"Liquidmetal" is just a trade name. The stuff is a disordered solid that can be compared to a glass (in structure - not transparency) or a "supercooled liquid". I've seen thin pieces of an iron based alloy of this type, and it has better yeild strength, better corrosion resistance, and better magnetic properties than a polycrystalline material with the same composition. The trick has been to produce an alloy of this type cheaply and in large thicknesses and still have decent strength etc. Various methods have been tried over the last couple of decades (it dates back to well before 1992 - I had a strip of an iron based alloy of this type produced by "Allied" some time around 1990, cheap enough to be handed as free samples to students) like pouring onto water-cooled copper disks to make thin sheets, then laminating the sheets together or forcing peices together with explosives. This advance involves changing the material so a much lower cooling rate is needed, so you can make bigger pieces more easily. This is very important, since once you get this stuff hot and let it cool too slowly it becomes a very ordinary material.
Just like diamond, however, if you get it hot you lose all of the wonderful properties. The same holds for the aluminium alloys that are used in aircraft, and that hasn't been a problem for nearly a century.
You can also run WindowMaker on Cygwin (comes bundled now), or any other window manager, as long as you can compile it on Cygwin, on Cygwin/XFree86
Or any window manager at all, as long as you run that on another box. I used Enlightenment running on a RedHat box on the local network, I just had to start Cygwin/XFree86 with no window manager (or kill twm once it was running), give the linux box permission to talk to X on the NT box, log into the linux box, then run the window manager with DISPLAY set to the NT box. A pain the first time, but a script can do it after that. Once the window manager is running you can use the menus to run stuff on the linux box and show it on the NT box - since DISPLAY stays the same. Obviously it also handles the locally run applications that use X as well.
And it's just like a toy - intended for children but grown men will play with it for hours.
Freon - a perfect name for vapourware
on
Microsoft Freon
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· Score: 2
It had to be said.
Good ideas in there though - but absolutly nothing that can't already be cobbled together today by amatuers with a hobby on mac, MS and *nix platforms. Getting it to be cheap will be the challenge.
There might be some Tesla type of technology needed here to make this work, but the rewards would be high.
Yes, it's called alternating current. I believe the engineers also use "broadcast power" (also known as radio, the patent was posthumously awarded to Tesla) to communicate. All of those crap "In search of" TV programs have led us to see a successful inventor as some sort of mystical crackpot, by leaving off little facts like Tesla abandoning the idea of broadcast power after he found out what the losses would be.
the only countries that I know of where there are real government-legislated economic incentives to minimise such losses are Australia
Not any more, we scrapped it in 1997 to follow the Californian model (I kid you not) due to "competition policy." It is an extremely weird situation, since government bodies run all power stations that can get electrons to capital cities, and power is sold on paper from places the current cannot come from. The economies of scale vanised, and for some reason all of the local monopolies started spending lots of money on advertising and dubious real estate ventures.
These devices were not designed to produce electricity, were they?
Actually they are - they are diesel-electric locomotives. A diesel engine drives a generator, which drives a large electric motor, and allows the locomotive to move along without the need to change gears while having the engine running at an efficient speed. It's important to be able to increase speed gradually when you are pulling a few thousand tonnes.
However, the locomotives made to move, and are not as efficient as a fixed diesel generator of the same size. They are nowhere near as efficient as a small unit in a tiny coal/oil burning steam power plant (and for such things bigger and hotter is better) but have the advantage that you don't have to wait three years for a turbine to be built. You can just park them in the right place and wire them up in days.
Let's not even consider nukes in this discussion - do you know how long it takes to built those plants or how much it costs? (let alone other problems). It looks very much like extra capacity was needed a decade ago, and waiting another decade for a very expensive solution may not be a good idea. It's just as well that people in the USA are used to "brownouts" by now.
Why does Sierra Railroad have such excess capacity
I'm not sure that they do - but if the power authority is desperate enough to use locomotives I don't think they care about lost freight capacity.
In my state (not in the USA) the stop-gap measure was old jet engines burning kerosine (or some similarly expensive fuel). Like California there was no excuse for it to happen, just incredibly stupid and short sighted actions on the part of those in control.
No, it's a "corporatised" group entirely owned by the government. These organisations used to be called "Qangos" and now they are called government corporations. It has something to do with making treasury figures look good, changing the "culture" of the public service organisations, and being able to keep blame at arms length. Australia is full of enormous numbers of these organisations. I used to work for a group called "Austa Electric" which was entirely owned and controlled by a state government. It even had shares for some reason, despite only having a single shareholder.
So in short, look at the website and you'll see some fine print somewhere about it being 100% government owned.
I heard that their cash was so indestructable that the company making it went out of business.
Would a government be mad enough to give a private body full and absolute control of their currency?
It must be some NRA weirdness like all the "Road Warrior" sort of stuff that was supposed to have happened here when semi-automatics and handguns were restricted.
I mean, if there were all these magical things Japan and Europe invented don't you think they would be making a killing selling them to us?
