with a mass m = 2e30 kg, we have a rest-mass energy E = m c^2 of 1.8e47 J.
If we want to borrow this much energy from the vacumm, the uncertainty principle indicates that we have to give it back after a time t = h/(4 pi E), where h = 6.64e-34 J s is Planck's constant.
Solving for t, we find that we can borrow a solar system's worth of energy for t = 4.42e-83 s. This is around forty orders of magnitude shorter than the Planck time, the shortest timescale of the universe.
Now that's what I call a whack with the physics clue-stick. You know, the plan would've worked if Planck wasn't so lazy. When I was Planck's age, I could saw and split six cords of wood, milk fifty cows, and plow 100 acres behind a single lame ox in 10^-43 seconds. Now here's this Planck fellow, claims he cain't git nothin' done-- not ONE SINGLE THING-- in less than that. Lazy, I tell ya'.
From what I could read of the article, he's saying that he developed a very efficient motor, not one that achieves over-unity.
From the article: "540mW[.54W] input... 1.755W out."
This goes beyond "efficient" and on into "unlikely". This is 305% efficiency. One cannot rationally expect 100% or more efficiency. He's claiming perpetual motion.
"The workshop itself is like a Hollywood set of an inventor's garage."
and
"he has been an entertainer for most of his life, making music and producing his daughter's singing career in the US. He posseses an oversized presence, with a booming voice and a long ponytail"
Sounds like your average con man putting on a show for the marks.
Last year my 30 year old daughter informed me of how much data a 7th grade student could put on the six sides of a new yellow pencil. From a few feet away it looks like it has been chewed on so the teacher asks no questions. Use only three sides and it even stays hidden when you put the pencil down.
When I was in 5th grade, I used a similar trick for a test in which we had to name all the states and their capitals. Rather than spend 4 weeks memorizing those useless facts, I simply wrote them on my pencil in the format of "Sacramento, California" = "SAC-CA". My prototype pencil turned out to be too obvious, though, so I then created a modified alphabet that only I could read. I probably spent more time refining that alphabet than it would have taken me to memorize the stupid state capitals, but in the end the alphabet was a better investment. I was for years able to use it as a "plain sight" type cheat-sheet font, whereby I could write out names, dates, or other mnemonic reminders on (say) the paper cover of a history book and leave it in plain sight next to my desk. To anyone else it looked like meaningless scratchings. I managed to get through YEARS of school without having to learn anything!;)
Is it legal to have your own car testify against you?
Is it legal to have your own fingerprint testify against you? Your own freezer full of severed heads? The rifling of the barrel of your own pistol? In the U.S., at least, the 5th Amd only protects you from SELF incrimination. Neither your car's black box nor the bloody knife you dropped at the murder scene can be considered part of your SELF. Besides, the only thing you're protected against is compulsory self incrimination, e.g. verbal testimony.
What *might* be a problem, however, is the reliability of the data. Imagine, you participate in a fender bender at 10 mph. But the black box says you were doing 50! You know you didn't and couldn't, but the stupid Flash-based thing got its numbers messed up - and you go to jail for that? If these numbers are to be accepted in court of law, they must be truly reliable, with a good techlonogical assurance of the fact.
This is unlikely to be a problem. Courts take into consideration the fallibility of any given system when it is presented as a source of evidence. So far as I can tell, nobody is placing the reliability of an electronic black box aboved the reliability of the laws of physics. If you hit a car at 10, conservation of momentum will easily refute a broken black box that says you were going 50.
The airbag pre-exists the car version of the black box, so a black box isn't technically a requirement for there to be an airbag.
Nor is it, technically, a requirement for the fuel injection system (see the Bosch dual-point FI system in the Bf-109, ca.1938). It's likely all integrated because it makes sense technically and economically to have a centrally-controlled system.
The explosive force of an airbag can break bones if applied where it is not needed... so having the final five seconds of data is useful there. Why it needs to be kept beyond the five seconds after inpact cannot be explained by this function, however.
A lot of automotive computers are responsible for keeping the engine in tune. Often, a momentary snapshot if engine state doesn't provide enough information to keep the system optimized. I suspect that the 5-second buffer is primarily there to provide a larger data sample.
