It's not the patents that will keep the price sky high. Follow the links down to the actual scientific publications and think about what it takes to make such a material...
If the case is a thick piece of aluminum, it does make a pretty good heatsink, except that there is a terrible mechanical issue involved in clamping hot electronic parts to the case for good thermal transfer while still keeping them seated in the socket. I once worked on a plotter where the case lid was the heatsink for the motor drive transistors -- worked on it again and again, because the @#$%^& transistors kept pulling out of their sockets. You really don't want to go through this experience with a 400-pin device...
The thermoelectric device won't help with this issue. It is just this little disk that gets colder on one side and hotter on the other as you put electricity into it. What it does help with is if heat conduction, which is proportional to temperature difference times area, is insufficient to keep the IC temperature within working limits. That is, the interior of the IC is hotter than the outside, which is hotter than the heatsink, which has to be hotter than the air, and all those temperature differences can add up to a cooked CPU. The Peltier refrigerator changes this relationship by maybe 30 degrees. But you still need the heatsink to be clamped very solidly to the IC, just with the Peltier disk in-between.
What might work (if you really want that heavy metal case) is to use some sort of flexible heat pipe to connect the CPU and other hot spots to the case. Some laptops sort of do this with a flat plastic bag containing heat-conductive liquid or gel -- they lay it on top of the motherboard, then clamp the case over it, and it spreads the heat from the CPU, etc., out to that whole side of the case.
For higher heat-carrying capacity, you use a tube containing a substance that evaporates at the hot end and condenses at the cold end, with wick material to move the liquid back to the hot end. This sort of heat pump is usually metallic, but some corrugations in the middle would let it bend a few tenths of an inch. So you can attach the narrow hot end of this thing to the CPU, put the lid on the case, then run screws through it into nuts built into the wide cold end of the heat pipe and tighten it down, and that little bit of bend will allow it to tighten down flat to the underside of the lid without pulling the CPU out of the board...
Re:misleading headline - this GENERATES power
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New Semiconductor Coolers
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· Score: 3, Interesting
It's not the temperature difference alone that determines the power, but the temperature difference times the heat flow. And I know of no theoretical limits to heat flow, although there are lots of practical problems...
Nature has the full scientific article. I don't understand most of it, but it does say "Thin-film thermoelements lead to large cooling power densities (PD)... We estimate a value of PD of 700 W cm-2 at 353 K and 585 W cm-2 at 298 K at the measured maximum cooling in superlattice devices compared to a value of 1.9 W cm-2 in the bulk device of Fig. 4a". That is, 700 watts/cm2 cooling at 70C (the max temperature for industrial-spec semiconductors), 585 at 25C (room temperature), and it's about 350 times as fast at pumping heat as the comparison thermoelectric material.
To actually use that cooling ability, you've got to somehow couple 700W/cm2 heat into one side and remove rather more heat from the other side. (Or to generate 700W power, you've got to couple more than 700W to one side and remove the waste heat from the other.) A TO-220 power transistor has an approximately 1 cm2 metal plate on the back to contact the heatsink; take a really big heatsink and really good thermal paste and really torque down the screw clamping them together, and it will handle almost 20W. 700W would fry the transistor core instantly, before the backplate even got warm. The coupling between a GHz Pentium and heatsink/Peltier refrig/fan must be better than this, but not THAT much better. Lots of luck!
By the way, anyone notice that the reporter doesn't know the difference between "efficiency" and "effectiveness".
These anecdotes demonstrate something about the tube construction. You can't easily break the CRT from the front -- even dropping another extra-heavy monitor on it won't crack it -- but a brick dropping a few inches onto the neck will implode the tube.
The curved rear glass is only as strong as it has to be to support the air pressure. 14.5 psi * area of the tube probably = a few tons, but it's formed as a 360-degree arch shape, so all the glass is in compression. Glass is surprisingly strong in compression; any little cracks that start are forced closed instead of growing.
The nearly flat viewing area has to be very thick, since air pressure will be trying to bend the center of the screen inwards, and glass is not great at resisting bending. (Pushing in the screen stretches the outside surface around the edges and the inside surface around the center, and this will pull cracks wider.)
Also, when electrons are accelerated through several thousand volts and then stopped suddenly in the phosphors, they tend to emit x-rays. So you need a thick glass plate with lead (oxide?) dissolved in it to stop the x-rays. X-rays may also be emitted sideways, but it costs and weighs less to wrap the sides of the tube in lead foil than to use thick glass there.
Making the exposed part of the tube hard to break is just a fortunate side-effect of the mechanical requirements...
Do you mean you get any better warranty by buying a complete system with a pre-loaded OS? Not bloody likely. All you avoid is MS and the hardware makers pointing fingers at each other -- because MS won't talk to you at all!
By the way, I've installed a couple of starters and one fuel pump while laying on my back in parking lots or beside the road. I long ago lost track of how many starters I've changed in the driveway... But when the car is new and under warranty, it had better work right.
You can't count on that with computers, and that's what I'm complaining about. Software crashes cost nothing to the vendor, and you've got to be NASA or something to get even moderate reliability in your software; hardware crashes the vendor replacement parts, and it's usually reasonably reliable even in the bargain brands, but you still get top-rated brands mass-producing lemons now and then. (If you can forgive another analogy -- Chevy could produce the Vega and survive, Cadillac never would.)
OK, the broken steering linkage is a rather extreme example of "incidental and consequential" damages. However, I think that cases like that -- and finding such limitations in the warranties issued by _all_ competing manufacturers -- was the inspiration for the UCC (adopted by most state legislatures) to provide that incidental and consequential damages cannot be excluded from warranty on consumer products. And it doesn't distinguish serious and trivial cases. E.g., your starter motor in a new car fails due to a defect in it's manufacture, resulting in tow charges, loss of a few hours of your time, and labor putting in a new solenoid. GM cannot just send you a new starter and leave the rest up to you. They will probably pay for the tow and certainly pay for the labor. If they can't get the car back on the road promptly, they should also provide transportation until it is fixed.
