Sounds bizarre, but simply compressing air is more efficient than electrolysing water to H2 and then oxidising it back to water in a fuel cell.
It's already being used on an industrial scale in a couple of places:
http://www.aip.org/isns/reports/2001/025.html
You can think of the air as a big spring which won't wear out. The issue with it is energy density, but then that depends on the pressure you compress it to.
The French air car project uses around 200 atmospheres at the moment with proposed 300 if it reaches production. They used to have compressed air trams running about their cities.
Of course, his democratic system may actually be set up so that his vote does really count.
The British system on the other hand is set up so that a minority party like the New Labour party can take significantly less than half the votes (42%) yet still take power with a large enough majority in parliament (63%) that they can force through just about any legislation they feel like.
So for the majority of voters in Britain, their vote really doesn't count.
They couldn't buy the kind of publicity they've been getting. Gradually caving to the big guys, changing their name and in the news *every* time the situation changes even a little bit. All for the cost of a few defensive lawyers.
OK, so you start with artificial limbs, move on to military projects with vision, audio, vehicle control, then in 30 years it hits the commercial market.
What makes you think they don't have a stolen card?
What makes you think they don't have legitimate cards?
Spain is full of illegal Moroccan immigrants who don't have ID cards at all, who have counterfeit cards, who have stolen cards. 99.999% of them are economic migrants, not terrorists. That means there's a flourishing black market. So while honest spanish citizens go about their business presenting their cards all over the place, the illegals simply bypass the whole palaver.
Spain demonstrates the uselessness of ID cards as security devices.
You say it's the uber rich who have to pay their workers less. But... Most multinational companies (the ones who can offshore) are publicly traded and the single largest investors in publicly traded companies, by far, are the pension funds.
So it's really your pension fund which is driving the offshoring. Or as I like to put it since men die of earlier, little grey haired old grannies.
Do you think that identical products cost the same across the world? No, businesses charge what the market will bear. They can and do buy the same things you do, for less than you do. Cars, mobile phones, PCs, houses, and the ultimate sign of a civilised society... MacDonalds.
It doesn't drag *everyone* down, it's dragging you down at the moment. The money flows in, their local market economy improves, eventually their costs go up and they have more difficulty competing on price alone. In the meantime, the money flows out of America, the economy becomes poorer and the value decreases.
There will be a levelling out, but expect it to take a while.
Compared to the rest of the world. In the global market it's that simple.
China and India have very well educated, very intelligent engineers, scientists, developers and they can do as good a job, cheaper.
We keep hearing the argument, "When all the jobs have been offshored, who will buy the products?". Well, duh. The Chinese and Indians will. This means BTW that they are going to be large markets.
We're going to have to start competing on price and that basically means devaluation of the currency.
You get fingerprinted when they give it to you. Hasn't made any difference at all. To security obviously, with ETA and the recent train bombing, but also to the level of illegal immigration from Morocco.
It has been demonstrated that ID cards are completely ineffective.
ID cards didn't make a blind bit of difference to the terrorists who took out that train last month. They don't make any difference to Al-Qaeda or to ETA for that matter.
ID cards are just a kneejerk reaction by politicians who have to be *seen* to be doing something. ID cards must make us more secure... Right?
It's called the "Documento Nacional de Identidad". You go to a government office when you reach the age of 14, are fingerprinted and issued with the card. It must be renewed every five years and it has to be used all over the place.
The problem is that it made absolutely no difference to the effectiveness of the bombers who killed 200 people when they blew up that train in March. It hasn't even been particularly effective in the long running fight against the domestic ETA terrorist organisation and the other argument about immigration, well Spain is the gateway to Europe for Moroccan imigrants.
So, there's no particular evidence that identity cards make any difference at all to the security of a country.
If all you do is write software you might not agree, but when you are trying to invent something, what goes down on paper is what is plausible, what might or should work and frankly that's often just bullshit which skims over the real showstopping implementation problems.
The need for a real working prototype which actually demonstrates that it can target and zap mosquitos successfully with a real laser would force inventors to actually go through the process of solving the many and real problems.
It would make it nearly impossible for patents to be overly broad.
It would mean that the patent would have to have enough *real* information in them for a competitor to build a working clone when the patent has expired.
They pipe their waste water through reed beds to remove contaminants. They've had them in place since the 1960s.
