1. Cost: Stamping a CD costs a few cents, less than the cost of shipping it by US mail. Downloading it (if available on-line) and burning your own CD also costs less than a dollar. Printing, binding, and shipping a book costs a few dollars. (Authors only get about 10% of the cover price, the rest is expenses, advertising, and profit to the publisher and bookstore.) Of course, you also have to figure the cost of the reader--but in 20 years that should be about $10.
2. Availability of unusual editions: Specialized books such as college texts often cost around $100 if you can get them at all; a large part of that is the cost to the printer of setting up for a short run, and to the stores of storing less-popular books. On-line, these could be distributed at the cost of download & burn, plus maybe a couple of dollars for the author. Writing stuff like this is motivated more by "professional standing" (ego?) than by financial considerations, so the authors might be happy to give their book away if they know no one else is going to make money off of it. And once a book is on-line, it costs nothing to keep it there even if only one person a year downloads it.
3. Searching. In any electronic text format, you are no longer dependent on the author to anticipate what you want to look up and put it in the index.
4. Readers for the blind.
5. Storage space: I've got a whole room overflowing with printed books. A stack of CD's would be much tidier--and I suspect the cheap paper on a lot of those books is not going to last as long as a good CD-R.
Against this, of course there are several obvious disadvantages: battery or power cord, less portability, and (for at least a few more years) lower readability. But if with e-books I can find more books meeting my particular tastes and spend less....
Numerous people have commented on the problems with presently available hardware (display quality and lighting, breaks if you bend it, battery life). But these problems are going to be solved within a few years. A quite likely replacement is "electronic paper", discussed yesterday on/. This is apparently close to giving you the same contrast under ambient light as ink on paper. It should eventually be possible to make it flexible (sharp creases would break electrodes and pigment capsules, but gentle bends should be OK). It doesn't require power to hold a picture, just to erase and write. It does have the disadvantage for many computing applications of being very slow to change (about 1/2 second to rewrite the entire display), but for reading it sounds ideal. And the slow display speed means a slow, tiny, low-powered CPU board would do just fine.
The other question is how the text is distributed and stored. Until we get a dramatic cost decrease in solid-state storage, that's probably going involve CD's or something similar. Three inch CD's would hold any book, and allow a drive (including batteries and tiny CPU board) that measures about 3.5 x 5 x 1 inch. That is just a bit large for "pocket size", but you could clip it on your belt with a wire to the flexible e-paper display. I think first we'll see a paperback-sized unit with the (inflexible) e-paper on the top cover; this would allow the larger batteries or AC supply you would need to download books and write them to CD-R/RW.
The stealth planes don't fly mach 2. They don't even fly as fast as a 747. Have you seen the pictures? The "stealth" technology messes up the aerodynamics so it's amazing they can get them to fly at all.
I have not been able to download the article, but I do remember a few things from my years as a radar tech + EE school: First, cell phones use frequencies no higher than about 2GHz; most radar sets work at 10 to 30 GHz, so the same material would probably not work. However, my guess is that this technology uses a conventional radar transmitter, but use a network of receivers which report in by cell phones. Second, "stealth" planes are only stealthy in certain directions. RF absorbing material that was really effective across the full range of radar frequencies would have to be several feet thick, so the airplane couldn't fly. Instead, mostly they rely on the shape of the airplane to reflect the radar beam like a tilted mirror, away from the transmitting antenna. They use some thin radar-absorbing material, but this is only really effective where the signal is weak to start with, like with the waves scattered off the corners and the engine intakes.
Then again, maybe they just use cell phones on open-mike to catch the sound of that jet engine and badly-streamlined plane flying over. Or it could be even lower tech: In WWII, the British had a fairly effective network of thousands of people who would observe planes flying overhead and phone it in.
