They still have sextant operators ships, just in case all the whiz bang technology stops working. GPS is more convenient and accurate but that does little good if the satellites get "Goldeneyed."
Sure, you can cobble together enough hardware and make a digital video recorder but then you've got a cobbled together hunk of hardware.
The TiVo is in a nice form factor, very living room friendly. The interface is both simple and efficient, something that most PC DVR programs have yet to crack. And it's a dedicated machine, it doesn't drop frames, it doesn't cut sound, it just works.
A computer is very versatile but that flexibility has its own costs, ease of use being one of the biggest.
I have web access here at work without ready access to cable news services on TV. I watched/read about the events of September 11th on the web.
Materials Research for one...
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3D LCD Display
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Being able to manipulate a molecular structure or actually see a 3D representation of a ternary phase diagram would be hugely useful. Also surface plots of multi dimensional data would be much easier to manipulate.
Then you toss in all the design, CAD-CAM, visible relations in a database, etc and the possibilities are endless.
And that's just for materials and design. A lot of the same applications would work for drug research, medical applications, entymology, architectural renderings, etc etc.
You've got to be joking...
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3D LCD Display
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· Score: 1
Three dimensional hearing works because your brain is able to detect minute differences in the *arrival* of soundwaves at one ear vs. the other and then determine the direction of origin.
Three dimensional vision works because we have a small amount of seperation between our eyes. The brain compares the image received from both eyes and composites them together. 3D vision is a result of depth perception. Numerous optical illusions can trick the brain into seeing 2D images as 3D objects by playing with the relationship between what the individual eyes see and how the brain composites those images together.
What you describe would require advanced knowledge of when light leaves a distant object, and the computing power in our brains to detect the small intervals between the arrival of photons moving at the speed of light.
I'll leave the relativistic implications of being able to see in a vacuum as a homework assignment.
A big stink was made when Cassini was launched several years ago. Seems they finally figured out that deep space probes aren't solar powered. Cassini still launched and RTG's are still the only practical way to power spacecraft beyond the orbit of Mars.
Nuclear waste, even high level nuclear waste like used fuel assemblies CANNOT be made into a fission weapon. Spent fuel is maybe 1 or 2 percent U-235. Bomb grade material is >95% U-235.
A number of gas turbine plants scattered about Manhattan. The plants are small (relatively... only a block in size) and produce maybe 100 megawatts (don't quote me on the exact number). Oh... and they're really loud.
Tachyons are hypothesized to travel faster than the speed of light. It's a common misconception that Einstein's theories prohibit FTL travel - they do not. They do prohibit massive particles from accelerating past the speed of light (would require infinite energy). Massless particles like photons and the theoretical tachyon don't have this problem.
What happened to that glut of bandwidth we kept hearing about a few months back? I distinctly remember several "experts" proclaiming that the world had come into an over-capacity of bandwidth from all the expansion in the late 90's. There was talk-a-plenty of supply outstriping demand and how it was going to be the undoing of broadband providers. Funny how all that evaporated when the economy turned South... or maybe it was after AOL bought Time-Warner.
The idea of lights that go off when you remove the key though sounds rather promising...
Not at all unusual.
My 2001 Audi A4 turns cuts the headlights back to parking lights when the key is removed. Buddy of mine had a Hyundai Elantra in highschool that did the same thing... back in '94.
Not all types of fuel cells run hot enough to cause the damage that you describe. Large scale solid oxide fuel cells for industrial purposes do make a great deal of heat by design to increase their efficiency. Proton exchange cells do not require such high operating temperatures. Also the fuel for the fuel cell need not be in a compressed gas cylinder. Any number of liquid hydrocarbon or alcohol fuels can be used.
Fuel Cells can in fact run on many different hydrocarbon based fuels, from gasoline to pure alcohol (of any variety). The mechanism is the same in any case. The fuel acts as a Hydrogen donator, and the free hydrogens then drive the fuel cells along with oxygen from the air. The technology centers around diffusion of ions through a semipermeable insulating membrane, usually ceramic or plastic. Hydrogen gas is one one side of the membrane and oxygen gas (plain old air really but the oxygen does the work) is on the other. The hydrogens are stripped of their electron on one side of the membrane. The electrons flow to the other side of the cell (think negative to positive in battery terms) through an external circuit (be it laptop, cell phone, pager, etc) and the hydrogen diffuses through the membrane to form water with the freely available oxygen, this closes the circuit and satisfies thermodynamics, making the whole thing work.
