This is just silly. Just because there is a communication network, and a protocol does not mean that there needs to be a single point of failure. Cars can even test that the other cars are following the correct protocols, and are in proper communication. There would always be problems with loan psychotics vehicles, but people drive into market places, and drive drunk all the time.
Comments like this make me realize that South Korea will probably be the first place that has computer controlled vehicles, because they have one government composed of 7 companies that provide almost everything (insurance, banking, cars, telecom, gas, etc...). OK maybe the Japanese will do it.
Hmmm... what fraction of news published and edited in reputable journals contains factual errors? That would be another interesting story.
But come on... 90% of everything is crap. This is no more or less true in medical research, which is a fraction of the $50 billion total spent on research. OMG that's like "One MILLLLIIION DOLLLLARS". That's like 0.5% of GDP so don't be surpised when it's bunk, it's drop in the bucket compared to development costs. If you haven't figure this out you're still a little naive.
So what do real scientists and engineers (that includes doctors) do? They build something that works, and it's a long hard slog, and most of the problems you encounter aren't the cool sexy ones you thought they would be at the start. They don't make big headlines, and they've mostly been discovered (and solved) by a zillion people before you. The key is solving a problem so well that nobody has to solve it ever again! Then the other bad solutions slowly go away, and people can work on other problems (yes QWERTY is good enough).
Now with medicine, things were made a bit better because of the FDA and the clinical trials model, before the more significant political interference of the last decade. Unfortunately, there's the issue that people really want to believe in magical cures that will save uncle Milt, or their cat so they'll pressure doctors and believe con-men for the rest of time. This is fed by the journalistic-industrial lie complex.
Sure scientists are wrong all the time, or certainly less accurate than they could be, but not usually about big things. More often than not they miss the real interesting results making things come out the way they think they should. It takes someone who really believes in their ability to do something right to discover something really new... and if it's truely astounding they better be prepared to spend the next decade proving it and developing some cool new tools with it. If those things work as they predicted and not the guys before... then hey they must be on to something!
The problem is that there are all sorts of quick-fix "cranberries cure cancer" quacks out there. They're in sales where it doesn't matter if it works. That's why your computer doesn't run any faster with the new whizzy RAM than the old stuff, but it doesn't mean Moore's Law doesn't progress. The key is the guys doing the development and implementing the new ideas, and proving they work. They keep making better faster cooler stuff !THAT WORKS!
The BS you read in most hype journals (EETimes are you listening?) is mostly unproven tripe. It occasionally has a grain of truth, along with a lot of interpretation bias, and if you bothered to read the original article (did you?) and some of their other articles (hah that's harder) you can often tell what the nuance is, how careful the methods were, and whether it's worth trying to replicate yourself. Guess what if you're not in the field that paper really wasn't meant for you (it was meant for the tenure comittee or the guys who gave you a grant etc). The stock market guys may go crazy, but that's because they don't give a damn about science or the truth. Same thing with most journalists these days, frankly. They care about money, and figure their reputation won't be much worse than anyone elses.
I was hoping this was going to be about internet video sex slavery or something:^P
Hmm... and putting externally available insecure computers on your network makes you vulnerable. I guess that's news to someone. Oh, well I guess I should be doing something other than reading/. since I'm not atwork this weekend anyway.
It's been possible to buy similar "virus level" filters for hiking since at least the 80s. The typical problems are cleaning, and clogging. See Katadyn or your local REI for a variety of samples. Then there's the "$2" (really about $7) LifeStraw, that was advertised on gizmodo 2 years ago... is this just a running theme?
If the filter is small enough to block viruses, then it is so small that even very small 1u particles will clog it. The whole filter system has to be optimized... and they still clog. They claim 1000 liters, but I'm not really buying it. If it really has something to do with distilling, then I'd be more positive, but that's usually pretty darn complex.
Perhaps he's using a teflon reverse osmosis filter? At the price, it's certainly possible. Those take significant pressure, but they would take out viruses. The water has to start pretty clean too or they develop a film which clogs them too. People have tried iodine on them as well... it works for a while. Whithout knowing what this thing is (and the website's no help), I don't think we can really talk coherently about it.
If it is just a filter you can reverse flush and clean and do a variety of other things, but if your filter clogs after a few liters you'll be _very_ unhappy. This is made more difficult by the fact that you're trying to clean out biologicals, which will happily grow in the filter so it clogs up even quicker, and the cleaning is even more important and difficult to do completely. That's why people make throw aways or just add a halogen (chlorene/iodine) to a tub of relatively filtered water (so things can diffuse) and wait an hour.
Most hikers (who bother) use a more coarse filter (for bacteria only). Often these are treated with iodine as well, and perhaps charcoal to remove bad tastes. These keep clogging problems down, and make cleaning somewhat more easy. That's what the LifeStraw is based on.
I hope this is really an advancement, but it has the smell of an ad.
Ummm... No. Look I like what you're saying but, the real issue is the efficiency of manufacture, conversion, and distribution.