Cell phones are actually quite common in the third world. For instance, in rural India a quite common "small business opportunity" is to buy a cell phone and rent it out by the minute. When you only need to serve about 1 phone per hundred people, it's much cheaper to put in a network of cellular towers than to run copper everywhere. If the total bandwidth is not too high, you can avoid running copper at all, just interconnect the towers by microwave beams. It might be necessary to give each tower it's own power supply -- but most of these countries are sunny, so use solar cells and lead-acid batteries.
I seriously doubt that the technology could be used with the pinpoint accuracy needed to direct weapons fire. I agree. What that technology might do is to vector a fighter to somewhere near the stealth bomber (they are NOT fighters, no matter what the Air Force says), and then it will have to aim the guns by other means: eyeball, or fly above it and look for the infrared glow of the jet exhausts. (They put the exhausts above the wings so people on the ground with IR goggles can't see them, but from the right angle they still must be very visible. It is harder to pick out a target looking down because of all the other heat sources on the ground, but campfires don't move at 500 knots.)
The bigger weakness is, how long do you think that cellular network is going to continue working once the USAF finds out it is vectoring in the interceptors?
Face it, our "stealth" technology is flawed. You can't absorb enough of the radar waves in a reasonable thickness of material, so they build the airplane with planar surfaces so it reflects radar waves mirror-fashion, usually in other directions than back towards the transmitter. So if you use a wide network of receivers, some of them will catch the reflected waves. Also, the jet engines and poor aerodynamics of these planes must make them fairly noisy, so you could find the general area of an attack simply by leaving a lot of phones on open-mike.
Real stealth technology would use radar-transparent materials, like wood and canvas. I don't see any way to avoid a metal motor, but if you use a small piston engine driving a wooden propellor, you don't get that much reflection. And with a good muffler you wouldn't hear this plane passing overhead at 80 MPH. Wait a minute--we used to have that technology, in 1918!
One more thing: Since the heads don't follow the exact same path every time, you've also got to do something to ensure that the fringe areas out to each side of the track really got overwritten. If you can get direct control of the head position microstepper, you write once a little to the inside of the nominal track position, then write once a little to the outside. Repeat for the other 22 patterns required to be sure of complete erasure... It's a big pain to write the program, but once written you just put it on bootable DOS floppies with the instructions: "Insert in disk drive, turn power on, wait until complete (up to 3 days)." A good link to a thorough discussion of this has been posted before.
Of course, there is a big assumption when erasing this thorough is required: that someone will get hold of the drive and believe that it is worth a great deal of work by high-paid techs using very expensive test equipment in a clean room. If the computer has a sticker saying "War plans room. May contain classified data", there's a pretty good chance someone would do that. But if you simply dd (or a DOS/Windows equivalent) a shipment of 100 machines scrapped from the personnel dept, do you really think anyone is going to dissassemble all 100 hard drives on the chance that maybe one of them contains useful data? (And don't you think that the school receiving those machines might investigate who's been stealing the hard drives?)
That could work, but I think you could buy a new (probably 10X bigger) drive for less. You can also bulk-erase _through_ the aluminum drive case, but modern hard drives require a very high magnetic field strength to erase (several times that required for the strongest ("type III") magnetic tape). It would be likely to bend or break the platters. And finally, there is no mil-spec qualified bulk-eraser for even type III tape--so regardless of technical merits, they couldn't use bulk-erase methods.
I possibly wrote some of the code for it 30 years ago, depending on which of hundreds of versions was adapted to the apple. Then I got kicked out of college for not doing the classes... But the only way I could take the code away from that old mainframe was paper tape or a printout -- it's long gone, and I doubt it would do you much good if I had kept it.
Now if you can find a way to read TRS-80 Model I floppies (single-sided 90K), I had a version of Star Trek among other things on those. But if I can find them, probably the magnetic stuff has either fallen off or demagnetized...
What, no Microsoft meets the Borg jokes? Or maybe Microsoft _is_ the Borg. It would explain how Picard and Janeway kept getting away "You will be assimilated. Resistance is... General Protection Fault in Unknown Module" 8-)
There's just no vendor to blame when [free software] breaks.
