Isn't H2O also a greenhouse gas? What effect on climate increased humidity levels have if H2O emissions where substituted for CO2 worldwide?
Whether it is or isn't is irrelevant: the net effect would be zero, because it would be used in a closed cycle (2xH20 + unused solar energy => 2xH2 + O2 => 2xH20 + useful energy). This is effectively the same argument that states that biodiesel or bioethanol are good fuels.
However, you'll pry my gas stove out of my cold dead hands....:-)
I find that gas is the best way to cook, at least stove top.....and the Viking and Wolfe stoves are really fun....15K btu's at the turn of a knob.....sweet.
Have you tried induction? I find it's every bit as good, plus has all the advantages of electricity (safe to leave switched on, digital controls so you can have timed on & off, can often be set to a power output that's lower than is possible with most gas burners) without the drawbacks (it isn't slow heating up, and doesn't get extremely hot). You may have to replace your pans. That's the only downside.
Well, when the storm blows up, you'll drag a cover over it, and then when you uncover it afterwards, it'll be fine. Except in the unlikely event of a tree falling on it, or something.
I'm a bit confused. Does Cesium speed thing up or slow things down?
I'm not surprised you're confused. You've read an article on weird quantum effects in the popular press as if anything that was described in it were true. No, light does not travel faster than c in the experiment described. It does do bizarre stuff, though.
The key difference is that IBM's approach didn't actually slow the light down, but rather channeled it through rather long conduits. You couldn't store an image that way, because the light was constrained to move in a single dimension inside a cavity. This can store images, because it is completely three dimensional.
There's no way a single photon makes a stencil image.
There's a well-known effect that when you perform Young's double-slit experiment with single photons, the interference patterns still remain. If a single photon can interfere with itself, I'm sure it can make an image.
Write that hot new game for Linux and release it as a bootable LiveCD using the Linux distro of your choice.
Great idea. Except that distributing binary-only drivers along with the kernel may be a violation of the kernel author's copyright, so the entire scheme is probably illegal. Unlike just filling in the ESRB rating field in your game's info structure with incorrect information, which would be perfectly legal (as long as you include text along with it to point out that the rating is unofficial).
There's no reason why a 2 foot cavity couldn't be built around the entire house, unless you live on less than 1/4 acre and the lot isn't wide enough, but that's rarely the case.
Here in the UK, that's almost always the case. Average plot size for a new house is roughly 1/8 acre, frontage typically leaves only 3-5 feet on each side. We build tight because the government requires us to; planning permission is almost impossible to get in areas that aren't already densely populated, and there are targets to increase the population density in most areas where suitable land is available.
True, and my next house I'm planning on substantially exceeding the UK requirement. I'll be going with aerated concrete blocks (on both skins if possible; most people only use one skin) and a cavity fill with high-resistance foam. That'll probably take my R-value up to about 4, rather than the 3 that's required.
All that's needed is mass production of the technology and development of newer better liquid setting materials.
Or a single implementation of a technology that can reproduce itself from off-the-shelf components. These people seem to be making progress in that direction. As long as your application can be made to work with a plastic (polycaprolactone) that melts at 60-70 degrees C.
None of these have particularly much to do with concrete, other than concrete requiring a few more cm of insulation on the outside than bricks.
Most modern UK houses are built with aerated concrete (which this doesn't seem to be able to produce, from all I can tell), which makes a substantial difference to the amount of insulation you'll require.
Not to mention the fact that while they almost give the printer away, you could employ a team of builders for about twenty years for the same cost as replacing the ink cartridge.
I'm waiting for laser-printer-inspired house production, myself.
The firm of polish builders I employed to replace my (polystyrene tile-covered) kitchen ceiling and move a door in one of my walls last year seemed competent, had a foreman who spoke perfect english, stuck to the original quote they gave despite discovering a few problems in the process, and generally did a good job.
We're talking about the building trade. You get your fair share of cowboys, regardless of the nationality of said cowboy. Don't read anything into it.
Considering cement/concrete are aggitated to remove air pockets when poured, I imagine it would be possible. Though, it would likely be rather brittle. You see, they are aggitated to remove the air pockets because thoose air pockets are one of the things that can cause it to crack.
Most new houses in the UK are built using aerated concrete blocks (e.g. "celcon") because these provide a better insulation, and building regulations now require an otherwise difficult-to-achieve 0.35 watts per square metre degree kelvin heat loss via walls. They've been in common use for around 20 years now, and cracking doesn't seem to be a problem. They do crumble a bit if you hit them on a corner, but the way they're used (inner skin only, usually, and with a layer of plaster/plasterboard applied to the inside) you don't tend to be able to do that, so it isn't a real issue.
How does it put the layer of insulation in the wall cavities? Is there a way of producing foamed concrete? That would be cool.
Not just cool, practically mandatory to meet the target U-value requirements in current UK building regulations -- walls must transmit less than 0.35 watts per square metre degree kelvin or (equivalently) have a 'resistivity' (R) value of roughly 3. 200mm of concrete has an R value of just 0.2. An standard 50mm cavity insulation will add just 1.4 to it. So, building with pure concrete walls, you need a cavity twice as wide as standard with twice as much insulation. Using aerated concrete, you can get an R value of 1.8 for the same width walls, meaning the standard 50mm insulation is more than adequate.
