> Batteries like this are almost 100% recycled into new batteries when they reach the end of their useful life.
That is not currently true, but is becoming more true as time goes on. Recycling rates for lead-acid batteries are quite high, and there's a reasonably robust supply chain from your local batteries plus or what have you, all the way back to building new batteries from reclaimed materials. The corresponding industry for the various LiIon chemistries is still in its infancy, but will grow rapidly as the supply of end-of-life lithium cells starts to boom in the coming years. We'll work out a reasonably optimal schedule of primary use, second-life use (eg EV battery packs refurbished / reused for stationary storage), and eventually recycling.
Lead-acid battery recycling has a fairly uniform product to be handled, both in terms of size and chemistry, whereas LiIon chemistries vary widely and individual cells range from the 0.1AHr range to the 100AHr range for big pouch cells. I'm not a battery expert so I'm not sure how big a problem that is from a recycling perspective. I suspect efficient and scalable battery disassembly is currently a larger problem than sorting the different electrodes for potentially-different processing afterward. Perhaps someone who actually knows something about this can comment further.
BNEF has access to good research and should have written a better article. Instead they've constructed a clickbait article full of gibberish that obscures rather than illuminates what data they do deign to present:
1. An average EV is less polluting, per mile, than even the best gasoline or diesel vehicle. 2. If that EV were built with dirty power, and charged throughout its life with dirty power, it would still be a net win, albeit a small one verging on a tie, on lifetime emissions. 3. We're projected to be be building a whole lot of new EVs.
And there's no mention of the obvious objections to this sort of facile analysis: 1. The average new EV probably displaces a purchase of an average new gasmobile, so the comparison with the most-efficient gasmobile is unrealistic. If the average new EV driver is particularly eco-conscious, and would otherwise be buying a highly-efficient gasmobile, that new driver is probably also sourcing the power from cleaner-than-average supplies, so calculating as if it were charged from the average local grid is unrealistic. 2. Grid carbon intensities are dropping worldwide, and the speed of this drop is accelerating as renewables get cheaper and cheaper relative to fossil-fueled plants. New renewables are cheaper than new thermal power plants almost everywhere, and we're only a few years away from new renewables being cheaper than continuing to fuel an already-built thermal plant in some parts of the world. Over a 15-year lifespan, EVs will keep getting cleaner per-mile, whereas gasmobiles will wear out and become less efficient. 3. While the article focuses on manufacturing emissions, their own graphs show that these correspond to only about 2 years worth of tailpipe emissions. A worthwhile target for reduction, for sure (and one that will happen naturally, as large manufacturers consistently seek to reduce their power costs by buying cheap renewable energy), but not the big target that we should be focusing on. The running costs dominate lifetime emissions, so we should tackle them first (especially as cleaning up electricity generation world-wide would also significantly reduce manufacturing emissions).
BNEF usually produces much better analysis than this. I'm disappointed in them.
And you're right that cars tend to be expensive, and people tend not to rationally think about those costs. However, it's not always so. Consider my annual vehicle expenses, which are about the same as your transportation expenses:
I have a low-end Leaf, purchased at the end of the model year for about $14k after federal tax incentive. That's about $1k/yr for its expected lifetime. I drove 6225 miles last year at the cost of $159 worth of electricity, some wear on my tires, a few car washes, and new wiper blades. To do that driving legally added about $650 in registration and insurance as well.
If you're saving money by building machines yourself, you're paying too much for your computers. Which you knew, having asked the question in the first place.
Find a local computer store that builds whitebox machines. My workplace is lucky enough to be next door to such an outfit, and they build our machines for us. Basically, for the Newegg price of the components, we get an assembled, tested (they have a burn-in suite that runs for a day) machine with a 1-yr system warranty and our custom drive image installed. Customer support is great - walk over there and talk to a real person who isn't following a script and knows what he's talking about.
Your local computer store may be crap, but it's easy to tell, and if you have a good one it beats the hell out of buying from Dell.
TFA: "The first table is a summary of the test results with the May 2010 IE Platform Preview and each of the major shipping browsers running on Windows."
So...IE8 isn't a "major shipping browser" that runs on Windows?