Is there some way to get the management to _read_ the EULA's on commercial software? They amount to "sold as-is" at best (the vendor is not responsible at all for the performance of the software), and often there are even worse clauses. Maybe someone ought to let the corporation's lawyers know that every time you install software, you are agreeing to a contract on behalf of the corporation -- so they'd better be reviewing it... I can't imagine a lawyer approving signing onto the "customer" side of a typical EULA without looking for alternatives.
Removing the "person" status sounds good, but this seems to be one case where the problem is a lack of legislation rather than an excess. There is no fundamental reason that a corporation should be treated as a person -- it's just that around 200 years ago many corporations were chartered for the first time, but there were no statutes governing how a corporation would come into court when a lawsuit was necessary (e.g., disputes over contract interpretation or unpaid bills). So the courts decided that the corporation would be treated as a "person" for the purpose of bringing or defending those civil cases. The problem is, there never has been been a clarification of where corporations stand in criminal proceedings -- and you can't put a corporation in jail so the "person" analogy really doesn't hold up. It's long past time to correct that, by restricting the "person" analogy to civil cases arising from the corporate business operations and providing that corporate officers are liable otherwise.
Re:So big... I want a little one!!
on
Flywheel UPS
·
· Score: 2
Thus you want a wheel rather than a simple disk. With most of the mass on the rim. No. The energy stored is proportional to the moment of inertia times the square of the rotational rate -- so speeding it up pays off much more than increased moment of inertia. But high speed requires great strength so the flywheel doesn't fly apart. High energy flywheels are usually disks of high strength material, and sometimes even thicker in the middle to give it the strength to hold the rim together.
Re:So big... I want a little one!!
on
Flywheel UPS
·
· Score: 2
It's so big because it's NOT for PC's. It provides 1,000 W for 4 hours, and their suggested market is telecommunications. Typical small UPS's provide 250 to 500 W for about 15 minutes. 99% of power outages are much less than that. If the lights are out in an office for 15 minutes, they'll probably send people home -- but the phone company switches work just fine in the dark, and should stay up through the longest outages. I can also see this unit as a server backup system when you need extremely high availability, except I didn't drill down deep enough to see the output voltages -- I think telecom systems run on 48VDC, so you'd need a different electronics module for computers.
It probably could be made in smaller size for a PC, but some of the costs don't scale down well, so I'd expect it to be too expensive.
Re:Flywheels are a great solution
on
Flywheel UPS
·
· Score: 2
Wouldn't you therefore want the flywheel to be as massive as possible? This is a fairly common misconception. When it's something like the flywheel on an internal combustion engine where the RPM's are limited by what it is attached to, then more weight may be necessary. But for energy storage, linked electrically, the limit on RPM's is usually just the strength/density ratio of the material.
e = m * v^2
So 2x the rotational rate (at a given diameter) gives 4x the energy stored. So what works best is to use a very strong material and spin it as fast as possible without coming apart.
Does anyone actually believe that man has been on the moon? Yes. A reasonably good amateur telescope could watch the spacecraft all the way there and back. Ham operators could pick up the radio signals -- and anyone with a dish could check the direction it came from. That certainly includes the Soviets, who would have loved to have caught us faking it. Thousands of men worked on the rockets. Tens of thousands of bean counters checked that all that money was being spent properly (especially on bean counters). No way could that many Americans keep a secret! What it all comes down to is, to fake a moon landing successfully, they would have had to build rockets capable of a moon landing and return, trained astronauts for the job, then at the last minute put 3 robots from Walt Disney studios inside the space suits to be loaded into the capsule in view of the press, and sent them off to the moon and back. They would have had to pre-tape everything that would happen in space, and have the spacecraft beam that back for TV -- including tape of where they actually landed, which wasn't exactly where they expected to land. It would be easier to actually do it than to fake it.
