The real question is, if you know you have to display your PDFs in a web browser, why not just convert them to something more web friendly on the server side and then display that to the client? It isn't like you'd be using pdf.js as your PDF viewer for any PDF. It has to be embedded in a website for specific PDFs on that site.
Hydrogen does not need to be stored as pure hydrogen. There are new ways of storing hydrogen being developed, for example via carbazole:
I can't find any information on the density of hydrogen stored in carbazole. I suspect it is very low. Even cryogenically cooled liquid hydrogen only has 1/3 the energy density of gasoline. That's your mane problem with hydrogen. Anyway, couldn't just just as easily develop a type of battery that takes fuel instead of a direct electric charge?
The really big advantage of hydrogen is that filling up your car takes exactly as long as it does now for a standard car. No "recharging overnight", you can refill the car in a minute or two. So you can refill in the middle of a journey without having to stay at a hotel - you can use the hydrogen car like a car. And the range of a full tank of hydrogen is also bigger than any affordable battery you can have in a car right now.
Yes, I understand that fuels are more convenient, but hydrogen is still a terrible fuel. Might as well just keep burning gasoline. Consumers will.
But hydrogen has its own transportation and storage problems. The only safe way way to get hydrogen to consumers is as a compressed gas. And then it no longer compares to gasoline as a fuel. Even as a cryogenic liquid, it STILL only has 1/3 the energy density by volume of gasoline. I get that fuels are more convenient than batteries, but hydrogen isn't all that much better.
Hydrogen and other fuels can be pumped pretty fast, the tank does not get smaller with age
No, but it does get weaker with age. Lookup enbrittlement. Hydrogen is a terrible fuel.
Wow, now I feel dumb. I totally got drawn into some troll's journal when he referenced our thread. I knew he was a troll, but I did it anyway. Oh well. At least I didn't make more than one comment in the journal.
Depends on where you get the hydrogen from. If you're getting it from fossil fuels, I would consider it a source. For practical purposes (as far as the consumer is concerned), hydrogen is fuel regardless of where it comes from. You have to consider supply chain for both. Just looking at the storage mechanism in the vehicle is silly.
No it wouldn't. Energy density by volume of liquid hydrogen is 1/3 that of gasoline. So unless you're willing to carry around 3 times teh amount of fuel, I don't think you're getting the same range. And even then, do you really think it is reasonable for every car to carry 40 gallons of liquid hydrogen around with them? I don't.
It really makes more sense to cut out the hydrogen middle man and either use fossil fuels or electricity in consumer grade automobiles. Both gasoline and electricity are much easier and safer to work with. Yeah, battery technology is not quite up to par, but it is worth trying to get there.
You don't need to, but it helps depending on the liquid gas. They don't use natural gas in BBQs, BTW. They use propane, at least around here. Propane turns to liquid at relatively low pressures. It is convenient like that. The pressure needed to store it is about the pressure you'd want to delivery it at. Hydrogen, on the other, is very difficult to liquefy and storing it and transporting it is no trivial matter.
Wow dude, as if gasoline weren't some dangerous liquid that we pump into cars?
It is flammable, but that's about it. It is actually pretty safe. It isn't like splashing a bit on you is going to cause serious burns
All the major car manufacturers are still researching hydrogen. If they think it still might have a chance, you ought to figure out why, instead of throwing your brain-dead speculation on Slashdot.
I've done plenty of research and reading in this area. Hydrogen has too many problems. In many ways it is an unnecessary step. If you produce hydrogen from fossil fuels, you're not doing much better than burning gasoline and if you make hydrogen from electricity, you're wasting perfectly good electricity that could just as well go directly into cars. In practice, what benefit does hydrogen actually have? None. It is a pointless conversion in most cases.
Car manufacturers doing research in this area is just due diligence at this point. They need to keep current just in case there is some big breakthrough, but for the most part, they're committing to electric as an alternative.
It doesn't matter. Conversion from electricity and water to hydrogen and back can be very efficient.
And yet almost nobody does it. Most hydrogen is produced from fossil fuels.
The problem with electric cars is energy storage (batteries), and hydrogen can be stored more easily than electricity.