If IE8 scores so terribly that Microsoft is embarrassed to post its scores, that's fine, but it would be less dishonest and more informative then to include recent betas of their competitors' browsers in addition to the latest shipping version.
Sure I leave my browser running all the time. FF runs from a few minutes after I log in until Windows gets flaky and slow weeks-to-months later. Browser tabs are a great to-do list, with context and history. Why would I ever close my browser? 5 seconds to load it up (or 3 minutes, if it's restoring my ~100 tabs) is a waste of time, and RAM is cheap.
Sure. If speed, durability, power, and acoustics are valueless to you.
For the rest of us, SSDs are worth a premium. The amount of that premium depends on the user and workload.
However, given the success of WD's Raptor line of drives, I would suggest that there's certainly a segment of the population who needs or thinks it needs faster rather than larger disk. And further that this segment is sufficiently large to support a business.
It's not just database users who are buying fast SSDs (which can hit 200MB/sec read and >100MB/sec write these days), and prices are plunging as a result.
>The target for the Macbook Air is the road-warrior, the person who racks up enough frequent flyer miles in a year to fly to Paris for Christmas.
Don't those people already have X-series Thinkpads? I know I do. Granted, this one's about twice as fast (maybe 3x), 15% lighter, and has a nicer screen. The price is about the same. But my Thinkpad has another hour of battery life (and it's removable too), twice the USB ports, firewire, gigE, a CF reader, IR, a PC-CARD slot, a real video port, parallel, and a dock connector. And it's 6 years old.
Dropping all the extra bits my X31 has would save probably more than that 15% weight, so what we're left with is that in 6 years Apple's got a faster machine with a better screen. That's really disappointing.
The wireless CD drive sharing Apple's doing is cool. I'd like to see EFI replace the legacy BIOS in the rest of the market so we can start seeing more of that kind of thing. But the hardware they're selling is a badly designed Thinkpad shaped like a squished chiclet. And it's not black.
Yes, I'm sure this will increase the long-term profitability of Mr. Tilton's business enterprise. Imagine the happiness one must feel settling down into an industrial bank of chairs at the gate, knowing that for just a few dollars more per ticket, one has secured the incalculable benefit of a different colored baggage tag. Much like a different-colored credit card or checks with pictures on them, the knowledge that one is, in actual fact, a big shot must be splendid. Why, I'm nearly overcome with joy knowing that for just a few dollars more on my taxes, I've summoned into existence an entire army of highly trained professionals who are ensuring that rather than the coffee I've brewed at home, I am enjoying, while seated in those industrial chairs, only the finest brew, made from beans blessed by a bored TSA agent who languidly waved through a man he's met every day of his job, pushing the same cart of restaurant supplies to the same place. As a happy side-effect, I'm protected from the dangers of e. coli in my juice and cryptosporidium in my water.
This sense of serenity is surely not measurable by such pedestrian metrics as dollars and hours.
Legacy support is important to many business Windows customers; some of them are still using 16-years-old custom software that needs to run on whatever desktop OS their employees are running.
Bullshit.
Slap it in an DOS VM and be done with it. Hell, that's basically what NT does anyway. Backwards compatibility is a great excuse for a crummy security model and a requirement of the marketing department which can't really give a satisfactory answer to "...but why shouldn't I run my DOS VM on Linux and save $200?" It's not actually a technical requirement. In a world where you can buy a quad-core CPU for a couple hundred bucks, with each core as fast as the fastest x86 chip you could buy a couple years ago, there's really no reason not to cordon off all that nasty old Windows code in a VM or two and let it munch on one of the cores.
The word you're looking for is GPT. It has nothing to do with 4k hardware sectors, but it does support up to 128 partitions. Which ought to be enough for anybody (says the man with a 1 average number of partitions per disk in his household).
In particular, there is a speed limiter in your car, in all liklihood. It's probably set at somewhere between 100 and 140 mph. So it's not even an issue with added expense, etc. A simple software tweak would keep you from going faster than 75 (the fastest posted speed limit I know of in the US, though parts of Montana or somesuch may be faster).
