What's the equivalent of x-raying a large sample of the welded joints?
Hook in something to monitor memory usage and running the program through everything it possibly can do until you know there are no memory leaks or stack overflow/underflow. At every point where the user can type something, enter illegal characters, overlong strings, a null string, etc., AND TRACE WHERE THE PROGRAM GOES as it handles it. (Maybe this requires a logic analyzer -- which can cost as much as an x-ray machine...) Make sure the program has taken every branch both ways.
But before you start on all that testing, first do an honest, thorough code review. This has been well-proven to actually save development time and money; every hour of code review finds bugs that would have taken two or three hours to track down in debug. In addition, it finds bugs that probably would have got through all testing, so it considerably improves the software quality. And it's an educational experience for the programmers.
Too many software companies aren't even doing the code review. That's just stupid. But they also don't do much testing. The reason is obvious. You build a bridge that falls down, and there are lawsuits. You build a car where the steering wheel falls off, and there are lawsuits -- and no matter what "limitation of liability" clauses you put in the sales contract, you are still liable for defects in design or workmanship under the UCC. But for some bizarre reason, software companies have been able to avoid liability for obvious negligence in designing their software...
More exactly, it appears that (at least on the Gothic cathedrals), they waited for cracks to appear in the masonry, then reinforced as indicated. One bit of "reinforcement" is rather interesting. Good stonework is quite strong in compression, and an arch subject only to gravitational loading is quite definitely in compression. However, when the wind blows and tries to push the building sideways, the flying buttresses on the upwind side could have wound up in tension (being pulled apart), where the strength is zero. So they put gargoyles on top of the buttresses, adding just enough weight to keep them in compression.
there are actual laws in Japan prohibiting the selling of books, magazines, and other things at a lower-than-retail cost. The main thing about that is that it eliminates the used-book, etc., markets, except for collectables, so the publishers get to sell more new books at full price.
A very long time ago, some American book publisher tried to do that with a license agreement on the inside front cover. The courts slapped them down quite thoroughly, creating the "first sale doctrine." Pity that doesn't apply to software -- but now we have government of the people, by corporate stooges (both Republicans and Democrats), and for the corporations...
They're not going to lose refresh because of power failure. No matter what the storage technology is, you don't leave a server farm like Google's at the mercy of the local power grid, you have some sort of generators for backup.
They _will_ lose bits of data. DRAM chips fail. Motherboards fail (taking out perhaps 2G at a time). Cosmic rays flip individual bits. It's much less lost at a time than HD fails, but probably the flipped bits occur far more often. But Google never guaranteed 100% accuracy...
It's really pretty tricky to design an embedded system so that re-programming the Flash on board is easy enough for lusers to do, and yet it will never, ever get changed by accident. PC's are probably the easiest cast, since they come with built-in serial comm, a full-featured OS, and user interface through a full-sized display, keyboard, and mouse -- yet I hear of accidents happening in re-flashing and leaving the MB dead until the chip is physically replaced.
Now think of doing this with a CD drive, which has no display other than a few LED's, no keyboard other than a few function keys, and no communications capability...
Or maybe it's that truck A is tricked out like a sports car and sold mainly to idiots that can't drive and don't have the sense to stay home, while truck B is designed so that you can't get it out of the dealer's lot until you've studied how to drive it. It might or might not be inherently more dangerous, but I'd worry about the one that's operated by idiots more.;-)
Seriously, your numerical argument applies somewhat to e-mail viruses, but not to direct attacks on servers. Crackers don't go after the entire population of computers -- they mainly go after those that can be reached directly on the web, since you probably have to first compromise a firewall to reach the rest. Windows sells on lots of desktops and laptops, but it isn't the biggest player in servers. (Or not in machines that are _intentionally_ servers -- I've heard stories about home computer users, who couldn't define "server", clicking a single checkbox and totally exposing their machines on the web.) If Windows is attracting most of the cracking efforts, it's because they think they have a much better chance of succeeding there. If they thought they'd have as easy a time cracking into *nix servers, they'd be doing that, because there are plenty of targets.
1) As someone else noted, often the World Bank loans are designed more to allow 3rd worlders to buy from or make products for international corporations than to actually meet local needs.
