Solar cells don't have that big an impact on the heat balance. They are only about 10% efficient, plus whatever energy is used locally winds up as heat. If you paved over New Mexico, the solar cells would reflect a lot less light than the sand they covered, so I think you'd get a net increase in heat. Of course, as a former resident of NM, I think it would be much wiser to pave over TX and southern CA, with the d*d Texans and Californians squashed underneath. 8-) No, the way to implement solar power is to cover rooftops with solar cells. This has zero environmental impact, other than whatever pollution and mining damage comes from _producing_ the solar cells. The main issue with solar is that you can build and run a coal plant for many of years on what an equivalent amount of solar cells costs, plus the coal plant works at night. And if you don't think economics is as important as ecology, you need to go check out how much extra pollution impoverished people create...
Fusion power might have less environmental impact than solar cell production, and it doesn't cut out around supper time. I'd certainly rather have a fusion plant nearby than a giant bank of lead-acid batteries, but I think there are better ways to store a city's worth of solar power for the night...
Given that neutrons have no electrical charge, is there any way to extract the kinetic energy other than smacking them into something?
You use a small black hole (grin) to create a gravity field so strong that the neutrons orbit it until they decay into protons and electrons, with a half-life of 12 seconds. Then a magnetic field separates the protons and electrons, you collect them on electrodes, and you just have to convert a small current at millions of volts DC to something you can feed into the power grid.
In short, with foreseeable technology the answer is no. Neutrons are affected only by gravity and the "strong" and "weak" nuclear forces. We don't even have a theory for effective gravity control. The nuclear forces are extremely short range (like the diameter of nuclei), so even if we could influence them, we couldn't capture neutrons any more efficiently than we already do with shielding. (Actually shielding uses the nuclear forces: use enough of it and there is no way through without hitting a nucleus.)
In the easiest reaction to start up, D+T = He-4 + n, Most of the energy goes with the neutron and gamma rays, but the helium nucleus does recoil when the neutron is fired off. This heats the plasma somewhat; _if_ this heating exceeds the heat loss by radiation, you could expand the expended plasma through a magnetic field to separate electrons from nuclei and collect some electricity directly. But the bulk of the energy would still feed a steam cycle.
A gamma-ray "photocell" would have to work at millions of volts to be at all efficient, so it isn't going to happen in solid-state. I could conceive of a vacuum tube where the gamma rays knock electrons loose and toward a -1,000,000V cathode, but I can't see how to get a significant percentage of the gamma rays to hit the electron in just the right place... One other possibility might be to use materials that "scintillate" (emit light) when hit by gamma rays, and capture that light in photocells. But photocells are generally less than 25% efficient, and I doubt you'd get 10% efficiency overall. If you could run the scintillator and photocells at boiler temperatures, then the energy missed by those could make steam to drive a turbine, etc., so maybe you'd increase the overall efficiency from 30% to 40% -- but I think the scintillators are some sort of plastic and photocells need to stay cool to work well.
The best bet, aside from sucking it up and using the steam cycle, is an alternative fuel mix that outputs much of the energy as fast charged particles. Someone suggested D + He-3 = He-4 + p. (D = Deuterium, H-2. He = Helium. p = proton.) The proton might come flying out pretty fast (with He-4 recoiling at the same momentum but 1/4 the kinetic energy, same as with a neutron). An electron would be left behind somewhere in the plasma cloud. So you could use magnetic separation to collect the protons, or to turn plasma heated by the protons into electricity. I don't know what the yields would be (either how much of the D would react this way instead of other ways, or what percentage of the energy goes into kinetic energy of the proton and HE-4 versus gammay rays). But all energy that evades magnetic separation will still be heat for the steam boiler, so it would improve efficiency if it works at all.
We decide what is obscene from community to community. Where I live, in Oregon, we have no obscenity laws.
Now I find out why Dad moved to Oregon when he retired. 8-)
Seriously, this works for a bar or a store. It doesn't work for a web business. If some nosy parker in Memphis downloads it and reports it to the authorities, you can get indicted and tried under Tennessee law and Memphis community standards. If you want to be safe, you've got to be somewhere out of reach of interstate extradition, and probably the feds also. (I pick on Memphis because it was long the home location of a porn-obsessed postal inspector whose lifelong mission was to impose Memphis community standards on mail order literature everywhere. And under US laws he could, until the vendors learned to refuse all orders from those zip codes.)
when OS/2 was still viable IBM's commodity hardware was almost universally shipped with MSWindows.
1) Microsoft was a lot better at marketing software than IBM. IBM is fundamentally a stodgy hardware company and is not good at selling software. (There might have been an additional factor. I don't know if this was still true at the point when OS/2 got slaughtered in the marketplace, but in the past, there has evidently been interference with the PC division by the main-frame division. The mainframe guys were afraid of the competition and didn't realize that if it didn't come from their own PC's, it would come from someone else's. And the mainframe guys ran the company.) So the IBM PC hardware division could not sell enough PC's with OS/2 to survive.
