"In the very early days, lines went from point A to point B directly and were dedicated to communication only between those two points. This tends to increase the number of wires exponentially. (That is not an exaggeration -- it really is exponential.) "
Can you explain to me why it really is exponential? I can see that it might be quadratic (n sets of wires to n people = n*n wires), but how do you get exponential?
You hit the nail on the head: Australia is mostly empty space (Actually, most of Australia is wilderness).
Most Australians live in areas that are about as dense as the areas where most Americans live. I suspect that the proportion of Australians living in a given density is about the same as the proportion of Americans living at that density. As we are talking about short range communication (<100km) I think the two can be compared quite reasonably.
Actually, for drinking water you want it to be deep anyway because the UV gets down a long way and sterilises the water. The problem is that a reasonable reservoir might be 1km^3, which is about as big as the argyle diamond mine. It's taken 20 years to dig that out, and there has been diamonds to make it worthwhile. Another problem is supporting the sides - if you want it to be steep sided you either need reinforce with concrete, which is expensive, or find somewhere with good solid rock, which is hard to then dig.
We studied this in school. They use large alcohols as the skin (as covered in this article). The point is that it's usually distribution rather than storage that is the problem. (In Melbourne.au the annual evaporation rate is 3m - on a shallow 30m deep dam this means that it would take 10 years to evaporate the water away, assuming none is added. I have some old papers here from the 60s by the then Melbourne Metropolitan Board of Works about this idea.
If you are having problems keeping water due to evaporation then you need to choose a better dam site.
More interesting is a proposal to store stormwater underground. Firstly, the land area and evaporation issues disappear (to be replaced by similar issues:) but more importantly, the water is actually cleaned by the action of anerobic bacteria on the water.
I read that link and I must say that the example is somewhat baffling considering you would lose $25k even if the discount rate were 0%, so I'm not exactly sure what their point is. Perhaps you could explain?
I submitted a story on using Boron as an alternative energy carrier, but it was rejected. Woe is me. Anyway, here's the interesting link: http://www.eagle.ca/~gcowan/boron_blast.htm l
Boron is inert both in energetic form (boron) and dead form (boron oxide glass). It is very energy dense and you can recycle the combustion product using a straightforward sequence of reactions.
Yes, my first thought was, "gee 50% is very high", but perhaps they are only considering the light that gets absorbed. Clearly (sic) they couldn't be converting 100% of the incident light energy to electricity, or you wouldn't be able to see through them. Given that, perhaps it makes more sense when rating their efficiency to measure only the energy that they don't allow through.
A more interesting technology is the titania dye based solar panels, which use a different physics to convert to photons to electricity. (My understanding is that it works more like a battery than a diode)
Road damage is proportional to the cube of the axle load (actually, the effective pressure of the tyres on the road). Petrol costs tend to be under quadratic for mass, so SUVs will pay less than is fair for the amount of road damage. Trucks even less so.
I agree that increasing the cost of petrol is a sensible solution, but there will need to be a differential cost based on the road damage to make it fair.
Firstly, do we really want to be putting more mercury into the environment, even in its safer metallic form?
More importantly though, you can make an accelerometer using a single silicon chip. At last year's UIST I saw a tilt keyboard which used the standard silicon accelerometer.
"Your main means for debugging: 3 LEDs... you can begin to imagine the headaches I face on a daily basis."
Why don't you do the development on a virtual machine? I use simulpic for my pic programming needs - surely you have something similar?
Re: 300 foot tree
The tallest living thing was a Eucalyptus regnans felled last century from Mount Baw Baw in.au. (From D. Attenborough's "Life of Plants") at around 140m. Nifty eh?
From the article about grey goo: "-- Space itself, an invisible froth of subatomic forces and short-lived particles, might undergo a "phase transition" like water molecules that freeze into ice. Such an event could "rip the fabric of space itself. The boundary of the new-style vacuum would spread like an expanding bubble," devouring Earth and, eventually, the entire universe beyond it."
Greg Egan's latest book, Schild's Ladder is a great story penned from this premise.
Presumably they have to justify their existence by showing that there is a lot of infringment out there - nobody would believe it if they said 99% of software was copied against the word of the licence, and vice versa, if they claimed that 1% was being illegally copied people would ask why they were bothering.
So I guess their chief of marketing said "hmmm, make it a small amount less than last year, to show we're having an effect, otherwise our customers will decide we are not worth it".
This ti-book provides a firewall, airport basestation, digital frame and interface to our heating unit, and all for less than 50W continuous power:) The LCD frame stayed on as we agreed it looked nice anyway, and nobody could find a small enough torx screwdriver to open the case.
Slashdot Mirror
"In the very early days, lines went from point A to point B directly and were dedicated to communication only between those two points. This tends to increase the number of wires exponentially. (That is not an exaggeration -- it really is exponential.) "
Can you explain to me why it really is exponential? I can see that it might be quadratic (n sets of wires to n people = n*n wires), but how do you get exponential?