2) WB makes loans that poor countries probably aren't going to be able to pay back, then harshly regulates their economies in an effort to wring out the money. Loan sharks generally won't loan to you if they expect to have to pay a legbreaker to collect, and certainly won't knowingly loan you more than you can possibly pay back, but the WB can't quite figure out whether they're a lending or a welfare instititution, so they make obviously bad loans and then go nuts trying to collect...
3) Tiny loans to start small local businesses have been proven to fuel economic development much better than the WB's mega-loans to governments. However, even if the WB wants to make the tiny loans, I don't see how they can -- micro-loans have to be made by local people in the villages.
When your method of transporting supplies is to have men pull sledges up the glacier and through the snow, it just isn't possible to build in much of a safety margin. Scott had it calculated out very well for normal weather, with enough margin for some bad weather, but not quite enough for what he encountered.
Amundsen went through the same weather, but had much wider margins -- not only because he used dog-teams, but also when the loads got lighter, he killed the extra dogs, and fed the carcasses to men and dogs...
The amazing thing about Scott
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The Coldest March
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· Score: 4, Insightful
The amazing thing about Scott's expedition is how close it came to succeeding, in spite of a fundamentally _stupid_ plan and the bad luck of apparently hitting the worst weather in a century. Scott didn't get along with sled-dogs for some reason, so he tried a tractor (broke down immediately -- in 1912 that was no surprise), and ponies from somewhere north of England (Antartica was too cold for them, and they ate too much). Finally he decided to just pull the sledges by manpower. That didn't allow enough food per man. Still, they almost made it.
Amundsen adopted a plan that made it much easier to get the food up the glaciers, although it the English professed to be shocked when they heard about it. He surveyed a route that went several hundred miles on sea ice, then up a glacier, then a long, nearly flat run to the pole. He started with heavily loaded sleds and enormous dog teams. By the time they reached the glaciers, the sleds were lighter, so the dogs didn't have much trouble pulling them uphill. At the top, Amundsen got out a pistol, shot the extra dogs, and loaded up the sleds with fresh meat.
And you probably thought "dog eat dog" was just an expression.
Fat Americans rarely live past 35 without suffering multiple heart attacks or strokes.
1) That's a gross exaggeration. Obesity does eventually lead to a greater chance of heart attacks and strokes, but they rarely hit before 35, no matter how fat you are, and most of the obese live well past 50. And some fat people with unhealthy habits live to 90-something (Winston Churchill), while some lean and trim athletes die of heart attacks before 40 (tennis champ Arthur Ashe).
2) Go back a few hundred years, and tell a chubby (and very wealthy) 20-year old "You keep eating like that and you might be dead around 40." His answer "Gee, you mean I'll live that long!"
When the average lifespan was around 30 in medieval Europe, fat was a protection against at least one common cause of dying young (starving to death in wintertime), it gave those armored knights a weight edge on their opponents, and it's quite likely that it somehow gives more capability to fight off the infections that killed so many. Of course, this generally wasn't couch-potato fat, because most people who could afford to overeat like knights, successful farmers, and successful craftsmen got plenty of exercise and had massive muscles under the fat.
Given our welfare system, those children generally do survive to procreate themselves -- often excessively. At least among the people I know best (white smalltown/rural Americans), there is a quite obvious fission into two groups:
Responsible people, who delay marriage and childbearing until they are making enough money to support a family, and in most cases limit the number of children they have. (OK, part of that isn't responsibility, but pure selfishness -- raising kids right is a hell of a lot of work.)
Irresponsible people, who don't bother to get the education needed to get the good jobs, but (married or not) procreate early and often. So their children are often supported by taxes collected from the responsible. Their children generally start out with serious handicaps for the job market, such as inherited stupidity, dropping out of high-school, or a criminal record, but I do know a number of people born before 1960 who worked hard and overcame those handicaps. Since the federalization of welfare programs in the 1960's, welfare children often have a much more serious handicap --they can't even keep a McDonald's job because they won't even get out of bed and go to work on time...
As for the payload 20 tons of Payload is Huge! Nothing capable of carrying humans or delicate electronics can support a 20 ton payload. The shuttle was designed for a maximum of 60,000 pounds = 30 tons. However, the shuttle was also designed so that a team of thousands spends several months re-assembling it after every mission, and instead of one 30 ton load, it usually carries a number of smaller modules totalling much less than it's theoretical capacity. The beanstalk would always be hauling a load up, and the main operating cost would be the electricity to power the elevator.