As I understand the laws, you could also sue for the time you lost -- but since you'd spend days in court and pay your lawyer in five or six figures, it's hardly worthwhile.
If the car was bought for and used in business, then the mfg is allowed to exclude incidental and consequential damages -- corporate buyers should be able to read and understand that limited warranty, and negotiate a better one if needed, or find another mfg willing to stand behind it's products before buying a fleet of cars. Nor can any manufacturer afford to cover alleged consequential damages such as "My car broke down, I missed my sales appointment and lost a $100M contract." So a reasonable warranty for business use is generally somewhere in between "parts only" and full coverage. But consumers hardly ever have the ability to negotiate over the warranty, so the law provides a minimum warranty for them. And this causes most mfgs to maintain a certain minimum quality level so they aren't flooded in lawsuits -- which also benefits businesses that need to buy a reliable car without paying cadillac prices, for instance.
Yes, it would be better if everyone could negotiate a price & warranty to best suit their particular needs. E.g., gamers can get lowest price and "parts only" warranties, corporations buy high-quality servers with warranties that pay $10,000/hour for downtime (and OS and hardware such that they aren't likely to have _any_ downtime), and people that use a single computer for serious business get appropriate in-between price, quality, and warranty. So go right ahead, call up Bill Gates and tell him that because you use your home computer for financial records and work, you are willing to pay three times as much for an OS more stable than Windows and a guarantee of $100/hour for any downtime... 8-)
You'd be right to bring a class-action suit, except that IBM is fulfilling their warranty in a speedy fashion.
Replacing the failed drive is nothing like meeting a full warranty. Your system is down (if single-drive) or crippled (if multiple-drive) for days while waiting for the new drive. Then you've got to spend hours installing it, formatting it, and reloading from backup. (No backup? THAT is your own fault.) Is IBM re-imbursing people for the down time and labor?
The electronics & software industries have gotten used to quality levels and warranties far more limited than would be acceptable anywhere else. This is of dubious legality, it holds back the progress of the industry (imagine if half of the people now employed in tech support were free to develop new uses for the computers, instead of running around restoring them after crashes), and it deters businesses and people from investing more into hardware and software.
Imagine if the steering linkage broke on a new car while going down the freeway at 70mph, and the manufacturer would only send out a new steering linkage? (1) Would you buy a car from that company after hearing about this? (2) Under the laws in most states, the courts would toss out that "limited warranty" and allow the victims' estates to sue for wrongful death, the value of the car, etc. This might have been unreasonable in 1910, when few engineers could design a car that would make it out of the driveway on it's own power, let alone hold together through a long high-speed trip. But two decades later, you could drive a good car across the USA without stopping for repairs... The computer and software industries have had more than 50 years to learn how to make reliable products. Why don't they?
The one real point here is that by obsessively building ever larger central nodes in star configurations, instead of making many smaller central offices linked in a mesh, they greatly increase the area knocked out by a single disaster. If you lose the central office your house is connected to, of course you lose phone service. You also lose ISDN or ASDL internet, because that's the same darn bundle of wires. Possibly the nearest cell tower is on top of that CO, so it goes down too. This is pretty much unavoidable, short of doubling the cost of everything.
But there is no reason that taking out one building should take out service over 500 densely populated square miles. They could have stuffed an automated CO into a closet every six blocks in NYC. Instead, they ran all the wires for miles to get to one building which was filled with multiple copies of the same automated switch. It probably cost more (because of all the extra length of copper) than a distributed network, but being monopolies local phone companies just pass those costs on to their customers, so why go to the trouble of changing your business structure every century?
If all the mergers and acquisitions of telephone companies by each other was supposed to benefit the consumer, why is phone service more expensive than ever?
Long distance service is much, much cheaper than before de-regulation. In the 1970's, it cost nearly $1/minute, so the cost has gone down nearly 10 times even though the $ is worth much less than it was. This reflects both cut-throat competition and technological advances (fiber instead of copper).
Local service has gone up, perhaps with inflation, perhaps more than that. No competition, and no real technological advances since digital switching went in about 30 years ago. Hook-up charges are even more outrageous; in most cases, the house is already wired and all they have to do is tell the computer to turn the line on, but they'll charge a $70 "service call".
Understand the difference between a competitive market and a regulated monopoly yet?
The risk that caused the shutdown of airports wasn't to travellers, but to people in large buildings on the ground... I don't have statistics right handy, but I suspect that even on 9/11 there were more people killed on the roads than the few hundred killed _in_ airplanes. (Lots more were killed _by_ airplanes, but that's a risk you take by being on the ground, not by flying.) Grounding the planes until they could be sure no more would be flying into the great big obvious targets America has provided was rational; driving instead of riding after they went back into service is NOT. (OK, there are many cases where all that extra security means you can get there faster by ground -- but it's still riskier by far.)
Not to mention that the airplanes could be a lot safer if the gov't and media hadn't spent decades training Americans not to resist criminals, even when their little bitty knives barely qualify as weapons. If the passengers had just rushed the hijackers right at the start, chances are the only ones dead would have been the hijackers...
First, the Dept of Agriculture has done a very good job of eliminating the sources of anthrax (infected farm animals). So it's very unusual for Americans to be exposed to anthrax in the first place, unless they work with sick sheep or in a lab studying it. Many of those positive tests are going to turn out to be erroneous, but there is real reason for concern whenever someone who has never done agricultural work really has anthrax antibodies.
