I believe what they're saying there is that with a higher-power RF amplifier that is purpose-built to operate in a vacuum, they could test in even higher vacuum than they were able to during this test. The section is Summary and Forward Work and I don't think they're saying that they did not test in a vacuum, but that their ability to test in a vacuum was limited and could be improved in future work. 5x10^-6 torr is not quite "vacuum of outer space"; it's a high vacuum, but not quite interstellar-space vacuum.
It's probably #2. The paper, as presented at the 50th AIAA/ASME/SAE/ASEE Joint Propulsion Conference, is available for purchase. I happened to have a spare $25 and a burning curiosity. The full paper isn't available on the NASA site, only the abstract can be gotten there for free. If you wanna read the details, you have to pay for 'em.
Anyhow, here's the relevant bit from the paper: "Two roughing pumps provide the vacuum required to lower the environment to approximately 10 Torr in less than 30 minutes. Then, two high-speed turbo pumps are used to complete the evacuation to 5x10E-6 Torr, which requires a few additional days. During this final evacuation, a large strip heater (mounted around most of the circumference of the cylindrical chamber) is used to heat the chamber interior sufficiently to emancipate volatile substances that typically coat the chamber interior walls whenever the chamber is at ambient pressure with the chamber door open. During test run data takes at vacuum, the turbo pumps continue to run to maintain the hard vacuum environment."
I'm not a physicist, but the paper is still an absolutely fascinating read, and contains a number of color photos of the test apparatus, the device itself, etc. The amount of detail they went into for the experiment is really impressive; seismically isolating the test chamber, using liquid metal (galinstan) electrical contacts to eliminate any forces due to a mechanical coupling to a wire, compensating for the magnetic field that is created by passing electricity through the device, and so on. This is NASA we're talking about here, the guys that do ROCKET SCIENCE. The idea that they wouldn't test this device in a vacuum is laughable.
Something spooky is going on inside this device, and I hope it doesn't take us too long to figure out what is really happening.
Robert Bussard's fusion project at Energy Matter Conversion Corporation was aimed at investigating Proton-Boron fusion, because it is clean and produces no high-energy neutrons. I was really hoping this was a follow-on to that work. The device Bussard called a Polywell actually shows some serious potential to revolutionize nuclear power globally. It even shows enough promise that the US Navy has been funding some small-scale experiments. It's unfortunate that Bussard died before he could see the potential of the Polywell realized, but it would be nice to see it succeed none the less.
You don't need a RED. The season 6 finale of House was shot entirely with a Canon EOS 5D Mark II DSLR, a camera body which these days can be had for under $3K. Admittedly lenses will set you back a bit, but you could probably still set up a high-def capable recording studio for less than $50,000 including a couple camera bodies, lenses and motion stabilizing rigs.
Why they threw $168 million at this and not Robert Bussard's Polywell fusion reactor is beyond me. They even had Dr. Bussard come and talk about his project at one of their Google TechTalks back in 2006... but no, Google isn't interested in clean and virtually limitless power. Participating in a gigantic construction project in the middle of nowhere is more their speed.
Bussard believed that $200 million was what would take to get a full-scale test reactor built that would prove out the net-gain fusion capabilities of his design. He'd been working on the project with limited funding by the US Navy to stay off the radar of the DOE. All fusion research in this country is dominated by the DOE and their as-yet unproven approaches and they tend to restrict federal funding from going to a new approach. Once the information embargo was lifted, Bussard was invited to speak at a Google TechTalk and show everyone what he'd been working on for the prior 11 years during which he'd not published a damn thing.
It's been five years. Five years since that talk and to the best of my knowledge there has been no significant financial contribution into this radical piece of technology that would completely revolutionize domestic energy production; nothing outside of a few million here and there from the US Navy.
The default behavior of the Page Up and Page Down keys is to move the viewport displaying the document one full screen-page up or down. The patent more specifically relates to absolute pages, regardless of zoom level or display size.