We don't need to worry about freezing because we've extracted too much solar power. Quite the opposite. The albedo of most solar cells is quite a bit lower than most of the earth since they're trying to absorb light. Most of that gets turned into heat, and some of it into electricity much of which also turns into heat. The heat has to be radiated off, especially as you're running that air-conditioner, which also doesn't magically make things any cooler. That doesn't mean that the heat is a big issue either, since it can't be much worse than asphalt. (Don't worry about spinning the earth moon system down either.)
The necessary covered area also isn't that big, its a square about 2 degrees across at the equator, or about 120 miles on a side. When you think of that spread all over the world, it's not that big (e.g. about one square mile for every 5 million people). Of course the mistake (or notable omission) made in the previous post's calculation is the 5-20% conversion efficiency. For low cost PVs ~10% efficient you need 1mi2/500kPop. That would be about an acre/kPop. Note that even for densely populated countries like England, the population density is only 1 kPop/mi2. This means that you need to designate 1/640 of your densest areas to solar power. That would be a square of 4ft/4ft for every 100ft/100ft (quarter acre) of suburban population, and more in the multi-sotry cities. (google conversions are great!)
What would it cost though? Well we need ~13TW (WOW that's a lot of giga Watt power plants!) and solar cells have about a 200,000hr lifetime generating power at ~0.5$/kWhr. So we could amortize the cost of our electricity for only $100,000/kW. Seems like a lot. That would be $1300 trillion, or 130 years of the US GDP (spent over 25 years). Hmmmm, I don't think that's happening any time soon. Now, if it was 10x cheaper it would be a great deal. That (10x improvement) means that the world could have relatively environmentally clean energy for only 1/4 of its current GDP assuming current efficencies. What does it take to get there? Well a 3x improvement in efficiency and a 3x reduction in price, or just a 10x reduction in price (to 5c/kWhr) would be enough! This even includes economic growth so GDP and population don't have to go down (at least not for lack of power). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_cell
(Note: I'm including all the oil and stuff too, since electric is only ~25% or 3TW of energy production.)
I really hope solar gets cheap soon, because it takes energy to make these things. If you've run out of cheap oil before you build enough solar to be self supporting, you get screwed fast. Any scarcity and human beings will try to take what they need. That way lies madness.
Of course you don't have to use PVs and as you mention, wind and wave are also manifestations of present solar power. Wind is already probably a factor of 3x cheaper, not quite enough:^( I like marine concrete wave concentration pumps. They're cheap to build big, and diffraction effects might make them more cost efficient still. Unfortunately, people like their coast lines;^) so you probably have to build them offshore. My guess is that shipping ammonia from them for growing crops is probably the most efficient thing to do, although perhaps hydrogen could be made to work.
Now imagine putting a few giant concrete and steel wave power converters out into the Gulf of Mexico during Huricane Season, and imagine how much power you could generate. There... I knew you could. On average each hurcane dissapates 50x total world power consumption while it spins (and there's a lot more than 6 a year). You see, that's where nature "wastes" all her power- in ocean heating, and ultimately big storms. They contain much more energy than all the bombs we've ever dropped. We really do consume a tiny fraction
This probably only occurs with GSM cell phones. These phones use a TDMA (Time Domain Multiple Access) technique, which causes them to transmit at very high powers (2W) for short (1ms) times. Depending on the efficiency of the transmitters it's common for voltages over 20Vp-p (peak-to-peak) to be generated and transmitted to other devices.
The capacitive coupling of an antenna to a key could then be quite good at the 1-2GHz frequencies (0.5pF @ 2GHz => 150Ohms). That's a low enough impedance to power up a device (through its protection diodes) and cause it to reprogram itself due to noise on the inputs. It could actually even fry the poor little silicon device, if it rectified the voltage got up high enough (>5V) for any length of time.
It's not that hard a problem to prevent (put a filter on your inputs folks!), but I doubt the automotive key entry designers are normally thinking of transmitters at that power and frequency.
I actually agree with much of what you're saying, but in this case the government basically is a business. I think there's a bit less internal corruption in business, because there's more money to be made taking it from outsiders rather than the internal budget. There is more external corruption (Enron et al), because if you can rip off your customers or the stockholders that's where the BIG money is. Embezzlement and kickbacks are usually small timers in sales and accounting.
If you've worked for a really big business and the governtment, you'll notice that they're not really much different.
"will agile smaller businesses be able to accomplish what once required a sprawling government project?"
No, because they don't have the political power to actually get large contracts. Their larger competitors will use their influence on legislators to get "written in" to large budget bills. Can you say, "No bid contract"? Their less scrupulous competitors will bribe legislators or military procurement. We've already seen this in Iraq with everything from oil and water, to flack jackets.
The most insidious tool that's used are the absurd design requirements documents. They set out an often completely unnecessary set of requirements that often only one company, or perhaps two very large companies can provide. This keeps any bidding process "under control". What will be delivered may not even meet those requirements, but only after years of delays, "best effort", and disappointment. The only good thing that seems to come out of the larger projects are the much derided "slush funds" that let individuals actually innovate without being put under this absurd process.