There is only one species of anthrax bacterium. In humans, it takes three forms of anthrax depending on where it enters the body. Pulmonary (lungs) is the least likely form to occur (you have to breathe thousands of spores right down into the lungs), but 99% fatal (to the non-vaccinated), unless you know you've been exposed and get injections of all the antibiotics you can stand _before_ symptoms appear. Cutaneous (skin) is slow-acting so there is time for antibiotics and vaccinations to work -- and usually wouldn't kill you anyhow. Intestinal (from eating infected meat) is also treatable with antibiotics, and doesn't seem to be a practical route for weapons use anyhow. (Unless your target is people so hungry they'll eat an obviously sick sheep...)
The letter senders no doubt intended that the powder be breathed into the lungs so it killed, but making powder that fine and stabilizing it so it doesn't clump in transit is difficult. Apparently the first letter was only partially successful (got one person, and didn't get past the nose in others), and the other letters were even less successful. Since the one pulmonary case was in Florida and the origin of the letters is thought to be Florida, it probably is a case of the powder clumping up with time so it probably wouldn't even become airborne in NYC. Someone who was handling that letter had a break in the skin, and the anthrax got in there.
The idea that one should increase one's risk of dying for the benefit of airline industry or the economy in general is surely one of the least helpful suggestion
You _really_ missed the point. What increases your chance of dying is when you go into a panic about a few hijackings or plane crashes and drive instead.
Anthrax is one of the easiest biological weapons to produce. There are plenty of purified samples out there -- and in 3rd world countries, you can still find infected sheep herds. Then, it's a bacterium, so it's not too hard to grow it in a culture. This poses a high risk of infecting yourself, but there are vaccines. If the vaccine isn't perfect, you are still much safer working in an anthrax lab than driving around with a truckload of explosives or trying to hijack an airplane...
It gets a little harder once you have grown tubs full of anthrax culture. You've got to get the bacteria to form spores, isolate the spores, form them into a very fine powder (so it will go into the lungs rather than getting filtered out by the nose), and stabilize the powder so it doesn't clump up before it is released. Apparently the terrorists didn't get one of the last two steps right -- I think 4 letters, just 1 where the powder became airborne at all, and only 1 lung infection. (Lung infections are fatal unless you start massive antibiotic injections _before_ symptoms appear; other infections are generally treatable.) But this is only their first try.
Finally, you've got to deliver the stuff. Letters loaded with white, soapy powder aren't going to work anymore. From here on, a half hour after opening anything suspicious, people are going to be in the hospital getting tests and shots. But how about dressing up like a furnace repairman, filling a toolbox with powdered spores, and dumping it into the air ducting?
they didn't test it for two weeks, well, my question is why would two weeks matter? Why would Anthrax have completely disappeared in that small amount of time? Anthrax spores are still potent after two _decades_, but that isn't the point. By delaying, the FBI risked the lives of everyone in that office.
If the terrorists had been competent at preparing the spores (making a fine enough powder to get into the lungs, instead of just infecting the skin), prompt testing would have been a matter of life and death. Inhaled anthrax can be treated -- if you get massive shots of antibiotics soon after being exposed. If you wait until you get sick, it's too late: death rates are at least 99%. Given the Florida incident, any suspicious letter should be immediately tested for anthrax, and if positive then anyone who might have breathed in a bit of the powder should start maximum-strength antibiotic injections immediately.
Of course, if your agency's primary goal is to grab headlines rather than protect the citizens, then you can wait until you've got a room full of corpses. It doesn't affect the forensic evidence, and the headlines are bigger. But that doesn't describe any agency of our gov't, does it?;-)
There is one way in which RAM can be cheaper. A small hard drive costs almost as much to make as a big one (you still need the spindle motor & controller, the head movement coil & controller, the case, and the IDE or SCSI interface). So you are probably never going to see hard drives retailing for under $100 except when someone's unloading obsolete drives at a loss. But you can certainly buy less than $100 worth of RAM, and if you don't use bloatware you can now do quite a lot in it.
The other issue is that RAM tends to be volatile, and you've got to have some sort of non-volatile storage. In solid-state, the choices are battery-backed SRAM (several times as expensive as *DRAM, plus the battery), Flash (about the same as SRAM, with slow and tricky write algorithms), or EEPROM (much more expensive unless you only need a few bytes). There are several other technologies in development, but not entirely ready yet. So, if you want to replace your HD with RAM right now, you either pay a lot more than you'd expect from PC memory prices, or you still have some sort of spinning-platter drive. How about a CD-R/W to boot up and load the RAM disk?
[Wondering if] they were affraid others might get their torpedo technology. It's not likely that any secret torpedo technology survived what seems to have accidental torpedo detonations in the bow torpedo room. (Are the Russians still implying it might have been something else, like a torpedo fired _at_ the Kursk that just happened to hit it in the torpedo tubes? Anyhow, it looks pretty clear that the first bang set off at least one warhead, and those contain over a ton of high explosive.) Take a big heavy steel tube with the ends closed, put several one-ton+ bombs _inside_ one end, set off one of them, and what do you think is going to be left of the equipment attached to those bombs?
Anyway, that part of the ship was cut off and left on the ocean bottom. But if the Russians are really paranoid, lifting the rest of the sub (especially the reactor) makes it safe to stack up more high explosive to smash anything that's left and spread the fragments around -- like blasting a jigsaw puzzle over several square miles...
doesn't it sound like "coincidence" that since war is grooming? This has been many months in the planning and preparation, since long before Sept 11. Even if the dutchmen had the right equipment and team sitting around ready to go, it would take more than a month to get it into position, do the undersea cutting, and hook up the cables. And before then they had to do months of work to customize their "Giant 4" pontoon by cutting a hole in the middle to take the conning tower. So the Russians had to have made a down payment (at least) several months ago -- assuming that the dutchment did six months or so of planning merely in hopes of getting a contract...
