advanced electric storage devices and batteries at all scales - lithium? Supercaps?
Supercapacitors based on nanotechnology will be coming within the next 7-10 years, and that will revolutionize the use of electricity, because it makes it possible to store on a large scale power generated by solar panels and wind turbines for later use. It also means electric cars don't need massive, space-hogging battery packs, since supercapacitor battery packs will be much smaller than NiMH and Li-On battery packs for automotive applications.
very simple and inexpensive computing devices with integrated wireless telephone and Internet capabilities - www.nokia.com?
Can you say iPhone? The Apple iPhone is a major leap forward towards such a device you mentioned.
onboard sensors and computers for smart vehicles - your door is... we know, we know
Those sensors are making it to a lot a higher-end cars, and lower-end vehicles are starting to get this technology, too.
advanced high-speed rail - presumably the high speed (400 km/h) rail we have now isn't advanced
I see within the next 15-20 years large-scale maglev deployment worldwide, since we're hitting the practical operational limits of steel-rail high-speed passenger trains (above 330 km/h, physical wear on pantographs/overhead wiring and steel wheels/rails becomes major issues).
In the future, when nanotech-based solar panels are on just about every residence, there will still be a need for AC power, mostly because AC power is better-suited for distributed power generation over a wide area.
All those Star Trek tech manuals, or star wars art books, or the discworld science books are ALL published with the blessing of Paramount, Lucasfilm and Terry Pratchet. (The ones I got at least)
Bingo. Remember all those illustrated books from DK publishing for Star Wars, the DC Comics universe and the Marvel Comics universe? They were not only done with the permission of the copyright holders, but the copyright holders (Lucasfilm, DC Comics and Marvel Comics) often assisted in writing these illustrated books.
The problem with the upcoming Harry Potter Lexicon is that it was done not as a commentary book, but a reference book using another person's creation without permission. Remember all those books speculating about Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows before the final HP book came out? Rowling and Warner Brothers never did object to these books because they were considered books commenting and speculating on what Rowling would do in the final HP novel, which has no serious copyright concerns.
France did something that the rest of the world should have done with nuclear power: standardize on a single complete powerplant design. By standardizing on a single complete powerplant design, they were able to train their operators and service engineers on how to safely operate the reactor at any plant in the country, and it also meant lower plant construction costs, too. Because it has so much cheap electric generation, that's why SNCF (the French National Railways) was able to build ultra-fast TGV trains all over the country without worries about getting electric power generation for these trains.
In fact, why the EU didn't just adopt the French nuclear powerplant design and built nuclear powerplants all over Europe based on this design is beyond me (aside from NIMBY environmentalist complaints).
I think people forget that the Chernobyl disaster was caused by a LOT of mitigating circumstances:
1. The reactor was not built inside a heavy concrete containment structure, the type that successfully kept most of the radiation out from the Three Mile Island reactor failure.
2. Graphite-moderated reactors are inherently dangerous to start with because graphite will burn if the nuclear fuel overheats.
3. The test that caused the explosion was caused by deliberately shutting down the safety systems normally in place at the reactor.
Today, thanks to vastly improved reactor technology, reactors can be designed so that in case all safety systems suddenly go down the reactor can automatically go into a "safe" mode and cool down by itself (the pebble-bed reactor is designed this way).
Apple should have held off introduction of the iPhone in Europe until it incorporates HSDPA broadband access over a 3G network, which I believe is fairly common there.
The ridiculous weight of the battery pack was why the General Motors EV1 wasn't such a great idea to start with. Switching to NiMH or Li-On batteries might lower some of the battery pack weight, but you still have to deal with charge times measured in hours.
However, MIT's new supercapacitor technology based on carbon nanotubes might solve the charge time problem, since it may allow for very high density electrical storage (e.g., further reduction in the size of the battery pack) and charge times measured in minutes, not hours.
Of course, you forgot two major problems that plagued the EV1:
1) The battery pack was massively large and heavy, which seriously cut into the interior space of the car.