Re:Different brodcaster licenses...
on
Launchcast Sued
·
· Score: 2
As far as I can tell from the RIIA licensing pages (IANAL), there are two kinds of licenses. "Statutory" licenses are the kind radio stations get -- they pay a fixed fee to the RIAA (I think), which then splits it up among all the copyright holders. "Voluntary" licenses have to be negotiated with each copyright holder. The thing is, statutory licenses do not allow customizing to individual preferences. Voluntary licenses allow this, but unless a 'caster offers a very narrow range of music (all Britney, all the time...)it is impossible to go to all the copyright holders and buy a license from each one. But maybe it would be possible to set up a web site where musicians and webcasters could post offers and let the computer complete the deal.
It is possible that the RIAA is constrained here by it's contracts with artists and record companies to collect the statutory fees for them, or by the law setting those fees, so that they don't have any choice but to sue webcasters who offer individually customized selections. It's a lot more likely that it got the law it paid for and the contracts it imposed, but you should _know_ before you toss accusations around.
Since the last big one was 65 million years ago, we've probably got plenty of time -- but the next one could be tomorrow or 100 million years from now. I think the odds against a strike big enough to destroy civilation world-wide in the next decade are around 10-million to one, but people do buy insurance against events that are no more likely than that. I think there should be a sensible program to work towards the capability to detect and deflect large meteorites, and eventually comets -- but mainly because I think that acquiring the needed spaceflight and telescopic capabilities will pay off in other ways.
I thought about that when I was watching Bruce Willis' shuttle trying to thread through all the loose rocks. The Orion would be a great ship for this kind of work, especially in the form proposed by Niven and Pournelle in Footfall. It wouldn't be hurt by the smaller rocks, and it could either push a big asteroid around or disintegrate a cluster of 100-foot rocks using just it's drive system. Of course launching it would be the worst ecological disaster in 65 million years, but it's minor compared to a major meteorite impact.
For you guys that don't know what I'm talking about: Orion was a 1950's or 60's proposal for a nuclear powered spaceship using only existing technology. It would consist of a cabin mounted on a very big, thick metal bell. To go, you launch a small nuclear bomb out the back and detonate it at the right distance for the bell to catch the blast without melting down. Repeat every few seconds until you are going fast enough. In the novel Footfall, to repel an alien invasion they created an Orion battleship by putting a heavy cruiser (ocean-going type) hull on the bell. Modern warships are designed so they can be sealed up for protection against chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons, but I'm not sure how much work it might take to make it airtight for space. But for the rest, it's armored, it's got eight inch guns to deal with the "small" stuff, and if those are insufficient you just build up speed towards the target, turn the ship, and toss some nukes. 8-)
As far as I know, there is no solvent for this stuff. We tried to find a solvent to clean up spills -- we've got one that will eat the floor tile out from under the lumps of spilled epoxy, but it doesn't touch this epoxy. It does dissolve some kinds of cured epoxy, but not the stuff the chemist picked for this job. Epoxy solidifies by an irreversible chemical reaction, so there is no particular reason that there has to be any solvent at all. Note also that epoxy is used for circuit boards and IC packages, so if there is a universal epoxy solvent, the board would come apart, which would tend to disconnect the RAM from the battery, causing erasure...
These seem to mostly be examples of ignorant teachers. Teachers' college standards are so low that it is possible for a person with a mental block about mathematics to become certified to teach high school algebra. The basic problem is that the core education courses are so stultifying that too few bright people can stand them.
paying/training teachers better (hopefully attracting/producing better teachers). They are already paying teachers much better and training them more than when I was in school forty years ago, and they are getting worse teachers. The main problem is, the extra pay isn't going to better teachers -- it's going to anyone who gets the required certificates (by enduring four or more years of one of the least intellectually stimulating majors in existence), and shows up most of the time. The second problem is, the training consists mostly of indoctrination into liberal/socialist politics and unproven teaching methods. Until they actually research what works, get some real quality control, and start basing promotion and retention on whether the kids learn, more money just gets you better paid deadwood.