2) In Judge Jackson's findings of fact last year, he cited an incident when Microsoft told IBM to back off on their OS/2 marketing, then delayed giving IBM the specs on the next version of Windows, so just before Christmas IBM was almost the only PC maker in the market without the latest version of Windows. IMHO, that would be a reason to buy IBM's, but most consumers weren't knowledgeable enough to avoid first releases. In other words, it looks suspiciously like IBM was punished for selling OS/2 too vigorously by getting their Christmas sales sabotaged. Apparently IBM has learned their lesson -- they are not pushing Linux hard enough to offend the monopoly power.
there's a reluctance to sue MS over its abuse of monopoly power, err, because it's a bad idea to offend the monopoly power...
Yep. I'm wondering if in the long run, MS is going to experience something analogous to what happened to medieval kings that went too far in looking for conspiracies to overthrow them. Eventually the nobles would get together and agree that for everyone's safety, the king _must be_ overthrown. And once it looked like the king was going down, _everyone_ was happy to pile on...
it's amazing what a "negligible amount of radiative gas" can do.
Oh my, suburbia invaded by giant mutant dandelions, what a nightmare, or extremely low-maintenance lawn, depending on your approach to yard work. 8-) Except that these were found "in an area that was untouched since the days of the accident," leading me to suspect that these are just ordinary dandelions that got left along long enough to grow really big. I have no idea how big a dandelion can grow, do you? But you get enough people out looking for something weird and they are going to find something, because there's always something weird out there. Call it the Erin Brokovich effect.
I wouldn't have wanted to save that gas in a tank and breathe it all, but the way it was vented it would have spread over a wide area and raised the background radiation level a fraction of a percent. A coal-fired plant releases more radiation in the fly-ash. Your TV set and CRT computer monitor emit more radiation. It was nothing to worry about, except that the way this happened (a stuck valve undetected for hours) suggests that either the operators were incompetent or the control console was beyond human comprehension...
there a more efficient or cost effective method to get the power out than heat+water=turbine-power?
At first glance, it looks like there sure ought to be. Tne conversion of heat to power necessarily allows some heat to just flow from the hot end to the cold end. The maximum possible efficiency is the hot temperature (in degrees Kelvin, that is referenced to absolute zero) divided by the cold temperature. In a steam plant the hot temperature is limited by how hot the pipes can get and still hold pressure, and the cold temperature is limited by wherever you are dumping it. So the theoretical best thermal efficiency is around 40%, and given the various losses which are unavoidable if you want the plant to run at a reasonable speed, overall efficiency isn't much better than 33%. That is, 1/3 of the heat is used, 2/3 is dumped.
So one theoretical way to increase efficiency is to somehow build the hot end without any solid materials to melt. I have seen theoretical designs of a magneto-hydrodynamic generator that would use the plasma itself as the working fluid (instead of steam) and magnetic fields instead of pipes and turbines. So your theoretical maximum efficiency could be extremely high (99.9...) but by the time you make it actually work you could be wasting more than a steam engine does. And, as far as I know, no one has really worked on this.
Also, you might not retain enough heat in the plasma to feed a MHD in the first place. The proposed fusion reactions I have seen tend to emit most of the energy as gamma rays and fast neutrons, and of course hot plasma is going to continually radiate it's heat away. So far the only way to collect the energy in that radiation is to absorb it in thick shielding, then you circulate water through the shielding, generate steam, etc., and probably wind up with ess than 30% efficiency like a fission plant. If you could directly capture the energy from that radiation, like by having the gamma rays knock electrons "uphill" against a strong electric field, then you could have much better efficiency. But that's even harder to make work than MHD.
These ideas are more than thirty years old, but as far as I know, no one has ever received a sufficient budget to really work on them. Someone asked if our government was really taking energy seriously. If we were really serious, we would be treating fusion power like the Manhattan Project in WWII -- trying everything that could work at the same time -- with one difference, we could make all the data public so anyone could make a contribution, rather than treating it all as deep secrets just in case there is some practical relationship between making 1/10 of an ounce of fuel fuse in a reactor and making hundreds of pounds fuse in a bomb.
Having presidents beholden to the oil business sure doesn't help, but even Carter talked about fusion power but didn't really do anything. For instance, during his administration a Russian scientist came to this country to give a lecture on their fusion power work. The FBI came in and covered up his blackboard. (Whose secrets were they protecting from whom?) Quite
A fusion reactor would contain just a few ounces of plasma. A magnetic field cannot drop instantly, instead it would gradually taper off. As the containment eases up, the plasma starts spreading out, fusion stops, and the plasma radiates away most of the heat before it's expanded out to the chamber walls. (And the chamber walls have to handle LOTS of radiated heat in operation.) Finally, even if somehow containment was lost instantly, the quantity of plasma is so small that the heat and energy content is easily manageable.
