Basically, the outer clay pot is porous. The water evaporates and escapes through the pores in the clay. This all happens very quickly because the air is so dry. So assuming that 1 kg of water evaporates each hour, this means about 2kJ of energy, and thus heat, is sucked from the pot. So for you non-metric heads, this means that every gallon of water equals 8,000 BTU. For reference, a typical family refigerator might use 7,700,000 BTU/yr, or 900BTU/hr.
You'd be surprised at the massive amount of energy that a liquid-to-vapor phase change can carry away. In fact, six times more energy is needed to turn one molecule of 100C liquid water to one molecule of 100C vapor water than is needed to heat liquid water from 0 to 100C!
Boiling, which is a similar phenomenon, is the most efficient way to transfer heat known to science.
Well, my section of the TS dept was kinda weird. We did no work. It was foreign language support and I could spend almost all day without answering a single call.
So my problem wasn't having my soul sucked out, it was having it "bored" out.
Now the Spanish side, though... Those people jump through the roof when you mention the words "Wrap up."
GRAMMAR NAZI SOAPBOX: (Sheesh! My grammar, spelling, diction, and style were horrible on the original post. How in the heck did it get rated up??! If I had mod-points, I'd rate myself down just because of stupidity.)
This reminds me of my days as a TSR for a major printing company. I worked for a total of 4 months, and went three of them without any training, except for the obligitory phone training. People there were and still are scared to go to bathroom because the phone will record how many minutes they're away. Some TSR's get breaks by just answering and "accidentally" hitting the hang up button, convieniently located just next to the pick up one.
Others just told customers the printer was defective and needed to be replaced and sent them a new one. (Now you know why it's so easy to get that printer replaced!)
And for the printers that really needed to be replaced, that really had major defects, it was a big no-no to even mention that this might be a common problems.
You see, tech support is all about image. The company doesn't want to give good tech support. It just wants the customers to not think badly about it.
P.S.: To be fair, the TS was nowhere near as bad as described in the article, but I was only in the (comparitively) highly-trained laser printer dept. The ink-jets were shipped out to India a LONG time ago.
What I think would be really interesting would be multiple LiveCD distros on one CD! Imagine, you use the boot loader to choose between Gnoppix or Knoppix, bioinformatic or educational, vanilla or chocolate.
And, honestly, DVDs aren't at all expensive. On rebate, I bought a whole slew of DVD-R from OfficeMax (Depot?) for $5 per 25. Yeah, they're low quality, but for linux distros, the junkable ones are what you want to use.
I personally welcome this. Maybe it's because of the bad taste left in my mouth by seeing the local orthodontist brag about how he only worked a couple hours a week, right before he jumped into his multi-million dollar Mitsubishi turbo-prop. My mom just paid several thousand dollars to have a root canal/tooth cap.
Perhaps it's not the best bet for open heart, but for some of the more insanely priced operations like that I think it make senses.
This is not surprising. There are a couple ways to price products. One is pricing what the seller imagines the product is worth. The other is pricing what the buyer thinks the product is worth. This is obviously a case of the latter.
Basically, people like Units. It's easy to compute when everything is nice and round. (Or round enough. 99cents practically equals one dollar) People obviously feel that one song is worth one of the base currency unit.
It'll be interesting to see what happens in countries such as China and Japan. I imagine that a song will go for 100Yen in Japan, but China? Who knows?
What bugs me about this is that it's only watching the action in ONE window. I open a good baker's dozen whenever I go online. I imagine that there are plenty of other people who do the same. The way I read the article, the ad will be served even if OTHER windows are currently downloading. That's going to make life hell on modem users who use tabed browsing to download other pages while pausing to read an article.
Since it currently requires Media Player, I'm going to uninstall Media Player on all my family's computers and they won't have to worry about anything. We'll be safe, at least until they figure out how to make it work on non-WMP systems.
Can ultra efficient price discrimination limit and eventually prevent entries into a market?
Imagine that Amazon.com succeeds in charging you exactly what you'll pay for. This means that you'll see their price, you'll consider it, and, WHAM, you'll click on the patented, novel, Buy(TM) button.
