The simple fact is that there are very few terrorists. So, most searches are going to be performed on people who are not terrorists. You can be polite, professional and still get the job done. The TSA is simply unprofessional and rude.
I had a flash and pounded out a patent - a cell phone, a camera and a web browser all in one. A little money for the patent application and now I'm filing lawsuits against all the big boys. Who says you need to do lots of hard work!
Of course the RIAA is behind it. However, you might want to look at who the RIAA is today:
Big Four EMI - British Sony BMG - Japanese/German, though the Sony side could probably be argued to be American controlled Universal - Owned by Vivendia - French Warner - American
I'm all for America bashing when there's something to it. There's been some really egregious stuff like trying to prosecute people under American law for "crimes" committed in other jurisdictions where they're not crimes. If a Swedish prosecutor is stupid enough to take the RIAA's and MPAA's line of bullshit that's a Swedish problem not an American problem.
So what if it can't get to orbit? Can you name another craft that will do a sub-orbital pop-up like it does with multiple passengers?
I think that the aerospace community has been way too fixated on making the perfect machine. It's just not possible in one go. Look at what happened to Venturestar. Instead of doing some intermediate, *flying* prototypes it was a big bang approach and they sunk how many billions into it? With *nothing* to show.
SS2 won't make it to orbit. And, many of the technologies in it aren't relevant to making it to orbit. However, Scaled Composites is gaining a lot of knowledge about how to build rocket propelled craft, about how to build ferry craft and do air launches. Burt Rutan is one hell of an aerospace designer. When he's ready to build an orbital craft I would bet money on him to make it happen.
Or, the other way around. I live outside the country and was downloading Battlestar Galactica via Bittorrent. When it became available on iTunes I was happy to pay the fee for the show - I enjoyed it a lot more than most television and wanted Universal and the creators to get some $$ and a "vote" for the show. Pulling it off iTunes sent me back to bittorrent.
Check out seatguru (www.seatguru.com). Northwest doesn't have power ports on all the planes but on some of them they even have them in economy.
I just flew business on United from/to Japan and if I hadn't been really looking for the power port I would never have found it. They can be pretty small.
Just flew back SFO to NRT, 11 hours. Got 8+ hours of work done with no battery swaps on my 17" MacBook Pro. How? Power socket.
Those are only in business class usually but the 17" is too big to use in economy as I found out a while back. The MacBook Air is nice and it's a premium product. The GP is right. Why would someone buy a sub-notebook and then lug around a bunch of batteries? If you've got cash to burn on a MacBook Air you can probably fly business. If not, why not buy one of the other fine Apple laptops and QUIT BITCHING? Or go buy a Dell or a Sony. You people act like you're forced to buy the product.
Thanks for the reply. I'd looked over how PEMs work but the electron==current relationship hadn't clicked.
The article implied that the two PEMs are identical and hence could be run in reverse. That would require that the voltage output of the hot PEM be higher with the same size/materials, etc.
If they weren't identical, though, maybe it would make more sense. Your overall hydrogen flow would have to be the same on the hot and the cold ends but maybe you could run several in series perhaps or several smaller ones in parallel on the hot end?
I'd like for this to work since it seems like such an elegant idea. Of course, cold fusion is pretty appealing too and wishing for things don't make it so.
It's even easier to just hook up a compressed cylinder of hydrogen to the things and have the guy from the gas supply company come by every few weeks to hook up a new one.
Hydrogen is not particularly expensive or hard to get. It's not being consumed in the device, some might leak. The amount of energy/$$ for the hydrogen working fluid will be negligible compared to the amount of electricity produced.
I'm not a PhD physicist so please bear with a stupid question.
I'm thinking that the low pressure side is consuming power, right? It's basically acting as a solid state pump, compressing the gas (protons). Since the gas has been cooled before it gets to the low pressure side it should take less power to compress it then it output passing through the high pressure/high temperature membrane.
In a power system you're not concerned with voltage - you're concerned with power. The membrane voltage can be the same at both sides and as long as the current is different there will be a net power output (or draw if you're running it backwards).