Ideally hydrogen and oxygen would be the only two fuel components needed, but we of course do not live in an ideal world. Using pure oxygen does not offer enough of performance benefit to offset the tremendous costs of air liquefaction to obtain pure oxygen. Hydrogen is the most abundant element in the universe, and it surrounds us in the form of water, but this hydrogen has been sequestered by oxygen. Obtaining pure hydrogen from water using electrolosis uses a great deal of energy, making it very expensive. NASA pays about $1.05 per pound of hydrogen, versus about $0.13 per pound for gasoline at my local Exxon. For this reason most commercial fuel cells use a reformer to process any number of hydrocarbon or alcohol based fuels into usable hydrogen. Hence methanol, ethanol, methane, etc. The reformation process decreases the efficeincy of the cell somewhat, but they are still much more efficient then chemical batteries.
Fuel cells are well over 100 years old, but until recently the manufacturing technology did not exist to make them really useful. It's basically a plumbing problem. To maximize power output per volume you need to create a large surface area for diffusion. This is usually accomplished by making numerous folds in the exchange membrane. However this makes it more difficult to pipe in hyrdogen and oxygen to where they are needed. The chemistry of the devices is well understood, and it's largely a manufacturing problem now.
The July '99 issue of Scientific American had a special section devoted to fuel cells, and features articles discussing the use of cells in portable items such as phones as well as residential and commerical scale cells for homes and offices.
I agree with your sentiments regarding recorded music, however I think there will always be a place for the large movie houses, at least for people like me who believe that content can be enhanced by presentation. For example, I don't have the money or space to put in an 80 foot movie screen and a full THX rig to see Star Wars. Having seen SW in both THX and non-THX I believe that the picture loses something as the screen decreases in size and the audio quality is lowered. The words were the same, the images the same, etc, but the presentation made all the difference, in my opinion. Of course I would love to have a THX theater in my basement, but well you know. Movie theaters are not just about control, economy of scale comes into the equation as well.
Yet another DIVX negative
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· Score: 1
Aside from the dangerous license practices that the DIVX model could have legitimized, the worst result of the entire DIVX fiasco was to limit the widespread acceptance of the DVD format. The average consumer probably knew nothing of the differences between DIVX and DVD, causing him or her to be stuck on a fence so to speak with regards to which format to support. Most lay people that I've talked to expressed relucatance towards investing in a DVD system because they didn't want to get caught on the bleeding edge and have an obsolete piece of equipment, ala Beta and VHS a few years ago.
DIVX did more harm to the DVD standard by confusing the average consumer then through financial competition. If DIVX hadn't come around more people would have invested in DVD players, helping the format to gain more widespread popularity. As it stands, I believe that there are over 1 million DVD users in the country. As that number grows the price of DVD equipment will naturally drop and the media will become easier to find. My local Blockbuster still doesn't carry rental DVD's though that's about to change. DIVX's legacy is that it has set this process back by at least a year and hindered the adoption of high quality digital home entertainment standards for everyone.
Re:You must not have a JVC
on
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· Score: 1
I've got a JVC HRVP-628U, it's a fairly high end editing VCR. It doesn't have the family message center, and I've never encountered the date roll over bug. Plus it appears that it's Y2K compliant, having accomplised the 1999 to 2000 rollover without incident and displaying the proper day of the week.
That only 6% of elligible customers actually make use of the cable modem option can be seen as a good thing, given that the bandwidth of the connection is largely dependent on the number of users. If the service became more popular and widespread the cable companies might have to expand their services, but I'd be worried about their response time. I've had bars on channel three and static on channel 19 for the past three months and they aren't exactly springing into action about that one if you know what I mean.
As for the telcos and T1 prices, I've heard from family members who work for our phone company (Bell Atlantic & Nynex) that they have no interest in marketing data services to the private residential sector. Hence the horrid pricing (at least in my market) on ISDN and xDSL services, not to mention the sky high fees for T1 connections. Old phone company joke: What does ISDN stand for? It Still Does Nothing. This reluctance to cash in on a huge market can only hurt the phone companies in the long run. As it stands now I can get cable modem bandwidth that is comparable to, and in some cases exceeds, T1 service for about $30 a month. Compared with the $959 monthly charge for a T1 it's chump change.