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E-books _could_ have several real advantages:
1. Cost: Stamping a CD costs a few cents, less than the cost of shipping it by US mail. Downloading it (if available on-line) and burning your own CD also costs less than a dollar. Printing, binding, and shipping a book costs a few dollars. (Authors only get about 10% of the cover price, the rest is expenses, advertising, and profit to the publisher and bookstore.) Of course, you also have to figure the cost of the reader--but in 20 years that should be about $10.
2. Availability of unusual editions: Specialized books such as college texts often cost around $100 if you can get them at all; a large part of that is the cost to the printer of setting up for a short run, and to the stores of storing less-popular books. On-line, these could be distributed at the cost of download & burn, plus maybe a couple of dollars for the author. Writing stuff like this is motivated more by "professional standing" (ego?) than by financial considerations, so the authors might be happy to give their book away if they know no one else is going to make money off of it. And once a book is on-line, it costs nothing to keep it there even if only one person a year downloads it.
3. Searching. In any electronic text format, you are no longer dependent on the author to anticipate what you want to look up and put it in the index.
4. Readers for the blind.
5. Storage space: I've got a whole room overflowing with printed books. A stack of CD's would be much tidier--and I suspect the cheap paper on a lot of those books is not going to last as long as a good CD-R.
Against this, of course there are several obvious disadvantages: battery or power cord, less portability, and (for at least a few more years) lower readability. But if with e-books I can find more books meeting my particular tastes and spend less....
Numerous people have commented on the problems with presently available hardware (display quality and lighting, breaks if you bend it, battery life). But these problems are going to be solved within a few years. A quite likely replacement is "electronic paper", discussed yesterday on /. This is apparently close to giving you the same contrast under ambient light as ink on paper. It should eventually be possible to make it flexible (sharp creases would break electrodes and pigment capsules, but gentle bends should be OK). It doesn't require power to hold a picture, just to erase and write. It does have the disadvantage for many computing applications of being very slow to change (about 1/2 second to rewrite the entire display), but for reading it sounds ideal. And the slow display speed means a slow, tiny, low-powered CPU board would do just fine.
The other question is how the text is distributed and stored. Until we get a dramatic cost decrease in solid-state storage, that's probably going involve CD's or something similar. Three inch CD's would hold any book, and allow a drive (including batteries and tiny CPU board) that measures about 3.5 x 5 x 1 inch. That is just a bit large for "pocket size", but you could clip it on your belt with a wire to the flexible e-paper display. I think first we'll see a paperback-sized unit with the (inflexible) e-paper on the top cover; this would allow the larger batteries or AC supply you would need to download books and write them to CD-R/RW.
Jeez, doesn't anyone get a joke anymore?
The stealth planes don't fly mach 2. They don't even fly as fast as a 747. Have you seen the pictures? The "stealth" technology messes up the aerodynamics so it's amazing they can get them to fly at all.
I have not been able to download the article, but I do remember a few things from my years as a radar tech + EE school: First, cell phones use frequencies no higher than about 2GHz; most radar sets work at 10 to 30 GHz, so the same material would probably not work. However, my guess is that this technology uses a conventional radar transmitter, but use a network of receivers which report in by cell phones. Second, "stealth" planes are only stealthy in certain directions. RF absorbing material that was really effective across the full range of radar frequencies would have to be several feet thick, so the airplane couldn't fly. Instead, mostly they rely on the shape of the airplane to reflect the radar beam like a tilted mirror, away from the transmitting antenna. They use some thin radar-absorbing material, but this is only really effective where the signal is weak to start with, like with the waves scattered off the corners and the engine intakes.
Then again, maybe they just use cell phones on open-mike to catch the sound of that jet engine and badly-streamlined plane flying over. Or it could be even lower tech: In WWII, the British had a fairly effective network of thousands of people who would observe planes flying overhead and phone it in.