How many loads a year? Assume one at a time, and speed similar to electrically powered "bullet" trains, 200km/hr (120mph). 22,000 km would take 220 hours, about ten days. So 36 "launches" and 720 tons of payload delivered a year. This probably exceeds the total payloads launched by all national and private rockets now.
Due to the lower cost, I expect there would be a considerable increase in both size and number of satellites sent up. That is, comsats now are probably around a ton, built as light as possible and limited in power because of the high per pound costs; with the beanstalk, they could afford to make them considerably larger, and to transmit at much higher power so the ground stations to pick them up could be smaller.
That will give the beanstalk a good steady revenue stream. If you want to build a 100 ton space station or interplanetary cruise ship, then you'll either have to get your five pieces in the queue right away, or else wait a few years until the waiting list for satellites on the beanstalk gets too long, so they build Beanstalk 2 with a much higher lift capacity...
if you didn't need a mobile phone the size of a domino, you could make them a bit bigger and use plain ordinary electrolytic capacitors instead.
Not quite. Aluminum electrolytics don't respond well at high frequencies, and in modern electronics usually the power supply filter caps have to handle quite high frequencies, since the power drawn by components varies rapidly. Ceramic caps take care of the highest frequencies, but don't store enough charge to cover everything. Electrolytics store lots of charge, but don't let it out fast enough. Tantalums are in-between, and quite often perfect.
The rising production of cell phones did cause a severe shortage of tantalums a year or two ago. One of our customers was then designing a board with a 233MHz Pentium, where size and weight didn't matter. So instead of tantalums, they used about a dozen medium size electrolytics in parallel -- this was massively more capacitance than needed, but by adding together the slight high frequency response of all those electrolytics, they got the same effect as a couple of good tantalums. Only trouble was, when you turned power on charging up all those caps for the first time put a strain on the power supply!
You are misunderstanding how this works -- it doesn't help that the reporter evidently didn't understand either. The article didn't say this, but it's obvious that the proposed MEM filters are for the receiver circuits, not the transmitter or speaker circuits where power capacity is an issue. (Forget the ring phone, other posters have cited many reasons it's not going to happen.)
Presently, the most precise analog input filters are electromechanical devices called SAW filters. An array of electrodes apply the input signal to start a piezoelectric crystal vibrating, with another array picking up the output signal. The signal passes through the crystal as a sound wave; the crystal might oscillate at many frequencies, but to pass between crystal and electrodes, the sound wavelength must match the array spacing.
The proposed "MEMS" filter is a tuning fork etched out of semiconductor, I assume with piezoleletric input and output electrodes. Only signals at very near the natural oscillation frequency of the fork can set it vibrating so as to be picked up at the output electrode. The electrodes can be much smaller, and for cell phone frequencies obviously the fork has to be very tiny. Since the device is smaller, it doesn't use as much power.
"Slower" -- no. "Uses more power" -- no. "More expensive" -- true for now, but the tinier device will probably be cheaper once it's become a commodity part mass-produced in competing factories. "More breakable" -- yes, but I don't think it will be breakable enough to be a likely point of failure. A really strong shock in the right direction could snap the tuning fork, but considering the tiny size and considerable strength of the likely materials, you'd probably mangle the case, display, and circuit board before you damaged the MEMS.
A slightly more realistic reliability concern is that for a tuning fork to work, it has to have air space around it. That is, where solid-state components are encased in solid epoxy, a bubble would have to be left around the fork. It's OK if the bubble comes out the intended size and location, and the epoxy covers it completely and makes a good seal around the wires. But if there's the slightest leak to let moisture or anything else get into the bubble, the device will soon die. There are a few larger components which require air bubbles to operate: crystal oscillators usually have a tuning-fork in a bubble, some optocouplers have an air gap separating the LED and phototransistor. No matter how much effort the manufacturer of these devices puts into controlling the build process and testing them 100%, we always have a few go bad when we solder them to the board. They also tend to have high field failure rates, although I don't know if that is due to leakage into the bubble. Crystals are lower frequency and a larger tuning fork, so more breakable, and optocouplers are used mainly to prevent high voltage zaps from getting into the device -- it's no surprise when a device that's _expected_ to be zapped gets zapped too much and fails.
Someone who went entirely too far with the "weakest link". He told his wife "You are the weakest link - goodbye", then strangled her. And he taped it! That sure made the trial a slam-dunk.
