Re:Wind Farms don't work
on
A Mighty Wind
·
· Score: 1
Ok, mesh cage isn't what I was thinking of... You've seen the frame-things that keep you from sticking your fingers into the oscillating fans? (The word I was wanting seems to be "fan grill"). Only needs to be about 100m in diameter (this gives 1.7m clearance) and the gap in the grill only needs to keep birds out. A spherical grill would be a little bigger (since the blades aren't in the center) and allow the windmill to turn to face the wind without having to make the grill turn with it, with the added bonus of being less likely to get a bird stuck to it.
I had no choice. I wasn't going to walk out of my job on the off-chance that I might find another job. I'm salaried. I knew I was getting screwed, etc.
So you chose to bend over and take it. Jolly good for you. You're lucky your management is sane, or next week you would have had a new project with twice the work and a week less on the deadline.
Just remember that no economy gives companies to enslave people, at least in the US.
Re:Wind Farms don't work
on
A Mighty Wind
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
More efficient omnidirectional prototypes were tested in the 1980's but they were banned because they tended to attract and kill birds.
Ok, theres an obvious solution to this... build a damn mesh cage around the propeller blades.
I guess this is too much of a duh solution for people to accept though, without getting a five million grant from the government to "study" it.
Long distance power transmission still sucks. Of course, something like this would be great for processing other materials.. like, say, generating Hydrogen to run our so-called hydrogen economy of the future.
Re:No more car tinkering...
on
42-Volt Autos
·
· Score: 1
The problem is that its neither voltage nor amperage that kills you, its Watts (the measure of power) (V*I). Thus, a high amperage at a low voltage is just as deadly as a low amperage at a high voltage (or a high voltage and high amperage). However, numbers in the middle may or may not be dangerous depending on how high they are. For instance, according to http://www.amasci.com/emotor/voltmeas.html most static electrictiy sparks are at least 500 volts and go up to several thousand.
So, in the end, the question is going to be "is the overall power in the system high enough to kill you" and the answer is going to be probably not, unless the current in use increases as well.
That said, it would be absurd to argue that privacy is an inalienable right (although, there are a lot of absurd people on Slashdot that will try and argue it without thinking it through).
So, after giving it some careful thought, I'm going to argue. As long as any one entity claims the right to privacy, then all entities must share that right to privacy. This is a classic "who watches the watchers" case. Lets go way out on a limb here and propose a completely one-sided transparent society. Citizens' every moves are recorded, analyzed, and filed away. Meanwhile, government offices no longer permit citizens to review their own records, review government records, or otherwise break through the privacy that the government maintains it needs in order to operate.
Citizens wake up every day, they go to work, they go home, turn on the "news" which is just the same government-provided "we are doing our best for you" feel-good media that doesn't reveal one bit about what the government has actually done, on every channel.
Crime spikes suddenly, well... not really, the criminals just get caught nowadays, instead of getting away. But lets take pedophiles, since they're the people everyone loves to hate (them, or terrorists, its hard to say). Rather than sitting around at home trying to download kiddie pr0n, they now sit around at the government office of popular observation and whack off to your daughter taking a shower. But you don't know this, you're not permitted to know who is on the other side of the camera. You just know that the cameras had to be installed to make sure you (or someone else) weren't molesting your children, or stealing your things, and that everyone's house has them. So now, the rest of the criminals have moved into the ultimate protection, the government offices, where they can falsify records and destroy evidence with impunity since nobody can watch them. Innocents are caught (perhaps because of a falsified record!), but since they are not permitted to review the secret government "evidence", they cannot defend themselves.
Now, lets look at the opposite: a completely open government and a private citizenry. Ignoring the benefits of seeing how your tax money goes to waste, we'll focus on crime fighting in this case. Anyone can anonymously look in on, say, the FBI and see whats going on. They can see that the FBI has the wrong address for them, and update their records (at this point, the anonymity should have to be dropped since you should be required to prove you're not changing someone else's records, as well as proving your changes are correct.) You can also see the progress being made on every investigation. A successful criminal in this world would track the investigation into his crime and stay one step ahead for as long as possible (people make mistakes). In this case, though, the criminal is limited to reacting to the information available to everyone, including the next door neighbor who knows that their neighbor is a wanted person. Our country is currently something like this, though with a little more privacy on the government side, and a little less privacy on the people's. But you still know its time to run and hide when your mugshot is on the 9 o'clock news. Unless you're a terrorist (or possibly a terrorist, or mistaken for a terrorist), and then youre simply disappeared into a world of secret tribunals and indefinite incarceration without trial or oversight or recourse.