That's the explanation. There are no previous patents for wheels.
You would think they would give some thought to non-patented prior art too. Next thing you know, they'll let someone patent communications satellites... 8-)
To heck with patenting the wheel...
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IgNobel Awards
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· Score: 3, Funny
I'll patent fire!
Claim 1: A process for the production of heat by the chemical combination of oxygen with solid, liquid, or gaseous substances.
Claim 2: The reduction in volume or weight of waste material by chemical combination with oxygen.
That's right. The key points don't concern cyberspace, but rather that the zoning ordinance used was not really applicable to this sort of operation. The ordinance specifically and only prohibited sexual entertainment in certain zones. The "entertainment" wasn't occurring there, but wherever the video is downloaded. The ostensible reason for the ordinance was that strip joints and adult bookstores attract undesirable traffic -- and if the security at Voyeur Dorm is good, there aren't going to be any such problems, nor did the city present any evidence that there were problems. And if there is some other motivation for the ordinance that the zoning commission did not want to publicly admit to, that isn't something the court needs to take into account...
If the ordinance forbade all businesses, then it would stand up. Of course, that also means no home offices...
Trademarks are only infringed when there is the potential for 'consumer confusion', and trust me that Mr. Serious is the only one confused about this.
Actor's get jobs because people recognize their name. I don't know about Australia, but in the USA, the actor's guild ensures that stage names are unique. That is, if your real name is Paul Newman and you become a professional actor, you've got to adopt a different stage name. So an actor's name is his trademark. And I don't think it is necessary to register it.
You are right that legally trademarks are only infringed when there is potential for confusion. Java the computer compiler and The Java Shop restaurant would not be infringing... but if some posterior orifice at Sun decided to sue, the restauranter might well be driven into bankruptcy by legal fees. Even though his business was named that back when "Sun" meant a big ball of fire in the sky.
So I can well understand why Mr. Serious wants to make sure it's understood from the start that he was there first.
No matter what type of fuel you put in your aircraft, it needs to have a certain (very large) amount of chemical energy. When it burns, it will release all of that energy. True. But it does make a difference whether that energy is released over a couple of hours from a big puddle of oil burning in one area, or in a few minutes from a gas cloud rising in a big fireball. If 767 went splat on a runway, the fireball might be worse -- most of the heat would go up, but that radiated downward might cook the passengers immediately, while with kerosene there's a chance to get away before it gets too hot. In the WTC, I think the liquid H2 would be boiling off so fast it wouldn't let much air come in, unless open doors on the stairwells and elevator shafts allowed it to suck air from below. (This is NOT supposed to happen in a skyscraper fire.) So you'd get hydrogen gas pouring out the windows and burning outside, which would be bad for the people in the floors above, but would not have melted the central pillars and allowed a collapse.
Or else it would have melted the outer wall supports on one side and let the top part of the building tip over and wreck half of Manhattan instead of hammering the towers straight down into the basement...
Light a large quantity of kerosene or even heavy fuel oil, and it "goes poof" better than gasoline. Ask any military demolitions man or firefighter. It's not real easy to light, but crashing an airliner provides more than enough ignition.
Of course, what brought down the WTC wasn't the bang but the continuing fire. Jet fuel stayed mostly on the floors that were originally hit and kept on burning as air came in through the blown-out windows, until after an hour or so the heat soaked through the concrete cladding and softened the steel posts. I think even liquid hydrogen would have evaporated too fast to do this. It would have made quite a flash and wiped out a few floors, then had to vent out of the building to find more air, and soon been all gone.
As to why H2 isn't used for jets: It's a bitch to store and transport. You need fuel tanks several times as large, even for liquid H2. And finally, in the system we have now H2 would be derived from fossil fuels, with enough energy lost there to make the overall cycle less efficient than directly burning the fossil fuel. You'd use more oil, not less (unless you based the cycle on coal), and put more CO2 into the air...
Umm, no. Their reflective paint may have included powdered aluminum, which is hard to ignite but pretty high in energy content once lit. Of course, the linseed oil in plain old-fashioned paint will burn too. But any kind of paint is a very thin layer, so very low energy concentration. Spread the "rocket-fuel" paint on a fireproof surface, light it, and at worst you get a flareup that forces nearby people to take cover for a few seconds, then dies out as all the fuel is burned.
Put it on canvas (probably what filled in the gaps between the aluminum struts), and you also get a cloth fire -- longer-lasting but not too dangerous in itself. But in the Hindenburg, the burning cloth let all the hydrogen out, and even though most of the hydrogen would have risen before it mixed with enough air to burn, the few percent of the heat that did radiate downward would have eventually been enough to ignite everything in the gondola -- wood paneling, diesel fuel, clothing, fat passengers...
If the Hindenburg had been filled with helium, the skin would have burned off, the gas would have left, and the gondola would have come down rather hard -- but unless this ignited the diesel fuel, there wouldn't have been much chance of burning to death.
It looks like this patent was finalized in Aug 2000, and this company has been trying to negotiate with TiVo since then. But the patent was issued in 1995. THEN the owner somehow got to re-write it to cover more possible implementations. That's one more reason to be suspicious of this patent.
Other reasons: It claims to cover functionality (pause button), not just an implementation of that functionality. AFAIK, no holder of the patent has ever marketed a system implementing the patent. Put those facts together, this seems like a non-inventor thinking up something that would be nice to have but he can't design, trying to get priority over the real inventors when they do design such a system.