For example, suppose that your display can fit 2 full 8.5x11 inch sheets of paper one after another, vertically. Just suppose. When you press the Page Down key now, you'll move down 2 pages. That is, if you were looking at pages 10 and 11, you'll be looking at pages 12 and 13 after pressing Page Down. If the Page Down key behaved according to the patent, pressing it once while viewing pages 10 and 11 would make it so you're viewing pages 11 and 12, because it only moved you down one absolute-page, instead of moving you down one screen-page (which is a virtual page containing two absolute pages).
Another example would be if you can only see the top 1/3 of a page on your display, and you press Page Down. With today's behavior of Page Down, you would be taken to the next 1/3 of the page. According to the patent's method, however, you'd be taken to the top 1/3 of the next page.
Why would that be strange? Unless you're innately paranoid to begin with, what's the difference between somebody staring at you and somebody photographing you? As they say, "Take a picture, it'll last longer." I'm not female or a child, but does it really matter what they'll do with the pictures? Maybe they thought some hypothetical woman or child was beautiful, and they wanted to put the photograph on display. Simply assuming that somebody who is doing something unusual is also doing something nefarious or wrong is too knee-jerk a reaction as far as I'm concerned. I don't particularly think there's anything wrong with photographing anyone or anything in public, much the same as I don't think there's anything wrong with looking at anything or anyone in public. You're welcome to your opinion, but from where I sit, that opinion exudes a certain paranoia that I rarely encounter.
Everyone blames oil companies for their record profits, when they should be watching profit MARGINS, which have remained static for the past decade for the majors like Exxon and others.
Can you back up your assertion about profit margins? I took a look myself, and In 1997, the gross and net income of Exxon-Mobil was $137B and $8.4B respectively, or a profit margin of ~6%. The same respective values in 2007 are $404B and $40.6B, or a profit margin of ~10%. Those numbers also represent a 4.83x increase in profit. I'm not an accountant however, so perhaps I'm misreading something.
Data: SEC 10-K filing for Exxon-Mobil for FY '97 and FY '07. Save the FY '07 document and remove the header garbage, then save it as.html. It's much prettier that way.
It isn't quite that simple. You need to understand a little bit about how Usenet works in order to see why this can't really be done.
Usenet is a collection of message boards that are syndicated across the internet to hundreds, if not thousands, of servers (or server farms). Once a message is posted, it is syndicated to all of those servers. Not instantaneously, but eventually. The nearest analogy I can come up with is sending an email to a listserv, which eventually re-mails the message to all subscribers. It's not a 1:1 analogy but it'll do its job, methinks.
So here's the problem: There are entire hierarchies of Usenet newsgroups ("listservs") that are completely unmoderated. Any one of these groups, at any time, can have child pornography posted to it. It may get removed from the original server, but it's already been syndicated ("re-mailed") to hundreds of other servers for people to download.
Once a naughty picture has been emailed to a distribution list, everyone sees it. So you ban that one user, let's say, but they can always get another email address and sign up again. So you close down the distribution list. But what if everyone else on the list really wanted to keep talking about Bi-plane technology of the early 1900's? Well, one of them starts a new distribution list, and the story continues...
And it's not like you can just say "Well, then they shouldn't allow binaries at all!" because actually, they don't. Usenet is all pure text. You use a particular piece of software to convert a certain piece of text into a binary data file. So then you say "Well, let's put a limit on message size!" That's already been done, and the limits on message sizes lead to people posting multi-part messages, which may perhaps themselves be part of a collection. That collection of messages, when properly decoded, yields a naughty picture, or movie, or mp3 or whatever.
The only way to prevent this sort of thing is to only syndicate moderated newsgroups, which is what this particular agreement seems to do. Although if you ask me, it'll just lead to increased use of steganographic encoding. Anyhow, if you only syndicate moderated newsgroups, or if ISPs get to decide what newsgroups to syndicate, you're basically at the censorship whims of multiple arbitrary parties. AT&T doesn't like muslims? No muslim newsgroups! Comcast hates jews? No jewish newsgroups! etc. Additionally, you need live people to moderate the newsgroups, and maybe they just don't like the anti-whitey tone in that particular message, or whatever. Censorship is bad, IMO.
Related devil's-advocate-ish question: What if moderators on slashdot could not just mod down a comment, but make it utterly disappear?