How about "erase"? IIRC, airline black boxes have a button that the pilot can hit on his way out of the cockpit to erase the voice recorder after a successful landing (defined: one you walk away from). Is this a Good Thing, or Considered Harmful?
Since the pilot can only erase the CVR data and not the radio comm or FDR, and is forbidden to erase the CVR after any situation that is likely to be investigated (e.g. an accident), this is a good thing. The crew should be able to say anything they like to one another without having to worry about some oaf subpoena-ing the CVR data to support his slander suit. The erase function is there to make it clear that the purpose of the CVR is solely for reconstruction of the events leading up to an accident, and nothing else.
what if you become airborne with your foot still on the pedal? The tire speed will quickly accelerate and could be reporting false numbers before the sensor detects the crash.
I reckon you gotta be moving pretty fast to be airborne for the 5+ seconds necessary to fill the device's b uffer with erroneous data. I think it's safe to assume that if the box was wrong for that reason, it might as well have been right...
You're wrong. Copyright infringement is theft. Just because YOU don't believe that copyrights should be enforced, doesn't mean that it's not theft.
No, you're wrong. Theft and copyright infringement are handled by two entirely separate parts of federal law. Theft has a very specific definition under the law, and copyright infringement does not mett that definition. Feel free to argue that it's the "moral equivalent" of theft if you like, but the law is very clear: copyright infringement is not theft.
This is not the battle to fight, it is a clear cut case of breaking the law. If this is where the MPAA wants to direct their resources, so be it.
The problem is, it's not the MPAA's resources. It's our taxpayer-funded municipal law enforcement organization that's doing the dirty work. That's why it shouldn't be a crime. The MPAA should have to devote THEIR resources through civil action, like everyone else does.
you would probably change your mind. I know a guy who owns a movie theater and I have met some fairly high ups in the Hollywood world. They both make their money from these laws
No, they don't make any money from these laws. Victims get restitution from civil action. This is a criminal violation. The problem is, they've turned what really should be a civil mater into a "crime". Prison should be reserved for crimes that pose a danger to society.
Sheesh! This guy prefers GAS POWERED soldering irons? Then again, he's clearly a dilettante at this stuff, as he calls the neutral side of an AC supply "negative". Oh yeah, the bastard couldn't spell "rivet" to save his life!
Suffer no injuries? I doubt that. The military really discourages people from admitting to any injuries, other than extremely serious ones. I know that after basic training my knees were shot, and it took months for them to heal.
I'm talking about serious injuries like the original poster was talking about. Most enlistees don't suffer any serious, long term injuries. How many people in AIT were on long-term profile from their basic training running injuries? I remember one guy out of a company of over a hundred. While this is merely anecdotal evidence (like your knees), one could reasonably deduce that the one guy I saw on crutches wasn't just the only one brave enough to admit he had a torn ligament...
This isn't quite the same as a real steadicam. What makes steadicam rigs so smooth is the combination of the weight AND the gimballing. His $14 unit has the weight, but requires that your HAND be the gimbal mount. Even the cheapest, simplest steadicam unit (the Steadicam Jr) has a gimballed grip. One of the most important things you can do with a real steadicam is set the shot angle of the camera beforehand and, no matter how much you tilt the handgrip, the shot angle stays the same. Also, real steadicam techniques involve panning the camera by applying minute preassure with the fingertip to make the rig swivel on the grip. Again, the $14 model can't do that.
Cripes, it's a T-shaped pipe arrangement with a weight. Steadicam it ain't.
Laws against speeding are stupid. See this report by the US Department of Transportation.
In a nutshell: people ignore speed limits and drive the speed they feel is safe, regardless of what the speed limit is.
As a result of this, it can be inferred that speed limits (for the most part--though there are exceptions) are set unreasonably low and as such serve no true purpose other than to generate revenue. It seems to me that laws that exist for no other reason than to fund their own enforcement shouldn't exist.
And for those that say speeders cause accidents--read the report I linked to. It begs to differ.