Actually hydrogen storage is fraught with problems. And not just "oh, but we can fix that" problems. It is more like hydrogen is just not very convenient. For example, hydrogen has a nasty habit of slowly breaking down metal (embrittlement). There's much more room for improved battery technology than there is for hydrogen storage and transmission. Besides, we already have the infrastructure to deliver electricity to every home. What's the point in introducing the hydrogen middleman?
If you are referring to electrolysis, it is my understanding electrolysis does not scale very well. And if you're just going to use electricity to make the hydrogen, why not just skip the hydrogen step and put the electricity directly into cars? It isn't like hydrogen is especially convenient to transport or store. Though I know there are ways to use the heat from a nuclear reactor to directly create hydrogen from water. Not sure how that scales though of if it is more or less efficient than using the heat to make electricity.
LOL Right. Because pumping liquid hydrogen at a station would just be soo safe and liquifying it and keeping it cold doesn't take much energy at all...
All these electric cars are just slowing down the development of hydrogen.
No, they're filling the niche that hydrogen is incapable of filling. There's very little new going on with hydrogen because it is just not a convenient fuel.
I'd be all for electric if nuclear power was common, but in my state almost all the energy is produced in coal power plants. I just don't see how that is so much different from burning gasoline.
You're aware that hydrogen is produced from fossil fuels releasing greenhouse gases, right?
If the automotive industry is going to undergo a paradigm shift, it should be the best one available, not some half-assed compromise.
And it isn't hydrogen. Sorry bud. There's just no good way to get hydrogen to consumers.
A Skype browser plugin? I don't see any other way to really integrate a desktop app and also embed in a browser. Does Silverlight allow generic network access and access to webcams for apps?
Maybe we're using disposable differently? Any song that makes it big on radio and then promptly gets forgotten is disposable. Doesn't matter much if it was on the radio for 1 week or 1 month.Who is to say what songs of today will be remembered 30 years from now?
You can't compel them, but you can hit them with a breach of contract suit... and you can have liquidated damages provisions that are so huge that they'd rather not breach. Essentially, compelling them through economic interests, rather than a legal order.
Breach of what contract? If it isn't valid to contractually obligate someone to file a lawsuit on your behalf, what is being breached by not filing a lawsuit on your behalf?
Plus, why would they not? If the inventor was well paid to simply sign a civil complaint for infringement at some point in the future, why wouldn't they?
Good point. Though wouldn't the patent be invalid because the owner wasn't doing anything with it?
I have to disagree. Since university educations are not free, and universities are not all fully publicly funded, I think it's a bit naive to say that a private university, like MIT, Harvard, Cornell, or others, should be doing research out of the goodness of their hearts.
I dont' really care what would motivate them to put their research into the public domain. I just think it is important to promote the free exchange of ideas wherever and whenever possible. To be perfectly honest, I don't even like idea of intellectual property at all, particularly patents and copyright They are necessary evils, at best. I'd be happy to see the whole concept of intellectual property abandoned and require nothing more than proper attribution to avoid fraud. But, alas, capitalism.
All that changes is that the $4.5billion will be a contract between the company and the inventor, such that the inventor agrees to go after any infringers. Your suggestion doesn't really change anything.
Another thing: If the inventor isn't doing anything with the patent, they'll lose it under my proposal. Who is going to give them $4.5bil contract for exclusive license to a patent if the the owner is just going to lose it for lack of implementation?
All that changes is that the $4.5billion will be a contract between the company and the inventor, such that the inventor agrees to go after any infringers. Your suggestion doesn't really change anything.
If the inventor dies, goes out of business, or doesn't have the resources to go after infringers, what then? I would personally question the validity of such a contract, but IANAL. It doesn't seem right to obligate someone else to file a lawsuit. I think you can prevent another from filing a lawsuit, but you shouldn't be able to compel them to on your behalf.
Again, I am not a lawyer and I openly admit ignorance of contract and patent law. I'm speaking of ethics only.
That's typically called a working requirement, and a few other countries have them, including India. While it's a good idea for getting rid of trolls, it also, unfortunately, affects research universities. Cornell does a lot of research and patenting, and they then license those patents to companies to implement the inventions... but they don't make anything themselves. Should Cornell, MIT, etc. be denied protection?
Yes, I think they should be denied protection. A potential licensee should contract with the university to do the research and the resulting patent should go to the company who intends to use it. Otherwise, research should go into the public domain. I think science is all too often hindered by proprietary and redundant research. Universities are supposed to foster the open exchange of knowledge.