Speed limits aren't enforced, with rare exceptions (speed traps). In general, only egregious violations (== unsafe driving) are pursued. Applying this model to copyright would result in the regime that existed prior to all the hooha about DRM: large duplicating rings are busted, but the little guy gets ignored.
Standard fluorescents aren't full-spectrum because it's cheaper not to mix up a fancy batch of phosphors. It's not a technological limitation. In fact there already exist several companies producing fluorescents with very high (95+) CRI in common sizes.
CFLs are expensive to make but that's not a reason not to use them. Particularly for business use where you can't hand-wave away the labor cost to replace bulbs, CFLs are quite a bit cheaper, even on fairly short timescales.
That leaves your mercury argument. It's plausible, though it may not ultimately be reasonable. You'd have to balance the environmental costs for production, transportation, power, and disposal of CFLs versus the equivalent (in terms of watt-hours) number of incandescents. I suspect at that point it becomes more of a judgement call as to whether, say, more mercury from CFLs balances out less fuel for powering them. It's quite possible however that the energy saved by using CFLs reduces mercury contamination (say from coal-fired power plants) by a greater amount than the potential contamination caused by the mercury they contain.
I count two engines and no gears in your description though, so I don't think it's what the article is talking about.
I'm not certain of that however, because even the Georgia Tech article repeatedly talks about this engine being useful during takeoff. The initial claims could be simply bad phrasings of something true: less mass needed for maneuvering == less fuel on the launchpad == more space for payload. But then it says "Satellites using the Georgia Tech engine to blast off can carry more payload thanks to the mass freed up by the smaller amount of fuel needed for the trip into orbit." But obviously an ion engine isn't used during launch.
I'm guessing this is all the fault of "Megan McRainey, Institute Communications & Public Affairs" not being an aerospace engineer either and screwing up the details. Maybe next time/. won't jump the gun and will wait until there's actual news, maybe even written by someone involved in the project.
IANAAE (aerospace engineer), but obviously this is only applicable if either
1. high-thrust mode is hugely less efficient than low-thrust mode, or 2. there is a considerable fuel cost to starting and/or stopping the motor.
If neither applies, then you would simply run the motor at high thrust for shorter periods of time, without the added expense of a low-thrust mode.
The article wasn't what you might call detail-oriented, but this is some sort of electric ion propulsion scheme, which achieves high specific impulse (~3000sec, accd. wikipedia) and so optimising for efficiency makes sense. But it's still an ion drive, so there'll be no takeoffs in its future. At least not takeoffs from anything with a gravitational well deeper than an asteroid.
So we have an article about a thing. Only the article doesn't say what it is or what it's good for. I think I'll keep getting my space news from not-ZDnet, thanks.
I don't know a whole lot about chemistry, but I do know that if you start with photosynthesis, you can afford to blow an awful lot of efficiency before you're competing with something like PV cells, even the really good ones. Granted solar-thermal, which you explicitly mentioned, is more efficient but that only works when your ultimate goal is heat. Once you start using that heat for something else, like driving turbines to generate electricity, you're burning that efficiency again.
Of course it's immediately clear that you've written the post with each sentence having a different set of assumptions in order to get your rant on. That's fine, but you ought to be clear that once you're positing wide-scale economic and sociological changes to get nuclear baseload generators powering plug-in cars (not to mention the technical problems), you've pretty much shot your theory that the world needs more arable land to support its future population. There's more than enough food produced here to feed everyone. Of course, a lot of it ends up turned into non-food items, inefficiently turned into meat, wasted, or otherwise sent places that are not the mouths of the starving. But we're postulating wide-scale economic and sociological changes, right? So on our new mostly-veggie diets there's land to spare and we don't even need to resort to anything drastic like better management of the 70% of the world covered by water.
I guess what I'm saying is that as long as we're both talking out our asses, we really don't have any problems left so solve. It's just that the solutions are so darn unpalatable.
The idea of a fan base paying for content isn't new. To my knowledge it simply hasn't been seriously tried yet. "That's not how the industry works" seems to be the only reason why it won't work for something like Serenity.