Now imagine that a new, energetic startup, Nile.com, decides that it wants to enter the internet book-selling market. It, not having the resources that Amazon has, is forced to use a "one-price-fits-all" strategy. Nile, by the laws of economics, will not be as efficient. And less efficient companies will lose out to more efficient ones, again, according to the laws of economics.
So all Amazon.com has to do to prevent Nile.com from gaining market share is operate at a high efficiency whenever there's a competitor. Once the competitors are toast it can go back to acting like a monopoly. The difference here is that NO ONE WILL EVER KNOW. If you don't know what price your neighbor paid, how can you claim that they've raised prices? Especially in a world where raising prices can actually mean not lowering consumer prices when distributor prices fall.
You're always happy with Amazon's price (remember this is a perfect price discrimination structure), so there's no incentive to look elsewhere. Amazon.com just keeps the excess profit from falling prices and only lowers them when new companies enter the field.
Bingo, a perpetual monopoly, one that can't be broken by anti-trust laws and investigations. Or am I seriously wrong in my theorizing?
What's funny is that in Europe the coffee cups seem to be getting smaller! I remember this special new coffee that doesn't even fill half a shot glass. Concentrated in the extreme.
On the otter hand, Europeans regard coffee drinking as one of the pinnacle achievements of mankind. My gf gets seriously pissed if I suggest that we visit a foreign city and NOT drink coffee.
If Microsoft were to create a metatag that web editors could use to OPT-IN, than they would have no problem with copyright.
Instead, we see the mentality of American business, that of opt-out. Microsoft obviously feels that they are the only correct opinion in this case, and that the default environment should be what they select.
NEVER, EVER, go after students. Haven't the governments learned anything from the near revolution in France in the late 60's, the riots in America in the late 60's, Tiananman Square, etc.? Students are the last people in the world to piss off!
Maybe it's because we have no resposibilties freeing us up to devote ourselves heart and soul. Maybe it's because we still have our enthusiasm.
But the best way I can see for any music association to destroy its power is to attack the students. If this were to occur in the US, I feel that within 5 years the laws would be so radically changed that the RIAA would be nothing more than an archaic symbol stripped of all power.
So I say, keep it up, Taiwan. The sooner you go after individual students, the sooner those future leaders will come to resent copywright monopolies.
I don't think they'd want to build technology into their product that they will be forced to troubleshoot and tech support for the next 5 years. They're better off to build the wireless network capability into a service pack.
Although knowing M$, they'll charge a $100 "upgrade" fee for this capability.
... at the SAE international conference in Detroit. It's quite the amazing contraption. I hung around and bugged the Ph.D. who worked on it for hours about the design
The hydrogen storage tank is so good that it can keep a charge for 7 days. Also, it's only a 40-some Liter tank so the car has basically the same mileage as the gasoline version of the 750iL.
One thing to realize about liquid hydrogen is that it is actually pretty safe. If the vessel were to be ruptured, it would never explode due to oxygen. More hydrogen would boil out, keeping any oxygen from entering. Any hydrogen exposed to air would rapidly (1.) dissapate, and (2.) flee upwards. Hydrogen/oxygen concoctions are only a problem in enclosed spaces.
The biggest problem from a cryogenic vessel is if the pressure were to build to high, but that never happens as there are lots of check valves and safety ports to release pressure build-up.
Do you think that Bountyquest has the patent for "overturing overly-broad and mis-issued patents through the use of an electronically distributed, peer-to-peer network?"
Instead of $30 for two episodes, $15 for 6. With 85 episodes, this is only $210 for everything.
Instead of
$1200.
Woo-hoo!
Re:Other fabrication methods using EM fields
on
Making Small Change
·
· Score: 1
Kettering, I believe.
They were a bunch of screwballs. I hope I'm not offending you, in case they work there, but it's the truth.
I got a little upset one day when a technician told me that "I wasn't qualified to make that sort of decision" when it was my primary focus in college.
Re:Other fabrication methods using EM fields
on
Making Small Change
·
· Score: 1
Maybe 40kV. I really don't remember.
It's really not a matter of voltages, so much as resistance and inductance.
Inductance is the major killer as it slows your rise time. Everything was matched as best as possible to make the rapid spike.
In the end, the voltages were quite (relatively) low because the resistance was low.