Slashdot Mirror
It's not the patents that will keep the price sky high. Follow the links down to the actual scientific publications and think about what it takes to make such a material...
If the case is a thick piece of aluminum, it does make a pretty good heatsink, except that there is a terrible mechanical issue involved in clamping hot electronic parts to the case for good thermal transfer while still keeping them seated in the socket. I once worked on a plotter where the case lid was the heatsink for the motor drive transistors -- worked on it again and again, because the @#$%^& transistors kept pulling out of their sockets. You really don't want to go through this experience with a 400-pin device...
The thermoelectric device won't help with this issue. It is just this little disk that gets colder on one side and hotter on the other as you put electricity into it. What it does help with is if heat conduction, which is proportional to temperature difference times area, is insufficient to keep the IC temperature within working limits. That is, the interior of the IC is hotter than the outside, which is hotter than the heatsink, which has to be hotter than the air, and all those temperature differences can add up to a cooked CPU. The Peltier refrigerator changes this relationship by maybe 30 degrees. But you still need the heatsink to be clamped very solidly to the IC, just with the Peltier disk in-between.
What might work (if you really want that heavy metal case) is to use some sort of flexible heat pipe to connect the CPU and other hot spots to the case. Some laptops sort of do this with a flat plastic bag containing heat-conductive liquid or gel -- they lay it on top of the motherboard, then clamp the case over it, and it spreads the heat from the CPU, etc., out to that whole side of the case.
For higher heat-carrying capacity, you use a tube containing a substance that evaporates at the hot end and condenses at the cold end, with wick material to move the liquid back to the hot end. This sort of heat pump is usually metallic, but some corrugations in the middle would let it bend a few tenths of an inch. So you can attach the narrow hot end of this thing to the CPU, put the lid on the case, then run screws through it into nuts built into the wide cold end of the heat pipe and tighten it down, and that little bit of bend will allow it to tighten down flat to the underside of the lid without pulling the CPU out of the board...
It's not the temperature difference alone that determines the power, but the temperature difference times the heat flow. And I know of no theoretical limits to heat flow, although there are lots of practical problems...
Nature has the full scientific article. I don't understand most of it, but it does say "Thin-film thermoelements lead to large cooling power densities (PD)... We estimate a value of PD of 700 W cm-2 at 353 K and 585 W cm-2 at 298 K at the measured maximum cooling in superlattice devices compared to a value of 1.9 W cm-2 in the bulk device of Fig. 4a". That is, 700 watts/cm2 cooling at 70C (the max temperature for industrial-spec semiconductors), 585 at 25C (room temperature), and it's about 350 times as fast at pumping heat as the comparison thermoelectric material.
To actually use that cooling ability, you've got to somehow couple 700W/cm2 heat into one side and remove rather more heat from the other side. (Or to generate 700W power, you've got to couple more than 700W to one side and remove the waste heat from the other.) A TO-220 power transistor has an approximately 1 cm2 metal plate on the back to contact the heatsink; take a really big heatsink and really good thermal paste and really torque down the screw clamping them together, and it will handle almost 20W. 700W would fry the transistor core instantly, before the backplate even got warm. The coupling between a GHz Pentium and heatsink/Peltier refrig/fan must be better than this, but not THAT much better. Lots of luck!
By the way, anyone notice that the reporter doesn't know the difference between "efficiency" and "effectiveness".
These anecdotes demonstrate something about the tube construction. You can't easily break the CRT from the front -- even dropping another extra-heavy monitor on it won't crack it -- but a brick dropping a few inches onto the neck will implode the tube.
The curved rear glass is only as strong as it has to be to support the air pressure. 14.5 psi * area of the tube probably = a few tons, but it's formed as a 360-degree arch shape, so all the glass is in compression. Glass is surprisingly strong in compression; any little cracks that start are forced closed instead of growing.
The nearly flat viewing area has to be very thick, since air pressure will be trying to bend the center of the screen inwards, and glass is not great at resisting bending. (Pushing in the screen stretches the outside surface around the edges and the inside surface around the center, and this will pull cracks wider.)
Also, when electrons are accelerated through several thousand volts and then stopped suddenly in the phosphors, they tend to emit x-rays. So you need a thick glass plate with lead (oxide?) dissolved in it to stop the x-rays. X-rays may also be emitted sideways, but it costs and weighs less to wrap the sides of the tube in lead foil than to use thick glass there.
Making the exposed part of the tube hard to break is just a fortunate side-effect of the mechanical requirements...
Do you mean you get any better warranty by buying a complete system with a pre-loaded OS? Not bloody likely. All you avoid is MS and the hardware makers pointing fingers at each other -- because MS won't talk to you at all!
By the way, I've installed a couple of starters and one fuel pump while laying on my back in parking lots or beside the road. I long ago lost track of how many starters I've changed in the driveway... But when the car is new and under warranty, it had better work right.
You can't count on that with computers, and that's what I'm complaining about. Software crashes cost nothing to the vendor, and you've got to be NASA or something to get even moderate reliability in your software; hardware crashes the vendor replacement parts, and it's usually reasonably reliable even in the bargain brands, but you still get top-rated brands mass-producing lemons now and then. (If you can forgive another analogy -- Chevy could produce the Vega and survive, Cadillac never would.)
OK, the broken steering linkage is a rather extreme example of "incidental and consequential" damages. However, I think that cases like that -- and finding such limitations in the warranties issued by _all_ competing manufacturers -- was the inspiration for the UCC (adopted by most state legislatures) to provide that incidental and consequential damages cannot be excluded from warranty on consumer products. And it doesn't distinguish serious and trivial cases. E.g., your starter motor in a new car fails due to a defect in it's manufacture, resulting in tow charges, loss of a few hours of your time, and labor putting in a new solenoid. GM cannot just send you a new starter and leave the rest up to you. They will probably pay for the tow and certainly pay for the labor. If they can't get the car back on the road promptly, they should also provide transportation until it is fixed.