Um, they have - look at all the Toyotas and Mercs for a start, then look at high tech industries led by Du Pont, Siemens, Fujitsu, Sony etc. Then take a look at American plumbing! That said, conservatism is rife everywhere and it takes a while for good ideas to take hold, and I don't know what this has to do with US cash anyway. Just fix the stuff so that it can't be copied so easily.
"The anti-counterfeit measures are basically non-existant"...
... except for the watermarks...
The world has moved on. It isn't the 1930s anymore, those tricks are failing on a regular basis and having enormous values on bills means that people have found it worth it to buy the stuff they need to do good reproductions.
Perhaps applying 1980s or above technologies won't work either due to the huge value of some bills. You guys have $500 bills don't you? If a crim has to spend half that to make every bill it is certainly worth their while. Perhaps phasing out the big bills and pushing more electronic funds transfer may help (although security is sometimes pretty bad there).
Yes, it makes it nice and easy to copy. A couple of years ago there was an estimate printed in New Scientist that around one fifth of the US dollars floating around Europe were not printed at the US mint. That's a serious amount of cash, there's almost as much money in US dollars outside of the USA than inside (hence the currency fluctuations since last year).
US bills demand respect
Yes, they look just like the money out of monopoly only all the same colour and printed on toilet paper! They are respected for the value they represent, not for what they look like. There are certainly advantages to polymer money, like durability, being able to go for a swim with a wallet full of cash and the unexpected one of being able to scratch off the hologram of your ruler with a coin.
"Xbox Live has military grade security to ensure no cheaters, no hackers, and no viruses."
It's true folks - nothing stops NT on on a warship - particularly when you divide by nothing.
Still, I hope they live up to their claims for the sake of the net. After all, they've come a long way since they couldn't get "ping" right (eg. the ping of death attack which could bring a server down with one command).
...that we end up going back to old technology? I mean, this is basically an old printing press
Think carefully - we are living in the age of steam! Most of our buildings are built using Roman technology (concrete). Both refinements of old technologies and new technologies have a place.
In the case of semiconductor technology, the die size is currently the limiting factor. I saw someone make a single atomic layer thick diode junction with Indium-Gallium-Arsenide on Silicon over a decade ago, using fairly basic equipment (a home made chemical vapour deposition setup) at a small university. Thickness isn't a problem - it's area. When we eventually hit nanotech, we'll see a lot of small versions of existing technology.
7 Years In Tibet had a very accurate representation of the physics of a pendulum
It's a pity that it didn't have a very accurate representation of Tibet. I watched it and thought "Wow - Tibetans look just like Mexicans!." Next they'll be casting Inuits from Canada for Kalahali Bushmen.
Anyway, "Seven Years with Brad Pitt" is not a movie I would recommend to anyone. The only reason I can think of that it was made was to cash in on Tibet being "trendy" - even all of the exciting bits from the novel or from what really happened were cut out and replaced with a boring fantasy.
so I can get rid of this shitty ass Telstra ADSL account
Very true - the funny thing is that in this country the papers are full of stuff about how there are not many people getting broadband connections. The reality is that the services are very poor and very expensive - so dial up is still the best way to go for most. Telstra invented ISDN, so they want everyone to use that (at premium rates) instead of a very unstable ADSL network (at premium rates and very localised areas). All of the people I know with ADSL have had problems - not a single happy customer; various stuff ups like Telstra deleting all their ADSL customers websites over Easter (and having no backups) annoyed a lot of people. All tremble before the power of the monopoly. Other companies are reselling Telstra ADSL, but when something fails you still have to deal with Telstra.
One problem with the wireless nets in Australia is that they have to connect to Telstra somewhere. Connecting at multiple points for redundancy is not a solution, since the ADSL service often goes down en-masse. The cable services are very localised, and have not expanded in five years.
Dude, when you guys build your internet, we promise we won't try to control it. As long as your using ours, you'll just have to deal with things like this.
That's right - Al Gore invented it didn't he?
Oddly enough, almost every bit of the net that exists outside of the US was built by others, and each seperate network was joined to each other and to the US network - giving an international network (hence the name internet). Even a backwater like Australia had a nationwide computer network run by the universities before it was connected to the US network. It is not a US network - it is an international network. Currently the US has a great deal of financial control of the internet (it costs others to get data both to AND from the US, while the US mainly only pays for internal traffic), and I can only see this increasing.
In light of this CHINA decides it doesn't want that headache of a bill when they re-unify and drops demands for unification of the two countrys(province & country what ever) and now taiwan is free to be their own country(and in trouble with all those licenses they now own)..
Do you realise that China is a lot bigger (and nastier) than microsoft? Forget the conspiracy theories, the agenda is clear - they want something that can easily be modified to fit local conditions, so it's better to be able to modify the source code than wait six months for a service pack (or never) - and have the support for old data vanish every three years or so.
At approx 3000 tonnes I would hate to know how much carbon was burnt to construct this monolith. At a saving of approx 90T/annum of Carbon emmisions (the rebate for solar energy) this will be back to break even approx 2035.