Serenity cost $40m to make, and got about $40m in domestic and foreign box-office receipts. If half those people were willing to pay the equivalent of 2 tickets or 1 DVD prior to the production, Joss would have had his $40m to make the film, and the fans would have everything. The movie, the extras, the bloopers, the dailies, the music, the script, etc. If you opened things up a bit and allowed contributions like "I'll put in $20,000 and if the movie gets made I want one of Morena Baccarin's outfits", you'd have your $40m that much faster, though the process could get a bit chaotic.
Maybe I'm being horribly naiive, but it seems to me that if the only thing standing between Firefly and Serenity was $40m, it shouldn't have taken nearly as long as it did.
Do you whine about ethernet being described in bits? Ethernet doesn't deal with bytes - that's at a higher OSI level. Similarly, platters don't deal with bytes: that's the controller's job.
CFLs work in dimmer-equipped sockets. They just don't work terribly well with dimmed sockets. So don't use the dimmer and you'll be fine. I've been told that dimmable CFLs are slated to reach general distribution "soonish", which I interpret to mean 1H07. LED lamps cost a whole lot more and their efficiency isn't nearly high enough as compared to CFLs to justify it. LEDs do have the advantage of even longer lifetimes and actual instant-on capability, but they're essentially undimmable (though you could certainly design a bulb that would switch the LEDs at high frequency to simulate dimming when appropriate).
So take your glass bottle back to the security checkpoint and ask the manager there to put it in your checked baggage for you.
The TSA's List of prohibited items clearly states (in bold, no less) that "Beverages purchased after security screening" are permissable in checked baggage.
The Congress shall have Power...To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries
Goal: promote the progress... And method: secure exclusive rights. Not the other way around.
Re:Beyond publicity, is there a point?
on
Blu-ray Laser Gadget
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· Score: 5, Interesting
Blue is cool. Also, hard to do. Between the two, you get expensive.
Red lasers are cheap because they're cheap to make, though the suspiciously cheap ones are, indeed, suspiciously cheaply made. Green lasers are pretty close to the human eye's peak responsiveness, so they appear brighter at a given power level than red or blue lasers.
There are all manner of lasers. CO2, Argon, and other gas lasers. Chemical lasers. Diode lasers. And several other varieties. Hand-held (and small bench) lasers are commonly diode lasers. Low-power red laser diodes are approximately free, which is why they show up everywhere. Infrared laser diodes aren't terribly expensive, even fairly high-powered ones. There is no such thing as a green laser diode. Hand-held green lasers are DPSS lasers, in which a high power infrared laser blasts a fancy neodymium compound that outputs a different infrared frequency that in turn hits a frequency-doubling crystal which finally outputs 532nm green light.
The take-home message here is that blue laser light is hard to get so it's expensive. It's also not terribly useful unless you actually need the high frequency for denser data packing. Green laser light is harder to get than red laser light, but in addition to looking cool it legitimately is more visible per watt. Check out the CIE luminosity function - 650nm red light appears about 8x dimmer per watt than 532nm green light. A $100 15mW green laser therefore should appear almost as bright as a $200 200mW red laser. Even though production of green laser light is less efficient than production of red laser light, the green laser should consume somewhat less power than the red one.
You got an Insightful, but you've made some mistakes there.
You've taken 1.25% of 300M people in the US. But there aren't 300M voters. Rounding up since the 2000 census, there are about 200M US citizens 18 or older ( http://www.census.gov/population/cen2000/phc-t31/t ab01-01.pdf ). About half of those eligible actually vote. Midterm elections run lower, at about 30%, and presidential elections run higher, more like 50-60%. It would be more correct to say that a 1.25% error rate works out to about a million votes, not 4 million.
Rendering aid is perfectly legit without these new provisions. The food, medicine, shelter, etc. that weren't provided resulted in well-deserved criticism but no apparent change in policy, and this new law won't help with that.
The additions allow the use of military forces in a law enforcement setting whenever the president wants. And don't try arguing that it's restricted to cases where local law enforcement is incapable of maintaining order. Read the text again, this time pretending you're Alberto Gonzales and your boss wants to illegally spy on citizens' communication. The verbiage is loose enough to drive a truck full of soldiers right through it.
Slashdot Mirror
> Batteries like this are almost 100% recycled into new batteries when they reach the end of their useful life.