It isn't just the reeds themselves which clean the water, they support microbiological colonies which break down organic and inorganic toxins and fix heavy metals in the soil keeping them out of the ground water.
Which is why "intellectual property" is such a bullshit concept.
Anyone can have good ideas, it's actually putting it into practice which is the difficult bit. Intellectual property implies that you can have an idea, patent it and then charge anyone who actually wants to put it into use. You should have to produce a *working* prototype for anything you want a patent on.
With a networked display protocol like X, there's no particularly good reason for putting all of your eggs in a single large and expensive basket on the server end.
You can deploy a similar, X based archtecture using Linux, or indeed Sun/HP/IBM kit. Make the desktop cheap diskless systems which support PXE booting, put in a load balanced array of smaller and cheaper servers on the back end instead of a large server, individually they work out very much in the same price range as a desktop PC. Examples would be Dell PowerEdge 750,1750,2650 machines or Sun V120,V240 machines and then because memory is cheap you max them out. I think the Dell PE 1750 provides a good price/ performance ratio at the moment. The architecture scales in parallel. Need more power you add more machines to the array. "The network is the machine" as they say. Consider them disposable, dispense with hardware maintenance, if a disk fails, buy another, if a machine fails completely outwith the warranty period just buy another.
Course, SunRays don't use X and are not Xterminals, i don't know if they support run apps on multiple different servers and still connect back to a single display, it's a mistake if they don't. This is the design mistake that Windows Terminal server makes(though Citrix doesn't), limiting scalability and increasing the server and administration costs.
Slashdot Mirror
It would be if you were coding the DNA by hand.
http://www.scienceblog.com/community/older/2003
And on artificial wombs:
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/international/st
So in 20 years or so, neither men nor women will be required for reproduction.
So don't sweat it love.
o ry /0,6903,648024,00.html
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/international/st
Tomorrow's world belongs to the machines.
Don't do it.
Sounds bizarre, but simply compressing air is more efficient than electrolysing water to H2 and then oxidising it back to water in a fuel cell.
It's already being used on an industrial scale in a couple of places:
http://www.aip.org/isns/reports/2001/025.html
You can think of the air as a big spring which won't wear out. The issue with it is energy density, but then that depends on the pressure you compress it to.
The French air car project uses around 200 atmospheres at the moment with proposed 300 if it reaches production. They used to have compressed air trams running about their cities.
That pretty much answers the question of why it's too expensive.
Then you have to be both colour blind and illiterate to make the wrong choice (Pepsi max BTW).
Of course, as the second placed cola maker, Pepsi added a bit of red to it's logo to sow confusion among Coca-cola drinkers.
To believe that his vote counts.
Of course, his democratic system may actually be set up so that his vote does really count.
The British system on the other hand is set up so that a minority party like the New Labour party can take significantly less than half the votes (42%) yet still take power with a large enough majority in parliament (63%) that they can force through just about any legislation they feel like.
So for the majority of voters in Britain, their vote really doesn't count.
They couldn't buy the kind of publicity they've been getting. Gradually caving to the big guys, changing their name and in the news *every* time the situation changes even a little bit. All for the cost of a few defensive lawyers.
Kerberos. Works with Windows and Unix.
See the "Liberty Alliance Project" for internet web sites.
There's of course other ways of doing it. LDAP, ssh etc.
That means using tools which let you do the same job faster and more reliably.
OK, so you start with artificial limbs, move on to military projects with vision, audio, vehicle control, then in 30 years it hits the commercial market.
What makes you think they have ID cards at all?
What makes you think they don't have a stolen card?
What makes you think they don't have legitimate cards?
Spain is full of illegal Moroccan immigrants who don't have ID cards at all, who have counterfeit cards, who have stolen cards. 99.999% of them are economic migrants, not terrorists. That means there's a flourishing black market. So while honest spanish citizens go about their business presenting their cards all over the place, the illegals simply bypass the whole palaver.
Spain demonstrates the uselessness of ID cards as security devices.
You say it's the uber rich who have to pay their workers less. But... Most multinational companies (the ones who can offshore) are publicly traded and the single largest investors in publicly traded companies, by far, are the pension funds.
So it's really your pension fund which is driving the offshoring. Or as I like to put it since men die of earlier, little grey haired old grannies.