Indirectly, better filtering helps reduce the size of a cellphone because lower-quality filtering results in a signal loss that is corrected by more amplification, which drains power.
That would be fine if your phone only received. To transmit, you need real power (5W?) which drains even palm-sized batteries fast. And I don't believe that the driver transistors and filters needed on the transmitter can shrink that small anyway.
Cell-phones have to have receive always turned on (so it can receive a call at any time), but when idle they only turn on transmit for a few milliseconds at a time to identify themselves to the network. My wife's cell phone batteries last for days in this mode. But when she starts talking, a full charge goes in half an hour.
I'm wondering just how well the international partners are going to agree about the interpretation of those rather subjective standards, though. For instance, considering the stories I've heard about Russians and drinking, over there "alcohol abuse" probably means letting vodka go to waste. 8-)
These aren't just NASA standards, they were agreed on with the international partners. See the Washington Post's article: "More than two years in the making, the criteria allow Russia, the United States, Canada, Japan or the European Space Agency to select station visitors."
I grew up with erector sets -- the older part of my set (from the 1950's) was pretty strong, but very heavy. The later stuff had "beams" stamped from the thinnest possible metal, you had to bolt 4 of them together in a box beam to get any strength. Legos were a little pricy for my family. (Plastic resins are expensive by the pound, although forming them into intricate shapes is cheap. Carbon steel is amazingly cheap in bulk, but making something out of it can get pretty expensive. Erector set pieces, except the screws and nuts, were made by rolling and stamping, which is as cheap as metal-forming gets if the quantities are large enough.)
I think Legos would be as strong or stronger than the later Erector sets if you glued the bricks together. One brick is pretty strong. Trouble is, if you used a strong glue, the pieces are no longer re-usable...
So if they thought he really was making bombs in his house, don't you think they would arrest him when he was away from home and not carrying any large packages, rather than going in when he was at home and possibly holding onto the detonator, after crowding all the agents they possibly could into range of the explosion?
I wasn't far into my own stint in the Air Force when I decided that a brain-controlled combat plane would be an extremely bad idea. Let's see now: Colonel Jones calls together his pilots, and informs them that due to an extremely heavy schedule of combat missions, leaves are canceled, and they are all confined to base until further notice. Then the Colonel climbs into his airplane and leads a dozen of those pilots into combat, each with the trigger wired into his brain. The colonel isn't coming back, because someone's going to think "I want to kill that bastard" just a little too hard.
And the peacetime AF is a nice, friendly organization as military units go. In infantry, if the privates don't want to kill the sergeant, he's not trying hard enough. Really, the obvious plan of infantry training is to get the men riled up and ready to kill _something_, but not quite enough to forget that there's a death penalty for attacking a superior. And then tell them the reason they're here, living outdoors, eating mystery rations, and getting harassed by sergeants and officers, is because of those bastards over there -- and it's OK to kill _them_!
There is a difference between using enough force to safely apprehend a suspect and using far more than is needed to show off or as extra-judicial punishment. In my experience, someone like this kid is all talk and no action. I have known a few _really_ dangerous men; they don't brag, they don't make extravagant threats, and most of all they don't go around telling others how to be dangerous.
If the FBI really thought this kid might be making bombs in his house, they would not have gone there -- they might have tripped over something and blown up the neighborhood, or if the kid was really nuts he might have pushed the detonator when he saw the SWAT team surrounding his house. They would have waited until he was away from his home and couldn't be carrying an arsenal.
Of course, since this kid thinks hacking private websites comes under freedom of speech, he needs some serious correction. But that should come after the trial, not by stormtroopers crashing into his home...
Seems to me like the smart thing to do is to investigate him for a couple months to see if he really is dangerous, and if so, then act appropriately. If they honestly didn't know, and he had lots of explosives somewhere, how do they know he wouldn't have blown them all up?
Actually, it appears that they did investigate him for several months before moving in. Which means (a) they're incredibly dumb not to notice this guy's all talk and no action, (b) they're afraid the neighbors are going to shoot at them, (c) they just got to show off all their fancy gear, or (d) they are over-using their SWAT teams as a form of extra-judicial punishment. While I am not personally familiar with LA, I doubt it's (b). You are permitted to pick 3 out of 4...
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What's the equivalent of x-raying a large sample of the welded joints?
