Sounds like a lot of hype with no real basis in fact. Given their figures of 35 degrees in, 140 degrees out, lets do a little simply math.
We're raising the temperature of the water by 105 degrees. A gallon of water weights about 8 lbs. So in order to heat just 1 gallon of water takes 8 * 105 = 840 BTUs. Finally, lets assume that you need the 1 gallon over a 1 minute period.
840 BTU/min = 14770 watts.
Hmm. 14770 watts is equal to 67 amps at 220 volts. Quite a large load.
What can we do with a gallon per minute of hot water? Not much. In fact a typical shower takes about 2.5 to 3 gallons per minute. Guess we need to triple the power consumption.
Now nothing that I've ever heard about Microwave heating implies that they manage to produce more heating than the power being supplied to them. Also considering that I've seen the specs for a tankless electric hot water heater (which just happens to have 3 stages where each stage happens to be supplied by an independent 60 amp breaker). I have to call into question the reason for even adding the complexity and expense of using microwaves for a tankless hot water heater. The simple fact is that there already exist tankless units (both gas and electric). However, gas is far more commonly used simply because of the much higher energy density. However, there are electric tankless unit if you happen to have a high enough capacity service. I really don't see microwaves managing to reduce the numbers in way, shape, or form.
After all, they're still finding Viking farms under the ice in Greenland. I suspect that we have people looking at short term changes and ignoring the geological evidence about cyclic changes in world temperatures.
show that the company is definitely having problems providing useful information.
The spec sheet for the N-Charge I has at the end a useful little chart that gives hard numbers like how many Amp-hours and watt-hours that the battery is rated for. However, N-Charge II has a nice sales pitch without any hard numbers on actual battery capacity.
Yes. Let's do a bit of back of the envelope calculations.
According to the CIA World Factbook the United States generated 3.6 trillion kilowatt hours of electricity in 2001 (I will ignore the power in the gasoline that was burned in cars, the oil used to heat homes and businesses, etc. Those items will increase the power requirement. These calculations are just what's required to replace the electric generation capability with solar).
Now at the equator, the solar intensity is about 1 kilowatt per square meter. If I assume that the 3.6 trillion kilowatt hours is evenly consumed over the year, this means that every day. 10 billion kilowatt hours is consumed. Assuming that the collectors work for an average of 12 hours per day (I'm being generious) That means that each square meter of collection area captures 12 kilowatt hours of power per day. This requires 833 million square meters of collection area. Oh did I mention that this 833 million square meters is with an assumed efficiency of 100%? What? You don't have a 100% efficient method of collecting solar power? No problem, just use more area. The most efficient solar cell that I can find runs at about 17% Most likely, you'll find something in the 6% to 10% range. But I'll use the 17% cells. That means that I need 5 billion square meters of collection area. Mind you, this is assuming an average of 12 hours per day every day. (Clouds not permitted). And assuming that the collection area is near the equator. There is NO excess capacity to deal with peak loads and NO storage capacity to deal with cloudy days. Now how big is 5 billion square meters? That would be 5000 square kilometers. How big is 5000 square kilometers? For reference, Delaware is about 5160 square kilometers in size. Just about right for the minimum required area.
But wait, there's more!
You need to add in a factor to deal with peak loads and cloudy/rainy days. A factor of 4 is typical industry standard, so you just have to pave over an area slightly greater than New Jersey (try filling out the environmental impact statement for that!).
Also, remember that the above calculations are just for replacing the electric generation capacity for the power used in the United States for the year 2001. If you intend on also replacing the power used in the form of gasoline and heating oil as well as the power used in the rest of the world, please multiply the required area by the appropiate factors.
Excuse me? Once it was discovered that "This Land Is Your Land" was already in the public domain, there no longer was a case capable of being fought. I can just imagine what would have happened if EFF did bring it before the court:
EFF: Your honor, during discovery, we found out that "This Land Is Your Land" is actually in the public domain. JUDGE: That's good to know. Now after finding that little piece of information, why are you wasting the time of this court? Case dismissed!
