The Standard Rules of Perpetual Motion Contests state that you are allowed to ignore maintainance concerns of real materials in order to focus on the basic physics involved. You can also make friction arbitarily small for the same reason. You may also assume an infinite budget.
As so many people are trying to tell me it wouldn't work for reasons so obvious I'd already dismissed them, I'll explain exactly what I thought of.
First, this doesn't involve the sun at all. Remove the sun. You do need the earth, because you need gravity. You then need two very, very tall columns of fluid: One water, one brine. The more saturated the salt solution, the shorter your giant column need be... but it's still got to be big.
Saltwater is denser than fresh, so as you go down the columns the pressure difference between them increases. At the very bottom, the salt column is exerting substantially more pressure than the fresh. So much so that you could run RO off it: Shifting water from the salt column into the fresh, and removing the salt in the process. This would cause the fresh column to rise and the salt to fall, so at the top you have a height difference. All you need to do this is direct the top of your fresh column into the salt column, and you have a perpetual cycle of water. Attach a turbine, and you have free energy. It's completly impractical - you'd have to build it in a deep ocean trench and probably get enough power to run a LED - but I can't find any reason it wouldn't work. I know there's one, because the alternative is that I've just earned myself a noble prize in phyics, I just can't find it.
Freenet is based around a distributed store, so no streaming. You can host static resources, and you can also host versioned resources like websites that allow you (and only you) to replace the current version with a newer one. But it isn't realtime.
The way the network is designed, adding a zero-administration p2p wireless grid wouldn't be too difficult. The problem is that there isn't much use for it - the chances you have another freenet user within range are just too slim. If Freenet was actually really popular, then it'd be good, but freenet is a niche network because there are very few people who demand that level of privacy. It is inhabited by pirates, free-speech activists, conspiracy theorists who believe the government(s) is out to get them, end-times religious types preparing for the coming oppression of the Antichrist and the occasional pedophile (Rumor says they have a message board somewhere, but I'm not going looking). Not the userbase for a popular network.
But they could have evolved in a very different way. Imagine if, for example, it had been invented by a cable TV company - quite possible, as they already control a physical infrastructure that they could build upon. What would it look like then? For a start, server and client would not be equal: There would be no need for them to build it that way, and it would be more efficient to rely on centralised server equipment at their offices. There would be no need for the end-user machines to talk to each other - they only need to talk to the servers, so probably wouldn't even have globally routable addresses. Web browsing and email would still end up working exactly the same, but it'd also be far less democratic: You couldn't easily send files to a friend without going through a server run by your ISP (Which would probably have all manner of filtering), you couldn't run your own webserver or mailserver without paying very high business rates, you couldn't host your own multiplayer games, and you couldn't get involved in network software development at all without buying some multi-thousand-dollar equipment usually purchased only by the service providers. It'd also be far more assymetric, and have anti-copying measures built in, and likely only allow you to connect the equipment your service provider has explicitly deemed acceptable - like the US phone system was back before the big breakup, when you couldn't buy a phone but had to lease an approved model from the service provider.
Or perhaps the internet would originate in academia, where... well, it'd look much as it does today, really. Because that is where historically our internet came from: Born of the military, adopted and raised by academic institutions, and set loose upon the world like a sheltered teenager suddenly invited to the wrong type of party.
I did design a perpetual motion machine involving a really deep tube in the ocean with a RO membrane at the bottom, exploiting the slight density difference between fresh and salt water to produce the required pressure. I know it can't work, because if it did it would be producing energy from nothing, but I still can't figure out exactly why it wouldn't work.
The laws of physics are rather strict on this account: You must, absolutly must, have a pressure source or some form of energy input. You can get energy out when you dilute a solution, and must put energy in to seperate them. It is possible it'll be more efficient though, so you don't need as much pressu.re
"It's just a matter of time till the lazy-ass 1337 network hackers get their collective acts together and start shunting their god-given right to free traffic off onto a pure P2P, encrypted, usually-connected, fido-net style worldwide wireless network grid"
Go support Freenet. It's all of those things except the wireless, which may be added on with ease once node density increases. We're having retention issues at the moment, so if you'd run a node or two with a terabyte-sized store and a fair amount of bandwidth it would really help.