There are two other possibilities to consider as well.
The first is a private government and a private citizenry. This, I believe, was the model for a very long time. The government had its secret toys in the guise of various secret agencies, the people had their secrets in the guise of a strong 4th amendment, and popular idea that what you do is your own business. In this society, the criminal investigation process was rigidly laid out. A cop would find evidence, present this evidence to the proper authorities, then if the evidence was sufficient,
Its not computer use specifically thats the problem, its improper posture and position. This has been known since shortly after the problem was recognized.
I've used computers since I got my commodore 64 a little more than 15 years ago. Never had a problem, until this year.
This year, I sliced open one of my fingers bad. The bandage I was wearing changed my typing position, and within the 12 or so days I had the bandages on, my wrists started hurting and my fingers tingled. The bandage and wrist pain is gone now, but my fingers still do tingle on occasion.
You should have watched that economic boom a little closer. How much of that was on the backs of loyal employees who kept working even after salaries were cut or even suspended, in the hopes of keeping the company afloat while the CEO jetted about the country in the corporate jet?
Eventually the employees got tired of this, and now they're showing the exact same loyalty they get from the companies: none.
I think that the pilots would notice the guy in the cockpit holding his cell phone 1 ft from the instruments during the cross country flight.
Do you know what I learned in freshman EE? Its that an ideal wire contains the same voltage at every point along it. Now, real world wires are not at all ideal, but they're pretty close. So what do you think the voltage drop in the various wires running down the length of the airplane is going to be? 10V tops if the wire is crappy and cracked? I don't remember any more how to get from V/m to actual voltage on a wire, but I'd wager the output is still more than the 28VDC that the equipment is designed to run at.
Plus if 80 people are using their cell phones, you don't get 80x the signal strength
Bzzt. Learned this in sophomore optics and senior networking class. Electromagnetic waves do create constructive/destructive criticism, indicating that if all 80 phones were broadcasting at the same time, it would be possible to peak at 80 times the maximum signal strength of a single phone. That wouldn't be the average behaviour over a long period of time, but the average would still be higher than a single cellphone. Of course, in my scenario, all 80 phones would send a nearly identical roaming signal at almost the same instant, so it probably could hit 70x or so.
Again, my gripe is methodology and conclusions. I say their methodology sucks and therefore there conclusions almost meaningless. I'm not saying that cell phones are harmless, I'm just saying that this test doesn't prove otherwise.
So, why must we continue to throw money at the obvious? When I was a child, my father told me that the company he was working for was hired by the government to perform the analysis of a concrete vault that a company had stored toxic waste in. The government wanted to know why toxic waste had penetrated farther through the concrete in some places than in others. They were paid something like $500k to perform this "analysis". I'll leave it up to you to get the obvious conclusion.
And yet governments continue to through money at bullshit, easy to solve problems while ignoring real ones that have no easy solution. I suppose bureaucrats just want to feel warm and fuzzy about something.
So saw some minor anomolies when they had signal generating equipment (not phones, but signal generating equipment) 1 foot away from the electronics
"Minor" anomalies? A 5 degree heading error puts you about 300 miles off at the end of a cross-country flight. As for your other gripes, CAN indicates that it is fully within the cellphone's spec to produce that output, and given that cellphones are designed to increase power when they cannot reach a cell, invariably they are FULLY CAPABLE of doing so as soon as the plane reaches a point where the cellphone can't communicate.
I also suspect that the interference caused by whatever equipment they used is negligible compared to, say, all 80 or so window seat passengers having their cellphones turned on, in their pockets, and all passing out of their cell at the exact same instant, more or less.