Hook in something to monitor memory usage and running the program through everything it possibly can do until you know there are no memory leaks or stack overflow/underflow. At every point where the user can type something, enter illegal characters, overlong strings, a null string, etc., AND TRACE WHERE THE PROGRAM GOES as it handles it. (Maybe this requires a logic analyzer -- which can cost as much as an x-ray machine...) Make sure the program has taken every branch both ways.
But before you start on all that testing, first do an honest, thorough code review. This has been well-proven to actually save development time and money; every hour of code review finds bugs that would have taken two or three hours to track down in debug. In addition, it finds bugs that probably would have got through all testing, so it considerably improves the software quality. And it's an educational experience for the programmers.
Too many software companies aren't even doing the code review. That's just stupid. But they also don't do much testing. The reason is obvious. You build a bridge that falls down, and there are lawsuits. You build a car where the steering wheel falls off, and there are lawsuits -- and no matter what "limitation of liability" clauses you put in the sales contract, you are still liable for defects in design or workmanship under the UCC. But for some bizarre reason, software companies have been able to avoid liability for obvious negligence in designing their software...
And construction projects are "open source." You have to file the plans at the building code office.
More exactly, it appears that (at least on the Gothic cathedrals), they waited for cracks to appear in the masonry, then reinforced as indicated. One bit of "reinforcement" is rather interesting. Good stonework is quite strong in compression, and an arch subject only to gravitational loading is quite definitely in compression. However, when the wind blows and tries to push the building sideways, the flying buttresses on the upwind side could have wound up in tension (being pulled apart), where the strength is zero. So they put gargoyles on top of the buttresses, adding just enough weight to keep them in compression.
there are actual laws in Japan prohibiting the selling of books, magazines, and other things at a lower-than-retail cost. The main thing about that is that it eliminates the used-book, etc., markets, except for collectables, so the publishers get to sell more new books at full price.
A very long time ago, some American book publisher tried to do that with a license agreement on the inside front cover. The courts slapped them down quite thoroughly, creating the "first sale doctrine." Pity that doesn't apply to software -- but now we have government of the people, by corporate stooges (both Republicans and Democrats), and for the corporations...
They're not going to lose refresh because of power failure. No matter what the storage technology is, you don't leave a server farm like Google's at the mercy of the local power grid, you have some sort of generators for backup.
They _will_ lose bits of data. DRAM chips fail. Motherboards fail (taking out perhaps 2G at a time). Cosmic rays flip individual bits. It's much less lost at a time than HD fails, but probably the flipped bits occur far more often. But Google never guaranteed 100% accuracy...
It's really pretty tricky to design an embedded system so that re-programming the Flash on board is easy enough for lusers to do, and yet it will never, ever get changed by accident. PC's are probably the easiest cast, since they come with built-in serial comm, a full-featured OS, and user interface through a full-sized display, keyboard, and mouse -- yet I hear of accidents happening in re-flashing and leaving the MB dead until the chip is physically replaced.
Now think of doing this with a CD drive, which has no display other than a few LED's, no keyboard other than a few function keys, and no communications capability...
Or maybe it's that truck A is tricked out like a sports car and sold mainly to idiots that can't drive and don't have the sense to stay home, while truck B is designed so that you can't get it out of the dealer's lot until you've studied how to drive it. It might or might not be inherently more dangerous, but I'd worry about the one that's operated by idiots more. ;-)
Seriously, your numerical argument applies somewhat to e-mail viruses, but not to direct attacks on servers. Crackers don't go after the entire population of computers -- they mainly go after those that can be reached directly on the web, since you probably have to first compromise a firewall to reach the rest. Windows sells on lots of desktops and laptops, but it isn't the biggest player in servers. (Or not in machines that are _intentionally_ servers -- I've heard stories about home computer users, who couldn't define "server", clicking a single checkbox and totally exposing their machines on the web.) If Windows is attracting most of the cracking efforts, it's because they think they have a much better chance of succeeding there. If they thought they'd have as easy a time cracking into *nix servers, they'd be doing that, because there are plenty of targets.
1) As someone else noted, often the World Bank loans are designed more to allow 3rd worlders to buy from or make products for international corporations than to actually meet local needs.