Do not underestimate the power of lazyness. Installing wires takes time!
Also there are a lot of people like my Mother, who reacts with utter horror to the idea of a visible wire maring her perfectly designed interior with it's tatty carpets and peeling wallpaper.
Me and some friends play ut2k4 often - and usually on the same maps. One of them has speakers. I've gotten good enough that I can tell were he is by the ambient sound effects.
From the perspective of the publishers, that's a good thing. If they sell directly to the customer via online sales, the retailer doesn't get a cut. Even if they go through an online store, the costs are much lower than those of a physical store with it's higher staffing and property rental.
Even if congress doesn't overrule the veto, there is a reason spending bills are must-pass. If they don't, parts of the government run out of money, which leads to the formation of angry mobs when they discover their children have been sent home from school because the teachers aren't getting paid, shortly followed by an increase in crime when criminals realise that police don't work for free. Some states are very heavily dependant on federal funding even for things as simple as school meals.
I remember simtower and the condo bug. If you pause a game, find an unsold condo, drop the price as low as you can, raise it back up again and unpause, it'll immediatly sell for full price. A way to cheat your way out of the dreaded Condo Price Crash.
Or work on technological means to render SOPA and such laws completly ineffective against the pirates. Then all they can be used for is shutting down popular and mostly-legal sites, inciting public outrage.
I imagine it could be done by putting a compressor and small storage tank on the bottom of the balloon. Going to high? Turn on compressor and transfer some of that helium from balloon to tank. Going too low? Open the valve and let some back in. The equipment would be heavy though, greatly reducing payload capacity, and flight time may be limited by the energy supply for the compressor.
The PHB is middle management by definition. The characteristic of the PHB is just that he leads a team but has no knowledge at all in the tasks for which his team are responsible - they enter the position via sideways transfer, and their training is limited to management concerns. The PHB is loathed for their inaccurate estimates of the difficulty of a task leading to unreasonable expectations and their disregard of technological concerns in decision-making. From the point of view of their unfortunate underlings, they appear to just be idiots. The original PHB character in Dilbert was the head of an engineering team but had no personal knowledge of or interest in engineering, and so could only provide his team with empty encouragement ("Work smarter, not harder!") and requests to do the impossible.
I'm sure there are plenty of historical precidents in which an action is regarded as a form of legitimate protest by the perpetuators, but a form of illegal violence by the state. Eventually the judgement of history will decide, but that can take decades - and really just depends on who wins, and thus who writes the history books. If the US had lost the war of independance, we'd be teaching that the rebels were a bunch of selfish thugs who just wanted to get out of paying taxes.
For the same reason that quite a few states still make it a criminal offense to have homosexual sex, even though everyone knows that'd be struck down in ten seconds if anyone tried to enforce it today. No state senator wants to go down in history as the one who legalised buggery, and none wants to go down in history as the one who legalised obscene toys either. It'd also be a way to instantly lose the social-conservative vote, and in some states the social conservative vote really is everything at the state level.
Being successful and being 'evil' by slashdot standards are not mutually exclusive. Rather the opposite: Most of the things the slashdot crowd opposes are things that would be done either to increase profit or to gain power with which to increase profit in future, so you'd expect the evil companies to be the more successful.
Well, it *could* if the licence agreement specified such... but the GPL actually has the exact opposite, a clause to make it clear that program output is not considered bound by the GPL. I don't know of any licences that do require output be copyright to the program developer, but it's quite possible some exist that I am not aware of.
Slashdot Mirror
Redirect them to the Pirate Bay, of course.
The Standard Rules of Perpetual Motion Contests state that you are allowed to ignore maintainance concerns of real materials in order to focus on the basic physics involved. You can also make friction arbitarily small for the same reason. You may also assume an infinite budget.