A fission reactor is much more dangerous because all the control rods stop (if they work) is the chain reaction. The chain reaction basically splits U235 nuclei up into random sized pieces, mostly highly radioactive, and most of the heat comes from the decay of those fragments. So when they drop the control rods, the fission tank continues to heat up for several hours. To prevent a melt-down, you have to keep the cooling water circulating. Of course this can be powered by the heat you are removing, but if the problem is a blockage in the cooling system... E.g., at THree Mile Island they had a cooling valve closed and didn't realize that for several hours. Secondary cooling kept the reactor well below melt-down, but it did get hot enough that pressure had to be let out, allowing a negligible amount of radiative gas to escape. Note that this was the "worst" accident in commercially-operated nuclear power anywhere in the world (Chernobyl wasn't commercially operated), and fusion would be safer.
There are two dangers in a fusion reactor. One is that one of the fuels might be tritium, a radioactive form of hydrogen, which is remarkably good at finding leaks. Due to the smaller fuel quantities required there is less overall danger of radioactive leakage than fission. It just requires good managment... The other is that fusion reactions release neutrons, which tend to turn other materials radioactive. In other words, unless you very carefully select materials not subject to this effect, and make them extremely pure, after 30 years or so the plant structure itself will be radioactive. Fission also releases neutrons...
Mysterious first chapter...
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Lord of Light
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· Score: 2
All of Zelazny's work is very good. Lord of Light is definitely the greatest. And I say that even though he started the book with a literary device that I have detested ever since first encountering it in James Joyce's most famous book: the first chapter that makes no sense until you've read the rest of the book. (Although with Joyce, it didn't necessarily make that much sense even then...) But when Zelazny wrote it, it worked well.
That said, I have one quibble with the review:
Colonists from Earth, using a mix of mental powers and high technology, have long ago subjugated the native inhabitants -- and are now making themselves into gods, ruling over their descendants within a framework set up in imitation of Hinduism and ancient India.
I interpreted things a little differently. WARNING: YET ANOTHER PLOT SPOILER COMING
The colony ship carried a very technically competent crew of mostly American or NW European extraction (the chaplain was Christian with an anglo-saxon name, Captain Jan Olvegg was maybe Dutch, and Sam Kalkin certainly seems American), and a large cargo of Hindu Indians with apparently no technical knowledge at all. (This is the one way in which the book has aged -- while India still has plenty of ignorant farmers, they've got very good engineers and coders too and I can't imagine any Indian government loading up the most ignorant of their people on a ship crewed by foreigners.) The destination world turned out not to be completely uninhabited, although a survey from space wouldn't have spotted the inhabitants (beings of pure energy and sea-dwellers), and the crew had to lead in many wars to make the world safe for humans. In the process, they forgot to educate the farmers, or even many of their own children, and the new world settled into the old pattern of peasants, princes, warriors, and Brahmans. There was one big piece of technology made available early and to all who could afford the fees: "re-incarnation" through copying your mind into a tank-grown body. (If you want to populate a world fast, immortality helps. And this particular technology fits right into the Hindu religion -- although having your next life depend on cash rather than how well you've acted doesn't fit, Christians accept much bigger discrepancies.)
The original crew meanwhile had not only kept their grip on technology, but been reincarnated so many times that their particular talents grew into god-like powers. They lived off by themselves in particularly favored real estate ("heaven" -- maybe like Boulder Colorado?), and argued about how to re-introduce the rest of the world to technology without gross disruptions. Of course, the longer they sat and argued, the larger the gap became -- but it did maintain their privileged condition.
Sam Kalkin eventually became disgusted with that and set himself up as Prince Siddhartha in some remote area. The story actually begins (chapter 2?) with Sam coming into a town for a new body after a long absence and discovering that things have changed very much -- the First (and some favored descendants) are now officially gods, the body merchants are "the Lords of Karma", and you get karma by feeding coins into "prayer machines" which are slot machines with no payout. Obviously Accelerationism lost, and Accelerationists have the choice of persuading the "gods" to let them into the club, or being reincarnated as dogs, epileptics, or whatever. So Sam insults "Brahma", has his troops overrun the Temple of Karma, gets his new body (and one for Captain Jan Olvegg also), and hauls away some critical machinery. Only after thus using violence to provide for his own present and future reincarnation does he then become the apostle of a non-violent religion. 8-)
I've read some of Campbell's fiction, never even knew about his non-fiction. Nor am I going to seek it out now. It is truly amazing how such a great editor could be such a bad writer!
Re:Exactly, Jack of Shadows is a better work
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Lord of Light
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Jack of Shadows made nowhere near the impression on me that Lord of Light did. I wonder if it's a generational thing? That is, it sounds like you grew up with D&D style games, and some access to computers, while when I was in college (the first time) D&D was just getting started and the first hobbyist computer was still in the future.
Aren't the Nine Princes in Amber also akin to Greek Gods? In some ways. They were also much like (but not entirely parallel to)the Plantagenets -- the Norman-English ruling family that repeatedly made war upon each other over several centuries, from Henry II's war with some of his sons to the Wars of the Roses in which the two main branches exterminated each other.
2. Require any lawyer sending out a threatening letter to deposit $500 into escrow, to cover the cost of hiring a lawyer to respond to it when the threats are unfounded. Taken together with the first item, this means that when a corp decides to threaten everyone who ridicules their ridiculous trademark, they have to plop down some money up front, and then either lose it or go to court and lose a lot more...