Indeed, the most important bit of wisdom from that report is:
"Unrealistic limits increase accident risks for persons who attempt to comply with limit by driving slower or faster than the majority of road users"
In other words, lowering speed limits increases the speed differential between those who blindly follow the posted limits, and those who drive with the flow of traffic. The greater this differential is, the greater risk of accident. WHen everyone is driving roughly the same speed, the only significant axis of interaction between cars is in the lateral direction. Introduce a car going 20mph slower than everyone else and you've got a dangerous obstacle in traffic.
You're missing an important thing about peer pressure. You have to care what your peers think for it to work.
Also, by extension, your peers need to have some recourse if you mess things up for them. This is why "group punishment" never worked in my high school gym class-- we weren't permitted to "correct" the behavior of the 2 or 3 miscreants causing the trouble. It did, however, work very well in basic training, where if one jackass slacker's antics had our whole platoon doing pushups in the Missouri dust for two hours, he'd most certainly have some sort of painful "accident" that evening after lights out.
I'm not sure what sort of "pressure" we should be allowed to apply to jackass drivers, though. Perhaps something involving cat pee...
This is hardly news. It's been used in single stand-alone instances for many years. There is, for example, a light at Sunset Boulevard and Marymount Place near UCLA that will turn red if you approach it at faster than about 35-40mph. Marymount Place isn't even really a street-- it's an access road to a side gate for a Catholic school-- so the light's only real purpose is to slow down traffic. As annoying as the concept may seem, it actually works. People figure out that the light turns red if they go too fast, and now people drive slower around there. As far as safety, the lights change with plenty of time for drivers to stop. If you're going so fast that you're depending on predicted behavior of traffic signals, you're driving too damn fast. Besides, we've had adaptive signaling systems in place for DECADES, and that already makes light timing somewhat unpredictable on a moment-by-moment basis.
The FBI and the CIA really don't butt heads to often, it is the FBI responsiblity to defend the US from the inside while the CIA is to defend the US from actions abroad.
Of course, where this gets tricky is with foreign espionage. The CIA might have the best information regarding who was sent by a foreign government to spy on us, but the job of actually catching those spies falls in the lap of the FBI. The ol' Soviet Union avoided that problem by giving BOTH jobs to the KGB, but that system was, to put it lightly, prone to abuse.
Teminology aside I dont think that adhering to the teachings of a man who was known to say such things as "Love thy neighbor as thy self" is all that bad of an idea. From my understanding, Jesus' teachings consist by and large of a philosophy of love and respect which i think are fairly honorable goals. All im saying is you end up looking like just as much an idiot as the christians rying to cram stuff down your throat when you try to cram the exact opposite down theirs. Do I think Christianity is for everyone. NO. But I think that it is probably not a bad thing for alot of people.
Crimony! All I was trying to point out was that his argument would've been more broadly applicable if he'd left out the references unique to his personal religion. By bringing up the "door-to-door Jesus salesmen", I was trying to illustrate that, even though he has a very positive association with his religion, it is entirely possible for someone else to have a negative association with it. I'm not condemning Jesus' teachings, nor saying that he's wrong to believe in them.
Your overreacting. They may be irrelevent, and you may have taken them as preaching, the good news part may even be preaching in a very wide sense. But that doesn't at all diffuse his point that he is still a rational person.
I don't doubt that he's a rational person. I'm just pointing out that it's a very large world out there and many people take a dim view of certain varieties of Christianity and that, when making arguments strictly about faith and god, one's arguments are more likely to be accepted if one avoids religion-specific references.
If he substituted "Buddha" and "Tao", would it make a difference?
No. The concept of a "god" can be found in some form in every religious faith, so that word is sufficiently generic.
You are condemning him as a "nut-job" just because he used two key-words specific to his religion.
No, I'm saying that his argument makes him sound like a nut-job because he references two highly loaded keywords specific to a particular religion which freqently spawns proselytizing weirdos who think it's OK to sell religion door to door. He may not be trying to sound like a nut-job, in which case he might appreciate the observation. If he is a nut-job, then he can move along, no harm done.
You sound Jesusphobic.
Nah. Jesus was a cool cat in my book. I just don't much care for people who try to sell me their version of Jesus, telling me I'm going to Hell if I don't buy it. They're offensive jackasses and they suck.