As so many people are trying to tell me it wouldn't work for reasons so obvious I'd already dismissed them, I'll explain exactly what I thought of.
First, this doesn't involve the sun at all. Remove the sun. You do need the earth, because you need gravity. You then need two very, very tall columns of fluid: One water, one brine. The more saturated the salt solution, the shorter your giant column need be... but it's still got to be big.
Saltwater is denser than fresh, so as you go down the columns the pressure difference between them increases. At the very bottom, the salt column is exerting substantially more pressure than the fresh. So much so that you could run RO off it: Shifting water from the salt column into the fresh, and removing the salt in the process. This would cause the fresh column to rise and the salt to fall, so at the top you have a height difference. All you need to do this is direct the top of your fresh column into the salt column, and you have a perpetual cycle of water. Attach a turbine, and you have free energy. It's completly impractical - you'd have to build it in a deep ocean trench and probably get enough power to run a LED - but I can't find any reason it wouldn't work. I know there's one, because the alternative is that I've just earned myself a noble prize in phyics, I just can't find it.
Freenet is based around a distributed store, so no streaming. You can host static resources, and you can also host versioned resources like websites that allow you (and only you) to replace the current version with a newer one. But it isn't realtime.
The way the network is designed, adding a zero-administration p2p wireless grid wouldn't be too difficult. The problem is that there isn't much use for it - the chances you have another freenet user within range are just too slim. If Freenet was actually really popular, then it'd be good, but freenet is a niche network because there are very few people who demand that level of privacy. It is inhabited by pirates, free-speech activists, conspiracy theorists who believe the government(s) is out to get them, end-times religious types preparing for the coming oppression of the Antichrist and the occasional pedophile (Rumor says they have a message board somewhere, but I'm not going looking). Not the userbase for a popular network.
He might have had the same text. It is quite famous, and I doubt the police would wish to specify the title publicly if that is what they found.
But they could have evolved in a very different way. Imagine if, for example, it had been invented by a cable TV company - quite possible, as they already control a physical infrastructure that they could build upon. What would it look like then? For a start, server and client would not be equal: There would be no need for them to build it that way, and it would be more efficient to rely on centralised server equipment at their offices. There would be no need for the end-user machines to talk to each other - they only need to talk to the servers, so probably wouldn't even have globally routable addresses. Web browsing and email would still end up working exactly the same, but it'd also be far less democratic: You couldn't easily send files to a friend without going through a server run by your ISP (Which would probably have all manner of filtering), you couldn't run your own webserver or mailserver without paying very high business rates, you couldn't host your own multiplayer games, and you couldn't get involved in network software development at all without buying some multi-thousand-dollar equipment usually purchased only by the service providers. It'd also be far more assymetric, and have anti-copying measures built in, and likely only allow you to connect the equipment your service provider has explicitly deemed acceptable - like the US phone system was back before the big breakup, when you couldn't buy a phone but had to lease an approved model from the service provider.
Or perhaps the internet would originate in academia, where... well, it'd look much as it does today, really. Because that is where historically our internet came from: Born of the military, adopted and raised by academic institutions, and set loose upon the world like a sheltered teenager suddenly invited to the wrong type of party.
I did design a perpetual motion machine involving a really deep tube in the ocean with a RO membrane at the bottom, exploiting the slight density difference between fresh and salt water to produce the required pressure. I know it can't work, because if it did it would be producing energy from nothing, but I still can't figure out exactly why it wouldn't work.
The laws of physics are rather strict on this account: You must, absolutly must, have a pressure source or some form of energy input. You can get energy out when you dilute a solution, and must put energy in to seperate them. It is possible it'll be more efficient though, so you don't need as much pressu.re
But this isn't participating 'actively,' any more than is paying taxes to a government that spends part of them on war.