As I understand the laws, you could also sue for the time you lost -- but since you'd spend days in court and pay your lawyer in five or six figures, it's hardly worthwhile.
If the car was bought for and used in business, then the mfg is allowed to exclude incidental and consequential damages -- corporate buyers should be able to read and understand that limited warranty, and negotiate a better one if needed, or find another mfg willing to stand behind it's products before buying a fleet of cars. Nor can any manufacturer afford to cover alleged consequential damages such as "My car broke down, I missed my sales appointment and lost a $100M contract." So a reasonable warranty for business use is generally somewhere in between "parts only" and full coverage. But consumers hardly ever have the ability to negotiate over the warranty, so the law provides a minimum warranty for them. And this causes most mfgs to maintain a certain minimum quality level so they aren't flooded in lawsuits -- which also benefits businesses that need to buy a reliable car without paying cadillac prices, for instance.
Yes, it would be better if everyone could negotiate a price & warranty to best suit their particular needs. E.g., gamers can get lowest price and "parts only" warranties, corporations buy high-quality servers with warranties that pay $10,000/hour for downtime (and OS and hardware such that they aren't likely to have _any_ downtime), and people that use a single computer for serious business get appropriate in-between price, quality, and warranty. So go right ahead, call up Bill Gates and tell him that because you use your home computer for financial records and work, you are willing to pay three times as much for an OS more stable than Windows and a guarantee of $100/hour for any downtime... 8-)
You'd be right to bring a class-action suit, except that IBM is fulfilling their warranty in a speedy fashion.
Replacing the failed drive is nothing like meeting a full warranty. Your system is down (if single-drive) or crippled (if multiple-drive) for days while waiting for the new drive. Then you've got to spend hours installing it, formatting it, and reloading from backup. (No backup? THAT is your own fault.) Is IBM re-imbursing people for the down time and labor?
The electronics & software industries have gotten used to quality levels and warranties far more limited than would be acceptable anywhere else. This is of dubious legality, it holds back the progress of the industry (imagine if half of the people now employed in tech support were free to develop new uses for the computers, instead of running around restoring them after crashes), and it deters businesses and people from investing more into hardware and software.
Imagine if the steering linkage broke on a new car while going down the freeway at 70mph, and the manufacturer would only send out a new steering linkage? (1) Would you buy a car from that company after hearing about this? (2) Under the laws in most states, the courts would toss out that "limited warranty" and allow the victims' estates to sue for wrongful death, the value of the car, etc. This might have been unreasonable in 1910, when few engineers could design a car that would make it out of the driveway on it's own power, let alone hold together through a long high-speed trip. But two decades later, you could drive a good car across the USA without stopping for repairs... The computer and software industries have had more than 50 years to learn how to make reliable products. Why don't they?
The one real point here is that by obsessively building ever larger central nodes in star configurations, instead of making many smaller central offices linked in a mesh, they greatly increase the area knocked out by a single disaster. If you lose the central office your house is connected to, of course you lose phone service. You also lose ISDN or ASDL internet, because that's the same darn bundle of wires. Possibly the nearest cell tower is on top of that CO, so it goes down too. This is pretty much unavoidable, short of doubling the cost of everything.
But there is no reason that taking out one building should take out service over 500 densely populated square miles. They could have stuffed an automated CO into a closet every six blocks in NYC. Instead, they ran all the wires for miles to get to one building which was filled with multiple copies of the same automated switch. It probably cost more (because of all the extra length of copper) than a distributed network, but being monopolies local phone companies just pass those costs on to their customers, so why go to the trouble of changing your business structure every century?
If all the mergers and acquisitions of telephone companies by each other was supposed to benefit the consumer, why is phone service more expensive than ever?
Long distance service is much, much cheaper than before de-regulation. In the 1970's, it cost nearly $1/minute, so the cost has gone down nearly 10 times even though the $ is worth much less than it was. This reflects both cut-throat competition and technological advances (fiber instead of copper).
Local service has gone up, perhaps with inflation, perhaps more than that. No competition, and no real technological advances since digital switching went in about 30 years ago. Hook-up charges are even more outrageous; in most cases, the house is already wired and all they have to do is tell the computer to turn the line on, but they'll charge a $70 "service call".
Understand the difference between a competitive market and a regulated monopoly yet?
The risk that caused the shutdown of airports wasn't to travellers, but to people in large buildings on the ground... I don't have statistics right handy, but I suspect that even on 9/11 there were more people killed on the roads than the few hundred killed _in_ airplanes. (Lots more were killed _by_ airplanes, but that's a risk you take by being on the ground, not by flying.) Grounding the planes until they could be sure no more would be flying into the great big obvious targets America has provided was rational; driving instead of riding after they went back into service is NOT. (OK, there are many cases where all that extra security means you can get there faster by ground -- but it's still riskier by far.)
Not to mention that the airplanes could be a lot safer if the gov't and media hadn't spent decades training Americans not to resist criminals, even when their little bitty knives barely qualify as weapons. If the passengers had just rushed the hijackers right at the start, chances are the only ones dead would have been the hijackers...
First, the Dept of Agriculture has done a very good job of eliminating the sources of anthrax (infected farm animals). So it's very unusual for Americans to be exposed to anthrax in the first place, unless they work with sick sheep or in a lab studying it. Many of those positive tests are going to turn out to be erroneous, but there is real reason for concern whenever someone who has never done agricultural work really has anthrax antibodies.