That is not currently true, but is becoming more true as time goes on. Recycling rates for lead-acid batteries are quite high, and there's a reasonably robust supply chain from your local batteries plus or what have you, all the way back to building new batteries from reclaimed materials. The corresponding industry for the various LiIon chemistries is still in its infancy, but will grow rapidly as the supply of end-of-life lithium cells starts to boom in the coming years. We'll work out a reasonably optimal schedule of primary use, second-life use (eg EV battery packs refurbished / reused for stationary storage), and eventually recycling.
Lead-acid battery recycling has a fairly uniform product to be handled, both in terms of size and chemistry, whereas LiIon chemistries vary widely and individual cells range from the 0.1AHr range to the 100AHr range for big pouch cells. I'm not a battery expert so I'm not sure how big a problem that is from a recycling perspective. I suspect efficient and scalable battery disassembly is currently a larger problem than sorting the different electrodes for potentially-different processing afterward. Perhaps someone who actually knows something about this can comment further.
BNEF has access to good research and should have written a better article. Instead they've constructed a clickbait article full of gibberish that obscures rather than illuminates what data they do deign to present:
1. An average EV is less polluting, per mile, than even the best gasoline or diesel vehicle.
2. If that EV were built with dirty power, and charged throughout its life with dirty power, it would still be a net win, albeit a small one verging on a tie, on lifetime emissions.
3. We're projected to be be building a whole lot of new EVs.
And there's no mention of the obvious objections to this sort of facile analysis:
1. The average new EV probably displaces a purchase of an average new gasmobile, so the comparison with the most-efficient gasmobile is unrealistic. If the average new EV driver is particularly eco-conscious, and would otherwise be buying a highly-efficient gasmobile, that new driver is probably also sourcing the power from cleaner-than-average supplies, so calculating as if it were charged from the average local grid is unrealistic.
2. Grid carbon intensities are dropping worldwide, and the speed of this drop is accelerating as renewables get cheaper and cheaper relative to fossil-fueled plants. New renewables are cheaper than new thermal power plants almost everywhere, and we're only a few years away from new renewables being cheaper than continuing to fuel an already-built thermal plant in some parts of the world. Over a 15-year lifespan, EVs will keep getting cleaner per-mile, whereas gasmobiles will wear out and become less efficient.
3. While the article focuses on manufacturing emissions, their own graphs show that these correspond to only about 2 years worth of tailpipe emissions. A worthwhile target for reduction, for sure (and one that will happen naturally, as large manufacturers consistently seek to reduce their power costs by buying cheap renewable energy), but not the big target that we should be focusing on. The running costs dominate lifetime emissions, so we should tackle them first (especially as cleaning up electricity generation world-wide would also significantly reduce manufacturing emissions).
BNEF usually produces much better analysis than this. I'm disappointed in them.
And you're right that cars tend to be expensive, and people tend not to rationally think about those costs. However, it's not always so. Consider my annual vehicle expenses, which are about the same as your transportation expenses:
$1000 'depreciation'
$584 insurance
$159 electricity
$100 maintenance
$85 vehicle registration
$70 tires
I have a low-end Leaf, purchased at the end of the model year for about $14k after federal tax incentive. That's about $1k/yr for its expected lifetime. I drove 6225 miles last year at the cost of $159 worth of electricity, some wear on my tires, a few car washes, and new wiper blades. To do that driving legally added about $650 in registration and insurance as well.
If you're saving money by building machines yourself, you're paying too much for your computers. Which you knew, having asked the question in the first place.
Find a local computer store that builds whitebox machines. My workplace is lucky enough to be next door to such an outfit, and they build our machines for us. Basically, for the Newegg price of the components, we get an assembled, tested (they have a burn-in suite that runs for a day) machine with a 1-yr system warranty and our custom drive image installed. Customer support is great - walk over there and talk to a real person who isn't following a script and knows what he's talking about.
Your local computer store may be crap, but it's easy to tell, and if you have a good one it beats the hell out of buying from Dell.
TFA: "The first table is a summary of the test results with the May 2010 IE Platform Preview and each of the major shipping browsers running on Windows."
So...IE8 isn't a "major shipping browser" that runs on Windows?
