a line on that sort of thing. Other places to ask are at high-end restaurants; they tend to get better quality meat, they may or may not be willing to tell you where.
2) Generally, it is advertised as such, and you have to rely on laws against false advertising unless you have some other way of knowing the truth value, such as knowing the farmer. Kosher/halal certification is also good for knowing certain things about the animal, and here you're simply trusting that the rabbi/whatever the equivalent is for halal isn't lying.
3) This is true. That's why I recommend: organic kosher/halal meat, as there are strict rules as to how it can be raised/killed, as well as being organic meat (no hormones, etc.) As to the water thing, it's like any druggie knows - know your dealer.
4) That's like saying if you're against factory farming, you shouldn't eat eggs at all because some of them are factory farmed. You shouldn't eat factory-farmed products, sure, but its not that hard to track down cage-free eggs. And garbage collector? What?
For me, good meat tastes fucking good, and I'm not about to deprive myself because some people are too lazy to do a little work. Some people have ethical objections to any meat. Some people just don't like the taste. Being that I have neither ethics nor a distaste for beef, it's very little effort for me to eat only/mostly high-quality meat.
I think its amusing how many vegetarians I know who'll happily eat factory-farmed veggies, and then turn around and yell at me when I have halal lamb for dinner.
My assumption is that if we can build an atomic-level fab, we have controlled fusion reactions available. That said, for the simple reason of conservation of mass-energy, a mass converter type fab is impractical even with fusion power (why? because only a portion of the mass in the fusion reaction is released as usable energy, while we have to provide all the energy to create the mass in a mass converter). An assembler is likely to be energy intensive - if we have controlled fusion, that'd be fine, but if we're relying on solar cells to provide the energy for a fabrication-based world, we're fooling ourselves.
Take off and landing are difficult... for HTOL aircraft. This is designed to use VTOL (vertical thrusters) to gain altitude, which won't rely on wings for lift; instead, the thin atmosphere and low gravity are beneficial, as both drag forces and gravity forces are reduced. During takeoff, this thing is basically a rocket, for which thin atmosphere and low gravity are benefits.
Once it hits altitude, it begins to fly; it's going to need a huge wingspan to do that, true, but it can get most of the speed from
Similarly, the landing is vertical, which means that all it needs to do is cancel horizontal speed and then use the vertical thruster as a brake to make a soft landing, roughly the same way the Apollo modules landed on the moon. Stability is the only issue with these, and its a surmountable obstacle.
Bottom line: there's no real reason to believe the takeoff/landing of this is unworkable - Apollo worked the same way. Flight is the only question mark, and we're pretty good at understanding how to make things fly; if they can make it fly in a low-density vacuum chamber on Earth, using helium to simulate the low-gravity condition, it seems likely they can make it fly on Mars.
Disclaimer: I am not a aerospace engineer, though I did take a few aero courses in college.
The problem with solar is that there probably isn't enough power to supply *everyone's* needs once you account for the fact that we're not going to tile the entire globe over, since we need space to do things like live and grow food, especially given two assumptions:
1. Desktop fabricators will be energy-intensive. 2. If they're desktop, assume that most of the world will have/want them, including countries that currently don't need all that much in the way of energy.
a part of Daimler-Benz, which merged with Chrysler corporation
I work in the auto industry. Although the correct business term may be 'merged', the term everyone who has to work with DCX uses is 'bought' or 'swallowed'. The Germans are *definitely* in charge over there.
The "look at all the awful things they do to meat" meme is bullshit. If you don't like factory farming, eat properly farmed meat. Nothing tastes good like a cheeseburger made out of no-hormones, free-ranged beef.
What about people who live in environments which solar cells are quite simply unsuitable for? Some parts of Earth's surface simply don't have enough light incident upon them for solar cells to be useful.
I suspect that by the time we can get nano-assembly of macro objects right, we'll have functional fusion generators, which will make energy significantly cheaper, to the point where nano-assemblers become practical energy-wise, so long as we aren't talking about pure energy to matter converters, which are impractical to power given any realistic power source.
But the energy cost issue is quite real; there's no such thing as free power.
