Wow, so many questions here could have been answered had there been any real technical information in the article. As it turns out the power plant is an ordinary VW engine which can run on ordinary diesel in addition to various biodiesels including soybean-derived ones. Here's the kind of info I wish Slashdot would put in their articles:
The high school kids have a website and picture/video gallery. The kids didn't build the car from scratch; it is a kit car based on a Honda Accord chassis. It uses a 1.9L VW TDi (Turbo Direct Injection) diesel (200hp) engine as its main power source driving the rear wheels, and has a 200hp electric motor attached to the front wheels. The electric motor is driven by a bank of ultracapacitors, so it has excellent power for short bursts of acceleration, but when not accelerating the vehicle is powered solely by the turbocharged diesel, so the mileage figure is the same as what you would get if it was not a hybrid (actually it would probably be better, especially since it doesn't do regenerative braking AFAIK).
An Attack racing kit costs about $20,000 (plus shipping, tax, import fees) plus you need a 1990-93 Accord. The resulting car is not street legal, and certainly not very comfortable. You can buy them preassembled, much more comfortable, and street legal for Europe for $70,000 but they're not hybrids and not stripped-down racing kits so likely heavier. Not sure how much the turbo diesel, electric motor, and ultracapacitors cost.
Ultracapacitors are very cool technology; IMHO they are likely to come out of the wings, completely replace batteries in almost all applications, and finally produce a viable traditional fully electric car long before fuel cells are ready. Ultracapacitors are already on a Moore's-law-like curve, and nanotech seems poised to help them jump ahead even faster. Ultracapacitors are ideal for car powerplant duty: they can discharge any amount of energy up to their total stored at a moment's notice; they can recharge *just as fast* as they discharge, and they do not degrade in performance with use. They are immune to shock and temperature extremes. There are no chemical reactions involved, so little excess heat and no dangerous gases are generated under any load and there is little danger of chemical leaks.
Ultracapacitors have only recently become practical for applications like this, which is perhaps why we haven't seen any developments quite like this yet from the lumbering car industry. But I would expect to start seeing ultracapacitor-boosted hybrids fairly soon, and I would also expect completely ultracapacitor-powered cars, with no other onboard power plant, in 10-20 years.
You are completely, utterly wrong. Since most Americans are car passengers but not motorcycle riders, your statistics are completely unrelated to the relative safety of cars and motorcycles. In fact, motorcycle riders are 35 times more likely to die from an accident than car passengers.
Wow, way to cut through the press release BS and find the real story. Thanks. Is it just me or are we getting more and more of these breathless press releases and gushing blog wackos lately? They always seem to be doing their best to bury the real (often interesting and worthy) story under a mountain of hype and irrelevant tangents.
Darwinia is *way* cooler than Rumble Box. When you play Darwinia you can tell it has been crafted by people who care about games. The interface just feels right in a way that no real-time strategy game ever has before. In other RTS games I feel crippled, peering through a tiny little porthole, scrolling madly, spending 80% of my time simply managing which units I have selected. Darwinia fixes all of that. You have complete 3D control of the camera at all times, and yet somehow camera management is second nature, not a chore. I hope never again to have to play a strategy game with a traditional "static overhead view" interface. Warcraft IV with Darwinia's interface would rock.
I'm sure it has very little to do with VTune not working on AMD and everything to do with Intel's business types telling the engineers "don't support AMD". Did you know that recently Intel and Skype "collaborated" to cripple Skype's conference call features when running on a non-Intel chip? They don't need a good technical reason; this is business.
WiMAX and microwave backbones require FCC licenses and are extremely expensive compared to 802.11. Microwave backbones would require a lot of cooperation between backbone nodes. In addition a backbone node would have to have even better routing than normal mesh nodes, probably requiring a dedicated computer or hardware and some know-how. A *lot* of smart people would be required to invest a *lot* of their own time and money into both setup and maintenance of these nodes. I just don't see it happening for free. And if it did happen, these backbones would be easy targets for legislation, monitoring, and filtering just as Internet backbones are today. Where is the benefit of the mesh?