2) WB makes loans that poor countries probably aren't going to be able to pay back, then harshly regulates their economies in an effort to wring out the money. Loan sharks generally won't loan to you if they expect to have to pay a legbreaker to collect, and certainly won't knowingly loan you more than you can possibly pay back, but the WB can't quite figure out whether they're a lending or a welfare instititution, so they make obviously bad loans and then go nuts trying to collect...
3) Tiny loans to start small local businesses have been proven to fuel economic development much better than the WB's mega-loans to governments. However, even if the WB wants to make the tiny loans, I don't see how they can -- micro-loans have to be made by local people in the villages.
When your method of transporting supplies is to have men pull sledges up the glacier and through the snow, it just isn't possible to build in much of a safety margin. Scott had it calculated out very well for normal weather, with enough margin for some bad weather, but not quite enough for what he encountered.
Amundsen went through the same weather, but had much wider margins -- not only because he used dog-teams, but also when the loads got lighter, he killed the extra dogs, and fed the carcasses to men and dogs...
The amazing thing about Scott's expedition is how close it came to succeeding, in spite of a fundamentally _stupid_ plan and the bad luck of apparently hitting the worst weather in a century. Scott didn't get along with sled-dogs for some reason, so he tried a tractor (broke down immediately -- in 1912 that was no surprise), and ponies from somewhere north of England (Antartica was too cold for them, and they ate too much). Finally he decided to just pull the sledges by manpower. That didn't allow enough food per man. Still, they almost made it.
Amundsen adopted a plan that made it much easier to get the food up the glaciers, although it the English professed to be shocked when they heard about it. He surveyed a route that went several hundred miles on sea ice, then up a glacier, then a long, nearly flat run to the pole. He started with heavily loaded sleds and enormous dog teams. By the time they reached the glaciers, the sleds were lighter, so the dogs didn't have much trouble pulling them uphill. At the top, Amundsen got out a pistol, shot the extra dogs, and loaded up the sleds with fresh meat.
And you probably thought "dog eat dog" was just an expression.
Fat Americans rarely live past 35 without suffering multiple heart attacks or strokes.
1) That's a gross exaggeration. Obesity does eventually lead to a greater chance of heart attacks and strokes, but they rarely hit before 35, no matter how fat you are, and most of the obese live well past 50. And some fat people with unhealthy habits live to 90-something (Winston Churchill), while some lean and trim athletes die of heart attacks before 40 (tennis champ Arthur Ashe).
2) Go back a few hundred years, and tell a chubby (and very wealthy) 20-year old "You keep eating like that and you might be dead around 40." His answer "Gee, you mean I'll live that long!"
When the average lifespan was around 30 in medieval Europe, fat was a protection against at least one common cause of dying young (starving to death in wintertime), it gave those armored knights a weight edge on their opponents, and it's quite likely that it somehow gives more capability to fight off the infections that killed so many. Of course, this generally wasn't couch-potato fat, because most people who could afford to overeat like knights, successful farmers, and successful craftsmen got plenty of exercise and had massive muscles under the fat.
Given our welfare system, those children generally do survive to procreate themselves -- often excessively. At least among the people I know best (white smalltown/rural Americans), there is a quite obvious fission into two groups:
Responsible people, who delay marriage and childbearing until they are making enough money to support a family, and in most cases limit the number of children they have. (OK, part of that isn't responsibility, but pure selfishness -- raising kids right is a hell of a lot of work.)
Irresponsible people, who don't bother to get the education needed to get the good jobs, but (married or not) procreate early and often. So their children are often supported by taxes collected from the responsible. Their children generally start out with serious handicaps for the job market, such as inherited stupidity, dropping out of high-school, or a criminal record, but I do know a number of people born before 1960 who worked hard and overcame those handicaps. Since the federalization of welfare programs in the 1960's, welfare children often have a much more serious handicap --they can't even keep a McDonald's job because they won't even get out of bed and go to work on time...
Just one question: how do they make the touchscreen out of 3 inch armor steel so as to stand up to enraged Klingons?
As for the payload 20 tons of Payload is Huge! Nothing capable of carrying humans or delicate electronics can support a 20 ton payload. The shuttle was designed for a maximum of 60,000 pounds = 30 tons. However, the shuttle was also designed so that a team of thousands spends several months re-assembling it after every mission, and instead of one 30 ton load, it usually carries a number of smaller modules totalling much less than it's theoretical capacity. The beanstalk would always be hauling a load up, and the main operating cost would be the electricity to power the elevator.