I have a PS2 also. For RPGs, it's where it's at. But the GC has a *lot* of high quality games, especially the ones coming from Nintendo. Yes, many of them are rehashes of old franchises... but they're well done, entertaining rehashes. And I just want fun games to play, so that suits me just fine.
No, not really. When you're talking about 25c microcontrollers, you actually save more money by saving package size and part count than you do by having slightly cheaper total BOM.
Re:Already Solved - Vanadium Redox
on
230mph Electric Car
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Well, technically *everything we use* is non-renewable. Steel. Aluminum. Etc. Even sunlight, on a long enough time scale.
But it isn't like gasoline; the vanadium isn't actually used up. The vanadium is in solution; when you charge it, you chemically change it; discharge reverses the change. Think of it like a lead-acid battery; how often do you have to replace the lead and acid in one of those?
LED turn on time, for the record, is better than incandescent turn on time.
The dimmer problem for CF and LEDs has to do with how current dimmers, designed for incandescents, work. They, as you said, are basically variable resistors - they change the voltage supplied to the bulb, which changes the current through the filament, which modulates the emitted light.
Your idea about turning off various LEDs would work; however, there's a better way. And, bonus, its actually simpler to implement.
LEDs are easily dimmable; the easiest way is to provide a variable series resistor, allowing you to change the current. However, there are a number of reasons this is a dumb approach (easy to burn out, very non-linear response, etc.). A much better approach is to use a variable duty cycle PWM drive waveform at constant voltage; this allows an incredibly good range of dimmability for LEDs. The downside is it requires somewhat more complex electronics; that said, a 4 bit microcontroller or even a (cheapish) custom ASIC could easily handle the switching; hell, you could even make modules to convert traditional analog voltage dimmers to LED dimmers (ADC to micro, based on sampled voltage set the PWM duty cycle).
re: 2) Not constant; linear torque with RPM for many types of electric motors. Others, such as series-wound DC motors, display near-constant torque over a certain portion of their range. For an EV type load, you want constant torque to a certain point, and then you would like to shift to constant power. Series-wound DC motors approximate this curve quite well.
Re:Already Solved - Vanadium Redox
on
230mph Electric Car
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Vanadium in a sulfuric acid solvent.
Vanadium (atomic number 23) is present in bauxite, which is an important aluminum ore, so it shouldn't be impossible to up the current feedstock of vanadium to support using it in this application. Costwise, due to the fact that there isn't a ton of need for it, the price is not indicative of what it would be in a situation where there was heavy supply/demand effects; that said, in 98 it went for about $5.50 per pound.
Sulfuric acid is currently manufactured in large quantities for, amongst other things, many industrial chemistry processes and car batteries. Probably not an issue.
Slashdot Mirror
I was going to congratulate you on such a nice troll post... when I realized that you weren't trolling. You're just a gamer.
Isn't that going to piss off my city council, though? I mean, they seem to work so hard passing the things in the first place...
Guess what?
The dark side of the moon? It isn't. Think about it - the moon is locked such that the same face looks to Earth at all times. Thus, by definition, the far side of the moon MUST be lit by the sun some of the time - for example, during a lunar eclipse.
The He3 will be more or less equally distributed.
Convertering energy would certainly be magic.
Converting it isn't.
But when you say "Heat energy", do you mean infrared waves? Do you mean the actual reality of what heat is (molecular kinetic energy)? Did you bother to remember that you can't extract work from heat, only from heat differentials?
Using heat waves to move a current on a quantum level... what a bunch of bullshit.
The reason is very simple: To make a copy of software so that one more user can use it - you just have to download it. To make a copy of hardware so that one more user can use it - you have to actually manufacture a piece of hardware.
For my GSM data plan (Cingular), ping was roughly 400-600ms and throughput seemed to be in the 4-6 kbps range.
I grew up in Michigan; hard to buy foreign cars when you do that. DCX is definitely well on its way to removing itself from the Big 3. I wound up with a Mazda assembled up in Flat Rock; yes, Ford owns it, but so far it seems like the same sort of deal - Mazda develops with Ford financing, and Ford takes the platform and makes a Ford car based on it (e.g. the 500).