We are going to have sizable energy losses going through the membranes and be very susceptible to cracking, pitting, and holes...Current thermoelectric elements are not yet efficient enough to compete with closed cycle refrigeration systems. The way that I read the description was that the hydrogen passing through the membrane was what generate the electricity, similar to a fuel cell. Instead of the oxygen/hydrogen reaction pulling the hydrogen ions through the membrane they're forced through it by the pressure differential. (I really didn't understand how the electrical spark was supposed to jump start the thing.)
So, I don't think there are any thermoelectric elements. I don't know about Carnot cycle efficiencies, but replacing the heat->rotation->electricity conversion most power plants use with heat->electricity sounds good. I thought fuel cells were pretty efficient so this sounds like a different twist on fuel cells.
I don't understand the technology in depth enough to criticize it but it sounds pretty damn clever to me. A bit of "out of the box" thinking.
Sounds like he has enough cash to fund this puppy himself and bring it to market and make himself some money. My hat's off to him.
I wonder just how well one of Suns' "Black Box" containers will last in a salty environment. Salt air corrodes just about everything. The container is built for it, but you'd have to be careful about not opening the doors too often. Putting a data center into a naval environment, even one just rocking at a pier, is a lot more challenging then one in a building away from the shore. There's going to be a lot of cabling going onshore and that will all have to be maintained in ways that you don't have to do when there's no water involved.
One of their founders is an ex-Navy guy so maybe they've got it all wired. However, I don't think the Navy uses off-the-shelf stuff and buying navalized equipment is a lot more expensive then the just you get at Fry's.
Definitely assembler should be a requirement in any CS curriculum. If you can't work down at the bare metal level you're not a real programmer. If you don't understand what the processor underneath of you can really do and what's hard and what's easy for it to do you can't write good code
Sounds like "collage" wasn't a bad description for where you went. Seriously, though, if you're interested in really learning about computers you should consider a CS degree from a better university.
I agree and disagree with you. There's nothing wrong with CS being the path to becoming a "software engineer". Dumbing it down so that graduates didn't learn any CS is wrong though. If you take Mechanical Engineering or Electrical Engineering in college you don't expect to learn how to use AutoCAD or Verilog. You expect to learn the theory so that you can design and build safe, efficient, economical widgets.
It might make sense to have a CS and a Software Engineering major that are akin to each other the same way the Physics and Mechanical Engineering relate. Taking the theory out of Software Engineering is just wrong, though (I think we agree there). I don't see anything wrong with having a Software Engineering major offered at the university level, as universities should be educating people as well as doing research.
.fuck you collage idiots Well, the problem is that you want to a collage. That's a bunch of stuff pasted together by art majors. If you had gone to a college, or perhaps a university, you would have learned stuff beyond programming such as data structures, compiler theory, etc. Programming, especially in any particular language, is a skill, like plumbing or electrical wiring. Knowing the theory behind it is education. I was a decent programmer when I started college. All the theory and stuff that I learned in college didn't seem that useful at the time but as I've gone along in my career it's definitely the difference between being a code monkey and being someone who can design systems.
I went to UCSD back in the mid 80's. Our intro CS class back then was Pascal (UCSD P-System on IBM PC's baby!). As I recall, Pascal pointers are about midway between Java object references and C pointers. You can't just slam values into them but you can do pointer arithmetic and wind up accessing weird places. I remember lots of students having problems with pointers. I had a lot of experience writing BASIC code and also assembler (6502 & PDP-11). Thanks to my assembler experience pointers were not a problem for me but recursion looked like voodoo and I was not comfortable with it. The next programming class, though, was PDP-11 assembler. If you survived that you were good to go.
Those were the last classes the CS department offered that focused on learning a programming language. The Math department offered a C course that I took which helped a lot. As part of our Data Structures class we were supposed to pick up C++ and object-oriented programming. I still hate C++ thanks to Stroustrup's buggy cfront C++->C compiler.