Better way to do it would be to make damages for infringement determined off of either lost profits (if you make a product) or a reasonable market-price based licensing fee. So, a troll who has never gotten anyone to pay for a license might only get a few dollars, while a university can point to their licensing contracts and get similar terms.
I just want to express my opinion that patents should not be transferable. It is bad enough that corporations wield patents to hinder progress, maintain monopolies, and destroy smaller competitors. Patents are meant to protect the people who innovate. You should not be able to buy and sell this protection. If you didn't invent it, you shouldn't be able to enforce a patent on it even if you paid $4.5 billion for that "right." Also, If someone patents something, they have to do something with it themselves or they forfeit their patent. You can't just sit on an idea and wait for someone else to infringe on it so you can sue them. That's just wrong.
I think it is generally accepted among musicians that you borrow from each other, play each others' songs, add your own twists, etc. I think people need to give up on this idea that all music should be totally original.
Almost all music is at least partially copied from songs years ago. Don't fool yourself. There's not really much new in music unless you go out to the very fringes, and then it just starts to sound like random noise (to my ears anyway). I think you just have to embrace it. Music has constraints. Music in certain genres sound very similar. They sound even more similar the less familiar you are with the genre. That's just the way it is.
As far as doing a s study, I think it is valuable to quantify exactly what the songs have in common. Just knowing it intuitively isn't the same.
I really like that bit, but I'm pretty sure they're exaggerating the similarities between songs a little. They're just singing the songs in the same key. If you do that, almost any chords you play in that key will at least not sound bad. Many probably do use the same chord progression though.
Slashdot Mirror
Apple's Preview.app is the best PDF viewer I've ever used. I don't know what you've been trying to render.
So... like Java applets?
The real question is, if you know you have to display your PDFs in a web browser, why not just convert them to something more web friendly on the server side and then display that to the client? It isn't like you'd be using pdf.js as your PDF viewer for any PDF. It has to be embedded in a website for specific PDFs on that site.
Hydrogen does not need to be stored as pure hydrogen. There are new ways of storing hydrogen being developed, for example via carbazole:
I can't find any information on the density of hydrogen stored in carbazole. I suspect it is very low. Even cryogenically cooled liquid hydrogen only has 1/3 the energy density of gasoline. That's your mane problem with hydrogen. Anyway, couldn't just just as easily develop a type of battery that takes fuel instead of a direct electric charge?
The really big advantage of hydrogen is that filling up your car takes exactly as long as it does now for a standard car. No "recharging overnight", you can refill the car in a minute or two. So you can refill in the middle of a journey without having to stay at a hotel - you can use the hydrogen car like a car. And the range of a full tank of hydrogen is also bigger than any affordable battery you can have in a car right now.
Yes, I understand that fuels are more convenient, but hydrogen is still a terrible fuel. Might as well just keep burning gasoline. Consumers will.
Batteries suck as a form of energy storage
But hydrogen has its own transportation and storage problems. The only safe way way to get hydrogen to consumers is as a compressed gas. And then it no longer compares to gasoline as a fuel. Even as a cryogenic liquid, it STILL only has 1/3 the energy density by volume of gasoline. I get that fuels are more convenient than batteries, but hydrogen isn't all that much better.
Hydrogen and other fuels can be pumped pretty fast, the tank does not get smaller with age
No, but it does get weaker with age. Lookup enbrittlement. Hydrogen is a terrible fuel.
Wow, now I feel dumb. I totally got drawn into some troll's journal when he referenced our thread. I knew he was a troll, but I did it anyway. Oh well. At least I didn't make more than one comment in the journal.
I don't think it is safe to store liquid hydrogen under that kind of pressure.
There is no guarantee we will be able to overcome the remaining hurdles for electric,
Battery technology, and possibly even ultra capacitors, have much more to come.
and we may find a way to overcome the remaining hurdles for hydrogen.
Unlikely. There are some pretty hard limits on what we can do with hydrogen while keeping it safe for consumers and maintain energy density.
To say one absolutely will be the way to go is silly, because the answer isn't clear yet.
Absolutely? Maybe not, but things appear to be going towards electric.