Cell phones are actually quite common in the third world. For instance, in rural India a quite common "small business opportunity" is to buy a cell phone and rent it out by the minute. When you only need to serve about 1 phone per hundred people, it's much cheaper to put in a network of cellular towers than to run copper everywhere. If the total bandwidth is not too high, you can avoid running copper at all, just interconnect the towers by microwave beams. It might be necessary to give each tower it's own power supply -- but most of these countries are sunny, so use solar cells and lead-acid batteries.
I seriously doubt that the technology could be used with the pinpoint accuracy needed to direct weapons fire. I agree. What that technology might do is to vector a fighter to somewhere near the stealth bomber (they are NOT fighters, no matter what the Air Force says), and then it will have to aim the guns by other means: eyeball, or fly above it and look for the infrared glow of the jet exhausts. (They put the exhausts above the wings so people on the ground with IR goggles can't see them, but from the right angle they still must be very visible. It is harder to pick out a target looking down because of all the other heat sources on the ground, but campfires don't move at 500 knots.)
The bigger weakness is, how long do you think that cellular network is going to continue working once the USAF finds out it is vectoring in the interceptors?
Face it, our "stealth" technology is flawed. You can't absorb enough of the radar waves in a reasonable thickness of material, so they build the airplane with planar surfaces so it reflects radar waves mirror-fashion, usually in other directions than back towards the transmitter. So if you use a wide network of receivers, some of them will catch the reflected waves. Also, the jet engines and poor aerodynamics of these planes must make them fairly noisy, so you could find the general area of an attack simply by leaving a lot of phones on open-mike.
Real stealth technology would use radar-transparent materials, like wood and canvas. I don't see any way to avoid a metal motor, but if you use a small piston engine driving a wooden propellor, you don't get that much reflection. And with a good muffler you wouldn't hear this plane passing overhead at 80 MPH. Wait a minute--we used to have that technology, in 1918!
Is any of that information unavailable through other channels (budgets, FOIA requests)?
One more thing: Since the heads don't follow the exact same path every time, you've also got to do something to ensure that the fringe areas out to each side of the track really got overwritten. If you can get direct control of the head position microstepper, you write once a little to the inside of the nominal track position, then write once a little to the outside. Repeat for the other 22 patterns required to be sure of complete erasure... It's a big pain to write the program, but once written you just put it on bootable DOS floppies with the instructions: "Insert in disk drive, turn power on, wait until complete (up to 3 days)." A good link to a thorough discussion of this has been posted before.
Of course, there is a big assumption when erasing this thorough is required: that someone will get hold of the drive and believe that it is worth a great deal of work by high-paid techs using very expensive test equipment in a clean room. If the computer has a sticker saying "War plans room. May contain classified data", there's a pretty good chance someone would do that. But if you simply dd (or a DOS/Windows equivalent) a shipment of 100 machines scrapped from the personnel dept, do you really think anyone is going to dissassemble all 100 hard drives on the chance that maybe one of them contains useful data? (And don't you think that the school receiving those machines might investigate who's been stealing the hard drives?)
That could work, but I think you could buy a new (probably 10X bigger) drive for less. You can also bulk-erase _through_ the aluminum drive case, but modern hard drives require a very high magnetic field strength to erase (several times that required for the strongest ("type III") magnetic tape). It would be likely to bend or break the platters. And finally, there is no mil-spec qualified bulk-eraser for even type III tape--so regardless of technical merits, they couldn't use bulk-erase methods.
I possibly wrote some of the code for it 30 years ago, depending on which of hundreds of versions was adapted to the apple. Then I got kicked out of college for not doing the classes... But the only way I could take the code away from that old mainframe was paper tape or a printout -- it's long gone, and I doubt it would do you much good if I had kept it.
Now if you can find a way to read TRS-80 Model I floppies (single-sided 90K), I had a version of Star Trek among other things on those. But if I can find them, probably the magnetic stuff has either fallen off or demagnetized...