If IE8 scores so terribly that Microsoft is embarrassed to post its scores, that's fine, but it would be less dishonest and more informative then to include recent betas of their competitors' browsers in addition to the latest shipping version.
Sure I leave my browser running all the time. FF runs from a few minutes after I log in until Windows gets flaky and slow weeks-to-months later. Browser tabs are a great to-do list, with context and history. Why would I ever close my browser? 5 seconds to load it up (or 3 minutes, if it's restoring my ~100 tabs) is a waste of time, and RAM is cheap.
Sure. If speed, durability, power, and acoustics are valueless to you.
For the rest of us, SSDs are worth a premium. The amount of that premium depends on the user and workload.
However, given the success of WD's Raptor line of drives, I would suggest that there's certainly a segment of the population who needs or thinks it needs faster rather than larger disk. And further that this segment is sufficiently large to support a business.
It's not just database users who are buying fast SSDs (which can hit 200MB/sec read and >100MB/sec write these days), and prices are plunging as a result.
>The target for the Macbook Air is the road-warrior, the person who racks up enough frequent flyer miles in a year to fly to Paris for Christmas.
Don't those people already have X-series Thinkpads? I know I do. Granted, this one's about twice as fast (maybe 3x), 15% lighter, and has a nicer screen. The price is about the same. But my Thinkpad has another hour of battery life (and it's removable too), twice the USB ports, firewire, gigE, a CF reader, IR, a PC-CARD slot, a real video port, parallel, and a dock connector. And it's 6 years old.
Dropping all the extra bits my X31 has would save probably more than that 15% weight, so what we're left with is that in 6 years Apple's got a faster machine with a better screen. That's really disappointing.
The wireless CD drive sharing Apple's doing is cool. I'd like to see EFI replace the legacy BIOS in the rest of the market so we can start seeing more of that kind of thing. But the hardware they're selling is a badly designed Thinkpad shaped like a squished chiclet. And it's not black.
Yes, I'm sure this will increase the long-term profitability of Mr. Tilton's business enterprise. Imagine the happiness one must feel settling down into an industrial bank of chairs at the gate, knowing that for just a few dollars more per ticket, one has secured the incalculable benefit of a different colored baggage tag. Much like a different-colored credit card or checks with pictures on them, the knowledge that one is, in actual fact, a big shot must be splendid. Why, I'm nearly overcome with joy knowing that for just a few dollars more on my taxes, I've summoned into existence an entire army of highly trained professionals who are ensuring that rather than the coffee I've brewed at home, I am enjoying, while seated in those industrial chairs, only the finest brew, made from beans blessed by a bored TSA agent who languidly waved through a man he's met every day of his job, pushing the same cart of restaurant supplies to the same place. As a happy side-effect, I'm protected from the dangers of e. coli in my juice and cryptosporidium in my water.
This sense of serenity is surely not measurable by such pedestrian metrics as dollars and hours.
Bullshit.
Slap it in an DOS VM and be done with it. Hell, that's basically what NT does anyway. Backwards compatibility is a great excuse for a crummy security model and a requirement of the marketing department which can't really give a satisfactory answer to "...but why shouldn't I run my DOS VM on Linux and save $200?" It's not actually a technical requirement. In a world where you can buy a quad-core CPU for a couple hundred bucks, with each core as fast as the fastest x86 chip you could buy a couple years ago, there's really no reason not to cordon off all that nasty old Windows code in a VM or two and let it munch on one of the cores.
The word you're looking for is GPT. It has nothing to do with 4k hardware sectors, but it does support up to 128 partitions. Which ought to be enough for anybody (says the man with a 1 average number of partitions per disk in his household).
In particular, there is a speed limiter in your car, in all liklihood. It's probably set at somewhere between 100 and 140 mph. So it's not even an issue with added expense, etc. A simple software tweak would keep you from going faster than 75 (the fastest posted speed limit I know of in the US, though parts of Montana or somesuch may be faster).
Speed limits aren't enforced, with rare exceptions (speed traps). In general, only egregious violations (== unsafe driving) are pursued. Applying this model to copyright would result in the regime that existed prior to all the hooha about DRM: large duplicating rings are busted, but the little guy gets ignored.
I count one reason there.