1000 square feet is about 93 square meters. Solar radiation is "approximately 1000 watts per square meter for a surface perpendicular to the Sun's rays at sea level on a clear day." (wikipedia)
Now, at 1000 watts per square meter, 93 square meters is 93,000 watts. At 5.5% efficiency, that's a little over 5kw (5,115 watts). If this particular technology isn't that efficient yet, it probably will be soon, and you'll get that call.
In the meantime though, what I'm really psyched about though is the solar thermal plant that Sandia has had in the works for a while. They're sporting over 31% efficiency, or a little less than six times the amount of power per 1000 square feet than you're interested in. This is a fairly recently article on their efforts.
It says "Firearm" which is a class of weapons that don't include nuclear weapons. Additionally, there are pre-existing laws governing the possession of nuclear materials.
It's worth noting however that a railgun doesn't fall under that umbrella either, and AFAIK there aren't any regulations governing them. That is, discharging a firearm within city limits is usually illegal, but discharging a railgun is, AFAIK, not.
This is nonsense, of course. In the past, plenty of highly intelligent people have contributed to warfare and advanced weaponry. Leornardo da Vinci comes to mind. The problem is has to do with what Thomas Kuhn wrote about in "The Structure of Scientific Revolution". DARPA relies on a filtering mechanism that employs academics. Academics are not open to new ideas that may upset their world view. New Einsteins would do just that, disrupt their world view. They therefore tend to avoid organizations like DARPA and prefer to go it alone. Eventually, new paradigms are accepted and science experiences a seismic explosion of creativity. DARPA would do well to encourage disruptive ideas but, given that the old guard is in charge, I am not holding my breath. We might have to wait for them to die off, as Max Planck once suggested. Plenty? I don't know if you can qualify 'plenty' with one example. You also used 'in the past' and the question at hand is more about the, you know, present.
Speeding while passing is still illegal. That's not completely accurate. Speeding while passing on a two-lane road is still legal in most areas. Just throwing that out there.
Who draws the line between simple concepts and non-obvious algorithms? What is obvious to me may not be to you, and what is simple to you may be very complicated for me.
I was actually reading about this recently, so I'll try to explain it as best I can from what I understand.
Everything in existence is traveling through spacetime (three spatial dimensions and one temporal dimension) at the speed of light. Put another way, the speed at which you travel spatially and the speed at which you travel temporally, when combined, will always equal the speed of light. This is why, for example, when we peer into our telescopes and see distant galaxies, we see them just as they were millions of years ago; because a photon travels through space at the maximal speed limit, it doesn't travel through time and therefore does not age in any way. This is also the reason behind the time dilation effects experienced at very high rates of (spatial) speed. As you increase your speed in the spatial dimensions, you decrease your speed in the temporal dimension, which leads to localized time dilation from your frame of reference. They've seen this on a very small scale with the space shuttle: they synchronize two very expensive and very precise clocks, keep one here on the ground and send the other up in the shuttle. When the shuttle returns, the clock that went with it will be slightly (a small fraction of a second) behind the clock left on earth, because the speeds achieved during its journey were significant enough to cause localized time dilation. The GPS satellite network can also be considered an ongoing experiment into this effect. More information can be found here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_dilation
Disregarding that it would take a power source and propulsion method far beyond our current level of technology, it is possible to journey across the entire universe at a small fraction less than light speed (say 99.9999... percent), all within a single human lifetime. Also, at a constant acceleration of 1g, it would be possible to reach that speed in about 354 days.
Well, if it takes 354 days to reach light speed, and Alpha Centauri is about 1,461 light days (4 light years) away, you'd experience a healthy amount of time dilation for a bit more than those middle two light years of travel, assuming of course you could also decelerate at 1G and it would take another 354 days to decelerate at the end of your journey.
I don't see how the minimum trip before seeing significant time dilation would be a couple years, given that you'd reach light speed in 11 days less than a year's time. Oh, I keep using "light speed" but I mean "just oh so slightly less than light speed" because of the improbability of actually reaching the speed of light. You'd reach 90% of the speed of light at about 318 days, even.
Slashdot Mirror
I think this is an error in grammar.