One would suppose that the "baseline" you seek would be normal operation of the craft in conditions without interference. Considering that every flight I have taken to Boston has actually succeeded in landing somewhere within Massachusetts (in fact, they all managed to land at Logan, imagine that), I think that it can be safe to say that baseline operation does not involve compass error or navigation system error.
This, I think, gets to the heart of the danger to the open source community - claims that "a thousand eyes are better/more secure/keep you safe from misappropriated code" only works if any one is looking at the code.
Hm, this is true, but theres more to it than just that. I've been through large chunks of the kernel source a few times while screwing with writing drivers and schedulers and stuff for OS class, so I can say I've seen the misappropriated code....
Except that I have no way of knowing it was misappropriated... the only way to know would be to have non-developers become tainted with as much proprietary information as they can remember, and then review the code. Since they're tainted they wouldn't be able develop (anything at all, probably...) so their only value would be to make sure something inappropriate doesn't make it into the source.
And that assumes that the people reading the source don't have an ulterior motive in letting the misappropriated code accidentially "slip by". Like, say, a billion dollar lawsuit ulterior.
If IP theft occurred, then the actionable part here extends only to the thief. And thats it... SCO would not have any leg to stand on to sue companies or users who did not personally steal the IP from SCO.
I'm not sure whether this would work or not (since you reading the photon is what changes its spec... you'd be reading the new version of the photon, I'd think and would need the original key to put it back the way it was...)
But without pretty spiffy splicing techniques, how long do you think it would take to get that repeater inserted into a fibre link? When I was in college, a friend of mine got a job fusing splices in fibre optic lines with a special machine, and it still took him several minutes per splice once he got good with it. The other end is going to know something's up when the fibre goes dark for more than a few ms...
The area becomes known as a hotspot, wages (and usually the standard of living) rise, all is well. Then it's on to the next area that provides "cheap" labor.
This would be great, if only it were permanent. Except that its not... as soon as the companies start making noises and looking at the door, wages fall again in an attempt to keep them there. Government drops taxes in an attempt to keep them there. In the end, the company leaves anyway, since, unfortunately, the "hotspot" passed laws to protect their standard of living (like minimum wage laws, environmental protection laws, and the like) and the local area becomes even more depressed than it originally was, since both the people and the government is out money.
For an example, take a look at Houston's finances pre- and post-enron. Enron's gone, and what used to be a budget surplus has become a hot topic for the next mayor election.
Oh, and if you're ever in Houston, don't have a wreck. The police no longer have the funds to respond to accidents starting this month, and without that police report you're going to have a hard time collecting the insurance.
Well there you go. As long as your salary is justified by your productivity, then you're in good shape. Cheaper is not always better.
Great.
Now, will someone teach this to the current generation of corporate raider CEOs who don't care about rational behavior, don't care about the survival of the company, don't care about the product, don't care about the employees, don't care about the reputation, and just want to add another million to their paycheck and get the biggest gold parachute possible?
is exempt from the laws of macroeconomics
Laws? What laws? Show me one of your laws that applies where CEO A runs Company B into the ground. Every single one of your pretty little toy laws assumes -- no, requires -- that consumers act in their best interests, and companies act in their best interests. And yet, companies continue to pay out incredibly overinflated salaries to their CEOs, because everyone is on everyone else's board of directors. "Sure, we'll give you a raise, next week, just remember to vote for our raise over at supermegacorp!" "Wow, you swindled your company good! We're going to have to let you go from your CEO job, here's your golden parachute, don't forget to vote for my raise next week!"
Thats a LOT of countries you're going to have to lobby for these laws. Something like that is going to take a lot of money and time. Who are you going to get to fund this? Business (hah!)? The people who are already poor and underrepresented in a great many of the third world countries (hah!)?
I'm against uncontrolled corporate globalization, but its already too late to stop it, corporations already own most of the world governments, including the US, so laws aren't going to do one bit. What would be required is compelete education of the masses... except that with nearly all mass media controlled by superconglomerates (which is only going to get worse, thanks FCC!) how do you expect to get people to care?