Depends on where you get the hydrogen from. If you're getting it from fossil fuels, I would consider it a source. For practical purposes (as far as the consumer is concerned), hydrogen is fuel regardless of where it comes from. You have to consider supply chain for both. Just looking at the storage mechanism in the vehicle is silly.
No it wouldn't. Energy density by volume of liquid hydrogen is 1/3 that of gasoline. So unless you're willing to carry around 3 times teh amount of fuel, I don't think you're getting the same range. And even then, do you really think it is reasonable for every car to carry 40 gallons of liquid hydrogen around with them? I don't.
It really makes more sense to cut out the hydrogen middle man and either use fossil fuels or electricity in consumer grade automobiles. Both gasoline and electricity are much easier and safer to work with. Yeah, battery technology is not quite up to par, but it is worth trying to get there.
You don't need to keep liquid gasses cool,
You don't need to, but it helps depending on the liquid gas. They don't use natural gas in BBQs, BTW. They use propane, at least around here. Propane turns to liquid at relatively low pressures. It is convenient like that. The pressure needed to store it is about the pressure you'd want to delivery it at. Hydrogen, on the other, is very difficult to liquefy and storing it and transporting it is no trivial matter.
Wow dude, as if gasoline weren't some dangerous liquid that we pump into cars?
It is flammable, but that's about it. It is actually pretty safe. It isn't like splashing a bit on you is going to cause serious burns
All the major car manufacturers are still researching hydrogen. If they think it still might have a chance, you ought to figure out why, instead of throwing your brain-dead speculation on Slashdot.
I've done plenty of research and reading in this area. Hydrogen has too many problems. In many ways it is an unnecessary step. If you produce hydrogen from fossil fuels, you're not doing much better than burning gasoline and if you make hydrogen from electricity, you're wasting perfectly good electricity that could just as well go directly into cars. In practice, what benefit does hydrogen actually have? None. It is a pointless conversion in most cases.
Car manufacturers doing research in this area is just due diligence at this point. They need to keep current just in case there is some big breakthrough, but for the most part, they're committing to electric as an alternative.
It doesn't matter. Conversion from electricity and water to hydrogen and back can be very efficient.
And yet almost nobody does it. Most hydrogen is produced from fossil fuels.
The problem with electric cars is energy storage (batteries), and hydrogen can be stored more easily than electricity.
Actually hydrogen storage is fraught with problems. And not just "oh, but we can fix that" problems. It is more like hydrogen is just not very convenient. For example, hydrogen has a nasty habit of slowly breaking down metal (embrittlement). There's much more room for improved battery technology than there is for hydrogen storage and transmission. Besides, we already have the infrastructure to deliver electricity to every home. What's the point in introducing the hydrogen middleman?
If you are referring to electrolysis, it is my understanding electrolysis does not scale very well. And if you're just going to use electricity to make the hydrogen, why not just skip the hydrogen step and put the electricity directly into cars? It isn't like hydrogen is especially convenient to transport or store. Though I know there are ways to use the heat from a nuclear reactor to directly create hydrogen from water. Not sure how that scales though of if it is more or less efficient than using the heat to make electricity.
Liquid hydrogen is the way to go
LOL Right. Because pumping liquid hydrogen at a station would just be soo safe and liquifying it and keeping it cold doesn't take much energy at all...
All these electric cars are just slowing down the development of hydrogen.
No, they're filling the niche that hydrogen is incapable of filling. There's very little new going on with hydrogen because it is just not a convenient fuel.
I'd be all for electric if nuclear power was common, but in my state almost all the energy is produced in coal power plants. I just don't see how that is so much different from burning gasoline.
You're aware that hydrogen is produced from fossil fuels releasing greenhouse gases, right?
If the automotive industry is going to undergo a paradigm shift, it should be the best one available, not some half-assed compromise.
And it isn't hydrogen. Sorry bud. There's just no good way to get hydrogen to consumers.
A Skype browser plugin? I don't see any other way to really integrate a desktop app and also embed in a browser. Does Silverlight allow generic network access and access to webcams for apps?
Maybe we're using disposable differently? Any song that makes it big on radio and then promptly gets forgotten is disposable. Doesn't matter much if it was on the radio for 1 week or 1 month.Who is to say what songs of today will be remembered 30 years from now?
You can't compel them, but you can hit them with a breach of contract suit... and you can have liquidated damages provisions that are so huge that they'd rather not breach. Essentially, compelling them through economic interests, rather than a legal order.