I don't think there's anything wrong with Java as a first language. You can come up with pros and cons for just about any language as a first language. It sounds like the real problem is a lack of breadth. Java plus some assembler and then maybe some LISP or Prolog and you should be ready for just about anything.
These guys seem to think that ADA is the answer though you'll note that they also own an ADA related company. At UCSD back then we had a comparative languages class that covered a bunch of different languages including ADA. The prof was a big ADA fan and had in fact developed an ADA compiler. Unfortunately no one was allowed to use it since it had a habit of crashing the VAX (why I don't know - it was a rumor floating around). So, for us to do ADA we were supposed to write ADA and then follow a set of rules for transforming it, by hand, into Pascal. Most of us just wound up writing some Pascal that worked and then back translating it into ADA.
We just bought a 42" LCD HDTV (1080P). Standard DVD's look damn good on it. I would believe that HD sources will look even better but I'm not willing to shell out for one of these players to experiment. Probably I will be downloading some HD content to see how they look vs the DVD's. Like you, though, I don't see any point in buying a player until either I can buy a dual-format player for a reasonable price or one of the formats is a clear winner.
Do you have any issues with the RFID tags being ruined by X-ray equipment? Or being ruined by MRI's done on patients who had to be pulled straight from surgery to the MRI chamber for whatever reason? Isn't the whole point of the RFID tags to make sure that nothing is left inside the patient? They shouldn't be inside the patient when they're getting an X-ray or MRI so it doesn't really matter if they get fried in those kind of scans.
Basically what you're saying in a more informed way is what the original poster said - they weren't able to manage their inventory. It's a basic part of running a retail business. Yes, it's hard. Those who are good at it (Walmart) succeed in the retail space. Those that are bad at it will close their doors.
What's the danger? Well, you might ask Brandon Mayfield. The FBI made an incorrect match between his fingerprints and some prints found on a bag linked to the Madrid bombings. If they had not had his fingerprints they could not have claimed a match. In his case the match was obviously wrong but the FBI experts claimed that it was a match. Fingerprint matching is not a strictly mechanical process and has a lot of room for interpretation. Furthermore, no one has ever proved that fingerprints are really unique.
The only speed limit on charging capacitors is how many amps you can cram into the thing without melting any wires. That's kind of the point. 13MW is a lot of power to put through just about anything. To do it in a manner that idiots (think about who drives and who works at gas stations) can safely connect and disconnect the cables and with lots of cycles per day is going to take a lot of hard engineering.
Slashdot Mirror
The simple fact is that there are very few terrorists. So, most searches are going to be performed on people who are not terrorists. You can be polite, professional and still get the job done. The TSA is simply unprofessional and rude.
I had a flash and pounded out a patent - a cell phone, a camera and a web browser all in one. A little money for the patent application and now I'm filing lawsuits against all the big boys. Who says you need to do lots of hard work!
Of course the RIAA is behind it. However, you might want to look at who the RIAA is today:
Big Four
EMI - British
Sony BMG - Japanese/German, though the Sony side could probably be argued to be American controlled
Universal - Owned by Vivendia - French
Warner - American
I'm all for America bashing when there's something to it. There's been some really egregious stuff like trying to prosecute people under American law for "crimes" committed in other jurisdictions where they're not crimes. If a Swedish prosecutor is stupid enough to take the RIAA's and MPAA's line of bullshit that's a Swedish problem not an American problem.
The prosecution is happening in Sweden under Swedish law. No need to add gratuitous America bashing to the discussion.
So what if it can't get to orbit? Can you name another craft that will do a sub-orbital pop-up like it does with multiple passengers?
I think that the aerospace community has been way too fixated on making the perfect machine. It's just not possible in one go. Look at what happened to Venturestar. Instead of doing some intermediate, *flying* prototypes it was a big bang approach and they sunk how many billions into it? With *nothing* to show.
SS2 won't make it to orbit. And, many of the technologies in it aren't relevant to making it to orbit. However, Scaled Composites is gaining a lot of knowledge about how to build rocket propelled craft, about how to build ferry craft and do air launches. Burt Rutan is one hell of an aerospace designer. When he's ready to build an orbital craft I would bet money on him to make it happen.