But, man, you should have seen what we were using for switches. They were these mercury switches, don't remember the name. Sumpin' like "Nitron"
They were about the size of a gallon jug and helf full of mercury. Whenever the switches fired, it would vaporize a lot of mercury. We would have to wait for the mercury to condense and fall back to the bottom before we could fire again.
Other fabrication methods using EM fields
on
Making Small Change
·
· Score: 4
I used to work at a company in Dayton, OH, that specialized in high current applications. They would drop 1.2 million amps through a coil, inducing a current in a copper ring contained within the coil. The interaction of the moving charges and the magnetic field produced a phenomenal compaction pressure. The whole process took 40 milliseconds.
One use of this metal forming machine was to compact planetary gear rings from powdered metal. Before sintering, the density at the inner surface was 6.76 g/cc. The density for this steel in a "fully solid" state was 6.77 g/cc. Compare this to 6.6 g/cc, about the best that traditional hydraulic press powdered metal forming forges could do. And it only took 40 milliseconds.
Wow.
There was so much force involved, we were constantly breaking coils, with very explosive effects. You could hear a clap of thunder in the other building across the street.
It's amazing how Electrical Engineering and Mechanical Engineering can combine for some very frightening effects.
Oh, yeah, they also used to be a Star Wars research firm. They still have a working rail gun in the lab.:)
Working in cryobiology, a cryogenic field, I am familiar with some of the problems of liquid nitrogen.
Really, there aren't any. The stuff is insanely cheap. Like so cheap, you want to start using it as car fuel and stop drinking milk. I purchase 210L for $35.67, which works out to something around 55 cents a gallon!
Nitrogen is cheap, inert, catastrophic leaks have no effect on the world(unless it's in a closed room and someone can't get out before they suffocate), readily availalble (comprises 79% of air), and would only get cheaper to produce as power plants used more of it.
Keeping cables cool is also very easy since LN2 can be easily run through a pressurized system. There is no need to circulate the LN2 since the addition of heat will make some LN2 boil away. Simply allow the vapor to dissapate and replace any lost fluid.
The biggest problem with this project is what happens if the LN2 system fails for some reason. Fortunately, though, they will have an extremely long heads up on a failure and will be able to shut a cable down with plenty of time to spare.
On a side note, the cables use silver because it allows for proper grain growth and flexibility. Otherwise you couldn't make a cable out of the material. A big squarish chunk of it, sure, but not something long, thin, and reasonably flexible like a cable. Science News did an article on it a couple months ago.
Slashdot Mirror
Basically, the outer clay pot is porous. The water evaporates and escapes through the pores in the clay. This all happens very quickly because the air is so dry. So assuming that 1 kg of water evaporates each hour, this means about 2kJ of energy, and thus heat, is sucked from the pot. So for you non-metric heads, this means that every gallon of water equals 8,000 BTU. For reference, a typical family refigerator might use 7,700,000 BTU/yr, or 900BTU/hr.
You'd be surprised at the massive amount of energy that a liquid-to-vapor phase change can carry away. In fact, six times more energy is needed to turn one molecule of 100C liquid water to one molecule of 100C vapor water than is needed to heat liquid water from 0 to 100C!
Boiling, which is a similar phenomenon, is the most efficient way to transfer heat known to science.
Sig--
1. My girlfriend
2. You
3. ???
4. Profit!
Well, my section of the TS dept was kinda weird. We did no work. It was foreign language support and I could spend almost all day without answering a single call.
So my problem wasn't having my soul sucked out, it was having it "bored" out.
Now the Spanish side, though... Those people jump through the roof when you mention the words "Wrap up."
GRAMMAR NAZI SOAPBOX: (Sheesh! My grammar, spelling, diction, and style were horrible on the original post. How in the heck did it get rated up??! If I had mod-points, I'd rate myself down just because of stupidity.)
This reminds me of my days as a TSR for a major printing company. I worked for a total of 4 months, and went three of them without any training, except for the obligitory phone training. People there were and still are scared to go to bathroom because the phone will record how many minutes they're away. Some TSR's get breaks by just answering and "accidentally" hitting the hang up button, convieniently located just next to the pick up one.
Others just told customers the printer was defective and needed to be replaced and sent them a new one. (Now you know why it's so easy to get that printer replaced!)