There is only one species of anthrax bacterium. In humans, it takes three forms of anthrax depending on where it enters the body. Pulmonary (lungs) is the least likely form to occur (you have to breathe thousands of spores right down into the lungs), but 99% fatal (to the non-vaccinated), unless you know you've been exposed and get injections of all the antibiotics you can stand _before_ symptoms appear. Cutaneous (skin) is slow-acting so there is time for antibiotics and vaccinations to work -- and usually wouldn't kill you anyhow. Intestinal (from eating infected meat) is also treatable with antibiotics, and doesn't seem to be a practical route for weapons use anyhow. (Unless your target is people so hungry they'll eat an obviously sick sheep...)
The letter senders no doubt intended that the powder be breathed into the lungs so it killed, but making powder that fine and stabilizing it so it doesn't clump in transit is difficult. Apparently the first letter was only partially successful (got one person, and didn't get past the nose in others), and the other letters were even less successful. Since the one pulmonary case was in Florida and the origin of the letters is thought to be Florida, it probably is a case of the powder clumping up with time so it probably wouldn't even become airborne in NYC. Someone who was handling that letter had a break in the skin, and the anthrax got in there.
The idea that one should increase one's risk of dying for the benefit of airline industry or the economy in general is surely one of the least helpful suggestion
You _really_ missed the point. What increases your chance of dying is when you go into a panic about a few hijackings or plane crashes and drive instead.
Anthrax is one of the easiest biological weapons to produce. There are plenty of purified samples out there -- and in 3rd world countries, you can still find infected sheep herds. Then, it's a bacterium, so it's not too hard to grow it in a culture. This poses a high risk of infecting yourself, but there are vaccines. If the vaccine isn't perfect, you are still much safer working in an anthrax lab than driving around with a truckload of explosives or trying to hijack an airplane...
It gets a little harder once you have grown tubs full of anthrax culture. You've got to get the bacteria to form spores, isolate the spores, form them into a very fine powder (so it will go into the lungs rather than getting filtered out by the nose), and stabilize the powder so it doesn't clump up before it is released. Apparently the terrorists didn't get one of the last two steps right -- I think 4 letters, just 1 where the powder became airborne at all, and only 1 lung infection. (Lung infections are fatal unless you start massive antibiotic injections _before_ symptoms appear; other infections are generally treatable.) But this is only their first try.
Finally, you've got to deliver the stuff. Letters loaded with white, soapy powder aren't going to work anymore. From here on, a half hour after opening anything suspicious, people are going to be in the hospital getting tests and shots. But how about dressing up like a furnace repairman, filling a toolbox with powdered spores, and dumping it into the air ducting?
they didn't test it for two weeks, well, my question is why would two weeks matter? Why would Anthrax have completely disappeared in that small amount of time? Anthrax spores are still potent after two _decades_, but that isn't the point. By delaying, the FBI risked the lives of everyone in that office.
;-)
If the terrorists had been competent at preparing the spores (making a fine enough powder to get into the lungs, instead of just infecting the skin), prompt testing would have been a matter of life and death. Inhaled anthrax can be treated -- if you get massive shots of antibiotics soon after being exposed. If you wait until you get sick, it's too late: death rates are at least 99%. Given the Florida incident, any suspicious letter should be immediately tested for anthrax, and if positive then anyone who might have breathed in a bit of the powder should start maximum-strength antibiotic injections immediately.
Of course, if your agency's primary goal is to grab headlines rather than protect the citizens, then you can wait until you've got a room full of corpses. It doesn't affect the forensic evidence, and the headlines are bigger. But that doesn't describe any agency of our gov't, does it?
Yeah, I wonder if Cliff mixed up the M's and G's.
There is one way in which RAM can be cheaper. A small hard drive costs almost as much to make as a big one (you still need the spindle motor & controller, the head movement coil & controller, the case, and the IDE or SCSI interface). So you are probably never going to see hard drives retailing for under $100 except when someone's unloading obsolete drives at a loss. But you can certainly buy less than $100 worth of RAM, and if you don't use bloatware you can now do quite a lot in it.
The other issue is that RAM tends to be volatile, and you've got to have some sort of non-volatile storage. In solid-state, the choices are battery-backed SRAM (several times as expensive as *DRAM, plus the battery), Flash (about the same as SRAM, with slow and tricky write algorithms), or EEPROM (much more expensive unless you only need a few bytes). There are several other technologies in development, but not entirely ready yet. So, if you want to replace your HD with RAM right now, you either pay a lot more than you'd expect from PC memory prices, or you still have some sort of spinning-platter drive. How about a CD-R/W to boot up and load the RAM disk?
[Wondering if] they were affraid others might get their torpedo technology. It's not likely that any secret torpedo technology survived what seems to have accidental torpedo detonations in the bow torpedo room. (Are the Russians still implying it might have been something else, like a torpedo fired _at_ the Kursk that just happened to hit it in the torpedo tubes? Anyhow, it looks pretty clear that the first bang set off at least one warhead, and those contain over a ton of high explosive.) Take a big heavy steel tube with the ends closed, put several one-ton+ bombs _inside_ one end, set off one of them, and what do you think is going to be left of the equipment attached to those bombs?
Anyway, that part of the ship was cut off and left on the ocean bottom. But if the Russians are really paranoid, lifting the rest of the sub (especially the reactor) makes it safe to stack up more high explosive to smash anything that's left and spread the fragments around -- like blasting a jigsaw puzzle over several square miles...
doesn't it sound like "coincidence" that since war is grooming? This has been many months in the planning and preparation, since long before Sept 11. Even if the dutchmen had the right equipment and team sitting around ready to go, it would take more than a month to get it into position, do the undersea cutting, and hook up the cables. And before then they had to do months of work to customize their "Giant 4" pontoon by cutting a hole in the middle to take the conning tower. So the Russians had to have made a down payment (at least) several months ago -- assuming that the dutchment did six months or so of planning merely in hopes of getting a contract...