Hand me my command prompt. It's the one over there that says "Bad Motherfucker" on it.
bad_motherfucker>
Or, the other way around. I live outside the country and was downloading Battlestar Galactica via Bittorrent. When it became available on iTunes I was happy to pay the fee for the show - I enjoyed it a lot more than most television and wanted Universal and the creators to get some $$ and a "vote" for the show. Pulling it off iTunes sent me back to bittorrent.
Check out seatguru (www.seatguru.com). Northwest doesn't have power ports on all the planes but on some of them they even have them in economy.
I just flew business on United from/to Japan and if I hadn't been really looking for the power port I would never have found it. They can be pretty small.
Just flew back SFO to NRT, 11 hours. Got 8+ hours of work done with no battery swaps on my 17" MacBook Pro. How? Power socket.
Those are only in business class usually but the 17" is too big to use in economy as I found out a while back. The MacBook Air is nice and it's a premium product. The GP is right. Why would someone buy a sub-notebook and then lug around a bunch of batteries? If you've got cash to burn on a MacBook Air you can probably fly business. If not, why not buy one of the other fine Apple laptops and QUIT BITCHING? Or go buy a Dell or a Sony. You people act like you're forced to buy the product.
Thanks for the reply. I'd looked over how PEMs work but the electron==current relationship hadn't clicked.
The article implied that the two PEMs are identical and hence could be run in reverse. That would require that the voltage output of the hot PEM be higher with the same size/materials, etc.
If they weren't identical, though, maybe it would make more sense. Your overall hydrogen flow would have to be the same on the hot and the cold ends but maybe you could run several in series perhaps or several smaller ones in parallel on the hot end?
I'd like for this to work since it seems like such an elegant idea. Of course, cold fusion is pretty appealing too and wishing for things don't make it so.
It's even easier to just hook up a compressed cylinder of hydrogen to the things and have the guy from the gas supply company come by every few weeks to hook up a new one.
Hydrogen is not particularly expensive or hard to get. It's not being consumed in the device, some might leak. The amount of energy/$$ for the hydrogen working fluid will be negligible compared to the amount of electricity produced.
I'm not a PhD physicist so please bear with a stupid question.
I'm thinking that the low pressure side is consuming power, right? It's basically acting as a solid state pump, compressing the gas (protons). Since the gas has been cooled before it gets to the low pressure side it should take less power to compress it then it output passing through the high pressure/high temperature membrane.
In a power system you're not concerned with voltage - you're concerned with power. The membrane voltage can be the same at both sides and as long as the current is different there will be a net power output (or draw if you're running it backwards).
Am I making any sense or am I way off base?
So, I don't think there are any thermoelectric elements. I don't know about Carnot cycle efficiencies, but replacing the heat->rotation->electricity conversion most power plants use with heat->electricity sounds good. I thought fuel cells were pretty efficient so this sounds like a different twist on fuel cells.
I don't understand the technology in depth enough to criticize it but it sounds pretty damn clever to me. A bit of "out of the box" thinking.
Sounds like he has enough cash to fund this puppy himself and bring it to market and make himself some money. My hat's off to him.
I wonder just how well one of Suns' "Black Box" containers will last in a salty environment. Salt air corrodes just about everything. The container is built for it, but you'd have to be careful about not opening the doors too often. Putting a data center into a naval environment, even one just rocking at a pier, is a lot more challenging then one in a building away from the shore. There's going to be a lot of cabling going onshore and that will all have to be maintained in ways that you don't have to do when there's no water involved.
One of their founders is an ex-Navy guy so maybe they've got it all wired. However, I don't think the Navy uses off-the-shelf stuff and buying navalized equipment is a lot more expensive then the just you get at Fry's.