How many loads a year? Assume one at a time, and speed similar to electrically powered "bullet" trains, 200km/hr (120mph). 22,000 km would take 220 hours, about ten days. So 36 "launches" and 720 tons of payload delivered a year. This probably exceeds the total payloads launched by all national and private rockets now.
Due to the lower cost, I expect there would be a considerable increase in both size and number of satellites sent up. That is, comsats now are probably around a ton, built as light as possible and limited in power because of the high per pound costs; with the beanstalk, they could afford to make them considerably larger, and to transmit at much higher power so the ground stations to pick them up could be smaller.
That will give the beanstalk a good steady revenue stream. If you want to build a 100 ton space station or interplanetary cruise ship, then you'll either have to get your five pieces in the queue right away, or else wait a few years until the waiting list for satellites on the beanstalk gets too long, so they build Beanstalk 2 with a much higher lift capacity...
if you didn't need a mobile phone the size of a domino, you could make them a bit bigger and use plain ordinary electrolytic capacitors instead.
Not quite. Aluminum electrolytics don't respond well at high frequencies, and in modern electronics usually the power supply filter caps have to handle quite high frequencies, since the power drawn by components varies rapidly. Ceramic caps take care of the highest frequencies, but don't store enough charge to cover everything. Electrolytics store lots of charge, but don't let it out fast enough. Tantalums are in-between, and quite often perfect.
The rising production of cell phones did cause a severe shortage of tantalums a year or two ago. One of our customers was then designing a board with a 233MHz Pentium, where size and weight didn't matter. So instead of tantalums, they used about a dozen medium size electrolytics in parallel -- this was massively more capacitance than needed, but by adding together the slight high frequency response of all those electrolytics, they got the same effect as a couple of good tantalums. Only trouble was, when you turned power on charging up all those caps for the first time put a strain on the power supply!
You are misunderstanding how this works -- it doesn't help that the reporter evidently didn't understand either. The article didn't say this, but it's obvious that the proposed MEM filters are for the receiver circuits, not the transmitter or speaker circuits where power capacity is an issue. (Forget the ring phone, other posters have cited many reasons it's not going to happen.)
Presently, the most precise analog input filters are electromechanical devices called SAW filters. An array of electrodes apply the input signal to start a piezoelectric crystal vibrating, with another array picking up the output signal. The signal passes through the crystal as a sound wave; the crystal might oscillate at many frequencies, but to pass between crystal and electrodes, the sound wavelength must match the array spacing.
The proposed "MEMS" filter is a tuning fork etched out of semiconductor, I assume with piezoleletric input and output electrodes. Only signals at very near the natural oscillation frequency of the fork can set it vibrating so as to be picked up at the output electrode. The electrodes can be much smaller, and for cell phone frequencies obviously the fork has to be very tiny. Since the device is smaller, it doesn't use as much power.
"Slower" -- no. "Uses more power" -- no. "More expensive" -- true for now, but the tinier device will probably be cheaper once it's become a commodity part mass-produced in competing factories. "More breakable" -- yes, but I don't think it will be breakable enough to be a likely point of failure. A really strong shock in the right direction could snap the tuning fork, but considering the tiny size and considerable strength of the likely materials, you'd probably mangle the case, display, and circuit board before you damaged the MEMS.
A slightly more realistic reliability concern is that for a tuning fork to work, it has to have air space around it. That is, where solid-state components are encased in solid epoxy, a bubble would have to be left around the fork. It's OK if the bubble comes out the intended size and location, and the epoxy covers it completely and makes a good seal around the wires. But if there's the slightest leak to let moisture or anything else get into the bubble, the device will soon die. There are a few larger components which require air bubbles to operate: crystal oscillators usually have a tuning-fork in a bubble, some optocouplers have an air gap separating the LED and phototransistor. No matter how much effort the manufacturer of these devices puts into controlling the build process and testing them 100%, we always have a few go bad when we solder them to the board. They also tend to have high field failure rates, although I don't know if that is due to leakage into the bubble. Crystals are lower frequency and a larger tuning fork, so more breakable, and optocouplers are used mainly to prevent high voltage zaps from getting into the device -- it's no surprise when a device that's _expected_ to be zapped gets zapped too much and fails.