I believe what they're saying there is that with a higher-power RF amplifier that is purpose-built to operate in a vacuum, they could test in even higher vacuum than they were able to during this test. The section is Summary and Forward Work and I don't think they're saying that they did not test in a vacuum, but that their ability to test in a vacuum was limited and could be improved in future work. 5x10^-6 torr is not quite "vacuum of outer space"; it's a high vacuum, but not quite interstellar-space vacuum.
It's probably #2. The paper, as presented at the 50th AIAA/ASME/SAE/ASEE Joint Propulsion Conference, is available for purchase. I happened to have a spare $25 and a burning curiosity. The full paper isn't available on the NASA site, only the abstract can be gotten there for free. If you wanna read the details, you have to pay for 'em.
Anyhow, here's the relevant bit from the paper: "Two roughing pumps provide the vacuum required to lower the environment to approximately 10 Torr in less than 30 minutes. Then, two high-speed turbo pumps are used to complete the evacuation to 5x10E-6 Torr, which requires a few additional days. During this final evacuation, a large strip heater (mounted around most of the circumference of the cylindrical chamber) is used to heat the chamber interior sufficiently to emancipate volatile substances that typically coat the chamber interior walls whenever the chamber is at ambient pressure with the chamber door open. During test run data takes at vacuum, the turbo pumps continue to run to maintain the hard vacuum environment."
I'm not a physicist, but the paper is still an absolutely fascinating read, and contains a number of color photos of the test apparatus, the device itself, etc. The amount of detail they went into for the experiment is really impressive; seismically isolating the test chamber, using liquid metal (galinstan) electrical contacts to eliminate any forces due to a mechanical coupling to a wire, compensating for the magnetic field that is created by passing electricity through the device, and so on. This is NASA we're talking about here, the guys that do ROCKET SCIENCE. The idea that they wouldn't test this device in a vacuum is laughable.
Something spooky is going on inside this device, and I hope it doesn't take us too long to figure out what is really happening.
Stephen Thaler's creativity machine is proof of the potential of machine creativity.
Robert Bussard's fusion project at Energy Matter Conversion Corporation was aimed at investigating Proton-Boron fusion, because it is clean and produces no high-energy neutrons. I was really hoping this was a follow-on to that work. The device Bussard called a Polywell actually shows some serious potential to revolutionize nuclear power globally. It even shows enough promise that the US Navy has been funding some small-scale experiments. It's unfortunate that Bussard died before he could see the potential of the Polywell realized, but it would be nice to see it succeed none the less.
You don't need a RED. The season 6 finale of House was shot entirely with a Canon EOS 5D Mark II DSLR, a camera body which these days can be had for under $3K. Admittedly lenses will set you back a bit, but you could probably still set up a high-def capable recording studio for less than $50,000 including a couple camera bodies, lenses and motion stabilizing rigs.
Why they threw $168 million at this and not Robert Bussard's Polywell fusion reactor is beyond me. They even had Dr. Bussard come and talk about his project at one of their Google TechTalks back in 2006... but no, Google isn't interested in clean and virtually limitless power. Participating in a gigantic construction project in the middle of nowhere is more their speed.
Bussard believed that $200 million was what would take to get a full-scale test reactor built that would prove out the net-gain fusion capabilities of his design. He'd been working on the project with limited funding by the US Navy to stay off the radar of the DOE. All fusion research in this country is dominated by the DOE and their as-yet unproven approaches and they tend to restrict federal funding from going to a new approach. Once the information embargo was lifted, Bussard was invited to speak at a Google TechTalk and show everyone what he'd been working on for the prior 11 years during which he'd not published a damn thing.
It's been five years. Five years since that talk and to the best of my knowledge there has been no significant financial contribution into this radical piece of technology that would completely revolutionize domestic energy production; nothing outside of a few million here and there from the US Navy.
I have to say that I'm disappointed.
Surface doesn't use FTIR, it uses a vision-based system. It was detailed by Popular Mechanics.
You're missing something very subtle.
The default behavior of the Page Up and Page Down keys is to move the viewport displaying the document one full screen-page up or down. The patent more specifically relates to absolute pages, regardless of zoom level or display size.