2) The range was just too limited given the absurd charging times (around seven hours for circa 70-100 miles range).
Fortunately, technology may finally catch up to make a fully-electric car practical: supercapacitors based on carbon-nanotube technology, something MIT is working on currently (pun not intended). Using these new supercapacitors will allow a DRASTIC reduction in the size of the battery pack itself, and unlike NiMH and Li-On batteries supercapacitor recharge times are measured in ones of minutes.
I can foresee by 2015 a long-range electric vehicle about the same external physical size as the current Honda Fit but with the interior space as a Honda Civic, thanks to the elimination of the space-wasting engine compartment (each wheel will be driven by its own small electric motor and the entire supercapacitor battery pack sits on the floorpan between the front and rear wheels). The vehicle will go about 400 km (248 miles) on a full charge and you can charge the battery pack in under 10 minutes!:-)
I think we will find a lot rocky-crust planets orbiting other stars by 2025 thanks to the Terrestrial Planet Finder space telescope array that will probably be fully operational after 2016. They should concentrate on every star like our Sun within 100 light years of our Solar System in its search.
I think the biggest problem with Tsar Bomba was that it required extensive modifications to the Tu-95 bomber just to carry the bomb, and the bomb became an external store, which caused all kinds of problems in terms of aerodynamic drag. Remember, the most powerful nuclear bomb ever fielded by the USAF (the Mk. 17 bomb with a yield of circa 20 MT) was designed right from the start around the bomb bay dimensions of the B-52 bomber.
1) The sheer physical contact between the record needle and disc means both with wear out over time.
2) You have to deal with the problem of rumble from the turntable platter itself, not an easy problem to solve unless you go direct drive or belt drive with a heavy platter.
3) The problem of off-center records which can cause a very audiable "wowing" quality to the sound.
4) The accuracy of the turning speed of the platter itself (wow and flutter), resolved by either going direct drive or belt drive with a heavy platter.
5) The really finicky adjustments of the tonearm and cartridge (geometry adjustments, setting tracking force and setting anti-skating force).
6) Keeping the disc clean.
7) The limits of circa 23 minutes of music per side on an LP.
8) The limits of dynamic range of around 60-65 dB due to limitations of the disk cutting head and tonearm cartridge without going to a sound-compromising compression technique such as dbx.
9) Having to put the entire turntable on a flat surface that is physically very stable.
Is it small wonder why CD's rapidly replaced LP's?
People forget that today's air safety is vastly better than even 20 years ago.
With recent improvements like:
1) Ground radar to keep track of planes on taxiways and runways 2) Vastly improved radars to keep track of planes near airports 3) Doppler radar to closely watch for "microburst" thunderstorms 4) GPS systems to give pilots exact position within 30 feet accuracy 5) Major improvements in ATC systems and unification of ATC systems for multi-country use
Accident rates have actually dropped drastically on a passenger-mile basis.
Can we improve it further? Of course. That's why NASA is working on a new ATC technology called NextGen to improve safety and allow for planes to fly anywhere in US airspace with vastly improved navigation and safety factors for pilots.
I may get flamed for this, but I think one major reason why Led Zeppelin were a major holdout against legal downloads was the fact the former band members feared most of the downloads will be the song "Stairway to Heaven," causing people to ignore the numerous other music the group wrote. Besides, sales of the group's music was still quite profitable in album form for the surviving band members, so there was no real incentive for legal digital downloads until the recent announcement.
Actually, I've read that the Mars Science Laboratory lander design could be the basis for multiple landers on Mars. Unlike the Mars Exploration Rovers the MSL uses a radio-isotope thermoelectric generator (RTG), which allows for high-latitude operations on Mars itself. That could make it possible for rovers to operate at Mars' polar regions, carrying instruments to look for signs of life in these regions.