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Now that's what I call a whack with the physics clue-stick. You know, the plan would've worked if Planck wasn't so lazy. When I was Planck's age, I could saw and split six cords of wood, milk fifty cows, and plow 100 acres behind a single lame ox in 10^-43 seconds. Now here's this Planck fellow, claims he cain't git nothin' done-- not ONE SINGLE THING-- in less than that. Lazy, I tell ya'.
From the article: "540mW[.54W] input... 1.755W out."
This goes beyond "efficient" and on into "unlikely". This is 305% efficiency. One cannot rationally expect 100% or more efficiency. He's claiming perpetual motion.
and
Sounds like your average con man putting on a show for the marks.
Human stupidity is astounding. Just when you thought you've met the dumbest bone-head in the universe, along comes one EVEN DUMBER.
When I was in 5th grade, I used a similar trick for a test in which we had to name all the states and their capitals. Rather than spend 4 weeks memorizing those useless facts, I simply wrote them on my pencil in the format of "Sacramento, California" = "SAC-CA". My prototype pencil turned out to be too obvious, though, so I then created a modified alphabet that only I could read. I probably spent more time refining that alphabet than it would have taken me to memorize the stupid state capitals, but in the end the alphabet was a better investment. I was for years able to use it as a "plain sight" type cheat-sheet font, whereby I could write out names, dates, or other mnemonic reminders on (say) the paper cover of a history book and leave it in plain sight next to my desk. To anyone else it looked like meaningless scratchings. I managed to get through YEARS of school without having to learn anything! ;)
more like AOL toilet paper
Is it legal to have your own fingerprint testify against you? Your own freezer full of severed heads? The rifling of the barrel of your own pistol? In the U.S., at least, the 5th Amd only protects you from SELF incrimination. Neither your car's black box nor the bloody knife you dropped at the murder scene can be considered part of your SELF. Besides, the only thing you're protected against is compulsory self incrimination, e.g. verbal testimony.
This is unlikely to be a problem. Courts take into consideration the fallibility of any given system when it is presented as a source of evidence. So far as I can tell, nobody is placing the reliability of an electronic black box aboved the reliability of the laws of physics. If you hit a car at 10, conservation of momentum will easily refute a broken black box that says you were going 50.
Nor is it, technically, a requirement for the fuel injection system (see the Bosch dual-point FI system in the Bf-109, ca.1938). It's likely all integrated because it makes sense technically and economically to have a centrally-controlled system.
The explosive force of an airbag can break bones if applied where it is not needed... so having the final five seconds of data is useful there. Why it needs to be kept beyond the five seconds after inpact cannot be explained by this function, however.
A lot of automotive computers are responsible for keeping the engine in tune. Often, a momentary snapshot if engine state doesn't provide enough information to keep the system optimized. I suspect that the 5-second buffer is primarily there to provide a larger data sample.
Since the pilot can only erase the CVR data and not the radio comm or FDR, and is forbidden to erase the CVR after any situation that is likely to be investigated (e.g. an accident), this is a good thing. The crew should be able to say anything they like to one another without having to worry about some oaf subpoena-ing the CVR data to support his slander suit. The erase function is there to make it clear that the purpose of the CVR is solely for reconstruction of the events leading up to an accident, and nothing else.
I reckon you gotta be moving pretty fast to be airborne for the 5+ seconds necessary to fill the device's b uffer with erroneous data. I think it's safe to assume that if the box was wrong for that reason, it might as well have been right...
Minor nitpick: The "kid" is 34 years old.
No, you're wrong. Theft and copyright infringement are handled by two entirely separate parts of federal law. Theft has a very specific definition under the law, and copyright infringement does not mett that definition. Feel free to argue that it's the "moral equivalent" of theft if you like, but the law is very clear: copyright infringement is not theft.
The problem is, it's not the MPAA's resources. It's our taxpayer-funded municipal law enforcement organization that's doing the dirty work. That's why it shouldn't be a crime. The MPAA should have to devote THEIR resources through civil action, like everyone else does.