Why is it set up this way? Is there a better way with the Bureaucracy we have? Is tearing it down the way to go? Good questions. DARPA and some small programs try to fix this around the edges, but something with this much money in it will always draw the crooks.
NASA is subject to the same pitfalls. It just costs less money, and fewer people die.
They're going to regulate a common substance (colloidal silver) that's been around and caused no problem (other than gun metal gray skin) in humans consuming it daily at high concentrations? I don't think it's a miracle cure, but it's been used as a mild disinfectant to treat burns and non-potable water for over a hundred years. Come on, if you're worried about Argyria you can't be that worried about toxicity. http://homepages.together.net/~rjstan/index.html
Silver is highly reactive (with oxygen) so with such a high surface area it won't remain silver for very long at all, but will react with something else to become inert. I do suppose that if you fed huge amounts to a fish, and it turned black then predators might eat it more quickly, but that's silly. If the quantities were actually significant (like the amount of chlorine and ammonia we release) then I might be worried, but right now the cost of the material and manufacturing process make large quantities absurdly expensive ~$200/gallon.
Let's worry about something that's actually a problem rather than jumping on the "nano" everything bandwagon. There are much bigger environmental problems, they just happen to make big companies money.
Actually, since I'm not there, I should have said "alumi say good riddance". I have some hope, however, for my fellow Scurvy and Mole like brethren (Arrrrrr!). There's also Avery so perhaps it's 7/8ths of the current population... do the profs keep their grad slaves long enough that there are actually more undergraduate alumni than graduate?
No doubt I've offended Badministrators, GradTurkeys, Flems and Page Boys alike, as is my sworn duty.
Well, I can tell you that 6/7ths of caltech (undergrads) is happy about this (OK actually the caltech majority graduate students don't care, because they've been in lab for the last 24hrs). The cannon belongs only to a single undergraduate house (a mandatory housing system based on dining halls from a Harvard tradition, named for the guys who funded the buildings). That house of Freudian Fame is Fleming, whose denizens are known for walking around in red athletic shirts with Big White "F"s on them (yep, no kidding). They were the jocks when I was there, and retained more of the fraternity look and feel, though Page house may well have out done them in the last year by trying to haze their freshmen in the mountains. It's amazing what the socially inept, and impractical minded will lamely copy from others.
The cannon has been RF'ed (HaXXored) a bunch of times (yes, I served time at the Institute). Mostly this has been done by the other caltech students (shock!, awe?), but it was determined to be one of a very few objects that were un-touchable by the administration to prevent on-going student horse play. It was one of the few things you could be expelled permanently from school for (or simultaneously blow several heads off with large quantities of spaghetti). Instead we bricked in the front of Fleming one night, or changed the Hollywood sign, or flooded and froze the hallways, and we got in trouble, but not big trouble. The cannon has been turned around to face Fleming (on one night before they were set to fire it... they still get 4 times a year?), and everyone (from another house) has wanted to apply more permanent silence by the use of LN2 (use your brain), but it was forbidden by the honor code. Not only you, but your house would be punished. The Flems can go get it for all I care.
The truly sad thing is that the administration seems to have taken a line in the last 10 years against any pranks. Anything interesting has largely been forbidden by the Administration (by which I mean, when the police come after you the Institute attorneys won't be on your side). Unfortunately, caltech isn't big enough for the Administration to trip over its own feet enough, it's a bit too nimble and "all knowing" for the Institutes good. Plausible deniability can be a good thing. As I mentioned to the deans when I left (low these many years ago), I felt it had turned from a school of higher learning, to an Institute of lower liability. (On that topic, has anyone noticed how that guy from Numbers is trying to look just like Gary Lorden?). It's sad to see, but they've tried to stop lock picking, tunneling, bon fires, and every other form of fun... I hope they wake up now, and realize that if the students don't train security regularly, the Institute will be publicly humiliated for it.
p.s. for reference caltech is never capitalized except in formal communications p.s. the Board of Directors will try to get the LA times not to run any story related to this
Parentheses, braces, brackets, and other standard forms of indicating meta information have ceased to function. Ceasing communication.
it's true that DMCA and CBDTPA criminalize some of these activities, but lots of things/services sold don't come with any of these rights.
why can't i transfer my plane ticket to someone else? because it's a service contract. if people could transfer their tickets we might see a more efficient market, but that would in turn lower airline ticket profits.
the media industry has noticed the convenience of this kind of contract along with supporting criminal law in supporting their profits. unfortunately, extensions of this ultimately conflict with free speach.
which is more important? corporate profits or free speach- our representatives will get to decide this in the reasonably near future.
Rather than pay $1500 to start wipo legal proceedings you may lose, why not just buy the domain back? $550 is cheap...
Why, because you've lost all business sense and hate yourself for failing to reregister the name, and the guy who got there before you and put porn all over it so that the 'big cheese' as well as the listening (or slashdot reading) public figured out what's going on. sorry, that sucks.