Interesting you mention that because one thing cited on the Nobel Prize announcement was it made it possible to put high capacity storage on a small device. That was what made the original iPod possible in the first place and why the iPod classic now can store an amazing 160 GB of media data, more data storage capacity than most desktop machine hard drives of just even a few years ago!:-O
My definition of "useful" is a langugage that a lot of people speak, especially for business and diplomacy purposes. That's why Arabic, English, French, and Spanish are so useful (I may add Mandarin Chinese if only because of the sheer number of speakers in eastern Asia).
Right now, the only useful languages worldwide are Arabic (because everyone have to learn Arabic to read the Qu'ran), English (because of the British Empire of the 19th and 20th Centuries), French (because of the African colonies of the 19th and 20th Centuries), and Spanish (because of Spanish conquest and colonization of what is now Latin America). French is very useful on the African continent, because in much of Africa French is the ONLY common language among local tribal people that speak their own languages.
Actually, Windows 98 runs quite well even with as little as 96 MB of RAM. Windows XP, however, needs 512 MB of RAM to really run decently fast, and it hits the "sweet spot" of good performance at 1 GB of RAM (that's why my home machine has 1.5 GB of RAM). Also, you want at least a 500 MHz Intel Celeron "A" CPU to run XP, since it does tend to use a lot of CPU cycles to run all its features (my home machine runs an AMD Athlon XP 2200+ CPU).
By the way, you really need more RAM for today's broadband Internet experience, especially on web sites with a lot of multimedia embedded in the website.
It should be noted that it's a good idea to get a decently fast CPU and at least 512 MB of RAM to decently run fast today's latest Linux distributions from Ubuntu, Fedora, and so on--they're getting almost as voracious as Windows in terms of hardware requirements.
The biggest problem with Wi-Fi is that you need way too many transceivers to make it work on a municipal scale, and that adds up to costly problem of the the excess complexity of controlling and maintaining a large number of transceiver spots.
WiMAX--which is about to go to large-scale applications within the next 18 months--needs only a few transceiver towers to cover an entire city. That right there saves a lot of money since you only need to maintain and control a few transceiver towers.
While Windows 2000 Professional was a great upgrade, the problem was that at the time it first came out in early 2000 you needed about 384 MB of RAM to run it decently fast, at a time when most machines still only had about 128 MB of RAM! Once you upgraded the memory to 512 MB, Win2K ran pretty well, and it really ran great the more memory you installed.
I think much of griping against Windows Vista comes from the fact they've heavily changed the interface compared to Windows XP, which confused older Windows users. But once people become more used to the interface, this issue will go away.
Didn't we go through this same issue when Windows XP first came out in 2001? I remember back then you needed 512 MB to make it run decently fast, and the "sweet spot" was 1 GB of RAM (both of which were not that common back in 2001).
The problem with Windows Vista is that the hardware has not yet completely caught up with the potential of the OS. Just wait till 2008, when machines with 4 GB or more of RAM become more commonly available and graphics cards that support DirectX 10 are more widely available.
Depends on the type of abacus, though. The Chinese suanpan is often a big unit that tends to hog a lot of desk space, while the Japanese soroban looks more practical for small desks.
While it would be great to download files in FLAC or Apple Lossless format, the massive size of the files in these formats makes them a non-starter even with broadband Internet getting pretty commonplace today. That's because the compression to lossless format only saves about 30-50% in file size compared to the CD original.
With Amazon's 256 kbps variable data rate MP3's, the sound quality is good enough that to tell the difference between that and the original source requires the type of stereo equipment beyond the means of most consumers.
I like the fact Amazon is using 256 kbps variable bit rate for their MP3 encoding. This results in VERY good sound quality, good enough that to tell the difference between this and the CD original requires stereo equipment that costs way beyond the means of most consumers.
...Amazon.com opens up their new music download store TODAY.
Unlike Virgin's store, the Amazon digital music files use non-DRM'd MP3 file encoded at 256 kbps variable bit rate, which means high quality sound good enough that to tell the difference against the original file you'll need stereo equipment that costs way beyond the means of most consumers.