Definitely assembler should be a requirement in any CS curriculum. If you can't work down at the bare metal level you're not a real programmer. If you don't understand what the processor underneath of you can really do and what's hard and what's easy for it to do you can't write good code
Sounds like "collage" wasn't a bad description for where you went. Seriously, though, if you're interested in really learning about computers you should consider a CS degree from a better university.
I agree and disagree with you. There's nothing wrong with CS being the path to becoming a "software engineer". Dumbing it down so that graduates didn't learn any CS is wrong though. If you take Mechanical Engineering or Electrical Engineering in college you don't expect to learn how to use AutoCAD or Verilog. You expect to learn the theory so that you can design and build safe, efficient, economical widgets.
It might make sense to have a CS and a Software Engineering major that are akin to each other the same way the Physics and Mechanical Engineering relate. Taking the theory out of Software Engineering is just wrong, though (I think we agree there). I don't see anything wrong with having a Software Engineering major offered at the university level, as universities should be educating people as well as doing research.
.fuck you collage idiots Well, the problem is that you want to a collage. That's a bunch of stuff pasted together by art majors. If you had gone to a college, or perhaps a university, you would have learned stuff beyond programming such as data structures, compiler theory, etc. Programming, especially in any particular language, is a skill, like plumbing or electrical wiring. Knowing the theory behind it is education. I was a decent programmer when I started college. All the theory and stuff that I learned in college didn't seem that useful at the time but as I've gone along in my career it's definitely the difference between being a code monkey and being someone who can design systems.I went to UCSD back in the mid 80's. Our intro CS class back then was Pascal (UCSD P-System on IBM PC's baby!). As I recall, Pascal pointers are about midway between Java object references and C pointers. You can't just slam values into them but you can do pointer arithmetic and wind up accessing weird places. I remember lots of students having problems with pointers. I had a lot of experience writing BASIC code and also assembler (6502 & PDP-11). Thanks to my assembler experience pointers were not a problem for me but recursion looked like voodoo and I was not comfortable with it. The next programming class, though, was PDP-11 assembler. If you survived that you were good to go.
Those were the last classes the CS department offered that focused on learning a programming language. The Math department offered a C course that I took which helped a lot. As part of our Data Structures class we were supposed to pick up C++ and object-oriented programming. I still hate C++ thanks to Stroustrup's buggy cfront C++->C compiler.
I don't think there's anything wrong with Java as a first language. You can come up with pros and cons for just about any language as a first language. It sounds like the real problem is a lack of breadth. Java plus some assembler and then maybe some LISP or Prolog and you should be ready for just about anything.
These guys seem to think that ADA is the answer though you'll note that they also own an ADA related company. At UCSD back then we had a comparative languages class that covered a bunch of different languages including ADA. The prof was a big ADA fan and had in fact developed an ADA compiler. Unfortunately no one was allowed to use it since it had a habit of crashing the VAX (why I don't know - it was a rumor floating around). So, for us to do ADA we were supposed to write ADA and then follow a set of rules for transforming it, by hand, into Pascal. Most of us just wound up writing some Pascal that worked and then back translating it into ADA.
We just bought a 42" LCD HDTV (1080P). Standard DVD's look damn good on it. I would believe that HD sources will look even better but I'm not willing to shell out for one of these players to experiment. Probably I will be downloading some HD content to see how they look vs the DVD's. Like you, though, I don't see any point in buying a player until either I can buy a dual-format player for a reasonable price or one of the formats is a clear winner.
Basically what you're saying in a more informed way is what the original poster said - they weren't able to manage their inventory. It's a basic part of running a retail business. Yes, it's hard. Those who are good at it (Walmart) succeed in the retail space. Those that are bad at it will close their doors.
What's the danger? Well, you might ask Brandon Mayfield. The FBI made an incorrect match between his fingerprints and some prints found on a bag linked to the Madrid bombings. If they had not had his fingerprints they could not have claimed a match. In his case the match was obviously wrong but the FBI experts claimed that it was a match. Fingerprint matching is not a strictly mechanical process and has a lot of room for interpretation. Furthermore, no one has ever proved that fingerprints are really unique.
Ahhh....so funny I forgot to laugh