Huh? If I remember what I've read in the past, the thing that made Unix unique was that it was written mostly in a fairly high level language like C with very little assembly. Before that point, OSes were written primarily in assembly or macro assembly. That is a major reason that Unix was ported across so many platforms so quickly.
The "salt" is used to change how the password is hashed. If you look at the shadow password file on your computer, you'll see some lines that look like this
root:$1$abcdefge$abcd1234efg789hijklmno:0:0:...
You'll notice that the password field (the stuff after the 1st colon, and before the 2nd colon) is itself divided into 3 fields separated by dollar signs. The purpose of these fields are:
1st field - Identifies hashing method. This allows for future changes to how the password in stored while allowing backward compatability with existing passwords.
2nd field - This contains the salt used to hash the password. In order to verify a new password, this exact salt must be used in the hashing process. Since in this case, it's 8 characters long and each character can be one of 64 values, it means that each possible password my be hashed into one of 2^48 different values. This salt is generated randomly at the time that you set your password. The randomly generated salt is then stored here for use in verifying future authencation attempts.
3rd field - This is the actual hashed password using the salt specified in the previous field. It is 22 characters long, which with base 64 encoding can store 132 bits. Since MD5 only hashes to 128 bits, there are 4 unused bits at the tail end of this value.
Yes, the slashdot effect is against their TOS. To quote:
You agree not to take any action that will impose a disproportionately large or unreasonable load on our computer web server(s), network, or other infrastructure. Please be mindful of the large amounts of data transfer needed to allow viewing of the CPRR Museum web pages with multiple, large images, and avoid suddenly flooding the CPRR Museum website with large numbers of unanticipated visitors. Suddenly increased, excess web traffic on this website as a result of your actions, including but not limited to publicity, reporting, or recommendations to others regarding this website on network television or radio or national publications or media, of more than one gigabyte of additional Internet data transfer per month, shall be at your expense, and you agree to reimburse CPRR.org for the resulting costs at the rate of the then prevailing additional data transfer charge made by the Internet provider(s) hosting this website.
They will be changing their serial number from about 2004020900 to something about 1075680000 which according to the DNS system will be an older serial number because the difference is only 928340900 which is much less than half the range of a 32 bit number. They can make the change that they are planning if they make two changes with at least their cache interval amount of time between the changes. See RFC-1034.
The manufactures say that you should/must use matched drives.
One implication of this, is that if a drive in a RAID array fails, you should replace it with a drive that matches the other drives in the array. But, since you most likely don't have a spare matching drive or two, then you should replace all of the drives in the array.
Somehow, that doesn't seem right and therefore the claim that the drives in an array should/must match is false.
According to the article, the intensity would be limited to 20% or less that of the noon-time sun. Also, they claim that 20 terawatts of power would be generated. Making a few assumptions (1 kilowatt for noon-time sun in Arizona), I figure that an area about the size of Connecticut would have to be covered with receivers. Seems a tad large to be useful.
I suspect that this product will flag a lot of false positives. After reading the white paper, I believe that the following code would be considered "insecure."
Yes, and take a look at the number of U-boats that were spotted and sunk because of helium filled blimbs. Helium was a stratigic war material and the US was not about to believe that any helium given to Germany for the Hindenburg would stay in the Hindenburg.
In order for this scheme to even work it requires.
1. An encryption method that is secret
2. A tamper proof implementation of same
3. A method of detecting if the GPS signals are being spoofed
Reasoning.
1. If the method isn't secret, then someone can simply say screw the hardware, and build a decryptor that can generate the key for any location of earth to pass to the encryption algorythm.
2. If the implementation isn't tamperproof, it can be spoofed into acting as if it's anywhere I want. Also the algorythm can be compromised (see #1 above).
3. If it can't detect a spoofed GPS signal, then once again, I can have it act as if it's anywhere I want it to be.
As regards performing an exhaustive key search to decrypt the data (using whatever method you desire), the following tidbits are available for your consideration.
1. There is about 2^61 10 meter square places on the surface of the earth. 2^61 is a fairly large number, but not out of the realm of an exhaustive search.
