Gasoline? Internal combustion engines? They are terribly wasteful of both fuel, and energy. Even a very efficient gas burning engine pumps fuel out the tail pipe, which is the reason catalytic converters are required on vehicles in the US. If a laser can set off a more thorough, more efficient ignition, that burns ALL of the gasoline in the cylinder, fuel mileage will increase, for certain.
Modern gasoline engines already burn something like 95%+ of the fuel that is pumped in so there really isn't that much room for improvement. I suppose any improvement is better than none at all but don't expect any miracles. FWIW this is one of the reasons those gasoline additives that claim to improve efficiency are mostly BS, even if they did cause the fuel to burn 100% it would be hard to even measure the difference in mpg.
We all know who these ISP's are too. They tend to be the big boys.
FWIW Qwest seems to have at least started in this direction. A few weeks ago a customer called because Qwest was re-directing him to a web site claiming he was infected. Sure enough one of his machines was spewing spam at a prodigious rate.
Unless the judge was a real pushover, the warrant would almost certainly only be for drugs (or whatever else the dog is certified for), not any other contraband.
I'm not sure what difference you think that makes. Since drugs can be hidden almost anywhere a drug warrant allows them to search almost anywhere. Now if the warrant was for, say, a stolen anvil then the police couldn't search in places like the glove box since and anvil wouldn't fit but a drug warrant is pretty much an "anything" warrant.
it would be illegal for a cop to randomly search your car for no reason even if he did find drugs. But if that same officer has a dog and the dog starts barking at your car, he can now legally charge you with whatever contraband he finds. To me those two situations are exactly alike; the dog in this case is just the device with which the search is performed. Yet one is legal and the other is not.
I mostly agree but just to play Devil's advocate:
The difference is that the particles/chemicals that the dog is smelling are OUTSIDE of the car where you have no expectation of privacy.
The next evolutionary step is to remove the ICE and replace it with a microturbine engine, kind of like the ones used in some BMW motorcycles.
I wonder if 2 cycle or maybe rotary engines could work well in hybrids. It seems like the major issues with these designs (pollution for 2 cycle and efficiency for rotary) would improve significantly when running at a fixed speed.
If you replied in email to a person who posted an ad on the site, what would you expect to happen? Would you expect the person to post it publicly?
A perfect stranger? I'd certainly expect that they might. After all, some people are big mouths, gossips, etc. If you want something to remain private then don't tell it to anyone you don't have a good reason to trust.
Anyone else have RAM modules degrade over time? I've never seen this.
I've seen a few known good modules fail later on but it's pretty rare. I'd say I've seen fewer than 5 in 15 years. Most times when a previously good module suddenly appears bad there's something else going on such as a failing power supply etc.
Above post has serious blinders on. Other possibilities:
* he cooperated with the FBI investigation
* he was informed of the FBI investigation before the arrests
* he initiated the FBI investigation
Sure but for any of the above to be true we also have to believe one of the following:
* He forgot to tell the Obama admin about it. * He told them but they were too stupid to think they would need to have an explaination ready when the news broke.
Tagging this with "windows" isn't fair - it can affect any other system equally, this isn't a software problem, it's a user or developer issue.
The difference is mostly cultural but that doesn't make it any less real. Linux users typically get their software from an official repository or maybe from the site of the person or group who wrote it. Windows users however don't think twice about going to some random site with dozens of popups that insists that we first install some special "downloader" program just so they can then get the program they actually wanted, or one that kinda sort of sounds like the one they came for. If that program then adds yet another toolbar to their browser or starts displaying adds then that's just normal. Linux users would be screaming bloody murder if the same happened to them.
GGP posted about voters going to the Republicans because Clinton didn't get the Democrat nomination. Presumably a large chunk of those voters are doing so to get a woman into the white house by any means, even if it means voting for one completely opposed to the values of their original candidate.
I'm sure that there are a few of those left out there but I think it's wearing off quickly. Based on polls it looks like men are much more positive on Palin than women. I know it's anecdotal but my wife's reaction to the Palin/Biden debate was that Palin scared her. At first I thought it was just that women tend to be harder on other women but I'm starting to think it's really that us men just don't have a functional BS detector when it comes to women. No doubt someone's done a study.....