3. Someone other than a corporate hack appointing the judges to begin with. Difficult, considering that _both_ parties have been nominating nothing but corporate hacks for President since 1992...
True, no amount of pay is going to get better performance out of the people you hired. What better pay will do is help you hire and keep the best people. And in software, I rather suspect the best people do produce 10 times as much as the average.
However, in the software world, almost everyone is making more than enough to live on, and money beyond that is not that great a motivator. You do need to find other things to hold your best people, because if you just worked them hard and paid them what it was worth, they'd probably retire at 30...
[Training is] one of the first [expenses] to jettison when times start to look bad. And you are surprised? When times are bad, you can hire experienced people cheap. When times are good, either you train people in what you need, or you pay through the nose to lure them away from other good jobs.
My various formal classes in programming were all 15 to 30 years ago. Except for relational databases, the teachers all seemed to be stumbling around with little idea of how to actually teach the most important stuff, which is a way of thinking. They could throw examples at you, and then make you try to work through problems on your own until hopefully you "got it", but in general they couldn't actually teach "it." (Relational databases have a solid mathematical theory underlying them, and that seemed to help the instructor find something he could teach.) So for the most part, programming classes didn't have many advantages over getting a book and access to a computer and fumbling around on your own. Has this changed any since?
Moral of the story: treat your employees well, and they'll reward you with more than your money's worth. Over a century ago, my great-great grandfather became rich by paying coal miners more for an 8 hour day than the competition paid for 12 hours. His more competent, adequately fed and rested men got more coal out per shift -- and there were 3 shifts. Treating your workers well has always paid off, but most employers still don't learn.
You don't have to be competent to survive in business, just less incompetent than the competition.
Ultimately we need something that doesn't depend on human memory to retain "secret" information, hopefully not as drastic as implanting a chip... There are various biometric systems that (when they work) identify you by your own physical characteristics. One problem with those is that if you are identifying yourself to a server with your thumbprint (say), what keeps someone from just bypassing the fingerprint box and feeding in a recording? So a good system might be a chip on a card that (1) generates fully random passwords for you (like with a circuit that derives 1's and 0's from quantum noise), (2) remembers them, and (3) requires a live thumb on the sensor surface (top of the chip itself) every time you want it to crank out a password. But (4) you need some sort of backup system--muggers won't leave that card on you just because it won't do them any good. And this still leaves you vulnerable to someone snooping the lines while you are logging onto their target server.
A better system would be that same chip, only instead of storing fixed passwords, it conducts a conversation with the server, proving it's identity in a way that a snooper cannot replicate. E.g., the server sends out a random number. Your smartcard checks your thumb is there and has a pulse, then encrypts the random number with a 4096 bit private key and sends it back. The server uses the corresponding public key to decrypt and check. Line snooping does no good, because the challenge (random #) and response (encrypted #) are different every time, and that private key never leaves the chip.
...then why do you care how you get your MSN mail anyway? RTFA. He got a year's MSN contract with his new computer. Now if they would let you cancel the contract as soon as you find out what it really entails, it wouldn't be worth complaining about. But it sounds like they're going to bill him for 1 year whether or not he uses it...
They are going to somewhere in the Arctic, maybe Devon Island (Canadian, NW of Greenland if I remember right), where conditions are as Mars-like as possible without spaceflight. OK, the air is still breathable (except a sudden inhalation through the mouth could frost-bite your lungs), and the gravity is wrong, but temperature and terrain are similar, and we've got to train somehow before the real thing.
I'd switch. The trouble is, they lock you into paying for a year of service, _then_ you find out that certain standard services are not included. If you were free to quit anytime, then it's simply taking advantage of idiots, which has never been a big deal in the USA...
If I understand the MSN FAQ cited above, the proprietary protocol doesn't even support Outlook, just Outlook Express. (One difference between these is that Outlook stores your old emails on your own hard drive. Express stores them on the server only.)
In one way it is a Microsoft victory: instead of being split now, they get to go back to another judge for another year or two of hearings. Then they'll appeal his decision to delay another few years. Keep on the way they have, they may even have the next judge so spitting mad that obviously he can't make an unbiased judgement either... And then their next argument is "all that stuff is ancient history now."
Or maybe what they are really hoping for: "Hey every time I try to type this decision into the computer, it comes out as 'Microsoft acquitted on all counts.' Isn't there a non-Microsoft Word Processor left?"
While you're dreaming, how about 4 pieces: OS, GUI, office, network? The only thing really wrong with DOS 6.22/Windows 3.11 was limited support for 32 bit programs -- so if you think the court can untangle IE from Windows, let them also split out a 32 bit kernel from the goddammed bloated Windows system...
The real problem, is it isn't up to "us" to nail them, it's up to Junior's Justice Department. You think they are going to go aggressively after one of the biggest Republican campaign contributors?
However, because the finding of fact was upheld, it should make it easier for various companies that think they were harmed by MS's anticompetitive actions to go to court themselves and collect damages. This might be a bit like trying to weaken an elephant by turning loose a batch of mosquitos to suck its blood, but it beats waiting for Ashcroft to go out there and say "Bad Elephant! If you trample another crowd to death I will have to beat you with this feather!)