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Let's consider some of your comments:
advanced electric storage devices and batteries at all scales - lithium? Supercaps?
Supercapacitors based on nanotechnology will be coming within the next 7-10 years, and that will revolutionize the use of electricity, because it makes it possible to store on a large scale power generated by solar panels and wind turbines for later use. It also means electric cars don't need massive, space-hogging battery packs, since supercapacitor battery packs will be much smaller than NiMH and Li-On battery packs for automotive applications.
very simple and inexpensive computing devices with integrated wireless telephone and Internet capabilities - www.nokia.com?
Can you say iPhone? The Apple iPhone is a major leap forward towards such a device you mentioned.
onboard sensors and computers for smart vehicles - your door is... we know, we know
Those sensors are making it to a lot a higher-end cars, and lower-end vehicles are starting to get this technology, too.
advanced high-speed rail - presumably the high speed (400 km/h) rail we have now isn't advanced
I see within the next 15-20 years large-scale maglev deployment worldwide, since we're hitting the practical operational limits of steel-rail high-speed passenger trains (above 330 km/h, physical wear on pantographs/overhead wiring and steel wheels/rails becomes major issues).
In the future, when nanotech-based solar panels are on just about every residence, there will still be a need for AC power, mostly because AC power is better-suited for distributed power generation over a wide area.
All those Star Trek tech manuals, or star wars art books, or the discworld science books are ALL published with the blessing of Paramount, Lucasfilm and Terry Pratchet. (The ones I got at least)
Bingo. Remember all those illustrated books from DK publishing for Star Wars, the DC Comics universe and the Marvel Comics universe? They were not only done with the permission of the copyright holders, but the copyright holders (Lucasfilm, DC Comics and Marvel Comics) often assisted in writing these illustrated books.
The problem with the upcoming Harry Potter Lexicon is that it was done not as a commentary book, but a reference book using another person's creation without permission. Remember all those books speculating about Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows before the final HP book came out? Rowling and Warner Brothers never did object to these books because they were considered books commenting and speculating on what Rowling would do in the final HP novel, which has no serious copyright concerns.
France did something that the rest of the world should have done with nuclear power: standardize on a single complete powerplant design. By standardizing on a single complete powerplant design, they were able to train their operators and service engineers on how to safely operate the reactor at any plant in the country, and it also meant lower plant construction costs, too. Because it has so much cheap electric generation, that's why SNCF (the French National Railways) was able to build ultra-fast TGV trains all over the country without worries about getting electric power generation for these trains.
In fact, why the EU didn't just adopt the French nuclear powerplant design and built nuclear powerplants all over Europe based on this design is beyond me (aside from NIMBY environmentalist complaints).
I think people forget that the Chernobyl disaster was caused by a LOT of mitigating circumstances:
1. The reactor was not built inside a heavy concrete containment structure, the type that successfully kept most of the radiation out from the Three Mile Island reactor failure.
2. Graphite-moderated reactors are inherently dangerous to start with because graphite will burn if the nuclear fuel overheats.
3. The test that caused the explosion was caused by deliberately shutting down the safety systems normally in place at the reactor.
Today, thanks to vastly improved reactor technology, reactors can be designed so that in case all safety systems suddenly go down the reactor can automatically go into a "safe" mode and cool down by itself (the pebble-bed reactor is designed this way).
Apple should have held off introduction of the iPhone in Europe until it incorporates HSDPA broadband access over a 3G network, which I believe is fairly common there.
The ridiculous weight of the battery pack was why the General Motors EV1 wasn't such a great idea to start with. Switching to NiMH or Li-On batteries might lower some of the battery pack weight, but you still have to deal with charge times measured in hours.
However, MIT's new supercapacitor technology based on carbon nanotubes might solve the charge time problem, since it may allow for very high density electrical storage (e.g., further reduction in the size of the battery pack) and charge times measured in minutes, not hours.
Of course, you forgot two major problems that plagued the EV1:
:-)
1) The battery pack was massively large and heavy, which seriously cut into the interior space of the car.