Someone who went entirely too far with the "weakest link". He told his wife "You are the weakest link - goodbye", then strangled her. And he taped it! That sure made the trial a slam-dunk.
Indirectly, better filtering helps reduce the size of a cellphone because lower-quality filtering results in a signal loss that is corrected by more amplification, which drains power.
That would be fine if your phone only received. To transmit, you need real power (5W?) which drains even palm-sized batteries fast. And I don't believe that the driver transistors and filters needed on the transmitter can shrink that small anyway.
Cell-phones have to have receive always turned on (so it can receive a call at any time), but when idle they only turn on transmit for a few milliseconds at a time to identify themselves to the network. My wife's cell phone batteries last for days in this mode. But when she starts talking, a full charge goes in half an hour.
I'm wondering just how well the international partners are going to agree about the interpretation of those rather subjective standards, though. For instance, considering the stories I've heard about Russians and drinking, over there "alcohol abuse" probably means letting vodka go to waste. 8-)
These aren't just NASA standards, they were agreed on with the international partners. See the Washington Post's article: "More than two years in the making, the criteria allow Russia, the United States, Canada, Japan or the European Space Agency to select station visitors."
I grew up with erector sets -- the older part of my set (from the 1950's) was pretty strong, but very heavy. The later stuff had "beams" stamped from the thinnest possible metal, you had to bolt 4 of them together in a box beam to get any strength. Legos were a little pricy for my family. (Plastic resins are expensive by the pound, although forming them into intricate shapes is cheap. Carbon steel is amazingly cheap in bulk, but making something out of it can get pretty expensive. Erector set pieces, except the screws and nuts, were made by rolling and stamping, which is as cheap as metal-forming gets if the quantities are large enough.)
I think Legos would be as strong or stronger than the later Erector sets if you glued the bricks together. One brick is pretty strong. Trouble is, if you used a strong glue, the pieces are no longer re-usable...
So if they thought he really was making bombs in his house, don't you think they would arrest him when he was away from home and not carrying any large packages, rather than going in when he was at home and possibly holding onto the detonator, after crowding all the agents they possibly could into range of the explosion?
I wasn't far into my own stint in the Air Force when I decided that a brain-controlled combat plane would be an extremely bad idea. Let's see now: Colonel Jones calls together his pilots, and informs them that due to an extremely heavy schedule of combat missions, leaves are canceled, and they are all confined to base until further notice. Then the Colonel climbs into his airplane and leads a dozen of those pilots into combat, each with the trigger wired into his brain. The colonel isn't coming back, because someone's going to think "I want to kill that bastard" just a little too hard.
And the peacetime AF is a nice, friendly organization as military units go. In infantry, if the privates don't want to kill the sergeant, he's not trying hard enough. Really, the obvious plan of infantry training is to get the men riled up and ready to kill _something_, but not quite enough to forget that there's a death penalty for attacking a superior. And then tell them the reason they're here, living outdoors, eating mystery rations, and getting harassed by sergeants and officers, is because of those bastards over there -- and it's OK to kill _them_!
There is a difference between using enough force to safely apprehend a suspect and using far more than is needed to show off or as extra-judicial punishment. In my experience, someone like this kid is all talk and no action. I have known a few _really_ dangerous men; they don't brag, they don't make extravagant threats, and most of all they don't go around telling others how to be dangerous.
If the FBI really thought this kid might be making bombs in his house, they would not have gone there -- they might have tripped over something and blown up the neighborhood, or if the kid was really nuts he might have pushed the detonator when he saw the SWAT team surrounding his house. They would have waited until he was away from his home and couldn't be carrying an arsenal.
Of course, since this kid thinks hacking private websites comes under freedom of speech, he needs some serious correction. But that should come after the trial, not by stormtroopers crashing into his home...
Seems to me like the smart thing to do is to investigate him for a couple months to see if he really is dangerous, and if so, then act appropriately. If they honestly didn't know, and he had lots of explosives somewhere, how do they know he wouldn't have blown them all up?
Actually, it appears that they did investigate him for several months before moving in. Which means (a) they're incredibly dumb not to notice this guy's all talk and no action, (b) they're afraid the neighbors are going to shoot at them, (c) they just got to show off all their fancy gear, or (d) they are over-using their SWAT teams as a form of extra-judicial punishment. While I am not personally familiar with LA, I doubt it's (b). You are permitted to pick 3 out of 4...