No concrete differences? Well other than abortion rights, health care, tax strategy, foreign policies, education, and separation of church and state you are absolutely right - I can't see a difference
Ok, let's take them one at a time.
Abortion rights: Mccane hasn't had much to say about it in the general election but in the past his attitude has been essentially, "I'm against abortion but also against making it illegal". He does seem to flipflop on it from time to time depending on who he is pandering to at the moment which to me means it really isn't a priority to him either way. In practice that means that abortion laws would likely stay the same under both candidates. See this Youtube clip for a sample: http://hk.youtube.com/watch?v=DpGUiEWZDUI
Health Care: I'll concede there is a difference here but this is something that is going to be decided mainly by Congress.
Taxes: Once again, mainly something that will be decided by Congress. Anyway, they both want to increase spending. Obama wants to get the money from the rich and McCain want's to borrow it. Either way it's money that won't be available to the private sector since even borrowed money has to come from somebody.
Education: Both seem in favor of more Federal interference in local schools. I don't see a winner here.
Foreign Policy: Besides for the question of weather we talk to our enemies or yell at them I don't see much difference. They both want to commit far more troops than we actually have on various expeditions around the world. McCain seems worse here and Obama more thoughtful but then again so did Jimmy Carter.
Church and State: Both claim to be for seperation but both support "Faith based initiatives".
To be honest, it would be hard to find a better example of two fundamentally diametrically opposed female politicians as Clinton and Palin.
???? Clinton isn't running for anything and the Vice President has pretty limited decision making athority.
What Katrina and the financial crisis prove is that our government is so busy doing so many different things that they can't do any of it effectively. About health care, it sounds like we may be about to trade one broken system for another. I actually prefer McCains insurance approach but it has almost no chance of passing because the Democrats don't like it and the Republicans have higher priorities like gay marriage.
Bingo. Anyone who will vote for somebody based on their skin color or gender (or any other criteria the person has zero control over) isn't using their brain.
That's assuming you feel there is an actual concrete difference between the candidates. You really can't judge based on what they say because neither actually says very much once you get past the marketing speak and both lie on a regular basis. You can't really judge by their records because every bill they vote on is really a bunch of separate bills bundled together.
Given the above, I could certainly understand a black person reasoning that having a strong and well educated black man as President might be more valuable as a role model for their kids than any minor policy differences that might exist, especially after Congress has their say.
Your comments implying the driving slower may be more dangerous is laughable - like the tales told of people who got into accidents while trying to buckle their seatbelt.
No, it's just a recognition that velocity differentials are a major factor in traffic accidents (ultimately the only factor).
As the average speed of the US driver has climbed, the death toll has risen as well - both in absolute numbers and in average deaths per mile travelled.
Care to support that? According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration the total number of fatal crashes was about the same in 2007 as it was back in 1997 and the the number of fatalities per mile is much lower. See http://www-fars.nhtsa.dot.gov/Main/index.aspx
I was under the impression that the reason for running slightly richer than the stoichiometric ration was to allow the catelitic converter to do it's job. I can't imagine leaning out the mixture would increase the combustion temperature that much and if it did that would be a GOOD thing, not only for efficiency but also for power and the cooling system could always be improved to keep things from melting.
Not necessarily. You have to factor in how long the engine is running.
No you don't.
That is, say, 30mpg for 1 hour or 25 mpg for 48 minutes. There is a sweet spot where the factors of time and fuel used get their best values in relation to each other. 30 mpg for 60 minutes (60mph) is a 2 gallons used. 25mpg for 48 minutes (75mph) is 1.9 gallons.
WTF? Do you work for Verizon? You do realize that mpg stands for MILES PER GALLON right? So if the distance is fixed (60 miles in your example) than the only variable is gallons and therefore you WILL use less gas if you are getting 30mpg (2 gallons) than if you are getting 25mpg (2.4 gallons). If you were measuring fuel usage in gallons/hr you might have a point but mpg IS m/g.