I am, however, a bit anxious about the absence of rebar. What provides shear resistance without rebar? Is the concrete (take that word to mean either concrete or similar material their squeezing out to build these structures) ductile, reinforced with some kind of internal fibers, or otherwise designed not to crumble when the earthquake comes?
I don't know a lot about earthquake-resistant design, but here in the UK it's considered perfectly acceptable to build up to three or four storeys tall using blocks made from unreinforced concrete, as long as the foundations are adequate (I think foundations require reinforcing for some large buildings, but typical houses don't need it). We don't have significant house-falling-down issues.
It may also be used in copies of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, which is often licensed on a subscription model. Once the subscription expires, many companies typically end up using it anyway. Perhaps Red Hat is interested in stopping this.
Doing so would be an extra condition applied on use of the individual packages included in RHEL, and therefore a violation of the GPL. If there's any non-GPL software included (I've never tried it, so can't be sure), then it could be used for that.
Or it could be a landgrab aimed at Vista activation, which AFAICT works in exactly the way described.
I mean, the article says that there aren't any phones on the market that are comparable, so what would I get from an iPhone that I wouldn't get from one of these plus an addon SD card to bring its memory up to the same spec?
And why does the article author seem to think that not having a replaceable battery is an advantage? (And his point about iPod batteries being replaceable... yeah right... "Sonnet [the people who make the kits] recommends iPod Mini and fourth-generation iPod users seek professional installation expertise rather than upgrade themselves." So how is paying somebody for the privelege of changing your batteries in any way the same thing as being able to unscrew a cover, disconnect a lead, stick a new set in and reconnect the cover, as you can with most other portable rechargeable devices these days?)
This may change with the trusted computing stuff that is coming, unless someone find a weakness there too.
The weakness of TPM (at least for this kind of application) is that you can emulate a computer that has a TPM module, and choose your own private key for it. Then you can do anything you want.
TPM only helps content providers secure their stuff if they know the key of your TPM module when they produce the disk. If they don't, then there's no way they can do something that requires the TPM module to decrypt.
Slashdot Mirror
Isn't H2O also a greenhouse gas? What effect on climate increased humidity levels have if H2O emissions where substituted for CO2 worldwide?
Whether it is or isn't is irrelevant: the net effect would be zero, because it would be used in a closed cycle (2xH20 + unused solar energy => 2xH2 + O2 => 2xH20 + useful energy). This is effectively the same argument that states that biodiesel or bioethanol are good fuels.
However, you'll pry my gas stove out of my cold dead hands.... :-)
I find that gas is the best way to cook, at least stove top.....and the Viking and Wolfe stoves are really fun....15K btu's at the turn of a knob.....sweet.
Have you tried induction? I find it's every bit as good, plus has all the advantages of electricity (safe to leave switched on, digital controls so you can have timed on & off, can often be set to a power output that's lower than is possible with most gas burners) without the drawbacks (it isn't slow heating up, and doesn't get extremely hot). You may have to replace your pans. That's the only downside.
Well, when the storm blows up, you'll drag a cover over it, and then when you uncover it afterwards, it'll be fine. Except in the unlikely event of a tree falling on it, or something.
I'm a bit confused. Does Cesium speed thing up or slow things down?
I'm not surprised you're confused. You've read an article on weird quantum effects in the popular press as if anything that was described in it were true. No, light does not travel faster than c in the experiment described. It does do bizarre stuff, though.
The key difference is that IBM's approach didn't actually slow the light down, but rather channeled it through rather long conduits. You couldn't store an image that way, because the light was constrained to move in a single dimension inside a cavity. This can store images, because it is completely three dimensional.
There's no way a single photon makes a stencil image.
There's a well-known effect that when you perform Young's double-slit experiment with single photons, the interference patterns still remain. If a single photon can interfere with itself, I'm sure it can make an image.
Slow glass
... kernel author's ...
I mean "kernel authors'", obviously.
Write that hot new game for Linux and release it as a bootable LiveCD using the Linux distro of your choice.
Great idea. Except that distributing binary-only drivers along with the kernel may be a violation of the kernel author's copyright, so the entire scheme is probably illegal. Unlike just filling in the ESRB rating field in your game's info structure with incorrect information, which would be perfectly legal (as long as you include text along with it to point out that the rating is unofficial).
It's like tons. The imperial measurement is the "crapload"; the metric measurement is the "metric crapload."
You mean the crapploade.
There's no reason why a 2 foot cavity couldn't be built around the entire house, unless you live on less than 1/4 acre and the lot isn't wide enough, but that's rarely the case.
Here in the UK, that's almost always the case. Average plot size for a new house is roughly 1/8 acre, frontage typically leaves only 3-5 feet on each side. We build tight because the government requires us to; planning permission is almost impossible to get in areas that aren't already densely populated, and there are targets to increase the population density in most areas where suitable land is available.