What, no Microsoft meets the Borg jokes? Or maybe Microsoft _is_ the Borg. It would explain how Picard and Janeway kept getting away "You will be assimilated. Resistance is ... General Protection Fault in Unknown Module" 8-)
There's just no vendor to blame when [free software] breaks.
Is there some way to get the management to _read_ the EULA's on commercial software? They amount to "sold as-is" at best (the vendor is not responsible at all for the performance of the software), and often there are even worse clauses. Maybe someone ought to let the corporation's lawyers know that every time you install software, you are agreeing to a contract on behalf of the corporation -- so they'd better be reviewing it... I can't imagine a lawyer approving signing onto the "customer" side of a typical EULA without looking for alternatives.
Removing the "person" status sounds good, but this seems to be one case where the problem is a lack of legislation rather than an excess. There is no fundamental reason that a corporation should be treated as a person -- it's just that around 200 years ago many corporations were chartered for the first time, but there were no statutes governing how a corporation would come into court when a lawsuit was necessary (e.g., disputes over contract interpretation or unpaid bills). So the courts decided that the corporation would be treated as a "person" for the purpose of bringing or defending those civil cases. The problem is, there never has been been a clarification of where corporations stand in criminal proceedings -- and you can't put a corporation in jail so the "person" analogy really doesn't hold up. It's long past time to correct that, by restricting the "person" analogy to civil cases arising from the corporate business operations and providing that corporate officers are liable otherwise.
Thus you want a wheel rather than a simple disk. With most of the mass on the rim. No. The energy stored is proportional to the moment of inertia times the square of the rotational rate -- so speeding it up pays off much more than increased moment of inertia. But high speed requires great strength so the flywheel doesn't fly apart. High energy flywheels are usually disks of high strength material, and sometimes even thicker in the middle to give it the strength to hold the rim together.
It's so big because it's NOT for PC's. It provides 1,000 W for 4 hours, and their suggested market is telecommunications. Typical small UPS's provide 250 to 500 W for about 15 minutes. 99% of power outages are much less than that. If the lights are out in an office for 15 minutes, they'll probably send people home -- but the phone company switches work just fine in the dark, and should stay up through the longest outages. I can also see this unit as a server backup system when you need extremely high availability, except I didn't drill down deep enough to see the output voltages -- I think telecom systems run on 48VDC, so you'd need a different electronics module for computers.
It probably could be made in smaller size for a PC, but some of the costs don't scale down well, so I'd expect it to be too expensive.
Wouldn't you therefore want the flywheel to be as massive as possible? This is a fairly common misconception. When it's something like the flywheel on an internal combustion engine where the RPM's are limited by what it is attached to, then more weight may be necessary. But for energy storage, linked electrically, the limit on RPM's is usually just the strength/density ratio of the material.
e = m * v^2
So 2x the rotational rate (at a given diameter) gives 4x the energy stored. So what works best is to use a very strong material and spin it as fast as possible without coming apart.
Does anyone actually believe that man has been on the moon? Yes. A reasonably good amateur telescope could watch the spacecraft all the way there and back. Ham operators could pick up the radio signals -- and anyone with a dish could check the direction it came from. That certainly includes the Soviets, who would have loved to have caught us faking it. Thousands of men worked on the rockets. Tens of thousands of bean counters checked that all that money was being spent properly (especially on bean counters). No way could that many Americans keep a secret! What it all comes down to is, to fake a moon landing successfully, they would have had to build rockets capable of a moon landing and return, trained astronauts for the job, then at the last minute put 3 robots from Walt Disney studios inside the space suits to be loaded into the capsule in view of the press, and sent them off to the moon and back. They would have had to pre-tape everything that would happen in space, and have the spacecraft beam that back for TV -- including tape of where they actually landed, which wasn't exactly where they expected to land. It would be easier to actually do it than to fake it.