From the leaked memo "MD and CIO has directed that all external Webmail accounts be disabled immediately for all staff who have not changed their passwords yet"
Not to worry, I've already emailed them with a handy link to click on to log in and confirm their identities. They'll all be secured shortly.
Where it could be useful is in low power devices that typically run well under their heat tolerance with a passive heatsink. In that case, the device could be run hotter in exchange for 'recycling' some of the energy they consume to make them even lower power.
So, in principle this is like putting a Peltier device between a chip and heatsink and using the resulting energy?
only 500 cycles, really? that seems a little low. do they mean that after 500 charges the battery begins to decrease in capacity, or that the battery will start to fail completely after 500 charges?
Lithium Ion batteries start losing capacity the first time you charge them but I think the lifetime of a battery is the point where it has half of it's design capacity. FWIW 300-600 cycles really does seem to be about how long my various cell phone and laptop batteries seem to last.
Bogus argument. Humans are part of nature and the natural world. Therefore human activity is as "natural" as a beaver dam. Any other definition of "natural" is... unnatural.;-)
Sure but your definition leaves the word "natural" completely redundant and we would need another word to differentiate that which is done or caused by man/technology vs things that are not.
Even more humorous considering that most cars don't ever actually achieve the sticker value for MPG under normal driving conditions, and rarely do so with the added consistency of cruise control.
I'm not sure where you're getting that but every car I've owned has done better than the EPA highway rating while actually driving on the highway. If you look at the driving cycle the EPA uses even the highway cycle is pretty short. It's something like a mile or two of around town type driving followed by acceleration up to highway speed for 10 miles or so and then back to a mile or two of around town driving. Given that, it really shouldn't be surprising that you might do a bit better on a 100 mile road trip.
Slashdot Mirror
Gasoline? Internal combustion engines? They are terribly wasteful of both fuel, and energy. Even a very efficient gas burning engine pumps fuel out the tail pipe, which is the reason catalytic converters are required on vehicles in the US. If a laser can set off a more thorough, more efficient ignition, that burns ALL of the gasoline in the cylinder, fuel mileage will increase, for certain.
Modern gasoline engines already burn something like 95%+ of the fuel that is pumped in so there really isn't that much room for improvement. I suppose any improvement is better than none at all but don't expect any miracles. FWIW this is one of the reasons those gasoline additives that claim to improve efficiency are mostly BS, even if they did cause the fuel to burn 100% it would be hard to even measure the difference in mpg.
We all know who these ISP's are too. They tend to be the big boys.
FWIW Qwest seems to have at least started in this direction. A few weeks ago a customer called because Qwest was re-directing him to a web site claiming he was infected. Sure enough one of his machines was spewing spam at a prodigious rate.
Unless the judge was a real pushover, the warrant would almost certainly only be for drugs (or whatever else the dog is certified for), not any other contraband.
I'm not sure what difference you think that makes. Since drugs can be hidden almost anywhere a drug warrant allows them to search almost anywhere. Now if the warrant was for, say, a stolen anvil then the police couldn't search in places like the glove box since and anvil wouldn't fit but a drug warrant is pretty much an "anything" warrant.
it would be illegal for a cop to randomly search your car for no reason even if he did find drugs. But if that same officer has a dog and the dog starts barking at your car, he can now legally charge you with whatever contraband he finds. To me those two situations are exactly alike; the dog in this case is just the device with which the search is performed. Yet one is legal and the other is not.
I mostly agree but just to play Devil's advocate:
The difference is that the particles/chemicals that the dog is smelling are OUTSIDE of the car where you have no expectation of privacy.
The next evolutionary step is to remove the ICE and replace it with a microturbine engine, kind of like the ones used in some BMW motorcycles.
I wonder if 2 cycle or maybe rotary engines could work well in hybrids. It seems like the major issues with these designs (pollution for 2 cycle and efficiency for rotary) would improve significantly when running at a fixed speed.
If you replied in email to a person who posted an ad on the site, what would you expect to happen? Would you expect the person to post it publicly?
A perfect stranger? I'd certainly expect that they might. After all, some people are big mouths, gossips, etc. If you want something to remain private then don't tell it to anyone you don't have a good reason to trust.
1) Do people trust a memtest86 error to mean a bad memory module or motherboard or CPU?