Breach of what contract? If it isn't valid to contractually obligate someone to file a lawsuit on your behalf, what is being breached by not filing a lawsuit on your behalf?
Plus, why would they not? If the inventor was well paid to simply sign a civil complaint for infringement at some point in the future, why wouldn't they?
Good point. Though wouldn't the patent be invalid because the owner wasn't doing anything with it?
I have to disagree. Since university educations are not free, and universities are not all fully publicly funded, I think it's a bit naive to say that a private university, like MIT, Harvard, Cornell, or others, should be doing research out of the goodness of their hearts.
I dont' really care what would motivate them to put their research into the public domain. I just think it is important to promote the free exchange of ideas wherever and whenever possible. To be perfectly honest, I don't even like idea of intellectual property at all, particularly patents and copyright They are necessary evils, at best. I'd be happy to see the whole concept of intellectual property abandoned and require nothing more than proper attribution to avoid fraud. But, alas, capitalism.
All that changes is that the $4.5billion will be a contract between the company and the inventor, such that the inventor agrees to go after any infringers. Your suggestion doesn't really change anything.
Another thing: If the inventor isn't doing anything with the patent, they'll lose it under my proposal. Who is going to give them $4.5bil contract for exclusive license to a patent if the the owner is just going to lose it for lack of implementation?
All that changes is that the $4.5billion will be a contract between the company and the inventor, such that the inventor agrees to go after any infringers. Your suggestion doesn't really change anything.
If the inventor dies, goes out of business, or doesn't have the resources to go after infringers, what then? I would personally question the validity of such a contract, but IANAL. It doesn't seem right to obligate someone else to file a lawsuit. I think you can prevent another from filing a lawsuit, but you shouldn't be able to compel them to on your behalf.
Again, I am not a lawyer and I openly admit ignorance of contract and patent law. I'm speaking of ethics only.
That's typically called a working requirement, and a few other countries have them, including India. While it's a good idea for getting rid of trolls, it also, unfortunately, affects research universities. Cornell does a lot of research and patenting, and they then license those patents to companies to implement the inventions... but they don't make anything themselves. Should Cornell, MIT, etc. be denied protection?
Yes, I think they should be denied protection. A potential licensee should contract with the university to do the research and the resulting patent should go to the company who intends to use it. Otherwise, research should go into the public domain. I think science is all too often hindered by proprietary and redundant research. Universities are supposed to foster the open exchange of knowledge.
Better way to do it would be to make damages for infringement determined off of either lost profits (if you make a product) or a reasonable market-price based licensing fee. So, a troll who has never gotten anyone to pay for a license might only get a few dollars, while a university can point to their licensing contracts and get similar terms.
Do this too. What are damages based on now?
I just want to express my opinion that patents should not be transferable. It is bad enough that corporations wield patents to hinder progress, maintain monopolies, and destroy smaller competitors. Patents are meant to protect the people who innovate. You should not be able to buy and sell this protection. If you didn't invent it, you shouldn't be able to enforce a patent on it even if you paid $4.5 billion for that "right." Also, If someone patents something, they have to do something with it themselves or they forfeit their patent. You can't just sit on an idea and wait for someone else to infringe on it so you can sue them. That's just wrong.
Off topic, but I just had to say it.
That doesn't surprise me, really, some of the recent hits do strike me as pretty disposable.
Hint: Pop music has always been disposable. The fact that you're only noticing it about recent hits just means you're getting old.
I think it is generally accepted among musicians that you borrow from each other, play each others' songs, add your own twists, etc. I think people need to give up on this idea that all music should be totally original.
Almost all music is at least partially copied from songs years ago. Don't fool yourself. There's not really much new in music unless you go out to the very fringes, and then it just starts to sound like random noise (to my ears anyway). I think you just have to embrace it. Music has constraints. Music in certain genres sound very similar. They sound even more similar the less familiar you are with the genre. That's just the way it is.
As far as doing a s study, I think it is valuable to quantify exactly what the songs have in common. Just knowing it intuitively isn't the same.
I really like that bit, but I'm pretty sure they're exaggerating the similarities between songs a little. They're just singing the songs in the same key. If you do that, almost any chords you play in that key will at least not sound bad. Many probably do use the same chord progression though.