True, and my next house I'm planning on substantially exceeding the UK requirement. I'll be going with aerated concrete blocks (on both skins if possible; most people only use one skin) and a cavity fill with high-resistance foam. That'll probably take my R-value up to about 4, rather than the 3 that's required.
Right. Asking anyone who calls themselves something other than a mason to lay bricks for you is just asking for that sort of trouble.
You're looking at a UK/US terminology difference. Over here, nobody calls themselves a "mason" unless they really mean "freemason".
All that's needed is mass production of the technology and development of newer better liquid setting materials.
Or a single implementation of a technology that can reproduce itself from off-the-shelf components.
These people seem to be making progress in that direction. As long as your application can be made to work with a plastic (polycaprolactone) that melts at 60-70 degrees C.
None of these have particularly much to do with concrete, other than concrete requiring a few more cm of insulation on the outside than bricks.
Most modern UK houses are built with aerated concrete (which this doesn't seem to be able to produce, from all I can tell), which makes a substantial difference to the amount of insulation you'll require.
Not to mention the fact that while they almost give the printer away, you could employ a team of builders for about twenty years for the same cost as replacing the ink cartridge.
I'm waiting for laser-printer-inspired house production, myself.
The firm of polish builders I employed to replace my (polystyrene tile-covered) kitchen ceiling and move a door in one of my walls last year seemed competent, had a foreman who spoke perfect english, stuck to the original quote they gave despite discovering a few problems in the process, and generally did a good job.
We're talking about the building trade. You get your fair share of cowboys, regardless of the nationality of said cowboy. Don't read anything into it.
Considering cement/concrete are aggitated to remove air pockets when poured, I imagine it would be possible.
Though, it would likely be rather brittle.
You see, they are aggitated to remove the air pockets because thoose air pockets are one of the things that can cause it to crack.
Most new houses in the UK are built using aerated concrete blocks (e.g. "celcon") because these provide a better insulation, and building regulations now require an otherwise difficult-to-achieve 0.35 watts per square metre degree kelvin heat loss via walls. They've been in common use for around 20 years now, and cracking doesn't seem to be a problem. They do crumble a bit if you hit them on a corner, but the way they're used (inner skin only, usually, and with a layer of plaster/plasterboard applied to the inside) you don't tend to be able to do that, so it isn't a real issue.
How does it put the layer of insulation in the wall cavities? Is there a way of producing foamed concrete? That would be cool.
Not just cool, practically mandatory to meet the target U-value requirements in current UK building regulations -- walls must transmit less than 0.35 watts per square metre degree kelvin or (equivalently) have a 'resistivity' (R) value of roughly 3. 200mm of concrete has an R value of just 0.2. An standard 50mm cavity insulation will add just 1.4 to it. So, building with pure concrete walls, you need a cavity twice as wide as standard with twice as much insulation. Using aerated concrete, you can get an R value of 1.8 for the same width walls, meaning the standard 50mm insulation is more than adequate.
I am, however, a bit anxious about the absence of rebar. What provides shear resistance without rebar? Is the concrete (take that word to mean either concrete or similar material their squeezing out to build these structures) ductile, reinforced with some kind of internal fibers, or otherwise designed not to crumble when the earthquake comes?
I don't know a lot about earthquake-resistant design, but here in the UK it's considered perfectly acceptable to build up to three or four storeys tall using blocks made from unreinforced concrete, as long as the foundations are adequate (I think foundations require reinforcing for some large buildings, but typical houses don't need it). We don't have significant house-falling-down issues.
You seem to have missed the fact that the GP was quoting from Office Space. As you'd have realised, if you read the page you linked to. :)
It may also be used in copies of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, which is often licensed on a subscription model. Once the subscription expires, many companies typically end up using it anyway. Perhaps Red Hat is interested in stopping this.
Doing so would be an extra condition applied on use of the individual packages included in RHEL, and therefore a violation of the GPL. If there's any non-GPL software included (I've never tried it, so can't be sure), then it could be used for that.
Or it could be a landgrab aimed at Vista activation, which AFAICT works in exactly the way described.
I mean, the article says that there aren't any phones on the market that are comparable, so what would I get from an iPhone that I wouldn't get from one of these plus an addon SD card to bring its memory up to the same spec?
And why does the article author seem to think that not having a replaceable battery is an advantage? (And his point about iPod batteries being replaceable... yeah right... "Sonnet [the people who make the kits] recommends iPod Mini and fourth-generation iPod users seek professional installation expertise rather than upgrade themselves." So how is paying somebody for the privelege of changing your batteries in any way the same thing as being able to unscrew a cover, disconnect a lead, stick a new set in and reconnect the cover, as you can with most other portable rechargeable devices these days?)
Yeah, that's what I was about to post. My phone is self-unlocked, and MMS and internet access both still work fine from it.
This may change with the trusted computing stuff that is coming, unless someone find a weakness there too.
The weakness of TPM (at least for this kind of application) is that you can emulate a computer that has a TPM module, and choose your own private key for it. Then you can do anything you want.
TPM only helps content providers secure their stuff if they know the key of your TPM module when they produce the disk. If they don't, then there's no way they can do something that requires the TPM module to decrypt.