I dunno. He was an IT manager capable of installing software and changing a presentation; that's more IT knowledge than most IT managers have.
But he also left a number of vulnerabilities in the systems he was administering. Whether deliberate or accidental this is a dangerous failure. He has since demonstrated that even if he didn't know about the vulnerabilities, he had the ability to find out, and failed to do so.
They don't expect people to base their future on Silverlight. Why would anyone think that at this point?
Because a few years ago, MS was selling Silverlight to anyone they could convince. They told everyone Silverlight was the future, and many developers were dumb enough to believe them.
What will be Microsoft's next Silverlight, and who will buy?
Responding to the market and building stuff that will work on the machines of your target market is called flexibility and responsiveness.
It can also be referred to as "fickle". Business people don't like fickle, it is unreliable, and lends itself poorly to a business environment. Sooner or later MS will have exhausted the supply of suckers willing to spend time and money supporting MS bottom line when it doesn't really help anyone else. MS has a very poor track record of follow through, and they have a mixed record as far as new products are concerned. Customers are better off building for Apple, for whom everything turns to gold. Even Linux/GNU has the advantage that you will always be able to get support, and the documentation is in the public domain so you can support it yourself if absolutely necessary.
Groups like Anonymous and LulSec could probably do a lot more good for a lot of people if instead of pontificating about leaking government information actually did something useful like erase consumer debts instead of just posting passwords to porn sites online...
Although I agree that eliminating individual debt would be a worthwhile goal, it is very unlikely to succeed in this day of nearly permanent data. There are so many backups that permanently destroying data is damned difficult. You can make the information harder to retrieve, but an attack on the financial system on that scale would galvanize nearly everyone against them. Economic collapse is too easy to cause by messing with banks, and the specter of a new depression terrifies most people old enough to have heard the stories. Even young people who can't get a job because of the current recession will fully understand the implications of economic collapse.
To put in simple terms, a cash economy can only be so big because cash moves around very slowly, and requires large deposits of cash (savings) to allow open spending. Credit accelerates the economy by allowing much more efficient processing of funds. Our current cash economy is roughly 2% of the world economy. If you wipe out the credit economy, the world product drops by 98%, and people start starving by the hundreds of millions. Only the truly crazy, or exceptionally ignorant want to see that. So, we're stuck with the bad side of credit, like it or not, because the alternative is a nightmare.
The basic underpinning of how credit accelerates the economy, is how any large company processes their payroll. Back in the 19th century, a large company would maintain a large cash reserve for paying its employees. That way when employees cashed their checks each month, they would not bounce. This meant that companies had to have earnings *in advance* of their payroll needs. Today, large companies have payroll credit accounts which allow them to pay their employees from an account similar to a Home Equity Line of Credit. They pay a small interest rate on this debt, but it frees up their entire payroll for investment, so instead of having to tie up their entire payroll, they can invest that money in growth, with little or no penalty in financial terms. The entire concept is called leverage, and it is so powerful it has allowed our economy to grow to many tens of times the size it would be without it.
Pull that rug out from under everyone, and companies will not be able to pay their employees, who then will not be able to pay for anything, which will cause every companies revenues to drop which will exacerbate the problem. It s a nasty downward spiral which would make Black Tuesday look like a ticker tape parade. If the banks closed all of the payroll credit lines today, almost no one would get paid for many months. The ensuing run on the banks would collapse all of the banks, which would then default on all payments, preventing credit card payments from being paid out, preventing companies from paying their employees at all and causing the weaker governments to default on their payments. When they collapsed, it would take down the IMF and the world bank, and the snow-ball effect would take down the U.S., China, Germany, and the rest of the worlds "strong" governments withing a few months. If we were lucky, we would not end up in the middle of a global civil war. Food riots would commence in every medium sized and larger city in then world. People would exit the cities in mass and descend on the rural countryside, devastating crops. A very large percentage (50%+) of the population of the world would starve during the first winter, with most of those remaining starving in the next few years. It would be a return to a farm economy, and anything you didn't make with your own hands would be a rare luxury.
the U.S. TARP measures weren't the result of congress people not understanding a problem and responding wrongly, it was a matter of avert
I really think Luls and Anon are not out to do any actual good in the world, they just want to laugh and they really don't care who gets hurt in the process. I mean, it's certainly not them or anyone they know, so who cares, right?
Thats like saying that investigative reporters only write the stories, that they do, to get readers to pay for their publications. Its technically correct, but fails to tell the whole story. Like Journalists, these hackers are shining a bright light on other peoples dirty little secrets, and all of us can choose to benefit from the enlightenment, or embrace the blissfully ignorant darkness.
I, for one, choose the light, and judge others by which they choose. No matter how painful it may be.
So instead, we have a union, and the opposite happens. In any environment, you have good workers and lazy workers, and everything in between. With a union, everyone gets paid the same no matter how good or bad they perform, so hard work is not rewarded. Eventually everyone sinks to the lowest level, and the company is crushed by non-union competition, or the jobs are off-shored to somewhere cheaper if possible.