For example, suppose that your display can fit 2 full 8.5x11 inch sheets of paper one after another, vertically. Just suppose. When you press the Page Down key now, you'll move down 2 pages. That is, if you were looking at pages 10 and 11, you'll be looking at pages 12 and 13 after pressing Page Down. If the Page Down key behaved according to the patent, pressing it once while viewing pages 10 and 11 would make it so you're viewing pages 11 and 12, because it only moved you down one absolute-page, instead of moving you down one screen-page (which is a virtual page containing two absolute pages).
Another example would be if you can only see the top 1/3 of a page on your display, and you press Page Down. With today's behavior of Page Down, you would be taken to the next 1/3 of the page. According to the patent's method, however, you'd be taken to the top 1/3 of the next page.
Isn't it about time that crap dinosaur companies like IBM were bought up by dynamic young companies going places like Leveno?
That's already happening, piece by piece...
(it's spelled Lenovo, btw)
Why would that be strange? Unless you're innately paranoid to begin with, what's the difference between somebody staring at you and somebody photographing you? As they say, "Take a picture, it'll last longer." I'm not female or a child, but does it really matter what they'll do with the pictures? Maybe they thought some hypothetical woman or child was beautiful, and they wanted to put the photograph on display. Simply assuming that somebody who is doing something unusual is also doing something nefarious or wrong is too knee-jerk a reaction as far as I'm concerned. I don't particularly think there's anything wrong with photographing anyone or anything in public, much the same as I don't think there's anything wrong with looking at anything or anyone in public. You're welcome to your opinion, but from where I sit, that opinion exudes a certain paranoia that I rarely encounter.
Indeed. It isn't the terrorists that have won. The winners are the local authoritarian thug politicians.
Exactly, the terrorists.
Terrorist: One who governs by terrorism or intimidation.
They may not have directly acted in a terroristic way, but they certainly are ruling (and changing the rules) via intimidation (and FUD).
Just because somebody is ugly doesn't mean they can't prefer to look at things that aren't ugly. Hypocrisy is everywhere.
Everyone blames oil companies for their record profits, when they should be watching profit MARGINS, which have remained static for the past decade for the majors like Exxon and others.
Can you back up your assertion about profit margins? I took a look myself, and In 1997, the gross and net income of Exxon-Mobil was $137B and $8.4B respectively, or a profit margin of ~6%. The same respective values in 2007 are $404B and $40.6B, or a profit margin of ~10%. Those numbers also represent a 4.83x increase in profit. I'm not an accountant however, so perhaps I'm misreading something.
Data: SEC 10-K filing for Exxon-Mobil for FY '97 and FY '07. Save the FY '07 document and remove the header garbage, then save it as .html. It's much prettier that way.
CCFL stands for Cold Cathode Fluorescent Lamp. You may be confusing it with CFL, which is simply Compact Fluorescent Lamp. Just clarifying.
It isn't quite that simple. You need to understand a little bit about how Usenet works in order to see why this can't really be done.
Usenet is a collection of message boards that are syndicated across the internet to hundreds, if not thousands, of servers (or server farms). Once a message is posted, it is syndicated to all of those servers. Not instantaneously, but eventually. The nearest analogy I can come up with is sending an email to a listserv, which eventually re-mails the message to all subscribers. It's not a 1:1 analogy but it'll do its job, methinks.
So here's the problem: There are entire hierarchies of Usenet newsgroups ("listservs") that are completely unmoderated. Any one of these groups, at any time, can have child pornography posted to it. It may get removed from the original server, but it's already been syndicated ("re-mailed") to hundreds of other servers for people to download.
Once a naughty picture has been emailed to a distribution list, everyone sees it. So you ban that one user, let's say, but they can always get another email address and sign up again. So you close down the distribution list. But what if everyone else on the list really wanted to keep talking about Bi-plane technology of the early 1900's? Well, one of them starts a new distribution list, and the story continues...
And it's not like you can just say "Well, then they shouldn't allow binaries at all!" because actually, they don't. Usenet is all pure text. You use a particular piece of software to convert a certain piece of text into a binary data file. So then you say "Well, let's put a limit on message size!" That's already been done, and the limits on message sizes lead to people posting multi-part messages, which may perhaps themselves be part of a collection. That collection of messages, when properly decoded, yields a naughty picture, or movie, or mp3 or whatever.