I also think Internet traffic patterns are so nonlocal and webpages change so frequently that caching will not work well enough to save the mesh. If someone's logged in to a website then caching their pages is useless for everyone else, so you can't cache someone's webmail or Amazon or personalized Google or Slashdot pages. And you'll have a freeloader problem; many people will decide not to cache for others to save their own resources. And caching can never solve the underlying latency and bandwidth problems. Streaming video, VoIP, gaming, SSH, they will all never work over the mesh.
I just don't see the benefit of the mesh if you have the regular Internet, over which you can run encryption and it will be a million times better in every way. Bandwidth and low latency are incredibly important. With them the Internet will easily supercede every other form of communication we use, and decouple access providers (which are natural monopolies) from service providers (which should compete). Without the speed the Internet is not anywhere near as useful.
Until encryption is outlawed over the public Internet there will be little use for a globe-spanning mesh network. But if they go so far as to outlaw encryption it's only a bit farther to outlaw wireless meshes, and it's impossible to hide when you're broadcasting radio waves.
The only practical applications of mesh networks are (maybe) sensor grids and (in some cases) helping extend short-range wireless to be just a bit less short. Long distance meshes are both impractical and unnecessary.
Latency "might" be high? High packet loss, routing inefficiencies, and terrible latency would combine to make decent transfer rates impossible to achieve over medium distances. Forget about gaming, streaming video, SSH, remote X11/RDP, or VoIP. Surfing today's web would be intolerable. A wireless mesh would only be usable for low-bandwidth, non-latency-sensitive applications; email and usenet would be about it.
[...] We also show that the traffic pattern determines whether an ad hoc network's per node capacity will scale to large networks. In particular, we show that for total capacity to scale up with network size the average distance between source and destination nodes must remain small as the network grows. Non-local traffic patterns in which this average distance grows with the network size result in a rapid decrease of per node capacity. Thus the question ``Are large ad hoc networks feasible?'' reduces to a question about the likely locality of communication in such networks.
In other words, the highly nonlocal traffic patterns of today's Internet are simply not feasible over a wireless mesh; it only works if you talk to people close to you, and then what's the point? You could do that with slightly more powerful wireless.
The argument that we must "help capitalism out" is a fallacy. The market is an incredibly accurate predictor of phenomena like the future supply of commodities. Far more accurate than the chicken littles who run around proclaiming the end of civilization. As soon as it appears that oil is *actually* going to run out, the market will go crazy with investment into alternative energy sources. R&D will boom. Long before oil is actually scarce, prices will rise due to speculation. Still long before oil is actually scarce, alternative energy will first become competitive with and then cheaper than oil, both due to rising oil prices and falling alternative prices. And as soon as alternative energy is cheaper, the switch will begin in earnest, bringing in economies of scale. The switch will proceed exactly as fast as it needs to, guided by the invisible hand of the market.
Overall energy prices may rise during the transition. But the market has already survived a sextupling of the price of crude oil since 1998, and no disaster has resulted. The market can and does adapt to changing prices. Now oil has very little room to rise further, because alternatives are coming close to its price. Capitalism works.
All that means is that what oil is left will be efficiently allocated by selling it at $20/gallon when it becomes scarce enough.
You're forgetting that the high price will drive people to alternatives in droves, and the enormous boom in the alternative energy industry will lower prices with economies of scale and drive more R&D investment. Before long the world's energy sources will be far more diversified, efficient, and eco-friendly; possibly even cheaper; and it will be *because* of high oil prices, not in spite of them. Because capitalism works.
Also, I don't actually think OPEC is causing a major problem, because I don't think there is one. But if there was one, it could only be caused by market manipulation of the type OPEC tries to practice. And I didn't mean to say the U.S. had the most purely capitalistic system (absolutely pure capitalism is probably not a system I'd like to live under). I just think the U.S.' capitalistic system is the best (despite its many flaws) (and hence the flame-retardant gear...).
What you are saying does make sense, but I don't think OPEC has very much room to ratchet that price up anymore. We're already seeing the beginning of an investment boom in alternative energy and if oil rises much farther it's going to see some serious competition.
If anyone's causing the problem, it's OPEC manipulating the supply. If anything will solve the problem it's capitalism, the most efficient resource allocation system known to man, and still practiced nowhere better than the USA.