Sounds pretty sensible. The browser-tying dispute should _not_ have been the centerpiece of the case, since what actually belongs in an OS is pretty subjective, and it's probably impossible to _prove_ that there was no legitimate reason for MS to tie IE into the OS short of finding a memo from Gates to the effect "there's no technical reason for this, but we need to get IE so entangled with Windows that it's impossible to separate them and Judge J can go whistle..." So the new trial judge has specific instructions for how to adjudicate this -- if anyone still cares to argue it is a violation. IMO, all the attention given to that just obscured the solid parts of the case, such as all those exclusionary contracts. Do three different exclusionary contracts constitute a "course of conduct" in violation of the antitrust laws? It would seem so to me, but it's basically a matter of the trial judges opinion, and since Jackson showed apparent bias, of course that question has to go to a different trial judge. And finally, the breakup proposed does give the appearance that Jackson's anger at MS has overridden his good sense; it is probably excessive punishment for the offenses (other than dissing the Judge!), and also probably ineffective in actually correcting MS' behavior.
One thing I haven't seen mentioned in any of these summaries, which IMO was the "smoking gun" in the Findings of Fact if there ever was one: IBM was once selling both Windows PC's and a competitive operating system, OS/2. Microsoft asked IBM to reduce their advertising of OS/2, and delayed giving IBM advance technical details of the next Windows release until IBM complied. The punishment for trying to sell another (and maybe technically superior) OS was go through the pre-Christmas sales season with an obsolescent version of Windows on their mass-marketed PC hardware. This was using an existing near monopoly to destroy competition, period, and it is illegal for a company that dominates the market.
A little point about antitrust law as I understand it. (IANAL.) If you don't dominate the market, you can legally be much heavier-handed than MS; for instance, notice how a (major brand) gas station doesn't sell _anything_ that competes with (major brand) products. But since no one company has even 50% of the gasoline market, no one has a monopoly, and if a station operator doesn't like Mobil's deal he can just make a deal with one of the other companies. (But maybe someone ought to look into why it seems to be the same deal no matter which brand of gas is involved.) Apple, OS/2, Linux, and BEOS all together don't offer a large PC vendor enough sales that they can afford to have Microsoft "losing" their orders, so the vendors all get in line...
Corporate officers have sometimes gone to jail for antitrust offenses. Of course, that was when the Justice Dept was run by people who believed that the rich _could_ be criminals...
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Fusion power might have less environmental impact than solar cell production, and it doesn't cut out around supper time. I'd certainly rather have a fusion plant nearby than a giant bank of lead-acid batteries, but I think there are better ways to store a city's worth of solar power for the night...
You use a small black hole (grin) to create a gravity field so strong that the neutrons orbit it until they decay into protons and electrons, with a half-life of 12 seconds. Then a magnetic field separates the protons and electrons, you collect them on electrodes, and you just have to convert a small current at millions of volts DC to something you can feed into the power grid.
In short, with foreseeable technology the answer is no. Neutrons are affected only by gravity and the "strong" and "weak" nuclear forces. We don't even have a theory for effective gravity control. The nuclear forces are extremely short range (like the diameter of nuclei), so even if we could influence them, we couldn't capture neutrons any more efficiently than we already do with shielding. (Actually shielding uses the nuclear forces: use enough of it and there is no way through without hitting a nucleus.)
In the easiest reaction to start up, D+T = He-4 + n, Most of the energy goes with the neutron and gamma rays, but the helium nucleus does recoil when the neutron is fired off. This heats the plasma somewhat; _if_ this heating exceeds the heat loss by radiation, you could expand the expended plasma through a magnetic field to separate electrons from nuclei and collect some electricity directly. But the bulk of the energy would still feed a steam cycle.
A gamma-ray "photocell" would have to work at millions of volts to be at all efficient, so it isn't going to happen in solid-state. I could conceive of a vacuum tube where the gamma rays knock electrons loose and toward a -1,000,000V cathode, but I can't see how to get a significant percentage of the gamma rays to hit the electron in just the right place... One other possibility might be to use materials that "scintillate" (emit light) when hit by gamma rays, and capture that light in photocells. But photocells are generally less than 25% efficient, and I doubt you'd get 10% efficiency overall. If you could run the scintillator and photocells at boiler temperatures, then the energy missed by those could make steam to drive a turbine, etc., so maybe you'd increase the overall efficiency from 30% to 40% -- but I think the scintillators are some sort of plastic and photocells need to stay cool to work well.
The best bet, aside from sucking it up and using the steam cycle, is an alternative fuel mix that outputs much of the energy as fast charged particles. Someone suggested D + He-3 = He-4 + p. (D = Deuterium, H-2. He = Helium. p = proton.) The proton might come flying out pretty fast (with He-4 recoiling at the same momentum but 1/4 the kinetic energy, same as with a neutron). An electron would be left behind somewhere in the plasma cloud. So you could use magnetic separation to collect the protons, or to turn plasma heated by the protons into electricity. I don't know what the yields would be (either how much of the D would react this way instead of other ways, or what percentage of the energy goes into kinetic energy of the proton and HE-4 versus gammay rays). But all energy that evades magnetic separation will still be heat for the steam boiler, so it would improve efficiency if it works at all.