Do you think that identical products cost the same across the world? No, businesses charge what the market will bear. They can and do buy the same things you do, for less than you do. Cars, mobile phones, PCs, houses, and the ultimate sign of a civilised society... MacDonalds.
It doesn't drag *everyone* down, it's dragging you down at the moment. The money flows in, their local market economy improves, eventually their costs go up and they have more difficulty competing on price alone. In the meantime, the money flows out of America, the economy becomes poorer and the value decreases.
There will be a levelling out, but expect it to take a while.
Compared to the rest of the world. In the global market it's that simple.
China and India have very well educated, very intelligent engineers, scientists, developers and they can do as good a job, cheaper.
We keep hearing the argument, "When all the jobs have been offshored, who will buy the products?". Well, duh. The Chinese and Indians will. This means BTW that they are going to be large markets.
We're going to have to start competing on price and that basically means devaluation of the currency.
Spain also has a national ID card.
You get fingerprinted when they give it to you. Hasn't made any difference at all. To security obviously, with ETA and the recent train bombing, but also to the level of illegal immigration from Morocco.
It has been demonstrated that ID cards are completely ineffective.
ID cards didn't make a blind bit of difference to the terrorists who took out that train last month. They don't make any difference to Al-Qaeda or to ETA for that matter.
ID cards are just a kneejerk reaction by politicians who have to be *seen* to be doing something. ID cards must make us more secure... Right?
It's called the "Documento Nacional de Identidad". You go to a government office when you reach the age of 14, are fingerprinted and issued with the card. It must be renewed every five years and it has to be used all over the place.
The problem is that it made absolutely no difference to the effectiveness of the bombers who killed 200 people when they blew up that train in March. It hasn't even been particularly effective in the long running fight against the domestic ETA terrorist organisation and the other argument about immigration, well Spain is the gateway to Europe for Moroccan imigrants.
So, there's no particular evidence that identity cards make any difference at all to the security of a country.
If all you do is write software you might not agree, but when you are trying to invent something, what goes down on paper is what is plausible, what might or should work and frankly that's often just bullshit which skims over the real showstopping implementation problems.
The need for a real working prototype which actually demonstrates that it can target and zap mosquitos successfully with a real laser would force inventors to actually go through the process of solving the many and real problems.
It would make it nearly impossible for patents to be overly broad.
It would mean that the patent would have to have enough *real* information in them for a competitor to build a working clone when the patent has expired.
They pipe their waste water through reed beds to remove contaminants. They've had them in place since the 1960s.
It isn't just the reeds themselves which clean the water, they support microbiological colonies which break down organic and inorganic toxins and fix heavy metals in the soil keeping them out of the ground water.
Which is why "intellectual property" is such a bullshit concept.
Anyone can have good ideas, it's actually putting it into practice which is the difficult bit. Intellectual property implies that you can have an idea, patent it and then charge anyone who actually wants to put it into use. You should have to produce a *working* prototype for anything you want a patent on.
For it's time it was *years* ahead of the competition for multimedia type work. Full gui built in, video, audio, games etc.
It rocked as a games platform and for video editing. 15 years ago.
i on /commodore-amiga-500_small.jpg
http://computermuseum.50megs.com/images/collect
Today?
With a networked display protocol like X, there's no particularly good reason for putting all of your eggs in a single large and expensive basket on the server end.
You can deploy a similar, X based archtecture using Linux, or indeed Sun/HP/IBM kit. Make the desktop cheap diskless systems which support PXE booting, put in a load balanced array of smaller and cheaper servers on the back end instead of a large server, individually they work out very much in the same price range as a desktop PC. Examples would be Dell PowerEdge 750,1750,2650 machines or Sun V120,V240 machines and then because memory is cheap you max them out. I think the Dell PE 1750 provides a good price/ performance ratio at the moment. The architecture scales in parallel. Need more power you add more machines to the array. "The network is the machine" as they say. Consider them disposable, dispense with hardware maintenance, if a disk fails, buy another, if a machine fails completely outwith the warranty period just buy another.
Course, SunRays don't use X and are not Xterminals, i don't know if they support run apps on multiple different servers and still connect back to a single display, it's a mistake if they don't. This is the design mistake that Windows Terminal server makes(though Citrix doesn't), limiting scalability and increasing the server and administration costs.