If you hire a good lawyer for the wipo process, _and you should_, the first thing they'll tell you is that you'll save a lot of money, just buying it back. Hopefully, they won't charge you $100 for the 15min consultation.
Now, by posting this to slashdot in what i can only guess is righteous selfdestructive ire you have very likely lost this chance or made it more expensive.
Yes I know that's an anachronism, from a time when videogames meant arcades where you paid only 25c to play for a few minutes of joy. But those were insightful, historically acurate minutes that digested all of WWII into side scrolling shooter extravoganzas.
Even if you ignore the effects of proteins feeding back to gene expression the number of combinations of genes grows exponentially. That they do at least occasionally feed back probably allows an increase in organism complexity to grow factorially with gene expression. To make things more complex, genes are not just on or off, but can be promoted to different levels of expression, which is why many of the cells in your body can be so different from each other.
The prediction of 100,000 genes was a very simplistic guess based on the total number of nucleotides and average gene length. There was little reason to believe that it would give much more than an order of magnitude, and guesses as to the actual number of genes in the academic community ranged over an order of magnitude themselves... because they just didn't know. In fact some would say we still don't know the expressed number, and you can still bet on it:
http://www.ensembl.org/Genesweep/
mitochondrial DNA doesn't count!
"And last June, in the journal Nature Genetics, two teams of scientists independently presented studies with estimates in the range of 28,000 to 35,000 genes".
Still, I think that even scientists have a hard time with combinatorial explosions. For example, it's hard to believe that 256bit encryption takes as many times longer than 128bit to guess at (ideally) as 128bit takes from knowing the answer to start with. Exponentials really don't seem intuitive so usually we use logarithms to simplify things.
Just so it's clear though, Titanium has some good points. Manufacturers seem to be able to build bikes out of it fairly easily. It's fatigue properties are significantly better than most any other material, especially at high temperature (discounting the single crystals like Ni & Si). Aluminum's fatigue strength is basically awful... try bending it a couple of times. Furthermore, Ti is rarely used as a pure metal (except for some marine and medical). Much like Aluminum, it occurs in common alloys like 6-4 (6% Al 4% Vanadium) and in alpha and beta anneal forms, which can have pretty different properties.
See the extensive data for your selves:
http://www.matweb.com/GetIndex2.asp
Aluminum has good points too... like it's got really high thermal/electrical conduction, and you can injection mold it. The latter is pretty cool, and happens because its high temp viscocity falls at high pressure. And interestingly if you go to small enough length scales like the TI micro-mirrors where you lengths are near the grain size of Aluminum the reliability goes way up.
http://www.dlp.com/dlp/resources/whitepapers/mem s/dplmems/1intro.asp
"Water cooled" makes it sound like these Toshibas are the Porches of the laptop world (as opposed to the air cooled VWs). What we're probably talking about here are heat pipes based on water (it happens to have a really high heat of vaporization, the right viscosity, and a big change in contact angle- for the meniscus). They've been used in laptops for years, mostly to get heat up on that big fin called a screen that you flip up whenever you use one.
Check out: http://www.cheresources.com/htpipes.shtml for more info on how these guys work. The key deal is that they don't require a pump to move the water, 'cause the heat does that work itself:^)
My experience is with the silicon micromachined versions of these. There are all sorts of problems they can develop (angle sensitivity, vapor lock...), but comercial versions work well, and have been around for decades, though they're not as small as you'ld like.
Currently folks at Stanford are working on electro-osmotic pumps for these exchangers to increase their efficiency/size ratio: http://www.stanford.edu/group/micr oheat/hex.html (use google if stanford fails to load like it did for me).
George Zwieg, who didn't recieve the nobel prize, but usually gets a fair bit of credit from the scientific community for the "discovery" of the quark... perhaps if Gell Mann tried harder he could become notorious among fellow scientists, but as it is I think you are right that he is doomed to obscurity.
I'd be surprised if stanford and ucsb were the only computers involved.:^| It sounds more like they were the only ones who noticed. That's a pretty important distinction, if you're going to blame the sysadmins for security holes... at least they turned in their machines and whatever logs still exist on them. Perhaps they (like exodus/global center) were running network monitoring tools to detect and respond to this kind of thing.
One example of these would be netscout, though they actually get their hardware from cisco.
Now _unfortunately_, these tools also make scanning for plaintext passwords over a WAN trivial so they should probably be banned as well, but that's just another problem for the fbi.:^)
the point may be that anecdotal reports are common. i know of at least 2 cases that i heard of before this story ever broke. they are also the only two people i know who have installed AOL5. incedentaly, i would also say that it did a real job on a laptop (vaio 505rx- did you know you can get linux on these thin guys now?! http://emperorlinux.com/), which required booting and reinstalling from the recovery CD. didn't even do the safe mode thing.
Slashdot Mirror
This is just silly. Just because there is a communication network, and a protocol does not mean that there needs to be a single point of failure. Cars can even test that the other cars are following the correct protocols, and are in proper communication. There would always be problems with loan psychotics vehicles, but people drive into market places, and drive drunk all the time.