Now I find out why Dad moved to Oregon when he retired. 8-)
Seriously, this works for a bar or a store. It doesn't work for a web business. If some nosy parker in Memphis downloads it and reports it to the authorities, you can get indicted and tried under Tennessee law and Memphis community standards. If you want to be safe, you've got to be somewhere out of reach of interstate extradition, and probably the feds also. (I pick on Memphis because it was long the home location of a porn-obsessed postal inspector whose lifelong mission was to impose Memphis community standards on mail order literature everywhere. And under US laws he could, until the vendors learned to refuse all orders from those zip codes.)
1) Microsoft was a lot better at marketing software than IBM. IBM is fundamentally a stodgy hardware company and is not good at selling software. (There might have been an additional factor. I don't know if this was still true at the point when OS/2 got slaughtered in the marketplace, but in the past, there has evidently been interference with the PC division by the main-frame division. The mainframe guys were afraid of the competition and didn't realize that if it didn't come from their own PC's, it would come from someone else's. And the mainframe guys ran the company.) So the IBM PC hardware division could not sell enough PC's with OS/2 to survive.
2) In Judge Jackson's findings of fact last year, he cited an incident when Microsoft told IBM to back off on their OS/2 marketing, then delayed giving IBM the specs on the next version of Windows, so just before Christmas IBM was almost the only PC maker in the market without the latest version of Windows. IMHO, that would be a reason to buy IBM's, but most consumers weren't knowledgeable enough to avoid first releases. In other words, it looks suspiciously like IBM was punished for selling OS/2 too vigorously by getting their Christmas sales sabotaged. Apparently IBM has learned their lesson -- they are not pushing Linux hard enough to offend the monopoly power.
there's a reluctance to sue MS over its abuse of monopoly power, err, because it's a bad idea to offend the monopoly power...
Yep. I'm wondering if in the long run, MS is going to experience something analogous to what happened to medieval kings that went too far in looking for conspiracies to overthrow them. Eventually the nobles would get together and agree that for everyone's safety, the king _must be_ overthrown. And once it looked like the king was going down, _everyone_ was happy to pile on...
Oh my, suburbia invaded by giant mutant dandelions, what a nightmare, or extremely low-maintenance lawn, depending on your approach to yard work. 8-) Except that these were found "in an area that was untouched since the days of the accident," leading me to suspect that these are just ordinary dandelions that got left along long enough to grow really big. I have no idea how big a dandelion can grow, do you? But you get enough people out looking for something weird and they are going to find something, because there's always something weird out there. Call it the Erin Brokovich effect.
I wouldn't have wanted to save that gas in a tank and breathe it all, but the way it was vented it would have spread over a wide area and raised the background radiation level a fraction of a percent. A coal-fired plant releases more radiation in the fly-ash. Your TV set and CRT computer monitor emit more radiation. It was nothing to worry about, except that the way this happened (a stuck valve undetected for hours) suggests that either the operators were incompetent or the control console was beyond human comprehension...
At first glance, it looks like there sure ought to be. Tne conversion of heat to power necessarily allows some heat to just flow from the hot end to the cold end. The maximum possible efficiency is the hot temperature (in degrees Kelvin, that is referenced to absolute zero) divided by the cold temperature. In a steam plant the hot temperature is limited by how hot the pipes can get and still hold pressure, and the cold temperature is limited by wherever you are dumping it. So the theoretical best thermal efficiency is around 40%, and given the various losses which are unavoidable if you want the plant to run at a reasonable speed, overall efficiency isn't much better than 33%. That is, 1/3 of the heat is used, 2/3 is dumped.
So one theoretical way to increase efficiency is to somehow build the hot end without any solid materials to melt. I have seen theoretical designs of a magneto-hydrodynamic generator that would use the plasma itself as the working fluid (instead of steam) and magnetic fields instead of pipes and turbines. So your theoretical maximum efficiency could be extremely high (99.9...) but by the time you make it actually work you could be wasting more than a steam engine does. And, as far as I know, no one has really worked on this.
Also, you might not retain enough heat in the plasma to feed a MHD in the first place. The proposed fusion reactions I have seen tend to emit most of the energy as gamma rays and fast neutrons, and of course hot plasma is going to continually radiate it's heat away. So far the only way to collect the energy in that radiation is to absorb it in thick shielding, then you circulate water through the shielding, generate steam, etc., and probably wind up with ess than 30% efficiency like a fission plant. If you could directly capture the energy from that radiation, like by having the gamma rays knock electrons "uphill" against a strong electric field, then you could have much better efficiency. But that's even harder to make work than MHD.