Actually, this wasn't. They had an agreement with MS to take this product to market. Unfortunately they signed a contract with a suicide clause which indicated that if they went under, MS got all their goods. Of course, Microsoft was supposed to pay them to keep them from going under...
So naturally Microsoft didn't pay them, they went under, MS took their stuff, and Sendo sued MS over breach of contract.
Now, at this point, the rights to the technology should be up in the air. If Microsoft broke the terms of the contract by not paying Sendo, then the contract is void and the IP is still Sendo's. But Microsoft, being the arrogant bastard it is, didn't wait for the lawsuit to end, and assumed that they could dole out the big bucks to make sure the suit ended in their favor. So they gave Sendo's IP to Orange to take Sendo's product to market.
So, yes, this is a case of "I will sue anyone who does what my patent describes", but for once, they're justified in biting back.
No, no, don't you realize why the regulations on consolidation are being dropped? Its much easier for the government to take over a few companies than many little ones.
for violations of Der Kopiright Akt. Herr Ashkroft announced that these economic terrorists will be stripped of their citizenship and summarially tortured for days without sleep until they confess to their vile plans of toppling the government-approved media.
Unlike pot, anime can't be grown in the backyard of nearly every state in the union. No, your bootleg got into your hands through pretty much the same people and methods that China's windows bootleg warehouses used to manufacture and distribute their bootlegs. While terrorism is probably not directly financed, it is no stretch of the imagination to see the organized crime links the bootlegging industry has.
"Otaku" is a word in an actual language which has a specific meaning
Actually, the word otaku in Japanese originally means "House". Over the years it eventually acquired a slang meaning of "one who doesn't leave their house".
So yeah. Going to Japan and telling someone there you're an "Otaku" gets you the same weird looks you get when you go out in public in an English speaking country and tell them you're a "Hacker".
Anything which will seep through cast iron is not suitable for use on a motor vehicle, for what should be obvious safety reasons.
I can't find anything on this in google. About how many molecules of H2 per cm^2 per second are we looking at? Significantly more than the amount of hydrogen already in the atmosphere? Enough so to induce flammability under otherwise normal circumstances?
The energy to split the hydrogen out of compounds must be coming from somewhere. How do you do it? Primarily with existing electric generation techniques - coal, nuclear, hydroelectric dams... there's no free lunch
Yes, but there is one advantage to using existing electrical facilities. Unlike individual people driving around, large companies can be successfully (read: systematically enforced) required to meet emissions standards. They tend to have the capital required to install scrubbers, flares, and other equipment that the average motorist doesn't care about, and wouldn't spend the $10,000 for anyways.
they've got 2-stroke engines. Which means mixing fuel and oil. Given that hydrogen reacts with most metals and probably burns hot enough to melt a lot of them, I would guess that this would be eliminated by using a ceramic engine (Si^2 to be exact) which requires no lubrication or coolant.
Wait 'til you see a car accident where a 2" diameter hole is put into the 1000PSI fuel tank of a 2500 pound car... (do some math and tell me what happens...)
Here's your math right here: PV=nRT
What does that mean? It means that when you punch a 2 inch hole in your tank, P)ressure drops. A lot. V)olume increases, but since the molecules are unable to instantly teleport away, it cannot increase as quickly as P drops. The amount of the gas (n) stays the same, and (R) stays the same unless a nuclear reaction occurs, in which case you have a whole host of other problems.
This leaves (T)emperature. Since the left hand side is reducing over all (remember, P---, V+) and n and R are constant, then T must reduce as well. Thus the claim the manufacturer makes that in the event of a puncture, the tank will freeze rather than burst into flame. (Hopefully they've designed enough strength into the tank that it can maintain integrity while frozen, though.) ((Hopefully the mass stored in the tank is relatively small compared to the mass of the vehicle overall, as well, otherwise your 2" hole will push your vehicle around.))
So yes, there are drawbacks, and yes, unless pure Oxygen is used, NO* will be generated.