2) The range was just too limited given the absurd charging times (around seven hours for circa 70-100 miles range).
Fortunately, technology may finally catch up to make a fully-electric car practical: supercapacitors based on carbon-nanotube technology, something MIT is working on currently (pun not intended). Using these new supercapacitors will allow a DRASTIC reduction in the size of the battery pack itself, and unlike NiMH and Li-On batteries supercapacitor recharge times are measured in ones of minutes.
I can foresee by 2015 a long-range electric vehicle about the same external physical size as the current Honda Fit but with the interior space as a Honda Civic, thanks to the elimination of the space-wasting engine compartment (each wheel will be driven by its own small electric motor and the entire supercapacitor battery pack sits on the floorpan between the front and rear wheels). The vehicle will go about 400 km (248 miles) on a full charge and you can charge the battery pack in under 10 minutes!
I think we will find a lot rocky-crust planets orbiting other stars by 2025 thanks to the Terrestrial Planet Finder space telescope array that will probably be fully operational after 2016. They should concentrate on every star like our Sun within 100 light years of our Solar System in its search.
I think the biggest problem with Tsar Bomba was that it required extensive modifications to the Tu-95 bomber just to carry the bomb, and the bomb became an external store, which caused all kinds of problems in terms of aerodynamic drag. Remember, the most powerful nuclear bomb ever fielded by the USAF (the Mk. 17 bomb with a yield of circa 20 MT) was designed right from the start around the bomb bay dimensions of the B-52 bomber.
Let's consider the problems that LP's face:
1) The sheer physical contact between the record needle and disc means both with wear out over time.
2) You have to deal with the problem of rumble from the turntable platter itself, not an easy problem to solve unless you go direct drive or belt drive with a heavy platter.
3) The problem of off-center records which can cause a very audiable "wowing" quality to the sound.
4) The accuracy of the turning speed of the platter itself (wow and flutter), resolved by either going direct drive or belt drive with a heavy platter.
5) The really finicky adjustments of the tonearm and cartridge (geometry adjustments, setting tracking force and setting anti-skating force).
6) Keeping the disc clean.
7) The limits of circa 23 minutes of music per side on an LP.
8) The limits of dynamic range of around 60-65 dB due to limitations of the disk cutting head and tonearm cartridge without going to a sound-compromising compression technique such as dbx.
9) Having to put the entire turntable on a flat surface that is physically very stable.
Is it small wonder why CD's rapidly replaced LP's?
People forget that today's air safety is vastly better than even 20 years ago.
With recent improvements like:
1) Ground radar to keep track of planes on taxiways and runways
2) Vastly improved radars to keep track of planes near airports
3) Doppler radar to closely watch for "microburst" thunderstorms
4) GPS systems to give pilots exact position within 30 feet accuracy
5) Major improvements in ATC systems and unification of ATC systems for multi-country use
Accident rates have actually dropped drastically on a passenger-mile basis.
Can we improve it further? Of course. That's why NASA is working on a new ATC technology called NextGen to improve safety and allow for planes to fly anywhere in US airspace with vastly improved navigation and safety factors for pilots.
I may get flamed for this, but I think one major reason why Led Zeppelin were a major holdout against legal downloads was the fact the former band members feared most of the downloads will be the song "Stairway to Heaven," causing people to ignore the numerous other music the group wrote. Besides, sales of the group's music was still quite profitable in album form for the surviving band members, so there was no real incentive for legal digital downloads until the recent announcement.
Actually, I've read that the Mars Science Laboratory lander design could be the basis for multiple landers on Mars. Unlike the Mars Exploration Rovers the MSL uses a radio-isotope thermoelectric generator (RTG), which allows for high-latitude operations on Mars itself. That could make it possible for rovers to operate at Mars' polar regions, carrying instruments to look for signs of life in these regions.