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They still have sextant operators ships, just in case all the whiz bang technology stops working. GPS is more convenient and accurate but that does little good if the satellites get "Goldeneyed."
http://www.academicpress.com/inscight/01151998/org anic1.htm
The term has been diluted by being applied to everyday items and concepts like "organic" farming and "organic" shampoos, etc.
In the strict, scientific sense, anything that contains carbon is organic.
Sure, you can cobble together enough hardware and make a digital video recorder but then you've got a cobbled together hunk of hardware.
The TiVo is in a nice form factor, very living room friendly. The interface is both simple and efficient, something that most PC DVR programs have yet to crack. And it's a dedicated machine, it doesn't drop frames, it doesn't cut sound, it just works.
A computer is very versatile but that flexibility has its own costs, ease of use being one of the biggest.
I have web access here at work without ready access to cable news services on TV. I watched/read about the events of September 11th on the web.
Being able to manipulate a molecular structure or actually see a 3D representation of a ternary phase diagram would be hugely useful. Also surface plots of multi dimensional data would be much easier to manipulate.
Then you toss in all the design, CAD-CAM, visible relations in a database, etc and the possibilities are endless.
And that's just for materials and design. A lot of the same applications would work for drug research, medical applications, entymology, architectural renderings, etc etc.
Three dimensional hearing works because your brain is able to detect minute differences in the *arrival* of soundwaves at one ear vs. the other and then determine the direction of origin.
Three dimensional vision works because we have a small amount of seperation between our eyes. The brain compares the image received from both eyes and composites them together. 3D vision is a result of depth perception. Numerous optical illusions can trick the brain into seeing 2D images as 3D objects by playing with the relationship between what the individual eyes see and how the brain composites those images together.
What you describe would require advanced knowledge of when light leaves a distant object, and the computing power in our brains to detect the small intervals between the arrival of photons moving at the speed of light.
I'll leave the relativistic implications of being able to see in a vacuum as a homework assignment.
The instrument panel, trip computer, and dash illumination change intensity based on ambient light both inside and outside the vehicle. Very nice.
A big stink was made when Cassini was launched several years ago. Seems they finally figured out that deep space probes aren't solar powered. Cassini still launched and RTG's are still the only practical way to power spacecraft beyond the orbit of Mars.
The article mentions tighter limits on the number of H1-B visas granted to foreign nationals. Current H1-B holders won't be "thrown out" at all.
Nuclear waste, even high level nuclear waste like used fuel assemblies CANNOT be made into a fission weapon. Spent fuel is maybe 1 or 2 percent U-235. Bomb grade material is >95% U-235.
A number of gas turbine plants scattered about Manhattan. The plants are small (relatively... only a block in size) and produce maybe 100 megawatts (don't quote me on the exact number). Oh... and they're really loud.
Tachyons are hypothesized to travel faster than the speed of light. It's a common misconception that Einstein's theories prohibit FTL travel - they do not. They do prohibit massive particles from accelerating past the speed of light (would require infinite energy). Massless particles like photons and the theoretical tachyon don't have this problem.
What happened to that glut of bandwidth we kept hearing about a few months back? I distinctly remember several "experts" proclaiming that the world had come into an over-capacity of bandwidth from all the expansion in the late 90's. There was talk-a-plenty of supply outstriping demand and how it was going to be the undoing of broadband providers. Funny how all that evaporated when the economy turned South... or maybe it was after AOL bought Time-Warner.
Chris Bangle has lost his mind...
The idea of lights that go off when you remove the key though sounds rather promising...
Not at all unusual.
My 2001 Audi A4 turns cuts the headlights back to parking lights when the key is removed. Buddy of mine had a Hyundai Elantra in highschool that did the same thing... back in '94.
Not all types of fuel cells run hot enough to cause the damage that you describe. Large scale solid oxide fuel cells for industrial purposes do make a great deal of heat by design to increase their efficiency. Proton exchange cells do not require such high operating temperatures. Also the fuel for the fuel cell need not be in a compressed gas cylinder. Any number of liquid hydrocarbon or alcohol fuels can be used.
Fuel Cells can in fact run on many different hydrocarbon based fuels, from gasoline to pure alcohol (of any variety). The mechanism is the same in any case. The fuel acts as a Hydrogen donator, and the free hydrogens then drive the fuel cells along with oxygen from the air. The technology centers around diffusion of ions through a semipermeable insulating membrane, usually ceramic or plastic. Hydrogen gas is one one side of the membrane and oxygen gas (plain old air really but the oxygen does the work) is on the other. The hydrogens are stripped of their electron on one side of the membrane. The electrons flow to the other side of the cell (think negative to positive in battery terms) through an external circuit (be it laptop, cell phone, pager, etc) and the hydrogen diffuses through the membrane to form water with the freely available oxygen, this closes the circuit and satisfies thermodynamics, making the whole thing work.