It costs energy to make anything that is constructed - even weaving a basket with has a carbon debt. After all, the materials had to get to you somehow, plus the energy that went into producing and transporting the food that you ate for lunch before, and if you do it with the light on that adds in as well. In a lot of cases it just isn't worth claculating such things, the figures you get for oil, coal etc. carbon debts would usually just include the fuel and not transportation, construction, mining, energy used when the contractors are watching tv at night etc. In the case of alternative energies a lot of these things are considered to make the figures look bad - but there is no real comparison. The "carbon debt" is usally at best a very rough comparison, and at worst a lie used for political ends. The numbers are just not kept in track in enough detail. Even the carbon debt for the CPU of the computer you are reading this on is going to vary wildly based on the batch size, rejection rate, and how big the zone-refining setup for the silicon was. The carbon debt for all the copper bits will also vary wildly.
stuff like steel uses a bit less
You need to use a lot of carbon to make steel, and a lot of electricity to make aluminium. How you get the electricty will affect the carbon debt of the aluminium wildly - if it's from the south end of Australia it will be from hydro, if it's from the north it will be from coal - it isn't just a simple number.
Besides, with processes like sol-gel you can almost make solar cells in a bucket, and cure them in an oven.
Doesn't extinction by humans seem like another form of natural selection?
The whole process was run by a beuracracy - you can't get anything less natural, but at least it's well documented.
If we bring back a species, even one that we drove to extinction, doesn't that invalidate natural selection entirely?
Natural selection is a lot more complex than the 19th century economic theory that Darwin used as a metaphor. There are very few monopoly animals (I suspect that we are the only one). Where there are lions there are also hyenas. Where there are wilderbeast there are also antelopes. There's sybiosis and a lot of strange depenancies, which are not necessarily fixed. So potentially interesting philosophy aside, you're talking about a metaphor and not the real thing.
Slashdot Mirror
Just like diamond, however, if you get it hot you lose all of the wonderful properties. The same holds for the aluminium alloys that are used in aircraft, and that hasn't been a problem for nearly a century.
It also stops all of those annoying exploits of the spoon protocol by script kiddies.
Good ideas in there though - but absolutly nothing that can't already be cobbled together today by amatuers with a hobby on mac, MS and *nix platforms. Getting it to be cheap will be the challenge.
However, the locomotives made to move, and are not as efficient as a fixed diesel generator of the same size. They are nowhere near as efficient as a small unit in a tiny coal/oil burning steam power plant (and for such things bigger and hotter is better) but have the advantage that you don't have to wait three years for a turbine to be built. You can just park them in the right place and wire them up in days.
Let's not even consider nukes in this discussion - do you know how long it takes to built those plants or how much it costs? (let alone other problems). It looks very much like extra capacity was needed a decade ago, and waiting another decade for a very expensive solution may not be a good idea. It's just as well that people in the USA are used to "brownouts" by now.
In my state (not in the USA) the stop-gap measure was old jet engines burning kerosine (or some similarly expensive fuel). Like California there was no excuse for it to happen, just incredibly stupid and short sighted actions on the part of those in control.
So in short, look at the website and you'll see some fine print somewhere about it being 100% government owned.
It must be some NRA weirdness like all the "Road Warrior" sort of stuff that was supposed to have happened here when semi-automatics and handguns were restricted.
Perhaps applying 1980s or above technologies won't work either due to the huge value of some bills. You guys have $500 bills don't you? If a crim has to spend half that to make every bill it is certainly worth their while. Perhaps phasing out the big bills and pushing more electronic funds transfer may help (although security is sometimes pretty bad there).
Still, I hope they live up to their claims for the sake of the net. After all, they've come a long way since they couldn't get "ping" right (eg. the ping of death attack which could bring a server down with one command).
In the case of semiconductor technology, the die size is currently the limiting factor. I saw someone make a single atomic layer thick diode junction with Indium-Gallium-Arsenide on Silicon over a decade ago, using fairly basic equipment (a home made chemical vapour deposition setup) at a small university. Thickness isn't a problem - it's area. When we eventually hit nanotech, we'll see a lot of small versions of existing technology.
Anyway, "Seven Years with Brad Pitt" is not a movie I would recommend to anyone. The only reason I can think of that it was made was to cash in on Tibet being "trendy" - even all of the exciting bits from the novel or from what really happened were cut out and replaced with a boring fantasy.
One problem with the wireless nets in Australia is that they have to connect to Telstra somewhere. Connecting at multiple points for redundancy is not a solution, since the ADSL service often goes down en-masse. The cable services are very localised, and have not expanded in five years.
Oddly enough, almost every bit of the net that exists outside of the US was built by others, and each seperate network was joined to each other and to the US network - giving an international network (hence the name internet). Even a backwater like Australia had a nationwide computer network run by the universities before it was connected to the US network. It is not a US network - it is an international network. Currently the US has a great deal of financial control of the internet (it costs others to get data both to AND from the US, while the US mainly only pays for internal traffic), and I can only see this increasing.
It had to be said!
Besides, with processes like sol-gel you can almost make solar cells in a bucket, and cure them in an oven.
Wasn't that simple, and it wasn't really his boss that tried to take control either - just someone that wanted to be.