Comments like this make me realize that South Korea will probably be the first place that has computer controlled vehicles, because they have one government composed of 7 companies that provide almost everything (insurance, banking, cars, telecom, gas, etc...). OK maybe the Japanese will do it.
Hmmm... what fraction of news published and edited in reputable journals contains factual errors? That would be another interesting story.
But come on... 90% of everything is crap. This is no more or less true in medical research, which is a fraction of the $50 billion total spent on research. OMG that's like "One MILLLLIIION DOLLLLARS". That's like 0.5% of GDP so don't be surpised when it's bunk, it's drop in the bucket compared to development costs. If you haven't figure this out you're still a little naive.
So what do real scientists and engineers (that includes doctors) do? They build something that works, and it's a long hard slog, and most of the problems you encounter aren't the cool sexy ones you thought they would be at the start. They don't make big headlines, and they've mostly been discovered (and solved) by a zillion people before you. The key is solving a problem so well that nobody has to solve it ever again! Then the other bad solutions slowly go away, and people can work on other problems (yes QWERTY is good enough).
Now with medicine, things were made a bit better because of the FDA and the clinical trials model, before the more significant political interference of the last decade. Unfortunately, there's the issue that people really want to believe in magical cures that will save uncle Milt, or their cat so they'll pressure doctors and believe con-men for the rest of time. This is fed by the journalistic-industrial lie complex.
Sure scientists are wrong all the time, or certainly less accurate than they could be, but not usually about big things. More often than not they miss the real interesting results making things come out the way they think they should. It takes someone who really believes in their ability to do something right to discover something really new... and if it's truely astounding they better be prepared to spend the next decade proving it and developing some cool new tools with it. If those things work as they predicted and not the guys before... then hey they must be on to something!
The problem is that there are all sorts of quick-fix "cranberries cure cancer" quacks out there. They're in sales where it doesn't matter if it works. That's why your computer doesn't run any faster with the new whizzy RAM than the old stuff, but it doesn't mean Moore's Law doesn't progress. The key is the guys doing the development and implementing the new ideas, and proving they work. They keep making better faster cooler stuff !THAT WORKS!
The BS you read in most hype journals (EETimes are you listening?) is mostly unproven tripe. It occasionally has a grain of truth, along with a lot of interpretation bias, and if you bothered to read the original article (did you?) and some of their other articles (hah that's harder) you can often tell what the nuance is, how careful the methods were, and whether it's worth trying to replicate yourself. Guess what if you're not in the field that paper really wasn't meant for you (it was meant for the tenure comittee or the guys who gave you a grant etc). The stock market guys may go crazy, but that's because they don't give a damn about science or the truth. Same thing with most journalists these days, frankly. They care about money, and figure their reputation won't be much worse than anyone elses.
Go read the actual article:
http://medicine.plosjournals.org/perlserv/?request=get-document&doi=10.1371/journal.pmed.0020124&ct=1
It's not nearly as interesting as reading a sensationalistic WJ article, but I give them props for linking to it.
I was hoping this was going to be about internet video sex slavery or something:^P
/. since I'm not atwork this weekend anyway.
Hmm... and putting externally available insecure computers on your network makes you vulnerable. I guess that's news to someone. Oh, well I guess I should be doing something other than reading
It's been possible to buy similar "virus level" filters for hiking since at least the 80s. The typical problems are cleaning, and clogging. See Katadyn or your local REI for a variety of samples. Then there's the "$2" (really about $7) LifeStraw, that was advertised on gizmodo 2 years ago... is this just a running theme?
If the filter is small enough to block viruses, then it is so small that even very small 1u particles will clog it. The whole filter system has to be optimized... and they still clog. They claim 1000 liters, but I'm not really buying it. If it really has something to do with distilling, then I'd be more positive, but that's usually pretty darn complex.
Perhaps he's using a teflon reverse osmosis filter? At the price, it's certainly possible. Those take significant pressure, but they would take out viruses. The water has to start pretty clean too or they develop a film which clogs them too. People have tried iodine on them as well... it works for a while. Whithout knowing what this thing is (and the website's no help), I don't think we can really talk coherently about it.
If it is just a filter you can reverse flush and clean and do a variety of other things, but if your filter clogs after a few liters you'll be _very_ unhappy. This is made more difficult by the fact that you're trying to clean out biologicals, which will happily grow in the filter so it clogs up even quicker, and the cleaning is even more important and difficult to do completely. That's why people make throw aways or just add a halogen (chlorene/iodine) to a tub of relatively filtered water (so things can diffuse) and wait an hour.
Most hikers (who bother) use a more coarse filter (for bacteria only). Often these are treated with iodine as well, and perhaps charcoal to remove bad tastes. These keep clogging problems down, and make cleaning somewhat more easy. That's what the LifeStraw is based on.
I hope this is really an advancement, but it has the smell of an ad.
Ummm... No. Look I like what you're saying but, the real issue is the efficiency of manufacture, conversion, and distribution.