Standard fluorescents aren't full-spectrum because it's cheaper not to mix up a fancy batch of phosphors. It's not a technological limitation. In fact there already exist several companies producing fluorescents with very high (95+) CRI in common sizes.
CFLs are expensive to make but that's not a reason not to use them. Particularly for business use where you can't hand-wave away the labor cost to replace bulbs, CFLs are quite a bit cheaper, even on fairly short timescales.
That leaves your mercury argument. It's plausible, though it may not ultimately be reasonable. You'd have to balance the environmental costs for production, transportation, power, and disposal of CFLs versus the equivalent (in terms of watt-hours) number of incandescents. I suspect at that point it becomes more of a judgement call as to whether, say, more mercury from CFLs balances out less fuel for powering them. It's quite possible however that the energy saved by using CFLs reduces mercury contamination (say from coal-fired power plants) by a greater amount than the potential contamination caused by the mercury they contain.
See, now that makes sense!
/. won't jump the gun and will wait until there's actual news, maybe even written by someone involved in the project.
I count two engines and no gears in your description though, so I don't think it's what the article is talking about.
I'm not certain of that however, because even the Georgia Tech article repeatedly talks about this engine being useful during takeoff. The initial claims could be simply bad phrasings of something true: less mass needed for maneuvering == less fuel on the launchpad == more space for payload. But then it says "Satellites using the Georgia Tech engine to blast off can carry more payload thanks to the mass freed up by the smaller amount of fuel needed for the trip into orbit." But obviously an ion engine isn't used during launch.
I'm guessing this is all the fault of "Megan McRainey, Institute Communications & Public Affairs" not being an aerospace engineer either and screwing up the details. Maybe next time
IANAAE (aerospace engineer), but obviously this is only applicable if either
1. high-thrust mode is hugely less efficient than low-thrust mode, or
2. there is a considerable fuel cost to starting and/or stopping the motor.
If neither applies, then you would simply run the motor at high thrust for shorter periods of time, without the added expense of a low-thrust mode.
The article wasn't what you might call detail-oriented, but this is some sort of electric ion propulsion scheme, which achieves high specific impulse (~3000sec, accd. wikipedia) and so optimising for efficiency makes sense. But it's still an ion drive, so there'll be no takeoffs in its future. At least not takeoffs from anything with a gravitational well deeper than an asteroid.
So we have an article about a thing. Only the article doesn't say what it is or what it's good for. I think I'll keep getting my space news from not-ZDnet, thanks.
A mature, end-of-life technology is cheaper than it was at its introduction? I'm astounded!
Obviously these people are being given too much money if this is what they're spending it on.
I don't know a whole lot about chemistry, but I do know that if you start with photosynthesis, you can afford to blow an awful lot of efficiency before you're competing with something like PV cells, even the really good ones. Granted solar-thermal, which you explicitly mentioned, is more efficient but that only works when your ultimate goal is heat. Once you start using that heat for something else, like driving turbines to generate electricity, you're burning that efficiency again.
Of course it's immediately clear that you've written the post with each sentence having a different set of assumptions in order to get your rant on. That's fine, but you ought to be clear that once you're positing wide-scale economic and sociological changes to get nuclear baseload generators powering plug-in cars (not to mention the technical problems), you've pretty much shot your theory that the world needs more arable land to support its future population. There's more than enough food produced here to feed everyone. Of course, a lot of it ends up turned into non-food items, inefficiently turned into meat, wasted, or otherwise sent places that are not the mouths of the starving. But we're postulating wide-scale economic and sociological changes, right? So on our new mostly-veggie diets there's land to spare and we don't even need to resort to anything drastic like better management of the 70% of the world covered by water.
I guess what I'm saying is that as long as we're both talking out our asses, we really don't have any problems left so solve. It's just that the solutions are so darn unpalatable.
The idea of a fan base paying for content isn't new. To my knowledge it simply hasn't been seriously tried yet. "That's not how the industry works" seems to be the only reason why it won't work for something like Serenity.