Well, I'd add some other possibilities such as:
Bad power supply,
Memory isn't seated properly in it's socket.
Incorrect timing set in bios.
Memory is incompatable with your motherboard.
etc..
But yeah, if memtest86 says there's a problem then there really is something wrong.
Anyone else have RAM modules degrade over time? I've never seen this.
I've seen a few known good modules fail later on but it's pretty rare. I'd say I've seen fewer than 5 in 15 years. Most times when a previously good module suddenly appears bad there's something else going on such as a failing power supply etc.
Above post has serious blinders on. Other possibilities:
* he cooperated with the FBI investigation
* he was informed of the FBI investigation before the arrests
* he initiated the FBI investigation
Sure but for any of the above to be true we also have to believe one of the following:
* He forgot to tell the Obama admin about it.
* He told them but they were too stupid to think they would need to have an explaination ready when the news broke.
Do either of those seem likely to you?
Tagging this with "windows" isn't fair - it can affect any other system equally, this isn't a software problem, it's a user or developer issue.
The difference is mostly cultural but that doesn't make it any less real. Linux users typically get their software from an official repository or maybe from the site of the person or group who wrote it. Windows users however don't think twice about going to some random site with dozens of popups that insists that we first install some special "downloader" program just so they can then get the program they actually wanted, or one that kinda sort of sounds like the one they came for. If that program then adds yet another toolbar to their browser or starts displaying adds then that's just normal. Linux users would be screaming bloody murder if the same happened to them.
GGP posted about voters going to the Republicans because Clinton didn't get the Democrat nomination. Presumably a large chunk of those voters are doing so to get a woman into the white house by any means, even if it means voting for one completely opposed to the values of their original candidate.
I'm sure that there are a few of those left out there but I think it's wearing off quickly. Based on polls it looks like men are much more positive on Palin than women. I know it's anecdotal but my wife's reaction to the Palin/Biden debate was that Palin scared her. At first I thought it was just that women tend to be harder on other women but I'm starting to think it's really that us men just don't have a functional BS detector when it comes to women. No doubt someone's done a study.....
No concrete differences? Well other than abortion rights, health care, tax strategy, foreign policies, education, and separation of church and state you are absolutely right - I can't see a difference
Ok, let's take them one at a time.
Abortion rights: Mccane hasn't had much to say about it in the general election but in the past his attitude has been essentially, "I'm against abortion but also against making it illegal". He does seem to flipflop on it from time to time depending on who he is pandering to at the moment which to me means it really isn't a priority to him either way. In practice that means that abortion laws would likely stay the same under both candidates. See this Youtube clip for a sample: http://hk.youtube.com/watch?v=DpGUiEWZDUI
Health Care: I'll concede there is a difference here but this is something that is going to be decided mainly by Congress.
Taxes: Once again, mainly something that will be decided by Congress. Anyway, they both want to increase spending. Obama wants to get the money from the rich and McCain want's to borrow it. Either way it's money that won't be available to the private sector since even borrowed money has to come from somebody.
Education: Both seem in favor of more Federal interference in local schools. I don't see a winner here.
Foreign Policy: Besides for the question of weather we talk to our enemies or yell at them I don't see much difference. They both want to commit far more troops than we actually have on various expeditions around the world. McCain seems worse here and Obama more thoughtful but then again so did Jimmy Carter.
Church and State: Both claim to be for seperation but both support "Faith based initiatives".
To be honest, it would be hard to find a better example of two fundamentally diametrically opposed female politicians as Clinton and Palin.
???? Clinton isn't running for anything and the Vice President has pretty limited decision making athority.
What Katrina and the financial crisis prove is that our government is so busy doing so many different things that they can't do any of it effectively. About health care, it sounds like we may be about to trade one broken system for another. I actually prefer McCains insurance approach but it has almost no chance of passing because the Democrats don't like it and the Republicans have higher priorities like gay marriage.
Bingo. Anyone who will vote for somebody based on their skin color or gender (or any other criteria the person has zero control over) isn't using their brain.