You hit the nail on the head: Australia is mostly empty space (Actually, most of Australia is wilderness).
Most Australians live in areas that are about as dense as the areas where most Americans live. I suspect that the proportion of Australians living in a given density is about the same as the proportion of Americans living at that density. As we are talking about short range communication (<100km) I think the two can be compared quite reasonably.
Let's see:- breakfast.com/rosegarden/. tu-chemnitz.de/~jan/noteedi t/noteedit.html
http://www.lilypond.org
http://www.all-day
http://rnvs.informatik
http://www.mutopiaproject.org/
The last one is a site with public domain music entered as lilypond score.
Actually, for drinking water you want it to be deep anyway because the UV gets down a long way and sterilises the water. The problem is that a reasonable reservoir might be 1km^3, which is about as big as the argyle diamond mine. It's taken 20 years to dig that out, and there has been diamonds to make it worthwhile. Another problem is supporting the sides - if you want it to be steep sided you either need reinforce with concrete, which is expensive, or find somewhere with good solid rock, which is hard to then dig.
We studied this in school. They use large alcohols as the skin (as covered in this article). The point is that it's usually distribution rather than storage that is the problem. (In Melbourne.au the annual evaporation rate is 3m - on a shallow 30m deep dam this means that it would take 10 years to evaporate the water away, assuming none is added. I have some old papers here from the 60s by the then Melbourne Metropolitan Board of Works about this idea.
:) but more importantly, the water is actually cleaned by the action of anerobic bacteria on the water.
If you are having problems keeping water due to evaporation then you need to choose a better dam site.
More interesting is a proposal to store stormwater underground. Firstly, the land area and evaporation issues disappear (to be replaced by similar issues
I read that link and I must say that the example is somewhat baffling considering you would lose $25k even if the discount rate were 0%, so I'm not exactly sure what their point is. Perhaps you could explain?
I mean, MOL runs MacOS 9 or X at the same time as running Linux. Why can't PCs do something similar?
I submitted a story on using Boron as an alternative energy carrier, but it was rejected. Woe is me. Anyway, here's the interesting link:m l
http://www.eagle.ca/~gcowan/boron_blast.ht
Boron is inert both in energetic form (boron) and dead form (boron oxide glass). It is very energy dense and you can recycle the combustion product using a straightforward sequence of reactions.
Yes, my first thought was, "gee 50% is very high", but perhaps they are only considering the light that gets absorbed. Clearly (sic) they couldn't be converting 100% of the incident light energy to electricity, or you wouldn't be able to see through them. Given that, perhaps it makes more sense when rating their efficiency to measure only the energy that they don't allow through.
A more interesting technology is the titania dye based solar panels, which use a different physics to convert to photons to electricity. (My understanding is that it works more like a battery than a diode)
Road damage is proportional to the cube of the axle load (actually, the effective pressure of the tyres on the road). Petrol costs tend to be under quadratic for mass, so SUVs will pay less than is fair for the amount of road damage. Trucks even less so.
I agree that increasing the cost of petrol is a sensible solution, but there will need to be a differential cost based on the road damage to make it fair.
Firstly, do we really want to be putting more mercury into the environment, even in its safer metallic form?
More importantly though, you can make an accelerometer using a single silicon chip. At last year's UIST I saw a tilt keyboard which used the standard silicon accelerometer.
"Your main means for debugging: 3 LEDs ... you can begin to imagine the headaches I face on a daily basis."
.au. (From D. Attenborough's "Life of Plants") at around 140m. Nifty eh?
Why don't you do the development on a virtual machine? I use simulpic for my pic programming needs - surely you have something similar?
Re: 300 foot tree
The tallest living thing was a Eucalyptus regnans felled last century from Mount Baw Baw in
From the article about grey goo:
"-- Space itself, an invisible froth of subatomic forces and short-lived particles, might undergo a "phase transition" like water molecules that freeze into ice. Such an event could "rip the fabric of space itself. The boundary of the new-style vacuum would spread like an expanding bubble," devouring Earth and, eventually, the entire universe beyond it."
Greg Egan's latest book, Schild's Ladder is a great story penned from this premise.
Presumably they have to justify their existence by showing that there is a lot of infringment out there - nobody would believe it if they said 99% of software was copied against the word of the licence, and vice versa, if they claimed that 1% was being illegally copied people would ask why they were bothering.
So I guess their chief of marketing said "hmmm, make it a small amount less than last year, to show we're having an effect, otherwise our customers will decide we are not worth it".
Or, how many broads can a bored band board if a bar bars bored band broads?
We did this too, this time using a previous model Ti-book which had been dropped:
http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~njh/electronics/waThis ti-book provides a firewall, airport basestation, digital frame and interface to our heating unit, and all for less than 50W continuous power :) The LCD frame stayed on as we agreed it looked nice anyway, and nobody could find a small enough torx screwdriver to open the case.
And yes, typing on the keyboard is hardwork.