Slashdot Mirror
Ok, mesh cage isn't what I was thinking of... You've seen the frame-things that keep you from sticking your fingers into the oscillating fans? (The word I was wanting seems to be "fan grill"). Only needs to be about 100m in diameter (this gives 1.7m clearance) and the gap in the grill only needs to keep birds out. A spherical grill would be a little bigger (since the blades aren't in the center) and allow the windmill to turn to face the wind without having to make the grill turn with it, with the added bonus of being less likely to get a bird stuck to it.
I had no choice. I wasn't going to walk out of my job on the off-chance that I might find another job. I'm salaried. I knew I was getting screwed, etc.
So you chose to bend over and take it. Jolly good for you. You're lucky your management is sane, or next week you would have had a new project with twice the work and a week less on the deadline.
Just remember that no economy gives companies to enslave people, at least in the US.
More efficient omnidirectional prototypes were tested in the 1980's but they were banned because they tended to attract and kill birds.
Ok, theres an obvious solution to this... build a damn mesh cage around the propeller blades.
I guess this is too much of a duh solution for people to accept though, without getting a five million grant from the government to "study" it.
Long distance power transmission still sucks. Of course, something like this would be great for processing other materials.. like, say, generating Hydrogen to run our so-called hydrogen economy of the future.
The problem is that its neither voltage nor amperage that kills you, its Watts (the measure of power) (V*I). Thus, a high amperage at a low voltage is just as deadly as a low amperage at a high voltage (or a high voltage and high amperage). However, numbers in the middle may or may not be dangerous depending on how high they are. For instance, according to http://www.amasci.com/emotor/voltmeas.html most static electrictiy sparks are at least 500 volts and go up to several thousand.
So, in the end, the question is going to be "is the overall power in the system high enough to kill you" and the answer is going to be probably not, unless the current in use increases as well.
That said, it would be absurd to argue that privacy is an inalienable right (although, there are a lot of absurd people on Slashdot that will try and argue it without thinking it through).
So, after giving it some careful thought, I'm going to argue. As long as any one entity claims the right to privacy, then all entities must share that right to privacy. This is a classic "who watches the watchers" case. Lets go way out on a limb here and propose a completely one-sided transparent society. Citizens' every moves are recorded, analyzed, and filed away. Meanwhile, government offices no longer permit citizens to review their own records, review government records, or otherwise break through the privacy that the government maintains it needs in order to operate.
Citizens wake up every day, they go to work, they go home, turn on the "news" which is just the same government-provided "we are doing our best for you" feel-good media that doesn't reveal one bit about what the government has actually done, on every channel.
Crime spikes suddenly, well... not really, the criminals just get caught nowadays, instead of getting away. But lets take pedophiles, since they're the people everyone loves to hate (them, or terrorists, its hard to say). Rather than sitting around at home trying to download kiddie pr0n, they now sit around at the government office of popular observation and whack off to your daughter taking a shower. But you don't know this, you're not permitted to know who is on the other side of the camera. You just know that the cameras had to be installed to make sure you (or someone else) weren't molesting your children, or stealing your things, and that everyone's house has them. So now, the rest of the criminals have moved into the ultimate protection, the government offices, where they can falsify records and destroy evidence with impunity since nobody can watch them. Innocents are caught (perhaps because of a falsified record!), but since they are not permitted to review the secret government "evidence", they cannot defend themselves.
Now, lets look at the opposite: a completely open government and a private citizenry. Ignoring the benefits of seeing how your tax money goes to waste, we'll focus on crime fighting in this case. Anyone can anonymously look in on, say, the FBI and see whats going on. They can see that the FBI has the wrong address for them, and update their records (at this point, the anonymity should have to be dropped since you should be required to prove you're not changing someone else's records, as well as proving your changes are correct.) You can also see the progress being made on every investigation. A successful criminal in this world would track the investigation into his crime and stay one step ahead for as long as possible (people make mistakes). In this case, though, the criminal is limited to reacting to the information available to everyone, including the next door neighbor who knows that their neighbor is a wanted person. Our country is currently something like this, though with a little more privacy on the government side, and a little less privacy on the people's. But you still know its time to run and hide when your mugshot is on the 9 o'clock news. Unless you're a terrorist (or possibly a terrorist, or mistaken for a terrorist), and then youre simply disappeared into a world of secret tribunals and indefinite incarceration without trial or oversight or recourse.