That's assuming you feel there is an actual concrete difference between the candidates. You really can't judge based on what they say because neither actually says very much once you get past the marketing speak and both lie on a regular basis. You can't really judge by their records because every bill they vote on is really a bunch of separate bills bundled together.
Given the above, I could certainly understand a black person reasoning that having a strong and well educated black man as President might be more valuable as a role model for their kids than any minor policy differences that might exist, especially after Congress has their say.
Your comments implying the driving slower may be more dangerous is laughable - like the tales told of people who got into accidents while trying to buckle their seatbelt.
No, it's just a recognition that velocity differentials are a major factor in traffic accidents (ultimately the only factor).
As the average speed of the US driver has climbed, the death toll has risen as well - both in absolute numbers and in average deaths per mile travelled.
Care to support that? According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration the total number of fatal crashes was about the same in 2007 as it was back in 1997 and the the number of fatalities per mile is much lower. See http://www-fars.nhtsa.dot.gov/Main/index.aspx
I was under the impression that the reason for running slightly richer than the stoichiometric ration was to allow the catelitic converter to do it's job. I can't imagine leaning out the mixture would increase the combustion temperature that much and if it did that would be a GOOD thing, not only for efficiency but also for power and the cooling system could always be improved to keep things from melting.
Not necessarily. You have to factor in how long the engine is running.
No you don't.
That is, say, 30mpg for 1 hour or 25 mpg for 48 minutes. There is a sweet spot where the factors of time and fuel used get their best values in relation to each other. 30 mpg for 60 minutes (60mph) is a 2 gallons used. 25mpg for 48 minutes (75mph) is 1.9 gallons.
WTF? Do you work for Verizon? You do realize that mpg stands for MILES PER GALLON right? So if the distance is fixed (60 miles in your example) than the only variable is gallons and therefore you WILL use less gas if you are getting 30mpg (2 gallons) than if you are getting 25mpg (2.4 gallons). If you were measuring fuel usage in gallons/hr you might have a point but mpg IS m/g.
From the leaked memo "MD and CIO has directed that all external Webmail accounts be disabled immediately for all staff who have not changed their passwords yet"
Not to worry, I've already emailed them with a handy link to click on to log in and confirm their identities. They'll all be secured shortly.
Where it could be useful is in low power devices that typically run well under their heat tolerance with a passive heatsink. In that case, the device could be run hotter in exchange for 'recycling' some of the energy they consume to make them even lower power.
So, in principle this is like putting a Peltier device between a chip and heatsink and using the resulting energy?
only 500 cycles, really? that seems a little low. do they mean that after 500 charges the battery begins to decrease in capacity, or that the battery will start to fail completely after 500 charges?
Lithium Ion batteries start losing capacity the first time you charge them but I think the lifetime of a battery is the point where it has half of it's design capacity. FWIW 300-600 cycles really does seem to be about how long my various cell phone and laptop batteries seem to last.
Just to clarify - OFDM is the modulation method used to convery data.
Is "OFDM" a real thing or is it just some dyslexic's way of spelling ODFM?
If you covered 1000 VW beetles with these cells you'd be able to drive 2 of them across Texas.
There is no need to 'store' energy in the traditional sense.
Without efficient storage you end up having a bunch of coal/gas fired plants sitting around waiting for the inevitable cloudy day.
One alternative to improved storage would be more efficient long distance transport. After all it's almost always sunny somewhere.
Bogus argument. Humans are part of nature and the natural world. Therefore human activity is as "natural" as a beaver dam. Any other definition of "natural" is... unnatural. ;-)
Sure but your definition leaves the word "natural" completely redundant and we would need another word to differentiate that which is done or caused by man/technology vs things that are not.
Even more humorous considering that most cars don't ever actually achieve the sticker value for MPG under normal driving conditions, and rarely do so with the added consistency of cruise control.
I'm not sure where you're getting that but every car I've owned has done better than the EPA highway rating while actually driving on the highway. If you look at the driving cycle the EPA uses even the highway cycle is pretty short. It's something like a mile or two of around town type driving followed by acceleration up to highway speed for 10 miles or so and then back to a mile or two of around town driving. Given that, it really shouldn't be surprising that you might do a bit better on a 100 mile road trip.