The entire point of OPEC is to keep oil prices stable just below the threshold where people will start moving to other energy sources (and of course, no lower). A spike in the price of oil is the last thing OPEC wants, because while it would produce short-term profits, they know it will bring closer the inevitable decline of the oil industry, which they want to postpone for as long as possible.
For example, how many cars and gas stations in the US? How long would it take to convert all of those so that they can fuel hydrogen cars and to change all the gas stations to be hydrogen ready?
Wild guess here, but likely 10-20 years, less with government intervention if it was a dire emergency. And we *will* have that long to make the full transition. Oil will not one day suddenly disappear. Oil production will decline gradually and prices will continually rise. Speculators will raise prices long before oil is in any danger of actually becoming scarce. Those rising prices will first make high efficiency products more popular (good riddance SUVs...). Then, as alternative energy sources become price-competitive with oil, they will reap the benefits of a tidal wave of incoming investment which will have far greater impact than any environmental program or government subsidy possibly could. R&D will explode; economies of scale will drive down prices, and before long the world will be running on a far more diversified set of energy sources; likely more efficient and better for the environment into the bargain.
The transition will disrupt more than one economy (chiefly those that rely on oil as a main source of income), but there is no reason to think it will be a disaster on a global scale. The simple fact is, capitalism works, and this is *exactly* the kind of problem capitalism solves best.
Yes. As a bonus it also fixes bookmarking and deep linking, automatically. The key is to store any changing page state data in the URL itself using the hash portion, which you can change without causing a page reload.
... and becuase c is constant you can't compare your speed directly to the speed of light or to space itself (i.e. the "aether" which was disproven by the Michelson-Morley experiment). Your speed is not an absolute number but is only defined *relative* to other objects. Therefore it's difficult to have an effect which kicks in when travelling above a certain speed, because from other frames you appear to be travelling at different speeds and so different observers would expect different values for the effect.
For velocity-dependent relativistic effects such as time dilation and space contraction, it turns out that though observers apparently see different things their observations are all valid and consistent with each other. This is the truly astounding thing about relativity that takes a while to wrap your brain around.
For this guy's "anti-gravity beam" effect, people are complaining that it doesn't seem like the views of different observers can be reconciled. For example, people on a spaceship moving at.95c relative to Earth would observe Earth emitting an anti-gravity beam (it appears to be moving at.95c relative to them as all velocity is relative); yet the effects of such a beam would easily be noticed by us and we don't see any.
Of course, this is press-release science; undoubtedly the real issues are more complex and subtle.
I doubt it's due to any malice on their part toward IE; I suspect that originally they used an unpatched IE specifically to catch the largest variety of spyware, which was really the main focus of the study. Then I suspect they later decided they might as well test Firefox as well, and simply downloaded the then-current version.
They probably didn't originally realize that their study would get much more press as a comparison between Firefox and IE than as a compilation of spyware statistics. And so the focus of their study was changed after-the-fact even though their setup wasn't specifically designed for fair comparison.
They used computers running Windows XP without Service Packs 1 or 2. They tested IE 6.0 (no details about any patch installs separate from the [lack of] service packs) against Firefox 1.0.6. This is all from their paper (warning pdf), which has numerous other details.
Somebody should start a news site that takes all the top news stories, finds the original research or primary source, and links to that instead of the dumbed-down yet sensationalistic news wire blurbs and blog whores. I know I'd appreciate it.
Anyone who thinks logging in an IM client is not useful has never tried using it. The only problem I've had with it in the past is that logs are tied to one computer and one client, so they're not always available. Google's logs are of course online and searchable, and integrated with email as IM should have been from the start. And if you're already using GMail, you should have no problem with Google storing your messages.
I haven't tried it yet, but if it works at all this could be the best development to come out of Google since Google maps. And dare I hope that they won't be able to block it at work without killing GMail too?
Range isn't a problem at all. This doesn't replace Ethernet; it replaces USB, FireWire, VGA, DVI, RCA, optical, and HDMI cables (and it'll probably be cheaper than those high-end cables anyway). The short range makes this frequency ideal for unlicensed use, because interference also has a short range, and your private transmissions are much less likely to be intercepted. Thus it's an ideal replacement for short data cables of all kinds. I look forward to the day my mouse, keyboard, monitor, and printer are connected wirelessly to my CPU, and I can install a new piece of home theater equipment by simply placing it near my existing setup and then selecting it from a menu. Now if only they could do something about those pesky power cords...