2. But, in most cases, you don't need to perform an exhaustive search. The location is already specified for the "protected" data. All you really need is an "unapproved" implementation of the algorythm and you simply dial in the approved location and decode to your hearts' desire.
Overall, this is one of the sillier ideas that I've seen.
Nope, I'm not trolling. And you're correct, I haven't used a mem-card-based console before. Are you assuming that the customs official if he bothered to look up the web site wouldn't make the same mistake? Gee, here is a tool designed to read information stored internally to the console. Yep, sounds like piracy and I have got to stop it. Never mind that the decision was wrong, he made to call to support a bad law in the fashion he believed was right.
Looking at that link I see the following features listed:
1. Connect your DC console with your PC.
OK 2. Develop your own DC projects such as games, demos, etc.
OK 3. Upload already existing demos which can be downloaded from the Internet.
OK 4. Read memory card save datas and exchange them with friends.
Not OK
Number 4 looks like pirating and it's advertised as a product feature.
And look closely at the floating point math code. Microsoft basic had a bug in their floating point software that persisted until hardware floating point coprocessors became the norm. To demonstrate, type the following program into any microsoft based system running on an 8080, Z80, 8088, 8086 etc based processor without a math coprocessor.
A = 1E38
print A
B = 1E19
print B
C = 1E38
print C
You will find that the calculation of C causes a floating point overflow.
Like it's been said by others, the GreenVolt cells are NOT fuel cells, but simply normal batteries using salt water as an electrolyte.
Also, these cells use salt water and you have to replace the anodes at least every 50 hours. To quote their site:
Anode Replacement of PM Series Fuel Cell
A set of anodes can run for up to 50 hours. In the process of producing electricity the metal
anode is dissolved and when almost totally dissolved must be replaced. This is done by lifting out the spent anodes flushing out the cells several times with fresh water and clip in new anodes.
Doesn't sound like a fuel cell to me, sounds like a battery with replaceable anodes instead.
And why would you want to store Pu239 in the mountain anyway? You can make far better use of it in another reactor to make power. The entire idea behind a breeder reactor is that you take U235, U238, and Pu239 to extract energy and slowly convert the U238 into more Pu239 and from there convert the Pu239 into energy and short lived isotopes. ANYONE considering storing Pu239 for long periods of time needs to have their head examined.
If you use it wisely. A simple solution is to take advantage of the free web space provided by your ISP and put all of your jpeg's gif's and other large binary object that consume bandwidth. Then your websever can simply serve up text pages (possibly generated via cgi scripts) and when ever an image is desired, refer to the copy stored at your ISP. The result is that your home web server (using your own domain name) only serves 1 to 2 kilobyte pages and the high bandwidth consuming images don't use any of your available upstream bandwidth.
Another factor is owning your own domain name (which then gives you control over the userid). Email sent to me will reach me. However, spammers tend to prune 'abuse' from their lists....
Actually, everyone is going about this wrong. The real problem is finding the multplicative inverse of an exponent modulus N where N is the product of 2 large primes. Currently, we have a simple way of calculating this inverse *if* we have the factors of N. But, we don't know if that is the only easy method of calculating this inverse. The chain of logic I'm seeing is like this.
1. We need to calculate d using e and N.
2. d is easy to calculate if we have the factors to N.
3. We need to calculate the factors of N
To my way of thinking, this reminds me of a similar logic chain that I saw someone do in the past.
1. I need to find the smallest number in this array.
2. If I sort the array, all I need to do is pick the 1st element of the array.
3. Now I need to figure out how to sort an array.
Slashdot Mirror
Sounds like a lot of hype with no real basis in fact.
Given their figures of 35 degrees in, 140 degrees out, lets do a little simply math.
We're raising the temperature of the water by 105 degrees. A gallon of water weights about 8 lbs. So in order to heat just 1 gallon of water takes 8 * 105 = 840 BTUs.
Finally, lets assume that you need the 1 gallon over a 1 minute period.
840 BTU/min = 14770 watts.
Hmm.