Ideally hydrogen and oxygen would be the only two fuel components needed, but we of course do not live in an ideal world. Using pure oxygen does not offer enough of performance benefit to offset the tremendous costs of air liquefaction to obtain pure oxygen. Hydrogen is the most abundant element in the universe, and it surrounds us in the form of water, but this hydrogen has been sequestered by oxygen. Obtaining pure hydrogen from water using electrolosis uses a great deal of energy, making it very expensive. NASA pays about $1.05 per pound of hydrogen, versus about $0.13 per pound for gasoline at my local Exxon. For this reason most commercial fuel cells use a reformer to process any number of hydrocarbon or alcohol based fuels into usable hydrogen. Hence methanol, ethanol, methane, etc. The reformation process decreases the efficeincy of the cell somewhat, but they are still much more efficient then chemical batteries.
Fuel cells are well over 100 years old, but until recently the manufacturing technology did not exist to make them really useful. It's basically a plumbing problem. To maximize power output per volume you need to create a large surface area for diffusion. This is usually accomplished by making numerous folds in the exchange membrane. However this makes it more difficult to pipe in hyrdogen and oxygen to where they are needed. The chemistry of the devices is well understood, and it's largely a manufacturing problem now.
The July '99 issue of Scientific American had a special section devoted to fuel cells, and features articles discussing the use of cells in portable items such as phones as well as residential and commerical scale cells for homes and offices.
I agree with your sentiments regarding recorded music, however I think there will always be a place for the large movie houses, at least for people like me who believe that content can be enhanced by presentation. For example, I don't have the money or space to put in an 80 foot movie screen and a full THX rig to see Star Wars. Having seen SW in both THX and non-THX I believe that the picture loses something as the screen decreases in size and the audio quality is lowered. The words were the same, the images the same, etc, but the presentation made all the difference, in my opinion. Of course I would love to have a THX theater in my basement, but well you know. Movie theaters are not just about control, economy of scale comes into the equation as well.
Aside from the dangerous license practices that the DIVX model could have legitimized, the worst result of the entire DIVX fiasco was to limit the widespread acceptance of the DVD format. The average consumer probably knew nothing of the differences between DIVX and DVD, causing him or her to be stuck on a fence so to speak with regards to which format to support. Most lay people that I've talked to expressed relucatance towards investing in a DVD system because they didn't want to get caught on the bleeding edge and have an obsolete piece of equipment, ala Beta and VHS a few years ago.
DIVX did more harm to the DVD standard by confusing the average consumer then through financial competition. If DIVX hadn't come around more people would have invested in DVD players, helping the format to gain more widespread popularity. As it stands, I believe that there are over 1 million DVD users in the country. As that number grows the price of DVD equipment will naturally drop and the media will become easier to find. My local Blockbuster still doesn't carry rental DVD's though that's about to change. DIVX's legacy is that it has set this process back by at least a year and hindered the adoption of high quality digital home entertainment standards for everyone.
I've got a JVC HRVP-628U, it's a fairly high end editing VCR. It doesn't have the family message center, and I've never encountered the date roll over bug. Plus it appears that it's Y2K compliant, having accomplised the 1999 to 2000 rollover without incident and displaying the proper day of the week.
That only 6% of elligible customers actually make use of the cable modem option can be seen as a good thing, given that the bandwidth of the connection is largely dependent on the number of users. If the service became more popular and widespread the cable companies might have to expand their services, but I'd be worried about their response time. I've had bars on channel three and static on channel 19 for the past three months and they aren't exactly springing into action about that one if you know what I mean.
As for the telcos and T1 prices, I've heard from family members who work for our phone company (Bell Atlantic & Nynex) that they have no interest in marketing data services to the private residential sector. Hence the horrid pricing (at least in my market) on ISDN and xDSL services, not to mention the sky high fees for T1 connections. Old phone company joke: What does ISDN stand for? It Still Does Nothing. This reluctance to cash in on a huge market can only hurt the phone companies in the long run. As it stands now I can get cable modem bandwidth that is comparable to, and in some cases exceeds, T1 service for about $30 a month. Compared with the $959 monthly charge for a T1 it's chump change.