These ideas are more than thirty years old, but as far as I know, no one has ever received a sufficient budget to really work on them. Someone asked if our government was really taking energy seriously. If we were really serious, we would be treating fusion power like the Manhattan Project in WWII -- trying everything that could work at the same time -- with one difference, we could make all the data public so anyone could make a contribution, rather than treating it all as deep secrets just in case there is some practical relationship between making 1/10 of an ounce of fuel fuse in a reactor and making hundreds of pounds fuse in a bomb. Having presidents beholden to the oil business sure doesn't help, but even Carter talked about fusion power but didn't really do anything. For instance, during his administration a Russian scientist came to this country to give a lecture on their fusion power work. The FBI came in and covered up his blackboard. (Whose secrets were they protecting from whom?) Quite
A fission reactor is much more dangerous because all the control rods stop (if they work) is the chain reaction. The chain reaction basically splits U235 nuclei up into random sized pieces, mostly highly radioactive, and most of the heat comes from the decay of those fragments. So when they drop the control rods, the fission tank continues to heat up for several hours. To prevent a melt-down, you have to keep the cooling water circulating. Of course this can be powered by the heat you are removing, but if the problem is a blockage in the cooling system... E.g., at THree Mile Island they had a cooling valve closed and didn't realize that for several hours. Secondary cooling kept the reactor well below melt-down, but it did get hot enough that pressure had to be let out, allowing a negligible amount of radiative gas to escape. Note that this was the "worst" accident in commercially-operated nuclear power anywhere in the world (Chernobyl wasn't commercially operated), and fusion would be safer.
There are two dangers in a fusion reactor. One is that one of the fuels might be tritium, a radioactive form of hydrogen, which is remarkably good at finding leaks. Due to the smaller fuel quantities required there is less overall danger of radioactive leakage than fission. It just requires good managment... The other is that fusion reactions release neutrons, which tend to turn other materials radioactive. In other words, unless you very carefully select materials not subject to this effect, and make them extremely pure, after 30 years or so the plant structure itself will be radioactive. Fission also releases neutrons...
That said, I have one quibble with the review:
Colonists from Earth, using a mix of mental powers and high technology, have long ago subjugated the native inhabitants -- and are now making themselves into gods, ruling over their descendants within a framework set up in imitation of Hinduism and ancient India.
I interpreted things a little differently. WARNING: YET ANOTHER PLOT SPOILER COMING
The colony ship carried a very technically competent crew of mostly American or NW European extraction (the chaplain was Christian with an anglo-saxon name, Captain Jan Olvegg was maybe Dutch, and Sam Kalkin certainly seems American), and a large cargo of Hindu Indians with apparently no technical knowledge at all. (This is the one way in which the book has aged -- while India still has plenty of ignorant farmers, they've got very good engineers and coders too and I can't imagine any Indian government loading up the most ignorant of their people on a ship crewed by foreigners.) The destination world turned out not to be completely uninhabited, although a survey from space wouldn't have spotted the inhabitants (beings of pure energy and sea-dwellers), and the crew had to lead in many wars to make the world safe for humans. In the process, they forgot to educate the farmers, or even many of their own children, and the new world settled into the old pattern of peasants, princes, warriors, and Brahmans. There was one big piece of technology made available early and to all who could afford the fees: "re-incarnation" through copying your mind into a tank-grown body. (If you want to populate a world fast, immortality helps. And this particular technology fits right into the Hindu religion -- although having your next life depend on cash rather than how well you've acted doesn't fit, Christians accept much bigger discrepancies.)
The original crew meanwhile had not only kept their grip on technology, but been reincarnated so many times that their particular talents grew into god-like powers. They lived off by themselves in particularly favored real estate ("heaven" -- maybe like Boulder Colorado?), and argued about how to re-introduce the rest of the world to technology without gross disruptions. Of course, the longer they sat and argued, the larger the gap became -- but it did maintain their privileged condition. Sam Kalkin eventually became disgusted with that and set himself up as Prince Siddhartha in some remote area. The story actually begins (chapter 2?) with Sam coming into a town for a new body after a long absence and discovering that things have changed very much -- the First (and some favored descendants) are now officially gods, the body merchants are "the Lords of Karma", and you get karma by feeding coins into "prayer machines" which are slot machines with no payout. Obviously Accelerationism lost, and Accelerationists have the choice of persuading the "gods" to let them into the club, or being reincarnated as dogs, epileptics, or whatever. So Sam insults "Brahma", has his troops overrun the Temple of Karma, gets his new body (and one for Captain Jan Olvegg also), and hauls away some critical machinery. Only after thus using violence to provide for his own present and future reincarnation does he then become the apostle of a non-violent religion. 8-)
I've read some of Campbell's fiction, never even knew about his non-fiction. Nor am I going to seek it out now. It is truly amazing how such a great editor could be such a bad writer!
Jack of Shadows made nowhere near the impression on me that Lord of Light did. I wonder if it's a generational thing? That is, it sounds like you grew up with D&D style games, and some access to computers, while when I was in college (the first time) D&D was just getting started and the first hobbyist computer was still in the future.
Aren't the Nine Princes in Amber also akin to Greek Gods? In some ways. They were also much like (but not entirely parallel to)the Plantagenets -- the Norman-English ruling family that repeatedly made war upon each other over several centuries, from Henry II's war with some of his sons to the Wars of the Roses in which the two main branches exterminated each other.