There are two other possibilities to consider as well.
The first is a private government and a private citizenry. This, I believe, was the model for a very long time. The government had its secret toys in the guise of various secret agencies, the people had their secrets in the guise of a strong 4th amendment, and popular idea that what you do is your own business. In this society, the criminal investigation process was rigidly laid out. A cop would find evidence, present this evidence to the proper authorities, then if the evidence was sufficient,
Its not computer use specifically thats the problem, its improper posture and position. This has been known since shortly after the problem was recognized.
I've used computers since I got my commodore 64 a little more than 15 years ago. Never had a problem, until this year.
This year, I sliced open one of my fingers bad. The bandage I was wearing changed my typing position, and within the 12 or so days I had the bandages on, my wrists started hurting and my fingers tingled. The bandage and wrist pain is gone now, but my fingers still do tingle on occasion.
You should have watched that economic boom a little closer. How much of that was on the backs of loyal employees who kept working even after salaries were cut or even suspended, in the hopes of keeping the company afloat while the CEO jetted about the country in the corporate jet?
Eventually the employees got tired of this, and now they're showing the exact same loyalty they get from the companies: none.
I think that the pilots would notice the guy in the cockpit holding his cell phone 1 ft from the instruments during the cross country flight.
Do you know what I learned in freshman EE? Its that an ideal wire contains the same voltage at every point along it. Now, real world wires are not at all ideal, but they're pretty close. So what do you think the voltage drop in the various wires running down the length of the airplane is going to be? 10V tops if the wire is crappy and cracked? I don't remember any more how to get from V/m to actual voltage on a wire, but I'd wager the output is still more than the 28VDC that the equipment is designed to run at.
Plus if 80 people are using their cell phones, you don't get 80x the signal strength
Bzzt. Learned this in sophomore optics and senior networking class. Electromagnetic waves do create constructive/destructive criticism, indicating that if all 80 phones were broadcasting at the same time, it would be possible to peak at 80 times the maximum signal strength of a single phone. That wouldn't be the average behaviour over a long period of time, but the average would still be higher than a single cellphone. Of course, in my scenario, all 80 phones would send a nearly identical roaming signal at almost the same instant, so it probably could hit 70x or so.
Again, my gripe is methodology and conclusions. I say their methodology sucks and therefore there conclusions almost meaningless. I'm not saying that cell phones are harmless, I'm just saying that this test doesn't prove otherwise.
So, why must we continue to throw money at the obvious? When I was a child, my father told me that the company he was working for was hired by the government to perform the analysis of a concrete vault that a company had stored toxic waste in. The government wanted to know why toxic waste had penetrated farther through the concrete in some places than in others. They were paid something like $500k to perform this "analysis". I'll leave it up to you to get the obvious conclusion.
And yet governments continue to through money at bullshit, easy to solve problems while ignoring real ones that have no easy solution. I suppose bureaucrats just want to feel warm and fuzzy about something.
So saw some minor anomolies when they had signal generating equipment (not phones, but signal generating equipment) 1 foot away from the electronics
"Minor" anomalies? A 5 degree heading error puts you about 300 miles off at the end of a cross-country flight. As for your other gripes, CAN indicates that it is fully within the cellphone's spec to produce that output, and given that cellphones are designed to increase power when they cannot reach a cell, invariably they are FULLY CAPABLE of doing so as soon as the plane reaches a point where the cellphone can't communicate.
I also suspect that the interference caused by whatever equipment they used is negligible compared to, say, all 80 or so window seat passengers having their cellphones turned on, in their pockets, and all passing out of their cell at the exact same instant, more or less.
One would suppose that the "baseline" you seek would be normal operation of the craft in conditions without interference. Considering that every flight I have taken to Boston has actually succeeded in landing somewhere within Massachusetts (in fact, they all managed to land at Logan, imagine that), I think that it can be safe to say that baseline operation does not involve compass error or navigation system error.
Possibly, for fairly unusual values of "true"...