Wages drop, and work loads increase because demand for jobs is greater than supply. The opposite of that process is disruptive technology and business models which allow a "reset" of wages and responsibilities.
Lastly, let me assure you that hard working people don't tend to stay in union shops. They get promoted to management, or simply leave for a place where they can use their work ethic to get ahead. Unions are a race to the bottom.
Do you really believe that is easy? Getting a new job involves time searching for it. Also, not having a job even for a short period of time is not an attractive option for most people, which complicates the matter further. There's a lot of friction in the job market, which is why it doesn't work well at all without unions and regulation.
Were talking about a part time sales job, not a white collar career. Changing part time jobs is as easy as changing underwear. You stop showing up for one, and go down to the mall and spend 3 hours wandering store to store asking if they are looking for help. Job found. Pretty soon they'll decide that the job at the apple store wasn't really so bad, the employee just wanted far more than their contribution to the company was worth...
why shouldn't employees (who are free to associate, right?) try to leverage the sunk costs of their training into higher salary? assuming (for sake of argument) that there is no government interference on their behalf and that the unionizers don't initiate "violence" against the non-unionizers, why is this not a rational approach compatible with Libertarianism(tm)?
Because the government does interfere. The company should have a right to fire them all and start over if that is what they want to do, but the law makes that impossible.
It makes perfect sense for the employees to expect the same values in like kind, doesn't it? Sure it does! They will offer the highest value they can, and they know the company can afford that loyalty and excellent service, because it's a hall mark of how their CEO does things.
It only makes sense if the employees are contributing significantly to the margins. Why should an employee who performs poorly get the same compensation as one who performs well? Unions are a form of socialism. Would you advocate we switch to communism as well?
The magnetic field would need to exist outside the porous metal by at least a few millimeters to as much as a couple inches. Whether or not the metal is destroyed depends on the metal and its melting point. Thereby the metal used would have to have a melting point considerably higher than the temperature of the plasma.
In order to have any real cutting power, the plasma would have to be really hot. Plasma cutting torches spew between 5000 and 10,000 F, and those don't cut terribly fast. Tungsten and carbon both melt around 5000 to 6000 F. Even if the plasma was just cool enough not to melt the rod, it would loose all its strength at those temperatures, and your light saber would be a limp noodle.
Nothing drives me nuts more than armchair engineers. They have this insane faith in engineering to produce impossible solutions, and feel that if engineers haven't created their device for them, then the engineers just aren't trying. The original poster for this falls under the category of wing nut / whack job. Go out and read a book or two on plasma dynamics before you post somewhere claiming to have "solved" a plasma engineering problem.
heh heh yup. I also thought that the largest problem with a lightsaber being plasma is that to cut as efficiently as portrayed it would roast anyone within a football field of it. Little problem called convection and the laws of thermodynamics.
Not to mention that "metal rod" he's so proud of being obliterated the moment the plasma was turned on.
Actually, the cool part is that the kid is making hundreds of pounds out of this.
Only because two telcos are too stupid to realize what they are buying, and are hoping that someone will actually buy them. Someone made several million selling "pet rocks" once too, that didn't make the product any good.
He invented this? How come I had one before he was born?
I think I still have it saved somewhere in my old "Cool"
alarm equip. I used to do installs in the pre-computer
(pre 386 days). This was a box, with triggers and a phone
module. Event triggers, allowed for voice out, mic in.
Exact same thing. So... innovation?
Kudos to him for a great innovation.
-@|
AC til I find it...
You were using 3G in the pre-386 days?
the 3G part is not that part that people think is the cool part. In fact, the 3G part is entirely irrelevant to the operation of the invention. You could rig one of these things to work over a ham radio, or better, as was suggested earlier, VOIP through a pre-existing connection and save a fortune. The 3G part was because the kid is 13, and all the components of this setup are fairly easy to wire together (probably doesn't even require a breadboard). All of the parts are standard off the shelf modules. Hell, someone with some programming skill could make an old 486 with a sound card and a network connection do everything this does through VOIP, with only needing to make about half a dozen wiring connections through the game port and the speaker connections. Not that I have put any thought into this or anything.
I think more people knock than ring doorbells, even when they are available.. UPS has over the years gotten bad about just dumping the package on the porch.. I think most do attempt a knock (or ring), but they are trying to get on to the next address so they are not going to wait too long before they just leave it.. If you are really concerned and unable to be there to make sure you get you package, Fed Ex has a hold for pickup and you can get your package at the nearest office.
Many people don't realize that UPS and FedEx now offer a shipping option called "shipper release". It is a discounted shipping option that guarantees that the driver will leave the package, no matter the neighborhood, weather conditions, etc. The building could be on fire and they will leave the package. The catch is that the carrier is not responsible for lost or stolen packages. Many shippers use this option because it is cheaper to replace any packages lost, than it is to pay full shipping price (The shipper release discount is pretty big). Many, many shippers now use it. This in large part why packages are left. Often a driver wont even knock when the package is shipper release, they just drop and run.