Interesting you mention that because one thing cited on the Nobel Prize announcement was it made it possible to put high capacity storage on a small device. That was what made the original iPod possible in the first place and why the iPod classic now can store an amazing 160 GB of media data, more data storage capacity than most desktop machine hard drives of just even a few years ago! :-O
My definition of "useful" is a langugage that a lot of people speak, especially for business and diplomacy purposes. That's why Arabic, English, French, and Spanish are so useful (I may add Mandarin Chinese if only because of the sheer number of speakers in eastern Asia).
Right now, the only useful languages worldwide are Arabic (because everyone have to learn Arabic to read the Qu'ran), English (because of the British Empire of the 19th and 20th Centuries), French (because of the African colonies of the 19th and 20th Centuries), and Spanish (because of Spanish conquest and colonization of what is now Latin America). French is very useful on the African continent, because in much of Africa French is the ONLY common language among local tribal people that speak their own languages.
Actually, Windows 98 runs quite well even with as little as 96 MB of RAM. Windows XP, however, needs 512 MB of RAM to really run decently fast, and it hits the "sweet spot" of good performance at 1 GB of RAM (that's why my home machine has 1.5 GB of RAM). Also, you want at least a 500 MHz Intel Celeron "A" CPU to run XP, since it does tend to use a lot of CPU cycles to run all its features (my home machine runs an AMD Athlon XP 2200+ CPU).
By the way, you really need more RAM for today's broadband Internet experience, especially on web sites with a lot of multimedia embedded in the website.
It should be noted that it's a good idea to get a decently fast CPU and at least 512 MB of RAM to decently run fast today's latest Linux distributions from Ubuntu, Fedora, and so on--they're getting almost as voracious as Windows in terms of hardware requirements.
You are absolutely correct.
The biggest problem with Wi-Fi is that you need way too many transceivers to make it work on a municipal scale, and that adds up to costly problem of the the excess complexity of controlling and maintaining a large number of transceiver spots.
WiMAX--which is about to go to large-scale applications within the next 18 months--needs only a few transceiver towers to cover an entire city. That right there saves a lot of money since you only need to maintain and control a few transceiver towers.
While Windows 2000 Professional was a great upgrade, the problem was that at the time it first came out in early 2000 you needed about 384 MB of RAM to run it decently fast, at a time when most machines still only had about 128 MB of RAM! Once you upgraded the memory to 512 MB, Win2K ran pretty well, and it really ran great the more memory you installed.
I think much of griping against Windows Vista comes from the fact they've heavily changed the interface compared to Windows XP, which confused older Windows users. But once people become more used to the interface, this issue will go away.
Didn't we go through this same issue when Windows XP first came out in 2001? I remember back then you needed 512 MB to make it run decently fast, and the "sweet spot" was 1 GB of RAM (both of which were not that common back in 2001).
The problem with Windows Vista is that the hardware has not yet completely caught up with the potential of the OS. Just wait till 2008, when machines with 4 GB or more of RAM become more commonly available and graphics cards that support DirectX 10 are more widely available.
Depends on the type of abacus, though. The Chinese suanpan is often a big unit that tends to hog a lot of desk space, while the Japanese soroban looks more practical for small desks.
While it would be great to download files in FLAC or Apple Lossless format, the massive size of the files in these formats makes them a non-starter even with broadband Internet getting pretty commonplace today. That's because the compression to lossless format only saves about 30-50% in file size compared to the CD original.
With Amazon's 256 kbps variable data rate MP3's, the sound quality is good enough that to tell the difference between that and the original source requires the type of stereo equipment beyond the means of most consumers.
I like the fact Amazon is using 256 kbps variable bit rate for their MP3 encoding. This results in VERY good sound quality, good enough that to tell the difference between this and the CD original requires stereo equipment that costs way beyond the means of most consumers.
...Amazon.com opens up their new music download store TODAY.
Unlike Virgin's store, the Amazon digital music files use non-DRM'd MP3 file encoded at 256 kbps variable bit rate, which means high quality sound good enough that to tell the difference against the original file you'll need stereo equipment that costs way beyond the means of most consumers.