For all the advocacy gong on about polyphasic sleep, I have not seen any scientific evidence to support that it is as good as normal sleep. There are plenty of people who try it and report that they feel OK once they get used to it, but as has been pointed out earlier in the discussion, reduced performance due to sleep deprivation is highly deceptive, especially over the long term. People simply are not able to judge their own alertness and mental performance accuarately. The only evidence I would accept as supporting polyphasic sleep would be a scientifically-conducted study that used scientifically-accepted alertness and mental performance tests before, during, and after the trial of polyphasic sleep. Anything less is anecdotal at best and and misleading at worst.
Note that they are not forbidding GPL DRM software. Instead they are forbidding you from suing people who try to break your DRM. If your DRM actually works (i.e. is not breakable), then you should have no problem with this. However, we all know that actual working DRM is technically infeasible. If you disagree with this clause of the GPL you are admitting that DRM is impotent without constant police-state enforcement. Basically, this change to the GPL exposes DRM as the fraud it has always been.
Slashdot Mirror
The high school kids have a website and picture/video gallery. The kids didn't build the car from scratch; it is a kit car based on a Honda Accord chassis. It uses a 1.9L VW TDi (Turbo Direct Injection) diesel (200hp) engine as its main power source driving the rear wheels, and has a 200hp electric motor attached to the front wheels. The electric motor is driven by a bank of ultracapacitors, so it has excellent power for short bursts of acceleration, but when not accelerating the vehicle is powered solely by the turbocharged diesel, so the mileage figure is the same as what you would get if it was not a hybrid (actually it would probably be better, especially since it doesn't do regenerative braking AFAIK).
An Attack racing kit costs about $20,000 (plus shipping, tax, import fees) plus you need a 1990-93 Accord. The resulting car is not street legal, and certainly not very comfortable. You can buy them preassembled, much more comfortable, and street legal for Europe for $70,000 but they're not hybrids and not stripped-down racing kits so likely heavier. Not sure how much the turbo diesel, electric motor, and ultracapacitors cost.
Ultracapacitors are very cool technology; IMHO they are likely to come out of the wings, completely replace batteries in almost all applications, and finally produce a viable traditional fully electric car long before fuel cells are ready. Ultracapacitors are already on a Moore's-law-like curve, and nanotech seems poised to help them jump ahead even faster. Ultracapacitors are ideal for car powerplant duty: they can discharge any amount of energy up to their total stored at a moment's notice; they can recharge *just as fast* as they discharge, and they do not degrade in performance with use. They are immune to shock and temperature extremes. There are no chemical reactions involved, so little excess heat and no dangerous gases are generated under any load and there is little danger of chemical leaks.
Ultracapacitors have only recently become practical for applications like this, which is perhaps why we haven't seen any developments quite like this yet from the lumbering car industry. But I would expect to start seeing ultracapacitor-boosted hybrids fairly soon, and I would also expect completely ultracapacitor-powered cars, with no other onboard power plant, in 10-20 years.
You are completely, utterly wrong. Since most Americans are car passengers but not motorcycle riders, your statistics are completely unrelated to the relative safety of cars and motorcycles. In fact, motorcycle riders are 35 times more likely to die from an accident than car passengers.
Wow, way to cut through the press release BS and find the real story. Thanks. Is it just me or are we getting more and more of these breathless press releases and gushing blog wackos lately? They always seem to be doing their best to bury the real (often interesting and worthy) story under a mountain of hype and irrelevant tangents.
Darwinia is *way* cooler than Rumble Box. When you play Darwinia you can tell it has been crafted by people who care about games. The interface just feels right in a way that no real-time strategy game ever has before. In other RTS games I feel crippled, peering through a tiny little porthole, scrolling madly, spending 80% of my time simply managing which units I have selected. Darwinia fixes all of that. You have complete 3D control of the camera at all times, and yet somehow camera management is second nature, not a chore. I hope never again to have to play a strategy game with a traditional "static overhead view" interface. Warcraft IV with Darwinia's interface would rock.