That's the explanation. There are no previous patents for wheels.
You would think they would give some thought to non-patented prior art too. Next thing you know, they'll let someone patent communications satellites... 8-)
I'll patent fire!
Claim 1: A process for the production of heat by the chemical combination of oxygen with solid, liquid, or gaseous substances.
Claim 2: The reduction in volume or weight of waste material by chemical combination with oxygen.
That's right. The key points don't concern cyberspace, but rather that the zoning ordinance used was not really applicable to this sort of operation. The ordinance specifically and only prohibited sexual entertainment in certain zones. The "entertainment" wasn't occurring there, but wherever the video is downloaded. The ostensible reason for the ordinance was that strip joints and adult bookstores attract undesirable traffic -- and if the security at Voyeur Dorm is good, there aren't going to be any such problems, nor did the city present any evidence that there were problems. And if there is some other motivation for the ordinance that the zoning commission did not want to publicly admit to, that isn't something the court needs to take into account...
If the ordinance forbade all businesses, then it would stand up. Of course, that also means no home offices...
Trademarks are only infringed when there is the potential for 'consumer confusion', and trust me that Mr. Serious is the only one confused about this.
... but if some posterior orifice at Sun decided to sue, the restauranter might well be driven into bankruptcy by legal fees. Even though his business was named that back when "Sun" meant a big ball of fire in the sky.
Actor's get jobs because people recognize their name. I don't know about Australia, but in the USA, the actor's guild ensures that stage names are unique. That is, if your real name is Paul Newman and you become a professional actor, you've got to adopt a different stage name. So an actor's name is his trademark. And I don't think it is necessary to register it.
You are right that legally trademarks are only infringed when there is potential for confusion. Java the computer compiler and The Java Shop restaurant would not be infringing
So I can well understand why Mr. Serious wants to make sure it's understood from the start that he was there first.
Aerocapture has never been attempted before? On Mars, correct. But every space capsule that ever returned to Earth used aerocapture.
No matter what type of fuel you put in your aircraft, it needs to have a certain (very large) amount of chemical energy. When it burns, it will release all of that energy. True. But it does make a difference whether that energy is released over a couple of hours from a big puddle of oil burning in one area, or in a few minutes from a gas cloud rising in a big fireball. If 767 went splat on a runway, the fireball might be worse -- most of the heat would go up, but that radiated downward might cook the passengers immediately, while with kerosene there's a chance to get away before it gets too hot. In the WTC, I think the liquid H2 would be boiling off so fast it wouldn't let much air come in, unless open doors on the stairwells and elevator shafts allowed it to suck air from below. (This is NOT supposed to happen in a skyscraper fire.) So you'd get hydrogen gas pouring out the windows and burning outside, which would be bad for the people in the floors above, but would not have melted the central pillars and allowed a collapse.
Or else it would have melted the outer wall supports on one side and let the top part of the building tip over and wreck half of Manhattan instead of hammering the towers straight down into the basement...
Light a large quantity of kerosene or even heavy fuel oil, and it "goes poof" better than gasoline. Ask any military demolitions man or firefighter. It's not real easy to light, but crashing an airliner provides more than enough ignition.
Of course, what brought down the WTC wasn't the bang but the continuing fire. Jet fuel stayed mostly on the floors that were originally hit and kept on burning as air came in through the blown-out windows, until after an hour or so the heat soaked through the concrete cladding and softened the steel posts. I think even liquid hydrogen would have evaporated too fast to do this. It would have made quite a flash and wiped out a few floors, then had to vent out of the building to find more air, and soon been all gone.
As to why H2 isn't used for jets: It's a bitch to store and transport. You need fuel tanks several times as large, even for liquid H2. And finally, in the system we have now H2 would be derived from fossil fuels, with enough energy lost there to make the overall cycle less efficient than directly burning the fossil fuel. You'd use more oil, not less (unless you based the cycle on coal), and put more CO2 into the air...
Umm, no. Their reflective paint may have included powdered aluminum, which is hard to ignite but pretty high in energy content once lit. Of course, the linseed oil in plain old-fashioned paint will burn too. But any kind of paint is a very thin layer, so very low energy concentration. Spread the "rocket-fuel" paint on a fireproof surface, light it, and at worst you get a flareup that forces nearby people to take cover for a few seconds, then dies out as all the fuel is burned.
Put it on canvas (probably what filled in the gaps between the aluminum struts), and you also get a cloth fire -- longer-lasting but not too dangerous in itself. But in the Hindenburg, the burning cloth let all the hydrogen out, and even though most of the hydrogen would have risen before it mixed with enough air to burn, the few percent of the heat that did radiate downward would have eventually been enough to ignite everything in the gondola -- wood paneling, diesel fuel, clothing, fat passengers...
If the Hindenburg had been filled with helium, the skin would have burned off, the gas would have left, and the gondola would have come down rather hard -- but unless this ignited the diesel fuel, there wouldn't have been much chance of burning to death.
It looks like this patent was finalized in Aug 2000, and this company has been trying to negotiate with TiVo since then. But the patent was issued in 1995. THEN the owner somehow got to re-write it to cover more possible implementations. That's one more reason to be suspicious of this patent.
Other reasons: It claims to cover functionality (pause button), not just an implementation of that functionality. AFAIK, no holder of the patent has ever marketed a system implementing the patent. Put those facts together, this seems like a non-inventor thinking up something that would be nice to have but he can't design, trying to get priority over the real inventors when they do design such a system.