1. "Loser pays" system in court, like the UK.
2. Require any lawyer sending out a threatening letter to deposit $500 into escrow, to cover the cost of hiring a lawyer to respond to it when the threats are unfounded. Taken together with the first item, this means that when a corp decides to threaten everyone who ridicules their ridiculous trademark, they have to plop down some money up front, and then either lose it or go to court and lose a lot more...
3. Someone other than a corporate hack appointing the judges to begin with. Difficult, considering that _both_ parties have been nominating nothing but corporate hacks for President since 1992...
However, in the software world, almost everyone is making more than enough to live on, and money beyond that is not that great a motivator. You do need to find other things to hold your best people, because if you just worked them hard and paid them what it was worth, they'd probably retire at 30...
[Training is] one of the first [expenses] to jettison when times start to look bad. And you are surprised? When times are bad, you can hire experienced people cheap. When times are good, either you train people in what you need, or you pay through the nose to lure them away from other good jobs.
My various formal classes in programming were all 15 to 30 years ago. Except for relational databases, the teachers all seemed to be stumbling around with little idea of how to actually teach the most important stuff, which is a way of thinking. They could throw examples at you, and then make you try to work through problems on your own until hopefully you "got it", but in general they couldn't actually teach "it." (Relational databases have a solid mathematical theory underlying them, and that seemed to help the instructor find something he could teach.) So for the most part, programming classes didn't have many advantages over getting a book and access to a computer and fumbling around on your own. Has this changed any since?
You don't have to be competent to survive in business, just less incompetent than the competition.
A better system would be that same chip, only instead of storing fixed passwords, it conducts a conversation with the server, proving it's identity in a way that a snooper cannot replicate. E.g., the server sends out a random number. Your smartcard checks your thumb is there and has a pulse, then encrypts the random number with a 4096 bit private key and sends it back. The server uses the corresponding public key to decrypt and check. Line snooping does no good, because the challenge (random #) and response (encrypted #) are different every time, and that private key never leaves the chip.
use the whole sentence as the password That's fine if you can type a whole sentence blind without any errors. Most people can't.
...then why do you care how you get your MSN mail anyway? RTFA. He got a year's MSN contract with his new computer. Now if they would let you cancel the contract as soon as you find out what it really entails, it wouldn't be worth complaining about. But it sounds like they're going to bill him for 1 year whether or not he uses it...
They are going to somewhere in the Arctic, maybe Devon Island (Canadian, NW of Greenland if I remember right), where conditions are as Mars-like as possible without spaceflight. OK, the air is still breathable (except a sudden inhalation through the mouth could frost-bite your lungs), and the gravity is wrong, but temperature and terrain are similar, and we've got to train somehow before the real thing.
If I understand the MSN FAQ cited above, the proprietary protocol doesn't even support Outlook, just Outlook Express. (One difference between these is that Outlook stores your old emails on your own hard drive. Express stores them on the server only.)
Or maybe what they are really hoping for: "Hey every time I try to type this decision into the computer, it comes out as 'Microsoft acquitted on all counts.' Isn't there a non-Microsoft Word Processor left?"
The real problem, is it isn't up to "us" to nail them, it's up to Junior's Justice Department. You think they are going to go aggressively after one of the biggest Republican campaign contributors?
However, because the finding of fact was upheld, it should make it easier for various companies that think they were harmed by MS's anticompetitive actions to go to court themselves and collect damages. This might be a bit like trying to weaken an elephant by turning loose a batch of mosquitos to suck its blood, but it beats waiting for Ashcroft to go out there and say "Bad Elephant! If you trample another crowd to death I will have to beat you with this feather!)
One thing I haven't seen mentioned in any of these summaries, which IMO was the "smoking gun" in the Findings of Fact if there ever was one: IBM was once selling both Windows PC's and a competitive operating system, OS/2. Microsoft asked IBM to reduce their advertising of OS/2, and delayed giving IBM advance technical details of the next Windows release until IBM complied. The punishment for trying to sell another (and maybe technically superior) OS was go through the pre-Christmas sales season with an obsolescent version of Windows on their mass-marketed PC hardware. This was using an existing near monopoly to destroy competition, period, and it is illegal for a company that dominates the market.
A little point about antitrust law as I understand it. (IANAL.) If you don't dominate the market, you can legally be much heavier-handed than MS; for instance, notice how a (major brand) gas station doesn't sell _anything_ that competes with (major brand) products. But since no one company has even 50% of the gasoline market, no one has a monopoly, and if a station operator doesn't like Mobil's deal he can just make a deal with one of the other companies. (But maybe someone ought to look into why it seems to be the same deal no matter which brand of gas is involved.) Apple, OS/2, Linux, and BEOS all together don't offer a large PC vendor enough sales that they can afford to have Microsoft "losing" their orders, so the vendors all get in line...
Corporate officers have sometimes gone to jail for antitrust offenses. Of course, that was when the Justice Dept was run by people who believed that the rich _could_ be criminals...