14770 watts is equal to 67 amps at 220 volts. Quite a large load.
What can we do with a gallon per minute of hot water? Not much. In fact a typical shower takes about 2.5 to 3 gallons per minute. Guess we need to triple the power consumption.
Now nothing that I've ever heard about Microwave heating implies that they manage to produce more heating than the power being supplied to them. Also considering that I've seen the specs for a tankless electric hot water heater (which just happens to have 3 stages where each stage happens to be supplied by an independent 60 amp breaker). I have to call into question the reason for even adding the complexity and expense of using microwaves for a tankless hot water heater. The simple fact is that there already exist tankless units (both gas and electric). However, gas is far more commonly used simply because of the much higher energy density. However, there are electric tankless unit if you happen to have a high enough capacity service. I really don't see microwaves managing to reduce the numbers in way, shape, or form.
Record highs?
/ mars_snow_011206-1.html
Hmm. I don't think so.
After all, they're still finding Viking farms under the ice in Greenland.
I suspect that we have people looking at short term changes and ignoring the geological evidence about cyclic changes in world temperatures.
As another data point look at: http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/solarsystem
Somehow, I don't think what man is doing on Earth has much of an effect on Mars.
show that the company is definitely having problems providing useful information.
The spec sheet for the N-Charge I has at the end a useful little chart that gives hard numbers like how many Amp-hours and watt-hours that the battery is rated for. However, N-Charge II has a nice sales pitch without any hard numbers on actual battery capacity.
Yes. Let's do a bit of back of the envelope calculations.
According to the CIA World Factbook the United States generated 3.6 trillion kilowatt hours of electricity in 2001 (I will ignore the power in the gasoline that was burned in cars, the oil used to heat homes and businesses, etc. Those items will increase the power requirement. These calculations are just what's required to replace the electric generation capability with solar).
Now at the equator, the solar intensity is about 1 kilowatt per square meter. If I assume that the 3.6 trillion kilowatt hours is evenly consumed over the year, this means that every day. 10 billion kilowatt hours is consumed. Assuming that the collectors work for an average of 12 hours per day (I'm being generious) That means that each square meter of collection area captures 12 kilowatt hours of power per day. This requires 833 million square meters of collection area. Oh did I mention that this 833 million square meters is with an assumed efficiency of 100%? What? You don't have a 100% efficient method of collecting solar power? No problem, just use more area. The most efficient solar cell that I can find runs at about 17% Most likely, you'll find something in the 6% to 10% range. But I'll use the 17% cells. That means that I need 5 billion square meters of collection area. Mind you, this is assuming an average of 12 hours per day every day. (Clouds not permitted). And assuming that the collection area is near the equator. There is NO excess capacity to deal with peak loads and NO storage capacity to deal with cloudy days. Now how big is 5 billion square meters? That would be 5000 square kilometers. How big is 5000 square kilometers? For reference, Delaware is about 5160 square kilometers in size. Just about right for the minimum required area.
But wait, there's more!
You need to add in a factor to deal with peak loads and cloudy/rainy days. A factor of 4 is typical industry standard, so you just have to pave over an area slightly greater than New Jersey (try filling out the environmental impact statement for that!).
Also, remember that the above calculations are just for replacing the electric generation capacity for the power used in the United States for the year 2001. If you intend on also replacing the power used in the form of gasoline and heating oil as well as the power used in the rest of the world, please multiply the required area by the appropiate factors.
Have a good day.
Excuse me?
Once it was discovered that "This Land Is Your Land" was already in the public domain, there no longer was a case capable of being fought. I can just imagine what would have happened if EFF did bring it before the court:
EFF: Your honor, during discovery, we found out that "This Land Is Your Land" is actually in the public domain.
JUDGE: That's good to know. Now after finding that little piece of information, why are you wasting the time of this court? Case dismissed!
Huh?
If I remember what I've read in the past, the thing that made Unix unique was that it was written mostly in a fairly high level language like C with very little assembly. Before that point, OSes were written primarily in assembly or macro assembly. That is a major reason that Unix was ported across so many platforms so quickly.