As far as I can tell from the RIIA licensing pages (IANAL), there are two kinds of licenses. "Statutory" licenses are the kind radio stations get -- they pay a fixed fee to the RIAA (I think), which then splits it up among all the copyright holders. "Voluntary" licenses have to be negotiated with each copyright holder. The thing is, statutory licenses do not allow customizing to individual preferences. Voluntary licenses allow this, but unless a 'caster offers a very narrow range of music (all Britney, all the time...)it is impossible to go to all the copyright holders and buy a license from each one. But maybe it would be possible to set up a web site where musicians and webcasters could post offers and let the computer complete the deal.
It is possible that the RIAA is constrained here by it's contracts with artists and record companies to collect the statutory fees for them, or by the law setting those fees, so that they don't have any choice but to sue webcasters who offer individually customized selections. It's a lot more likely that it got the law it paid for and the contracts it imposed, but you should _know_ before you toss accusations around.
Megaton = 1,000,000 tons. 8,000 tons of TNT = .008Megaton
Since the last big one was 65 million years ago, we've probably got plenty of time -- but the next one could be tomorrow or 100 million years from now. I think the odds against a strike big enough to destroy civilation world-wide in the next decade are around 10-million to one, but people do buy insurance against events that are no more likely than that. I think there should be a sensible program to work towards the capability to detect and deflect large meteorites, and eventually comets -- but mainly because I think that acquiring the needed spaceflight and telescopic capabilities will pay off in other ways.
I thought about that when I was watching Bruce Willis' shuttle trying to thread through all the loose rocks. The Orion would be a great ship for this kind of work, especially in the form proposed by Niven and Pournelle in Footfall. It wouldn't be hurt by the smaller rocks, and it could either push a big asteroid around or disintegrate a cluster of 100-foot rocks using just it's drive system. Of course launching it would be the worst ecological disaster in 65 million years, but it's minor compared to a major meteorite impact.
For you guys that don't know what I'm talking about: Orion was a 1950's or 60's proposal for a nuclear powered spaceship using only existing technology. It would consist of a cabin mounted on a very big, thick metal bell. To go, you launch a small nuclear bomb out the back and detonate it at the right distance for the bell to catch the blast without melting down. Repeat every few seconds until you are going fast enough. In the novel Footfall, to repel an alien invasion they created an Orion battleship by putting a heavy cruiser (ocean-going type) hull on the bell. Modern warships are designed so they can be sealed up for protection against chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons, but I'm not sure how much work it might take to make it airtight for space. But for the rest, it's armored, it's got eight inch guns to deal with the "small" stuff, and if those are insufficient you just build up speed towards the target, turn the ship, and toss some nukes. 8-)
As far as I know, there is no solvent for this stuff. We tried to find a solvent to clean up spills -- we've got one that will eat the floor tile out from under the lumps of spilled epoxy, but it doesn't touch this epoxy. It does dissolve some kinds of cured epoxy, but not the stuff the chemist picked for this job. Epoxy solidifies by an irreversible chemical reaction, so there is no particular reason that there has to be any solvent at all. Note also that epoxy is used for circuit boards and IC packages, so if there is a universal epoxy solvent, the board would come apart, which would tend to disconnect the RAM from the battery, causing erasure...
These seem to mostly be examples of ignorant teachers. Teachers' college standards are so low that it is possible for a person with a mental block about mathematics to become certified to teach high school algebra. The basic problem is that the core education courses are so stultifying that too few bright people can stand them.
paying/training teachers better (hopefully attracting/producing better teachers). They are already paying teachers much better and training them more than when I was in school forty years ago, and they are getting worse teachers. The main problem is, the extra pay isn't going to better teachers -- it's going to anyone who gets the required certificates (by enduring four or more years of one of the least intellectually stimulating majors in existence), and shows up most of the time. The second problem is, the training consists mostly of indoctrination into liberal/socialist politics and unproven teaching methods. Until they actually research what works, get some real quality control, and start basing promotion and retention on whether the kids learn, more money just gets you better paid deadwood.