"It's just a matter of time till the lazy-ass 1337 network hackers get their collective acts together and start shunting their god-given right to free traffic off onto a pure P2P, encrypted, usually-connected, fido-net style worldwide wireless network grid"
Go support Freenet. It's all of those things except the wireless, which may be added on with ease once node density increases. We're having retention issues at the moment, so if you'd run a node or two with a terabyte-sized store and a fair amount of bandwidth it would really help.
Do not underestimate the power of lazyness. Installing wires takes time!
Also there are a lot of people like my Mother, who reacts with utter horror to the idea of a visible wire maring her perfectly designed interior with it's tatty carpets and peeling wallpaper.
The EU? Find me a government that hasn't done that.
Depends which side has more money. Evil is profitable.
Me and some friends play ut2k4 often - and usually on the same maps. One of them has speakers. I've gotten good enough that I can tell were he is by the ambient sound effects.
From the perspective of the publishers, that's a good thing. If they sell directly to the customer via online sales, the retailer doesn't get a cut. Even if they go through an online store, the costs are much lower than those of a physical store with it's higher staffing and property rental.
Even if congress doesn't overrule the veto, there is a reason spending bills are must-pass. If they don't, parts of the government run out of money, which leads to the formation of angry mobs when they discover their children have been sent home from school because the teachers aren't getting paid, shortly followed by an increase in crime when criminals realise that police don't work for free. Some states are very heavily dependant on federal funding even for things as simple as school meals.
I remember simtower and the condo bug. If you pause a game, find an unsold condo, drop the price as low as you can, raise it back up again and unpause, it'll immediatly sell for full price. A way to cheat your way out of the dreaded Condo Price Crash.
Or work on technological means to render SOPA and such laws completly ineffective against the pirates. Then all they can be used for is shutting down popular and mostly-legal sites, inciting public outrage.
I imagine it could be done by putting a compressor and small storage tank on the bottom of the balloon. Going to high? Turn on compressor and transfer some of that helium from balloon to tank. Going too low? Open the valve and let some back in. The equipment would be heavy though, greatly reducing payload capacity, and flight time may be limited by the energy supply for the compressor.
The PHB is middle management by definition. The characteristic of the PHB is just that he leads a team but has no knowledge at all in the tasks for which his team are responsible - they enter the position via sideways transfer, and their training is limited to management concerns. The PHB is loathed for their inaccurate estimates of the difficulty of a task leading to unreasonable expectations and their disregard of technological concerns in decision-making. From the point of view of their unfortunate underlings, they appear to just be idiots. The original PHB character in Dilbert was the head of an engineering team but had no personal knowledge of or interest in engineering, and so could only provide his team with empty encouragement ("Work smarter, not harder!") and requests to do the impossible.
Yet I still see frequent attempts to do just that in my webserver logs.
And I run apache on linux.
I'm sure there are plenty of historical precidents in which an action is regarded as a form of legitimate protest by the perpetuators, but a form of illegal violence by the state. Eventually the judgement of history will decide, but that can take decades - and really just depends on who wins, and thus who writes the history books. If the US had lost the war of independance, we'd be teaching that the rebels were a bunch of selfish thugs who just wanted to get out of paying taxes.
For the same reason that quite a few states still make it a criminal offense to have homosexual sex, even though everyone knows that'd be struck down in ten seconds if anyone tried to enforce it today. No state senator wants to go down in history as the one who legalised buggery, and none wants to go down in history as the one who legalised obscene toys either. It'd also be a way to instantly lose the social-conservative vote, and in some states the social conservative vote really is everything at the state level.
Being successful and being 'evil' by slashdot standards are not mutually exclusive. Rather the opposite: Most of the things the slashdot crowd opposes are things that would be done either to increase profit or to gain power with which to increase profit in future, so you'd expect the evil companies to be the more successful.
Well, it *could* if the licence agreement specified such... but the GPL actually has the exact opposite, a clause to make it clear that program output is not considered bound by the GPL. I don't know of any licences that do require output be copyright to the program developer, but it's quite possible some exist that I am not aware of.