And for the printers that really needed to be replaced, that really had major defects, it was a big no-no to even mention that this might be a common problems.
You see, tech support is all about image. The company doesn't want to give good tech support. It just wants the customers to not think badly about it.
P.S.: To be fair, the TS was nowhere near as bad as described in the article, but I was only in the (comparitively) highly-trained laser printer dept. The ink-jets were shipped out to India a LONG time ago.
What I think would be really interesting would be multiple LiveCD distros on one CD! Imagine, you use the boot loader to choose between Gnoppix or Knoppix, bioinformatic or educational, vanilla or chocolate.
And, honestly, DVDs aren't at all expensive. On rebate, I bought a whole slew of DVD-R from OfficeMax (Depot?) for $5 per 25. Yeah, they're low quality, but for linux distros, the junkable ones are what you want to use.
I personally welcome this. Maybe it's because of the bad taste left in my mouth by seeing the local orthodontist brag about how he only worked a couple hours a week, right before he jumped into his multi-million dollar Mitsubishi turbo-prop. My mom just paid several thousand dollars to have a root canal/tooth cap.
Perhaps it's not the best bet for open heart, but for some of the more insanely priced operations like that I think it make senses.
10 minutes out and the server's already melted down. How am I supposed to mod comments? Before reading the article?
Slashdot editors should make a special mirror for people with mod points. They ought to be good for something.
Well, I guess I'm just going to mod up the funny comments.
Wish I had a mod point!
This is not surprising. There are a couple ways to price products. One is pricing what the seller imagines the product is worth. The other is pricing what the buyer thinks the product is worth. This is obviously a case of the latter.
Basically, people like Units. It's easy to compute when everything is nice and round. (Or round enough. 99cents practically equals one dollar) People obviously feel that one song is worth one of the base currency unit.
It'll be interesting to see what happens in countries such as China and Japan. I imagine that a song will go for 100Yen in Japan, but China? Who knows?
What bugs me about this is that it's only watching the action in ONE window. I open a good baker's dozen whenever I go online. I imagine that there are plenty of other people who do the same. The way I read the article, the ad will be served even if OTHER windows are currently downloading. That's going to make life hell on modem users who use tabed browsing to download other pages while pausing to read an article.
Since it currently requires Media Player, I'm going to uninstall Media Player on all my family's computers and they won't have to worry about anything. We'll be safe, at least until they figure out how to make it work on non-WMP systems.
mirror
Quote--
Most great things in the world are for girls. I'm happy to embrace as many as I can.
(Unless he's French. In this case, I forbid him to m'embrasser.)
Can ultra efficient price discrimination limit and eventually prevent entries into a market?
Imagine that Amazon.com succeeds in charging you exactly what you'll pay for. This means that you'll see their price, you'll consider it, and, WHAM, you'll click on the patented, novel, Buy(TM) button.
Now imagine that a new, energetic startup, Nile.com, decides that it wants to enter the internet book-selling market. It, not having the resources that Amazon has, is forced to use a "one-price-fits-all" strategy. Nile, by the laws of economics, will not be as efficient. And less efficient companies will lose out to more efficient ones, again, according to the laws of economics.
So all Amazon.com has to do to prevent Nile.com from gaining market share is operate at a high efficiency whenever there's a competitor. Once the competitors are toast it can go back to acting like a monopoly. The difference here is that NO ONE WILL EVER KNOW. If you don't know what price your neighbor paid, how can you claim that they've raised prices? Especially in a world where raising prices can actually mean not lowering consumer prices when distributor prices fall.
You're always happy with Amazon's price (remember this is a perfect price discrimination structure), so there's no incentive to look elsewhere. Amazon.com just keeps the excess profit from falling prices and only lowers them when new companies enter the field.
Bingo, a perpetual monopoly, one that can't be broken by anti-trust laws and investigations. Or am I seriously wrong in my theorizing?
Does this mean that I can finally play DivXs on my Xbox?
Woo-hoo!!!
What's funny is that in Europe the coffee cups seem to be getting smaller! I remember this special new coffee that doesn't even fill half a shot glass. Concentrated in the extreme.
On the otter hand, Europeans regard coffee drinking as one of the pinnacle achievements of mankind. My gf gets seriously pissed if I suggest that we visit a foreign city and NOT drink coffee.