Serenity cost $40m to make, and got about $40m in domestic and foreign box-office receipts. If half those people were willing to pay the equivalent of 2 tickets or 1 DVD prior to the production, Joss would have had his $40m to make the film, and the fans would have everything. The movie, the extras, the bloopers, the dailies, the music, the script, etc. If you opened things up a bit and allowed contributions like "I'll put in $20,000 and if the movie gets made I want one of Morena Baccarin's outfits", you'd have your $40m that much faster, though the process could get a bit chaotic.
Maybe I'm being horribly naiive, but it seems to me that if the only thing standing between Firefly and Serenity was $40m, it shouldn't have taken nearly as long as it did.
Platter density is in terabits/sq in. Deal. That's the way it's specced. Research numbers are reported in bits because that's how the media works. When you add formatting, coding to limit long strings of duplicate bits, long Reed-Solomon ECC, etc., you lose a lot of those bits and get something that can more properly be expressed in bytes.
Do you whine about ethernet being described in bits? Ethernet doesn't deal with bytes - that's at a higher OSI level. Similarly, platters don't deal with bytes: that's the controller's job.
CFLs work in dimmer-equipped sockets. They just don't work terribly well with dimmed sockets. So don't use the dimmer and you'll be fine. I've been told that dimmable CFLs are slated to reach general distribution "soonish", which I interpret to mean 1H07. LED lamps cost a whole lot more and their efficiency isn't nearly high enough as compared to CFLs to justify it. LEDs do have the advantage of even longer lifetimes and actual instant-on capability, but they're essentially undimmable (though you could certainly design a bulb that would switch the LEDs at high frequency to simulate dimming when appropriate).
So take your glass bottle back to the security checkpoint and ask the manager there to put it in your checked baggage for you.
The TSA's List of prohibited items clearly states (in bold, no less) that "Beverages purchased after security screening" are permissable in checked baggage.
Goal: promote the progress... And method: secure exclusive rights. Not the other way around.
Blue is cool. Also, hard to do. Between the two, you get expensive.
Red lasers are cheap because they're cheap to make, though the suspiciously cheap ones are, indeed, suspiciously cheaply made. Green lasers are pretty close to the human eye's peak responsiveness, so they appear brighter at a given power level than red or blue lasers.
There are all manner of lasers. CO2, Argon, and other gas lasers. Chemical lasers. Diode lasers. And several other varieties. Hand-held (and small bench) lasers are commonly diode lasers. Low-power red laser diodes are approximately free, which is why they show up everywhere. Infrared laser diodes aren't terribly expensive, even fairly high-powered ones. There is no such thing as a green laser diode. Hand-held green lasers are DPSS lasers, in which a high power infrared laser blasts a fancy neodymium compound that outputs a different infrared frequency that in turn hits a frequency-doubling crystal which finally outputs 532nm green light.
The take-home message here is that blue laser light is hard to get so it's expensive. It's also not terribly useful unless you actually need the high frequency for denser data packing. Green laser light is harder to get than red laser light, but in addition to looking cool it legitimately is more visible per watt. Check out the CIE luminosity function - 650nm red light appears about 8x dimmer per watt than 532nm green light. A $100 15mW green laser therefore should appear almost as bright as a $200 200mW red laser. Even though production of green laser light is less efficient than production of red laser light, the green laser should consume somewhat less power than the red one.
You got an Insightful, but you've made some mistakes there.
t ab01-01.pdf ). About half of those eligible actually vote. Midterm elections run lower, at about 30%, and presidential elections run higher, more like 50-60%. It would be more correct to say that a 1.25% error rate works out to about a million votes, not 4 million.
You've taken 1.25% of 300M people in the US. But there aren't 300M voters. Rounding up since the 2000 census, there are about 200M US citizens 18 or older ( http://www.census.gov/population/cen2000/phc-t31/
Rendering aid is perfectly legit without these new provisions. The food, medicine, shelter, etc. that weren't provided resulted in well-deserved criticism but no apparent change in policy, and this new law won't help with that.
The additions allow the use of military forces in a law enforcement setting whenever the president wants. And don't try arguing that it's restricted to cases where local law enforcement is incapable of maintaining order. Read the text again, this time pretending you're Alberto Gonzales and your boss wants to illegally spy on citizens' communication. The verbiage is loose enough to drive a truck full of soldiers right through it.