The "salt" is used to change how the password is hashed. If you look at the shadow password file on your computer, you'll see some lines that look like this
root:$1$abcdefge$abcd1234efg789hijklmno:0:0:...
You'll notice that the password field (the stuff after the 1st colon, and before the 2nd colon) is itself divided into 3 fields separated by dollar signs. The purpose of these fields are:
1st field - Identifies hashing method. This allows for future changes to how the password in stored while allowing backward compatability with existing passwords.
2nd field - This contains the salt used to hash the password. In order to verify a new password, this exact salt must be used in the hashing process. Since in this case, it's 8 characters long and each character can be one of 64 values, it means that each possible password my be hashed into one of 2^48 different values. This salt is generated randomly at the time that you set your password. The randomly generated salt is then stored here for use in verifying future authencation attempts.
3rd field - This is the actual hashed password using the salt specified in the previous field. It is 22 characters long, which with base 64 encoding can store 132 bits. Since MD5 only hashes to 128 bits, there are 4 unused bits at the tail end of this value.
You agree not to take any action that will impose a disproportionately large or unreasonable load on our computer web server(s), network, or other infrastructure. Please be mindful of the large amounts of data transfer needed to allow viewing of the CPRR Museum web pages with multiple, large images, and avoid suddenly flooding the CPRR Museum website with large numbers of unanticipated visitors. Suddenly increased, excess web traffic on this website as a result of your actions, including but not limited to publicity, reporting, or recommendations to others regarding this website on network television or radio or national publications or media, of more than one gigabyte of additional Internet data transfer per month, shall be at your expense, and you agree to reimburse CPRR.org for the resulting costs at the rate of the then prevailing additional data transfer charge made by the Internet provider(s) hosting this website.
I do believe that the slashdot effect qualifies.
They will be changing their serial number from about 2004020900 to something about 1075680000 which according to the DNS system will be an older serial number because the difference is only 928340900 which is much less than half the range of a 32 bit number. They can make the change that they are planning if they make two changes with at least their cache interval amount of time between the changes. See RFC-1034.
Let's see if I got it.
The manufactures say that you should/must use matched drives.
One implication of this, is that if a drive in a RAID array fails, you should replace it with a drive that matches the other drives in the array. But, since you most likely don't have a spare matching drive or two, then you should replace all of the drives in the array.
Somehow, that doesn't seem right and therefore the claim that the drives in an array should/must match is false.
According to the article, the intensity would be limited to 20% or less that of the noon-time sun. Also, they claim that 20 terawatts of power would be generated. Making a few assumptions (1 kilowatt for noon-time sun in Arizona), I figure that an area about the size of Connecticut would have to be covered with receivers. Seems a tad large to be useful.
and if your boss claims that the budget won't support it, then refer said boss to
/ sharktank/0,4885,83304,00.html
http://www.computerworld.com/departments/opinions
I suspect that this product will flag a lot of false positives. After reading the white paper, I believe that the following code would be considered "insecure."
#include <stdlib.h>
#include <string.h>
char *duplicate(const char *input)
{
size_t len;
char *out;
out = NULL;
if (input != NULL) {
len = strlen(input);
out = malloc(len + 1);
if (out != NULL) {
strcpy(out, input);
}
}
return out;
}
Note the use of the "evil" function strcpy().
The real rule in programming is:
1. Write your code as if the person maintaining it is a homicidal maniac who knows where you live. All else is commentary.
Yes, and take a look at the number of U-boats that were spotted and sunk because of helium filled blimbs. Helium was a stratigic war material and the US was not about to believe that any helium given to Germany for the Hindenburg would stay in the Hindenburg.
In order for this scheme to even work it requires.
1. An encryption method that is secret
2. A tamper proof implementation of same
3. A method of detecting if the GPS signals are being spoofed
Reasoning.
1. If the method isn't secret, then someone can simply say screw the hardware, and build a decryptor that can generate the key for any location of earth to pass to the encryption algorythm.