:^(
We don't need to worry about freezing because we've extracted too much solar power. Quite the opposite. The albedo of most solar cells is quite a bit lower than most of the earth since they're trying to absorb light. Most of that gets turned into heat, and some of it into electricity much of which also turns into heat. The heat has to be radiated off, especially as you're running that air-conditioner, which also doesn't magically make things any cooler. That doesn't mean that the heat is a big issue either, since it can't be much worse than asphalt. (Don't worry about spinning the earth moon system down either.)
The necessary covered area also isn't that big, its a square about 2 degrees across at the equator, or about 120 miles on a side. When you think of that spread all over the world, it's not that big (e.g. about one square mile for every 5 million people). Of course the mistake (or notable omission) made in the previous post's calculation is the 5-20% conversion efficiency. For low cost PVs ~10% efficient you need 1mi2/500kPop. That would be about an acre/kPop. Note that even for densely populated countries like England, the population density is only 1 kPop/mi2. This means that you need to designate 1/640 of your densest areas to solar power. That would be a square of 4ft/4ft for every 100ft/100ft (quarter acre) of suburban population, and more in the multi-sotry cities.
(google conversions are great!)
What would it cost though? Well we need ~13TW (WOW that's a lot of giga Watt power plants!) and solar cells have about a 200,000hr lifetime generating power at ~0.5$/kWhr. So we could amortize the cost of our electricity for only $100,000/kW. Seems like a lot. That would be $1300 trillion, or 130 years of the US GDP (spent over 25 years). Hmmmm, I don't think that's happening any time soon. Now, if it was 10x cheaper it would be a great deal. That (10x improvement) means that the world could have relatively environmentally clean energy for only 1/4 of its current GDP assuming current efficencies. What does it take to get there? Well a 3x improvement in efficiency and a 3x reduction in price, or just a 10x reduction in price (to 5c/kWhr) would be enough! This even includes economic growth so GDP and population don't have to go down (at least not for lack of power).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_cell
(Note: I'm including all the oil and stuff too, since electric is only ~25% or 3TW of energy production.)
I really hope solar gets cheap soon, because it takes energy to make these things. If you've run out of cheap oil before you build enough solar to be self supporting, you get screwed fast. Any scarcity and human beings will try to take what they need. That way lies madness.
Of course you don't have to use PVs and as you mention, wind and wave are also manifestations of present solar power. Wind is already probably a factor of 3x cheaper, not quite enough
I like marine concrete wave concentration pumps. They're cheap to build big, and diffraction effects might make them more cost efficient still. Unfortunately, people like their coast lines;^) so you probably have to build them offshore. My guess is that shipping ammonia from them for growing crops is probably the most efficient thing to do, although perhaps hydrogen could be made to work.
Now imagine putting a few giant concrete and steel wave power converters out into the Gulf of Mexico during Huricane Season, and imagine how much power you could generate. There... I knew you could. On average each hurcane dissapates 50x total world power consumption while it spins (and there's a lot more than 6 a year). You see, that's where nature "wastes" all her power- in ocean heating, and ultimately big storms. They contain much more energy than all the bombs we've ever dropped. We really do consume a tiny fraction
This probably only occurs with GSM cell phones. These phones use a TDMA (Time Domain Multiple Access) technique, which causes them to transmit at very high powers (2W) for short (1ms) times. Depending on the efficiency of the transmitters it's common for voltages over 20Vp-p (peak-to-peak) to be generated and transmitted to other devices.
The capacitive coupling of an antenna to a key could then be quite good at the 1-2GHz frequencies (0.5pF @ 2GHz => 150Ohms). That's a low enough impedance to power up a device (through its protection diodes) and cause it to reprogram itself due to noise on the inputs. It could actually even fry the poor little silicon device, if it rectified the voltage got up high enough (>5V) for any length of time.
It's not that hard a problem to prevent (put a filter on your inputs folks!), but I doubt the automotive key entry designers are normally thinking of transmitters at that power and frequency.
The Rabelais footnote is a really interesting example of culture.
Could you provide a more complete citation?
I actually agree with much of what you're saying, but in this case the government basically is a business.
I think there's a bit less internal corruption in business, because there's more money to be made taking it from outsiders rather than the internal budget. There is more external corruption (Enron et al), because if you can rip off your customers or the stockholders that's where the BIG money is. Embezzlement and kickbacks are usually small timers in sales and accounting.
If you've worked for a really big business and the governtment, you'll notice that they're not really much different.
"will agile smaller businesses be able to accomplish what once required a sprawling government project?"
No, because they don't have the political power to actually get large contracts. Their larger competitors will use their influence on legislators to get "written in" to large budget bills. Can you say, "No bid contract"? Their less scrupulous competitors will bribe legislators or military procurement. We've already seen this in Iraq with everything from oil and water, to flack jackets.
The most insidious tool that's used are the absurd design requirements documents. They set out an often completely unnecessary set of requirements that often only one company, or perhaps two very large companies can provide. This keeps any bidding process "under control". What will be delivered may not even meet those requirements, but only after years of delays, "best effort", and disappointment. The only good thing that seems to come out of the larger projects are the much derided "slush funds" that let individuals actually innovate without being put under this absurd process.