I'm sure it has very little to do with VTune not working on AMD and everything to do with Intel's business types telling the engineers "don't support AMD". Did you know that recently Intel and Skype "collaborated" to cripple Skype's conference call features when running on a non-Intel chip? They don't need a good technical reason; this is business.
NProf is free and works, though it won't win any awards. Visual Studio 2005 Team System (not professional) includes a code profiler.
I also think Internet traffic patterns are so nonlocal and webpages change so frequently that caching will not work well enough to save the mesh. If someone's logged in to a website then caching their pages is useless for everyone else, so you can't cache someone's webmail or Amazon or personalized Google or Slashdot pages. And you'll have a freeloader problem; many people will decide not to cache for others to save their own resources. And caching can never solve the underlying latency and bandwidth problems. Streaming video, VoIP, gaming, SSH, they will all never work over the mesh.
Until encryption is outlawed over the public Internet there will be little use for a globe-spanning mesh network. But if they go so far as to outlaw encryption it's only a bit farther to outlaw wireless meshes, and it's impossible to hide when you're broadcasting radio waves.
The only practical applications of mesh networks are (maybe) sensor grids and (in some cases) helping extend short-range wireless to be just a bit less short. Long distance meshes are both impractical and unnecessary.
If you won't take my word for it, how about the words of an MIT mesh network study:
[...] We also show that the traffic pattern determines whether an ad hoc network's per node capacity will scale to large networks. In particular, we show that for total capacity to scale up with network size the average distance between source and destination nodes must remain small as the network grows. Non-local traffic patterns in which this average distance grows with the network size result in a rapid decrease of per node capacity. Thus the question ``Are large ad hoc networks feasible?'' reduces to a question about the likely locality of communication in such networks.
In other words, the highly nonlocal traffic patterns of today's Internet are simply not feasible over a wireless mesh; it only works if you talk to people close to you, and then what's the point? You could do that with slightly more powerful wireless.
The argument that we must "help capitalism out" is a fallacy. The market is an incredibly accurate predictor of phenomena like the future supply of commodities. Far more accurate than the chicken littles who run around proclaiming the end of civilization. As soon as it appears that oil is *actually* going to run out, the market will go crazy with investment into alternative energy sources. R&D will boom. Long before oil is actually scarce, prices will rise due to speculation. Still long before oil is actually scarce, alternative energy will first become competitive with and then cheaper than oil, both due to rising oil prices and falling alternative prices. And as soon as alternative energy is cheaper, the switch will begin in earnest, bringing in economies of scale. The switch will proceed exactly as fast as it needs to, guided by the invisible hand of the market.
Overall energy prices may rise during the transition. But the market has already survived a sextupling of the price of crude oil since 1998, and no disaster has resulted. The market can and does adapt to changing prices. Now oil has very little room to rise further, because alternatives are coming close to its price. Capitalism works.
You're forgetting that the high price will drive people to alternatives in droves, and the enormous boom in the alternative energy industry will lower prices with economies of scale and drive more R&D investment. Before long the world's energy sources will be far more diversified, efficient, and eco-friendly; possibly even cheaper; and it will be *because* of high oil prices, not in spite of them. Because capitalism works.
Also, I don't actually think OPEC is causing a major problem, because I don't think there is one. But if there was one, it could only be caused by market manipulation of the type OPEC tries to practice. And I didn't mean to say the U.S. had the most purely capitalistic system (absolutely pure capitalism is probably not a system I'd like to live under). I just think the U.S.' capitalistic system is the best (despite its many flaws) (and hence the flame-retardant gear...).
What you are saying does make sense, but I don't think OPEC has very much room to ratchet that price up anymore. We're already seeing the beginning of an investment boom in alternative energy and if oil rises much farther it's going to see some serious competition.
If anyone's causing the problem, it's OPEC manipulating the supply. If anything will solve the problem it's capitalism, the most efficient resource allocation system known to man, and still practiced nowhere better than the USA.