Try this in perl:
if ("God") { print "God is true\n"; }
if ("Evolution") { print "Evolution is true\n"; }
That is GREAT! No more having the court call my chief to try and figure out what I charged that guy.
You, sir, must be the nut who pulled me over and wrote me a ticket for doing 83.2 in a walrus zone.
This, I think, gets to the heart of the danger to the open source community - claims that "a thousand eyes are better/more secure/keep you safe from misappropriated code" only works if any one is looking at the code.
Hm, this is true, but theres more to it than just that. I've been through large chunks of the kernel source a few times while screwing with writing drivers and schedulers and stuff for OS class, so I can say I've seen the misappropriated code....
Except that I have no way of knowing it was misappropriated... the only way to know would be to have non-developers become tainted with as much proprietary information as they can remember, and then review the code. Since they're tainted they wouldn't be able develop (anything at all, probably...) so their only value would be to make sure something inappropriate doesn't make it into the source.
And that assumes that the people reading the source don't have an ulterior motive in letting the misappropriated code accidentially "slip by". Like, say, a billion dollar lawsuit ulterior.
If IP theft occurred, then the actionable part here extends only to the thief. And thats it... SCO would not have any leg to stand on to sue companies or users who did not personally steal the IP from SCO.
I'm not sure whether this would work or not (since you reading the photon is what changes its spec... you'd be reading the new version of the photon, I'd think and would need the original key to put it back the way it was...)
But without pretty spiffy splicing techniques, how long do you think it would take to get that repeater inserted into a fibre link? When I was in college, a friend of mine got a job fusing splices in fibre optic lines with a special machine, and it still took him several minutes per splice once he got good with it. The other end is going to know something's up when the fibre goes dark for more than a few ms...
The area becomes known as a hotspot, wages (and usually the standard of living) rise, all is well. Then it's on to the next area that provides "cheap" labor.
This would be great, if only it were permanent. Except that its not... as soon as the companies start making noises and looking at the door, wages fall again in an attempt to keep them there. Government drops taxes in an attempt to keep them there. In the end, the company leaves anyway, since, unfortunately, the "hotspot" passed laws to protect their standard of living (like minimum wage laws, environmental protection laws, and the like) and the local area becomes even more depressed than it originally was, since both the people and the government is out money.
For an example, take a look at Houston's finances pre- and post-enron. Enron's gone, and what used to be a budget surplus has become a hot topic for the next mayor election.
Oh, and if you're ever in Houston, don't have a wreck. The police no longer have the funds to respond to accidents starting this month, and without that police report you're going to have a hard time collecting the insurance.
Well there you go. As long as your salary is justified by your productivity, then you're in good shape. Cheaper is not always better.
Great.
Now, will someone teach this to the current generation of corporate raider CEOs who don't care about rational behavior, don't care about the survival of the company, don't care about the product, don't care about the employees, don't care about the reputation, and just want to add another million to their paycheck and get the biggest gold parachute possible?
is exempt from the laws of macroeconomics
Laws? What laws? Show me one of your laws that applies where CEO A runs Company B into the ground. Every single one of your pretty little toy laws assumes -- no, requires -- that consumers act in their best interests, and companies act in their best interests. And yet, companies continue to pay out incredibly overinflated salaries to their CEOs, because everyone is on everyone else's board of directors. "Sure, we'll give you a raise, next week, just remember to vote for our raise over at supermegacorp!" "Wow, you swindled your company good! We're going to have to let you go from your CEO job, here's your golden parachute, don't forget to vote for my raise next week!"
and to encourage a safety net and a minimum wage
Thats a LOT of countries you're going to have to lobby for these laws. Something like that is going to take a lot of money and time. Who are you going to get to fund this? Business (hah!)? The people who are already poor and underrepresented in a great many of the third world countries (hah!)?
I'm against uncontrolled corporate globalization, but its already too late to stop it, corporations already own most of the world governments, including the US, so laws aren't going to do one bit. What would be required is compelete education of the masses... except that with nearly all mass media controlled by superconglomerates (which is only going to get worse, thanks FCC!) how do you expect to get people to care?