No, they don't make any money from these laws. Victims get restitution from civil action. This is a criminal violation. The problem is, they've turned what really should be a civil mater into a "crime". Prison should be reserved for crimes that pose a danger to society.
Sheesh! This guy prefers GAS POWERED soldering irons? Then again, he's clearly a dilettante at this stuff, as he calls the neutral side of an AC supply "negative". Oh yeah, the bastard couldn't spell "rivet" to save his life!
I'm talking about serious injuries like the original poster was talking about. Most enlistees don't suffer any serious, long term injuries. How many people in AIT were on long-term profile from their basic training running injuries? I remember one guy out of a company of over a hundred. While this is merely anecdotal evidence (like your knees), one could reasonably deduce that the one guy I saw on crutches wasn't just the only one brave enough to admit he had a torn ligament...
Cripes, it's a T-shaped pipe arrangement with a weight. Steadicam it ain't.
Indeed, the most important bit of wisdom from that report is:
In other words, lowering speed limits increases the speed differential between those who blindly follow the posted limits, and those who drive with the flow of traffic. The greater this differential is, the greater risk of accident. WHen everyone is driving roughly the same speed, the only significant axis of interaction between cars is in the lateral direction. Introduce a car going 20mph slower than everyone else and you've got a dangerous obstacle in traffic.
Also, by extension, your peers need to have some recourse if you mess things up for them. This is why "group punishment" never worked in my high school gym class-- we weren't permitted to "correct" the behavior of the 2 or 3 miscreants causing the trouble. It did, however, work very well in basic training, where if one jackass slacker's antics had our whole platoon doing pushups in the Missouri dust for two hours, he'd most certainly have some sort of painful "accident" that evening after lights out.
I'm not sure what sort of "pressure" we should be allowed to apply to jackass drivers, though. Perhaps something involving cat pee...
This is hardly news. It's been used in single stand-alone instances for many years. There is, for example, a light at Sunset Boulevard and Marymount Place near UCLA that will turn red if you approach it at faster than about 35-40mph. Marymount Place isn't even really a street-- it's an access road to a side gate for a Catholic school-- so the light's only real purpose is to slow down traffic. As annoying as the concept may seem, it actually works. People figure out that the light turns red if they go too fast, and now people drive slower around there. As far as safety, the lights change with plenty of time for drivers to stop. If you're going so fast that you're depending on predicted behavior of traffic signals, you're driving too damn fast. Besides, we've had adaptive signaling systems in place for DECADES, and that already makes light timing somewhat unpredictable on a moment-by-moment basis.
Of course, where this gets tricky is with foreign espionage. The CIA might have the best information regarding who was sent by a foreign government to spy on us, but the job of actually catching those spies falls in the lap of the FBI. The ol' Soviet Union avoided that problem by giving BOTH jobs to the KGB, but that system was, to put it lightly, prone to abuse.
Crimony! All I was trying to point out was that his argument would've been more broadly applicable if he'd left out the references unique to his personal religion. By bringing up the "door-to-door Jesus salesmen", I was trying to illustrate that, even though he has a very positive association with his religion, it is entirely possible for someone else to have a negative association with it. I'm not condemning Jesus' teachings, nor saying that he's wrong to believe in them.
I don't doubt that he's a rational person. I'm just pointing out that it's a very large world out there and many people take a dim view of certain varieties of Christianity and that, when making arguments strictly about faith and god, one's arguments are more likely to be accepted if one avoids religion-specific references.
No. The concept of a "god" can be found in some form in every religious faith, so that word is sufficiently generic.
You are condemning him as a "nut-job" just because he used two key-words specific to his religion.
No, I'm saying that his argument makes him sound like a nut-job because he references two highly loaded keywords specific to a particular religion which freqently spawns proselytizing weirdos who think it's OK to sell religion door to door. He may not be trying to sound like a nut-job, in which case he might appreciate the observation. If he is a nut-job, then he can move along, no harm done.
You sound Jesusphobic.
Nah. Jesus was a cool cat in my book. I just don't much care for people who try to sell me their version of Jesus, telling me I'm going to Hell if I don't buy it. They're offensive jackasses and they suck.