2. If the implementation isn't tamperproof, it can be spoofed into acting as if it's anywhere I want. Also the algorythm can be compromised (see #1 above).
3. If it can't detect a spoofed GPS signal, then once again, I can have it act as if it's anywhere I want it to be.
As regards performing an exhaustive key search to decrypt the data (using whatever method you desire), the following tidbits are available for your consideration.
1. There is about 2^61 10 meter square places on the surface of the earth. 2^61 is a fairly large number, but not out of the realm of an exhaustive search.
2. But, in most cases, you don't need to perform an exhaustive search. The location is already specified for the "protected" data. All you really need is an "unapproved" implementation of the algorythm and you simply dial in the approved location and decode to your hearts' desire.
Overall, this is one of the sillier ideas that I've seen.
Nope, I'm not trolling. And you're correct, I haven't used a mem-card-based console before. Are you assuming that the customs official if he bothered to look up the web site wouldn't make the same mistake? Gee, here is a tool designed to read information stored internally to the console. Yep, sounds like piracy and I have got to stop it. Never mind that the decision was wrong, he made to call to support a bad law in the fashion he believed was right.
Looking at that link I see the following features listed:
1. Connect your DC console with your PC.
OK
2. Develop your own DC projects such as games, demos, etc.
OK
3. Upload already existing demos which can be downloaded from the Internet.
OK
4. Read memory card save datas and exchange them with friends.
Not OK
Number 4 looks like pirating and it's advertised as a product feature.
And look closely at the floating point math code. Microsoft basic had a bug in their floating point software that persisted until hardware floating point coprocessors became the norm. To demonstrate, type the following program into any microsoft based system running on an 8080, Z80, 8088, 8086 etc based processor without a math coprocessor.
A = 1E38
print A
B = 1E19
print B
C = 1E38
print C
You will find that the calculation of C causes a floating point overflow.
Like it's been said by others, the GreenVolt cells are NOT fuel cells, but simply normal batteries using salt water as an electrolyte.
Also, these cells use salt water and you have to replace the anodes at least every 50 hours. To quote their site:
Anode Replacement of PM Series Fuel Cell
A set of anodes can run for up to 50 hours. In the process of producing electricity the metal
anode is dissolved and when almost totally dissolved must be replaced. This is done by lifting out the spent anodes flushing out the cells several times with fresh water and clip in new anodes.
Doesn't sound like a fuel cell to me, sounds like a battery with replaceable anodes instead.
And why would you want to store Pu239 in the mountain anyway? You can make far better use of it in another reactor to make power. The entire idea behind a breeder reactor is that you take U235, U238, and Pu239 to extract energy and slowly convert the U238 into more Pu239 and from there convert the Pu239 into energy and short lived isotopes. ANYONE considering storing Pu239 for long periods of time needs to have their head examined.
If you use it wisely. A simple solution is to take advantage of the free web space provided by your ISP and put all of your jpeg's gif's and other large binary object that consume bandwidth. Then your websever can simply serve up text pages (possibly generated via cgi scripts) and when ever an image is desired, refer to the copy stored at your ISP. The result is that your home web server (using your own domain name) only serves 1 to 2 kilobyte pages and the high bandwidth consuming images don't use any of your available upstream bandwidth.
I like this idea! I think it's time to look at my email configuration.
Another factor is owning your own domain name (which then gives you control over the userid). Email sent to me will reach me. However, spammers tend to prune 'abuse' from their lists....
Actually, everyone is going about this wrong. The real problem is finding the multplicative inverse of an exponent modulus N where N is the product of 2 large primes. Currently, we have a simple way of calculating this inverse *if* we have the factors of N. But, we don't know if that is the only easy method of calculating this inverse. The chain of logic I'm seeing is like this.
1. We need to calculate d using e and N.
2. d is easy to calculate if we have the factors to N.
3. We need to calculate the factors of N
To my way of thinking, this reminds me of a similar logic chain that I saw someone do in the past.
1. I need to find the smallest number in this array.
2. If I sort the array, all I need to do is pick the 1st element of the array.
3. Now I need to figure out how to sort an array.
See the problem?