Why is it set up this way? Is there a better way with the Bureaucracy we have? Is tearing it down the way to go? Good questions. DARPA and some small programs try to fix this around the edges, but something with this much money in it will always draw the crooks.
NASA is subject to the same pitfalls. It just costs less money, and fewer people die.
They're going to regulate a common substance (colloidal silver) that's been around and caused no problem (other than gun metal gray skin) in humans consuming it daily at high concentrations? I don't think it's a miracle cure, but it's been used as a mild disinfectant to treat burns and non-potable water for over a hundred years. Come on, if you're worried about Argyria you can't be that worried about toxicity.
0 Last%20accessed%202/01/05
http://homepages.together.net/~rjstan/index.html
Silver is highly reactive (with oxygen) so with such a high surface area it won't remain silver for very long at all, but will react with something else to become inert. I do suppose that if you fed huge amounts to a fish, and it turned black then predators might eat it more quickly, but that's silly. If the quantities were actually significant (like the amount of chlorine and ammonia we release) then I might be worried, but right now the cost of the material and manufacturing process make large quantities absurdly expensive ~$200/gallon.
Let's worry about something that's actually a problem rather than jumping on the "nano" everything bandwagon. There are much bigger environmental problems, they just happen to make big companies money.
What total idiots!
Their own study indicates that humans who have consumed "a bottle a day for 30 years" suffered from argyria and little else.
http://www.epa.gov/iris/subst/0099.htm#reforal.%2
Actually, since I'm not there, I should have said "alumi say good riddance". I have some hope, however, for my fellow Scurvy and Mole like brethren (Arrrrrr!). There's also Avery so perhaps it's 7/8ths of the current population... do the profs keep their grad slaves long enough that there are actually more undergraduate alumni than graduate?
No doubt I've offended Badministrators, GradTurkeys, Flems and Page Boys alike, as is my sworn duty.
Well, I can tell you that 6/7ths of caltech (undergrads) is happy about this (OK actually the caltech majority graduate students don't care, because they've been in lab for the last 24hrs). The cannon belongs only to a single undergraduate house (a mandatory housing system based on dining halls from a Harvard tradition, named for the guys who funded the buildings). That house of Freudian Fame is Fleming, whose denizens are known for walking around in red athletic shirts with Big White "F"s on them (yep, no kidding). They were the jocks when I was there, and retained more of the fraternity look and feel, though Page house may well have out done them in the last year by trying to haze their freshmen in the mountains. It's amazing what the socially inept, and impractical minded will lamely copy from others.
The cannon has been RF'ed (HaXXored) a bunch of times (yes, I served time at the Institute). Mostly this has been done by the other caltech students (shock!, awe?), but it was determined to be one of a very few objects that were un-touchable by the administration to prevent on-going student horse play. It was one of the few things you could be expelled permanently from school for (or simultaneously blow several heads off with large quantities of spaghetti). Instead we bricked in the front of Fleming one night, or changed the Hollywood sign, or flooded and froze the hallways, and we got in trouble, but not big trouble. The cannon has been turned around to face Fleming (on one night before they were set to fire it... they still get 4 times a year?), and everyone (from another house) has wanted to apply more permanent silence by the use of LN2 (use your brain), but it was forbidden by the honor code. Not only you, but your house would be punished. The Flems can go get it for all I care.
The truly sad thing is that the administration seems to have taken a line in the last 10 years against any pranks. Anything interesting has largely been forbidden by the Administration (by which I mean, when the police come after you the Institute attorneys won't be on your side). Unfortunately, caltech isn't big enough for the Administration to trip over its own feet enough, it's a bit too nimble and "all knowing" for the Institutes good. Plausible deniability can be a good thing. As I mentioned to the deans when I left (low these many years ago), I felt it had turned from a school of higher learning, to an Institute of lower liability. (On that topic, has anyone noticed how that guy from Numbers is trying to look just like Gary Lorden?). It's sad to see, but they've tried to stop lock picking, tunneling, bon fires, and every other form of fun... I hope they wake up now, and realize that if the students don't train security regularly, the Institute will be publicly humiliated for it.
p.s. for reference caltech is never capitalized except in formal communications
p.s. the Board of Directors will try to get the LA times not to run any story related to this
Parentheses, braces, brackets, and other standard forms of indicating meta information have ceased to function. Ceasing communication.
aha! the east pole
;^)
where the easter bunny lives
... found the journalist's book on Amazon (a cookbook I believe) ... just end up leaving a bad taste in everyone's mouth
Was the cookbook that bad?
They were until Amazon cooked them!
It has the link that should have been on the front page for balance, if not accuracy.
it's true that DMCA and CBDTPA criminalize some of these activities, but lots of things/services sold don't come with any of these rights.
why can't i transfer my plane ticket to someone else? because it's a service contract. if people could transfer their tickets we might see a more efficient market, but that would in turn lower airline ticket profits.
the media industry has noticed the convenience of this kind of contract along with supporting criminal law in supporting their profits. unfortunately, extensions of this ultimately conflict with free speach.
which is more important? corporate profits or free speach- our representatives will get to decide this in the reasonably near future.