The only way to prevent this sort of thing is to only syndicate moderated newsgroups, which is what this particular agreement seems to do. Although if you ask me, it'll just lead to increased use of steganographic encoding. Anyhow, if you only syndicate moderated newsgroups, or if ISPs get to decide what newsgroups to syndicate, you're basically at the censorship whims of multiple arbitrary parties. AT&T doesn't like muslims? No muslim newsgroups! Comcast hates jews? No jewish newsgroups! etc. Additionally, you need live people to moderate the newsgroups, and maybe they just don't like the anti-whitey tone in that particular message, or whatever. Censorship is bad, IMO.
Related devil's-advocate-ish question: What if moderators on slashdot could not just mod down a comment, but make it utterly disappear?
1000 square feet is about 93 square meters. Solar radiation is "approximately 1000 watts per square meter for a surface perpendicular to the Sun's rays at sea level on a clear day." (wikipedia)
Now, at 1000 watts per square meter, 93 square meters is 93,000 watts. At 5.5% efficiency, that's a little over 5kw (5,115 watts). If this particular technology isn't that efficient yet, it probably will be soon, and you'll get that call.
In the meantime though, what I'm really psyched about though is the solar thermal plant that Sandia has had in the works for a while. They're sporting over 31% efficiency, or a little less than six times the amount of power per 1000 square feet than you're interested in. This is a fairly recently article on their efforts.
It says "Firearm" which is a class of weapons that don't include nuclear weapons. Additionally, there are pre-existing laws governing the possession of nuclear materials.
It's worth noting however that a railgun doesn't fall under that umbrella either, and AFAIK there aren't any regulations governing them. That is, discharging a firearm within city limits is usually illegal, but discharging a railgun is, AFAIK, not.
You wouldn't have to hide it for very long. Also, terrorists carrying nukes probably aren't going to just pull over.
Who draws the line between simple concepts and non-obvious algorithms? What is obvious to me may not be to you, and what is simple to you may be very complicated for me.
If you really think she's the most attractive woman in the world, you may want to get some new glasses.
I was actually reading about this recently, so I'll try to explain it as best I can from what I understand.
Everything in existence is traveling through spacetime (three spatial dimensions and one temporal dimension) at the speed of light. Put another way, the speed at which you travel spatially and the speed at which you travel temporally, when combined, will always equal the speed of light. This is why, for example, when we peer into our telescopes and see distant galaxies, we see them just as they were millions of years ago; because a photon travels through space at the maximal speed limit, it doesn't travel through time and therefore does not age in any way. This is also the reason behind the time dilation effects experienced at very high rates of (spatial) speed. As you increase your speed in the spatial dimensions, you decrease your speed in the temporal dimension, which leads to localized time dilation from your frame of reference. They've seen this on a very small scale with the space shuttle: they synchronize two very expensive and very precise clocks, keep one here on the ground and send the other up in the shuttle. When the shuttle returns, the clock that went with it will be slightly (a small fraction of a second) behind the clock left on earth, because the speeds achieved during its journey were significant enough to cause localized time dilation. The GPS satellite network can also be considered an ongoing experiment into this effect. More information can be found here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_dilation
Disregarding that it would take a power source and propulsion method far beyond our current level of technology, it is possible to journey across the entire universe at a small fraction less than light speed (say 99.9999... percent), all within a single human lifetime. Also, at a constant acceleration of 1g, it would be possible to reach that speed in about 354 days.
Well, if it takes 354 days to reach light speed, and Alpha Centauri is about 1,461 light days (4 light years) away, you'd experience a healthy amount of time dilation for a bit more than those middle two light years of travel, assuming of course you could also decelerate at 1G and it would take another 354 days to decelerate at the end of your journey.
I don't see how the minimum trip before seeing significant time dilation would be a couple years, given that you'd reach light speed in 11 days less than a year's time. Oh, I keep using "light speed" but I mean "just oh so slightly less than light speed" because of the improbability of actually reaching the speed of light. You'd reach 90% of the speed of light at about 318 days, even.