The entire point of OPEC is to keep oil prices stable just below the threshold where people will start moving to other energy sources (and of course, no lower). A spike in the price of oil is the last thing OPEC wants, because while it would produce short-term profits, they know it will bring closer the inevitable decline of the oil industry, which they want to postpone for as long as possible.
Wild guess here, but likely 10-20 years, less with government intervention if it was a dire emergency. And we *will* have that long to make the full transition. Oil will not one day suddenly disappear. Oil production will decline gradually and prices will continually rise. Speculators will raise prices long before oil is in any danger of actually becoming scarce. Those rising prices will first make high efficiency products more popular (good riddance SUVs...). Then, as alternative energy sources become price-competitive with oil, they will reap the benefits of a tidal wave of incoming investment which will have far greater impact than any environmental program or government subsidy possibly could. R&D will explode; economies of scale will drive down prices, and before long the world will be running on a far more diversified set of energy sources; likely more efficient and better for the environment into the bargain.
The transition will disrupt more than one economy (chiefly those that rely on oil as a main source of income), but there is no reason to think it will be a disaster on a global scale. The simple fact is, capitalism works, and this is *exactly* the kind of problem capitalism solves best.
Yes. As a bonus it also fixes bookmarking and deep linking, automatically. The key is to store any changing page state data in the URL itself using the hash portion, which you can change without causing a page reload.
For velocity-dependent relativistic effects such as time dilation and space contraction, it turns out that though observers apparently see different things their observations are all valid and consistent with each other. This is the truly astounding thing about relativity that takes a while to wrap your brain around.
For this guy's "anti-gravity beam" effect, people are complaining that it doesn't seem like the views of different observers can be reconciled. For example, people on a spaceship moving at .95c relative to Earth would observe Earth emitting an anti-gravity beam (it appears to be moving at .95c relative to them as all velocity is relative); yet the effects of such a beam would easily be noticed by us and we don't see any.
Of course, this is press-release science; undoubtedly the real issues are more complex and subtle.
They probably didn't originally realize that their study would get much more press as a comparison between Firefox and IE than as a compilation of spyware statistics. And so the focus of their study was changed after-the-fact even though their setup wasn't specifically designed for fair comparison.
Somebody should start a news site that takes all the top news stories, finds the original research or primary source, and links to that instead of the dumbed-down yet sensationalistic news wire blurbs and blog whores. I know I'd appreciate it.
Programmer says "Error on line 1: end of file encountered; expected sentence terminator.".
I haven't tried it yet, but if it works at all this could be the best development to come out of Google since Google maps. And dare I hope that they won't be able to block it at work without killing GMail too?
Range isn't a problem at all. This doesn't replace Ethernet; it replaces USB, FireWire, VGA, DVI, RCA, optical, and HDMI cables (and it'll probably be cheaper than those high-end cables anyway). The short range makes this frequency ideal for unlicensed use, because interference also has a short range, and your private transmissions are much less likely to be intercepted. Thus it's an ideal replacement for short data cables of all kinds. I look forward to the day my mouse, keyboard, monitor, and printer are connected wirelessly to my CPU, and I can install a new piece of home theater equipment by simply placing it near my existing setup and then selecting it from a menu. Now if only they could do something about those pesky power cords...
For all the advocacy gong on about polyphasic sleep, I have not seen any scientific evidence to support that it is as good as normal sleep. There are plenty of people who try it and report that they feel OK once they get used to it, but as has been pointed out earlier in the discussion, reduced performance due to sleep deprivation is highly deceptive, especially over the long term. People simply are not able to judge their own alertness and mental performance accuarately. The only evidence I would accept as supporting polyphasic sleep would be a scientifically-conducted study that used scientifically-accepted alertness and mental performance tests before, during, and after the trial of polyphasic sleep. Anything less is anecdotal at best and and misleading at worst.
The Earth would continue to orbit until the sun visibly disappeared.
Note that they are not forbidding GPL DRM software. Instead they are forbidding you from suing people who try to break your DRM. If your DRM actually works (i.e. is not breakable), then you should have no problem with this. However, we all know that actual working DRM is technically infeasible. If you disagree with this clause of the GPL you are admitting that DRM is impotent without constant police-state enforcement. Basically, this change to the GPL exposes DRM as the fraud it has always been.