Actually, this wasn't. They had an agreement with MS to take this product to market. Unfortunately they signed a contract with a suicide clause which indicated that if they went under, MS got all their goods. Of course, Microsoft was supposed to pay them to keep them from going under...
So naturally Microsoft didn't pay them, they went under, MS took their stuff, and Sendo sued MS over breach of contract.
Now, at this point, the rights to the technology should be up in the air. If Microsoft broke the terms of the contract by not paying Sendo, then the contract is void and the IP is still Sendo's. But Microsoft, being the arrogant bastard it is, didn't wait for the lawsuit to end, and assumed that they could dole out the big bucks to make sure the suit ended in their favor. So they gave Sendo's IP to Orange to take Sendo's product to market.
So, yes, this is a case of "I will sue anyone who does what my patent describes", but for once, they're justified in biting back.
No, no, don't you realize why the regulations on consolidation are being dropped? Its much easier for the government to take over a few companies than many little ones.
for violations of Der Kopiright Akt. Herr Ashkroft announced that these economic terrorists will be stripped of their citizenship and summarially tortured for days without sleep until they confess to their vile plans of toppling the government-approved media.
Unlike pot, anime can't be grown in the backyard of nearly every state in the union. No, your bootleg got into your hands through pretty much the same people and methods that China's windows bootleg warehouses used to manufacture and distribute their bootlegs. While terrorism is probably not directly financed, it is no stretch of the imagination to see the organized crime links the bootlegging industry has.
But did they pay someone to make those mp3s?
Thats the difference between Copyright Infringement and Bootlegging.
"Otaku" is a word in an actual language which has a specific meaning
Actually, the word otaku in Japanese originally means "House". Over the years it eventually acquired a slang meaning of "one who doesn't leave their house".
So yeah. Going to Japan and telling someone there you're an "Otaku" gets you the same weird looks you get when you go out in public in an English speaking country and tell them you're a "Hacker".
Anything which will seep through cast iron is not suitable for use on a motor vehicle, for what should be obvious safety reasons.
I can't find anything on this in google. About how many molecules of H2 per cm^2 per second are we looking at? Significantly more than the amount of hydrogen already in the atmosphere? Enough so to induce flammability under otherwise normal circumstances?
The energy to split the hydrogen out of compounds must be coming from somewhere. How do you do it? Primarily with existing electric generation techniques - coal, nuclear, hydroelectric dams... there's no free lunch
Yes, but there is one advantage to using existing electrical facilities. Unlike individual people driving around, large companies can be successfully (read: systematically enforced) required to meet emissions standards. They tend to have the capital required to install scrubbers, flares, and other equipment that the average motorist doesn't care about, and wouldn't spend the $10,000 for anyways.
they've got 2-stroke engines. Which means mixing fuel and oil. Given that hydrogen reacts with most metals and probably burns hot enough to melt a lot of them, I would guess that this would be eliminated by using a ceramic engine (Si^2 to be exact) which requires no lubrication or coolant.
Wait 'til you see a car accident where a 2" diameter hole is put into the 1000PSI fuel tank of a 2500 pound car... (do some math and tell me what happens...)
Here's your math right here: PV=nRT
What does that mean? It means that when you punch a 2 inch hole in your tank, P)ressure drops. A lot. V)olume increases, but since the molecules are unable to instantly teleport away, it cannot increase as quickly as P drops. The amount of the gas (n) stays the same, and (R) stays the same unless a nuclear reaction occurs, in which case you have a whole host of other problems.
This leaves (T)emperature. Since the left hand side is reducing over all (remember, P---, V+) and n and R are constant, then T must reduce as well. Thus the claim the manufacturer makes that in the event of a puncture, the tank will freeze rather than burst into flame. (Hopefully they've designed enough strength into the tank that it can maintain integrity while frozen, though.) ((Hopefully the mass stored in the tank is relatively small compared to the mass of the vehicle overall, as well, otherwise your 2" hole will push your vehicle around.))
So yes, there are drawbacks, and yes, unless pure Oxygen is used, NO* will be generated.
So, you have a better idea? I'd love to see it.