But DCX seems to have taken German pricing and combined it with the worst parts of both of their engineering. If Chrysler had managed to retain any control, maybe it would have been different, but it was definitely a buyout, not a merger.
Haven't really been all that impressed with the WRXs I've driven, but each to their own.
I'm not even really thinking about elemental transmutation, which is what you seem to be discussing. There, you're basically worried about your energy transition and barrier energies; unfortunately, barrier energies tend to be pretty high for most of the desirable reactions. Remember that you don't gain energy for many fission reactions, pretty much all the lighter element feedstocks wouldn't be worth fissioning, and fusion ceases to be energetically favorable once you're past carbon. All of these are going to be incredibly energy-expensive, and trying to recover the thermal energy released isn't that easy if you're also trying to do usable work in the same space. I don't know that, if we can achieve controlled fusion, its even worth trying to recover energy gained in fission/fusion; the extra complexity of the machine would probably more than outweigh the energy savings given how cheap controlled fusion would be if we can achieve atomic-level assembly.
1) Food co-ops sometimes, farmer's markets, or calling farms that grow it are best bets. I've seen it at major grocery stores, but its rare. You do have to work to track it down. If you have a local kosher or halal butcher, they often have a line on that sort of thing. Other places to ask are at high-end restaurants; they tend to get better quality meat, they may or may not be willing to tell you where.
2) Generally, it is advertised as such, and you have to rely on laws against false advertising unless you have some other way of knowing the truth value, such as knowing the farmer. Kosher/halal certification is also good for knowing certain things about the animal, and here you're simply trusting that the rabbi/whatever the equivalent is for halal isn't lying.
3) This is true. That's why I recommend: organic kosher/halal meat, as there are strict rules as to how it can be raised/killed, as well as being organic meat (no hormones, etc.) As to the water thing, it's like any druggie knows - know your dealer.
4) That's like saying if you're against factory farming, you shouldn't eat eggs at all because some of them are factory farmed. You shouldn't eat factory-farmed products, sure, but its not that hard to track down cage-free eggs. And garbage collector? What?
For me, good meat tastes fucking good, and I'm not about to deprive myself because some people are too lazy to do a little work. Some people have ethical objections to any meat. Some people just don't like the taste. Being that I have neither ethics nor a distaste for beef, it's very little effort for me to eat only/mostly high-quality meat.
I think its amusing how many vegetarians I know who'll happily eat factory-farmed veggies, and then turn around and yell at me when I have halal lamb for dinner.
My assumption is that if we can build an atomic-level fab, we have controlled fusion reactions available. That said, for the simple reason of conservation of mass-energy, a mass converter type fab is impractical even with fusion power (why? because only a portion of the mass in the fusion reaction is released as usable energy, while we have to provide all the energy to create the mass in a mass converter). An assembler is likely to be energy intensive - if we have controlled fusion, that'd be fine, but if we're relying on solar cells to provide the energy for a fabrication-based world, we're fooling ourselves.
Take off and landing are difficult... for HTOL aircraft. This is designed to use VTOL (vertical thrusters) to gain altitude, which won't rely on wings for lift; instead, the thin atmosphere and low gravity are beneficial, as both drag forces and gravity forces are reduced. During takeoff, this thing is basically a rocket, for which thin atmosphere and low gravity are benefits.
Once it hits altitude, it begins to fly; it's going to need a huge wingspan to do that, true, but it can get most of the speed from
Similarly, the landing is vertical, which means that all it needs to do is cancel horizontal speed and then use the vertical thruster as a brake to make a soft landing, roughly the same way the Apollo modules landed on the moon. Stability is the only issue with these, and its a surmountable obstacle.
Bottom line: there's no real reason to believe the takeoff/landing of this is unworkable - Apollo worked the same way. Flight is the only question mark, and we're pretty good at understanding how to make things fly; if they can make it fly in a low-density vacuum chamber on Earth, using helium to simulate the low-gravity condition, it seems likely they can make it fly on Mars.
Disclaimer: I am not a aerospace engineer, though I did take a few aero courses in college.