If Microsoft were to create a metatag that web editors could use to OPT-IN, than they would have no problem with copyright. Instead, we see the mentality of American business, that of opt-out. Microsoft obviously feels that they are the only correct opinion in this case, and that the default environment should be what they select.
without anybody knowing. I remember lots of stuff happening with Linux conferences and no one knew what was going on either.
Maybe it's because we have no resposibilties freeing us up to devote ourselves heart and soul. Maybe it's because we still have our enthusiasm.
But the best way I can see for any music association to destroy its power is to attack the students. If this were to occur in the US, I feel that within 5 years the laws would be so radically changed that the RIAA would be nothing more than an archaic symbol stripped of all power.
So I say, keep it up, Taiwan. The sooner you go after individual students, the sooner those future leaders will come to resent copywright monopolies.
Although knowing M$, they'll charge a $100 "upgrade" fee for this capability.
The hydrogen storage tank is so good that it can keep a charge for 7 days. Also, it's only a 40-some Liter tank so the car has basically the same mileage as the gasoline version of the 750iL.
One thing to realize about liquid hydrogen is that it is actually pretty safe. If the vessel were to be ruptured, it would never explode due to oxygen. More hydrogen would boil out, keeping any oxygen from entering. Any hydrogen exposed to air would rapidly (1.) dissapate, and (2.) flee upwards. Hydrogen/oxygen concoctions are only a problem in enclosed spaces.
The biggest problem from a cryogenic vessel is if the pressure were to build to high, but that never happens as there are lots of check valves and safety ports to release pressure build-up.
Do you think that Bountyquest has the patent for "overturing overly-broad and mis-issued patents through the use of an electronically distributed, peer-to-peer network?"
Instead of $1200.
Woo-hoo!
They were a bunch of screwballs. I hope I'm not offending you, in case they work there, but it's the truth.
I got a little upset one day when a technician told me that "I wasn't qualified to make that sort of decision" when it was my primary focus in college.
It's really not a matter of voltages, so much as resistance and inductance.
Inductance is the major killer as it slows your rise time. Everything was matched as best as possible to make the rapid spike.
In the end, the voltages were quite (relatively) low because the resistance was low.
But, man, you should have seen what we were using for switches. They were these mercury switches, don't remember the name. Sumpin' like "Nitron"
They were about the size of a gallon jug and helf full of mercury. Whenever the switches fired, it would vaporize a lot of mercury. We would have to wait for the mercury to condense and fall back to the bottom before we could fire again.
One use of this metal forming machine was to compact planetary gear rings from powdered metal. Before sintering, the density at the inner surface was 6.76 g/cc. The density for this steel in a "fully solid" state was 6.77 g/cc. Compare this to 6.6 g/cc, about the best that traditional hydraulic press powdered metal forming forges could do. And it only took 40 milliseconds.
Wow.
There was so much force involved, we were constantly breaking coils, with very explosive effects. You could hear a clap of thunder in the other building across the street.
It's amazing how Electrical Engineering and Mechanical Engineering can combine for some very frightening effects.
Oh, yeah, they also used to be a Star Wars research firm. They still have a working rail gun in the lab. :)
Really, there aren't any. The stuff is insanely cheap. Like so cheap, you want to start using it as car fuel and stop drinking milk. I purchase 210L for $35.67, which works out to something around 55 cents a gallon!
Nitrogen is cheap, inert, catastrophic leaks have no effect on the world(unless it's in a closed room and someone can't get out before they suffocate), readily availalble (comprises 79% of air), and would only get cheaper to produce as power plants used more of it.
Keeping cables cool is also very easy since LN2 can be easily run through a pressurized system. There is no need to circulate the LN2 since the addition of heat will make some LN2 boil away. Simply allow the vapor to dissapate and replace any lost fluid.
The biggest problem with this project is what happens if the LN2 system fails for some reason. Fortunately, though, they will have an extremely long heads up on a failure and will be able to shut a cable down with plenty of time to spare.
On a side note, the cables use silver because it allows for proper grain growth and flexibility. Otherwise you couldn't make a cable out of the material. A big squarish chunk of it, sure, but not something long, thin, and reasonably flexible like a cable. Science News did an article on it a couple months ago.