Rather than pay $1500 to start wipo legal proceedings you may lose, why not just buy the domain back? $550 is cheap...
Why, because you've lost all business sense and hate yourself for failing to reregister the name, and the guy who got there before you and put porn all over it so that the 'big cheese' as well as the listening (or slashdot reading) public figured out what's going on. sorry, that sucks.
If you hire a good lawyer for the wipo process, _and you should_, the first thing they'll tell you is that you'll save a lot of money, just buying it back. Hopefully, they won't charge you $100 for the 15min consultation.
Now, by posting this to slashdot in what i can only guess is righteous selfdestructive ire you have very likely lost this chance or made it more expensive.
Good luck.
Yes I know that's an anachronism, from a time when videogames meant arcades where you paid only 25c to play for a few minutes of joy. But those were insightful, historically acurate minutes that digested all of WWII into side scrolling shooter extravoganzas.
Even if you ignore the effects of proteins feeding back to gene expression the number of combinations of genes grows exponentially. That they do at least occasionally feed back probably allows an increase in organism complexity to grow factorially with gene expression. To make things more complex, genes are not just on or off, but can be promoted to different levels of expression, which is why many of the cells in your body can be so different from each other.
The prediction of 100,000 genes was a very simplistic guess based on the total number of nucleotides and average gene length. There was little reason to believe that it would give much more than an order of magnitude, and guesses as to the actual number of genes in the academic community ranged over an order of magnitude themselves... because they just didn't know. In fact some would say we still don't know the expressed number, and you can still bet on it:
http://www.ensembl.org/Genesweep/
mitochondrial DNA doesn't count!
"And last June, in the journal Nature Genetics, two teams of scientists independently presented studies with estimates in the range of 28,000 to 35,000 genes".
Still, I think that even scientists have a hard time with combinatorial explosions. For example, it's hard to believe that 256bit encryption takes as many times longer than 128bit to guess at (ideally) as 128bit takes from knowing the answer to start with. Exponentials really don't seem intuitive so usually we use logarithms to simplify things.
See the extensive data for your selves:
http://www.matweb.com/GetIndex2.asp
Aluminum has good points too... like it's got really high thermal/electrical conduction, and you can injection mold it. The latter is pretty cool, and happens because its high temp viscocity falls at high pressure. And interestingly if you go to small enough length scales like the TI micro-mirrors where you lengths are near the grain size of Aluminum the reliability goes way up.
http://www.dlp.com/dlp/resources/whitepapers/me
"Water cooled" makes it sound like these Toshibas are the Porches of the laptop world (as opposed to the air cooled VWs). What we're probably talking about here are heat pipes based on water (it happens to have a really high heat of vaporization, the right viscosity, and a big change in contact angle- for the meniscus). They've been used in laptops for years, mostly to get heat up on that big fin called a screen that you flip up whenever you use one.
:^)
Check out: http://www.cheresources.com/htpipes.shtml
for more info on how these guys work. The key deal is that they don't require a pump to move the water, 'cause the heat does that work itself
My experience is with the silicon micromachined versions of these. There are all sorts of problems they can develop (angle sensitivity, vapor lock...), but comercial versions work well, and have been around for decades, though they're not as small as you'ld like.
Currently folks at Stanford are working on electro-osmotic pumps for these exchangers to increase their efficiency/size ratio:
http://www.stanford.edu/group/micr oheat/hex.html
(use google if stanford fails to load like it did for me).
enjoy,
Kurth
George Zwieg, who didn't recieve the nobel prize, but usually gets a fair bit of credit from the scientific community for the "discovery" of the quark... perhaps if Gell Mann tried harder he could become notorious among fellow scientists, but as it is I think you are right that he is doomed to obscurity.
UCSB Local Press/Press release
by just someone on 04:15 PM February 12th, 2000 EST
(#49)
(just someone User Info)
"Actually, the ucsb admin was doing some sluething..."
check out his summary of an actually informative article:
SB Newspress: http://news.newspress.com/toplocal/computer.htm
I'd be surprised if stanford and ucsb were the only computers involved. :^|
:^)
It sounds more like they were the only ones who noticed. That's a pretty important distinction, if you're going to blame the sysadmins for security holes... at least they turned in their machines and whatever logs still exist on them. Perhaps they (like exodus/global center) were running network monitoring tools to detect and respond to this kind of thing.
One example of these would be netscout, though they actually get their hardware from cisco.
Now _unfortunately_, these tools also make scanning for plaintext passwords over a WAN trivial so they should probably be banned as well, but that's just another problem for the fbi.
the point may be that anecdotal reports are common. i know of at least 2 cases that i heard of before this story ever broke. they are also the only two people i know who have installed AOL5. incedentaly, i would also say that it did a real job on a laptop (vaio 505rx- did you know you can get linux on these thin guys now?! http://emperorlinux.com/), which required booting and reinstalling from the recovery CD. didn't even do the safe mode thing.