The problem with solar is that there probably isn't enough power to supply *everyone's* needs once you account for the fact that we're not going to tile the entire globe over, since we need space to do things like live and grow food, especially given two assumptions:
1. Desktop fabricators will be energy-intensive.
2. If they're desktop, assume that most of the world will have/want them, including countries that currently don't need all that much in the way of energy.
a part of Daimler-Benz, which merged with Chrysler corporation
I work in the auto industry. Although the correct business term may be 'merged', the term everyone who has to work with DCX uses is 'bought' or 'swallowed'. The Germans are *definitely* in charge over there.
The "look at all the awful things they do to meat" meme is bullshit. If you don't like factory farming, eat properly farmed meat. Nothing tastes good like a cheeseburger made out of no-hormones, free-ranged beef.
What about people who live in environments which solar cells are quite simply unsuitable for? Some parts of Earth's surface simply don't have enough light incident upon them for solar cells to be useful.
I suspect that by the time we can get nano-assembly of macro objects right, we'll have functional fusion generators, which will make energy significantly cheaper, to the point where nano-assemblers become practical energy-wise, so long as we aren't talking about pure energy to matter converters, which are impractical to power given any realistic power source.
But the energy cost issue is quite real; there's no such thing as free power.
You forgot one thing:
Real geeks don't need phones to talk to their mom. They just yell up the stairs from the basement.
I own a Gamecube.
Metroid Prime. And #2.
Eternal Darkness.
The Super Monkey Balls.
Super Smash Bros.
I have a PS2 also. For RPGs, it's where it's at. But the GC has a *lot* of high quality games, especially the ones coming from Nintendo. Yes, many of them are rehashes of old franchises... but they're well done, entertaining rehashes. And I just want fun games to play, so that suits me just fine.
Sorry, have you ever actually *played* Animal Crossing? It's not really targeted at children.
No, not really. When you're talking about 25c microcontrollers, you actually save more money by saving package size and part count than you do by having slightly cheaper total BOM.
Well, technically *everything we use* is non-renewable. Steel. Aluminum. Etc. Even sunlight, on a long enough time scale.
But it isn't like gasoline; the vanadium isn't actually used up. The vanadium is in solution; when you charge it, you chemically change it; discharge reverses the change. Think of it like a lead-acid battery; how often do you have to replace the lead and acid in one of those?
Yeah, just realized how dumb my comment was in that regard. They're basically a very stupid AC PWM technique.
LED turn on time, for the record, is better than incandescent turn on time.
The dimmer problem for CF and LEDs has to do with how current dimmers, designed for incandescents, work. They, as you said, are basically variable resistors - they change the voltage supplied to the bulb, which changes the current through the filament, which modulates the emitted light.
Your idea about turning off various LEDs would work; however, there's a better way. And, bonus, its actually simpler to implement.
LEDs are easily dimmable; the easiest way is to provide a variable series resistor, allowing you to change the current. However, there are a number of reasons this is a dumb approach (easy to burn out, very non-linear response, etc.). A much better approach is to use a variable duty cycle PWM drive waveform at constant voltage; this allows an incredibly good range of dimmability for LEDs. The downside is it requires somewhat more complex electronics; that said, a 4 bit microcontroller or even a (cheapish) custom ASIC could easily handle the switching; hell, you could even make modules to convert traditional analog voltage dimmers to LED dimmers (ADC to micro, based on sampled voltage set the PWM duty cycle).
re: 2) Not constant; linear torque with RPM for many types of electric motors. Others, such as series-wound DC motors, display near-constant torque over a certain portion of their range. For an EV type load, you want constant torque to a certain point, and then you would like to shift to constant power. Series-wound DC motors approximate this curve quite well.
Vanadium in a sulfuric acid solvent.
Vanadium (atomic number 23) is present in bauxite, which is an important aluminum ore, so it shouldn't be impossible to up the current feedstock of vanadium to support using it in this application. Costwise, due to the fact that there isn't a ton of need for it, the price is not indicative of what it would be in a situation where there was heavy supply/demand effects; that said, in 98 it went for about $5.50 per pound.
Sulfuric acid is currently manufactured in large quantities for, amongst other things, many industrial chemistry processes and car batteries. Probably not an issue.
Exporting data to MATLAB.