Wealthier than average people are driven to succeed. They're driven to finish college and they are driven to find a good job. There is certainly correlation between education and income, but I see no reason to believe the formal education itself has any bearing on ones chances at financial success. It seems that the attributes one has drives them to finish college, then make lots of money. However, if you removed the option of college, they would still be driven to make lots of money.
That right there is what is known as a co-dependent variable, and after you adjust for them, you still get an overwhelming advantage to getting any degree, but especially the "right" degree.
So, you're saying that you're willing to gamble the relatively well understood consequences of nuclear disasters with the highly unknown consequences of global warming and air pollution? I would humbly suggest that continuing to burn fossil fuels is the greater of the two evils and that we should move towards nuclear fast. It's entirely possible that we have already pulled the trigger that will kill billions of people, but its also possible we haven't, or there never was a trigger to pull. We simply don't know yet. To put the risk of nuclear in perspective, Chernobyl has been estimated to have killed 5000 people all told. Even if that is off by a factor of ten, compare it to the roughly 50,000 people killed in car crashes in the U.S. last year alone. The risks of nuclear are well understood, and significantly lower than your daily commute, even with the lax safety that was the old soviet union. The risks of fossil fuels are not well understood at all (some are: air pollution, and acid rain). Any businessman would tell you that's an easy choice, and nobody but a true gambling addict would take the bet when the odds are not clear, but that is what you would sign us all up for... If you don't think that the stuff being put out by burning fossil fuels is generally bad, then I propose we hook up your exhaust pipe to your household air ducts and you can breathe what you're spouting. I would simply ask: "who's the nut-job?"
See, this, right here, is why anyone with a halfway-useful education immediately laughs at the green movement. You honestly seem to think that tossing a few billion dollars at a bunch of scientists will result in some magical doohickey which produces limitless energy with no environmental impact or risk to the public. Technology doesn't work that way. Improvements don't scale that way. You may as well suggest prayer; it's just as likely to produce the desired result.
If I had mod points, I would void my other posts in this thread just to give them to that post. It sums up very nicely. Your average 10 year old can understand that having money by itself is no good if you don't know how to buy what you want. Spending a fortune on "science" only does any good if the scientists happen to be on the right track. If they are not, then you get bupkus (See Tokamak). Research and Development is great at making incremental improvements to existing technology, but if the existing technology is fundamentally limited, then all the RnD in the world wont get you more than those limits. What is needed is whats called a "breakthrough", and the those are unpredictable and mostly independent of funding. There is nothing you can do to cause them deliberately (or prevent them).
A good example of this principle is the atomic bomb. Nuclear piles were a common thing for researchers to be working on in the 30s. They were interesting, but making them go boom required a great deal of incremental improvement in yield and size. These improvements could be bought. There was, however, no way that anyone in the 19th century was going to build a nuclear weapon, no matter how much money they spent, because the breakthrough hadn't happened yet.
Until people stop believing in electrical genies that can hold vast amounts of power in a thimble, they can't think about the problem rationally because they believe electric is the portable power solution. Electricity is great, but even if you replaced the entire interior of your car with the best battery technology, it wouldn't be but a few percent of the energy stored in your gas tank.
Actually, if you filled the entire car, it would be about 25-40%. Which would be more than enough because the efficiency (Battery to road) is 80-90% whereas I.C. efficiency (Gas to road) is around 20-40%. Batteries are getting better *very* fast. Within 10 years, batteries will come up to about 10% of the volumetric and gravimetric density of gas (currently about 3% and 1% respectively). At that point, Full electrics will be a completely viable alternative to gas. This improvement will come as the increases in performance are a natural extension of the same principles that drove Moores law. Ultra capacitors alone are well above the 10% energy density of gasoline mark, and the only likely remaining hurdle is manufacturing in quantity (quality control).
Well, Gas and Coal (which are not the intended replacements) at least don't remain a deadly menace for ten times longer than man has walked this planet until now.
I wouldn't be so sure about that. The last ice age lasted 10,000 years. Messing with our planet-wide climate without fully understanding it is like playing Russian roulette without even knowing how many bullets are in the gun. Radioactive waste is almost entirely a localized problem. Even putting 100 tons of highly radioactive debris into the atmosphere at Chernobyl, and detonating however many hundreds of nuclear weapons in the last 5 decades, didn't really affect 99+% of the population of the planet. Fossil Fuels, however have had a demonstrable affect. As with all things technology, Nuclear power will get safer as it gets more mature.
All of the planet-wide renewables together are not up to the task of replacing fossil fuels. Only Nuclear can handle the workload. Anyone who believes otherwise is encourage to do the math themselves. Figure out how much raw materials are needed for each of the renewable energy sources / MWH, do the math and you will discover that the raw materials are not available to make solar work. There are not enough workable locations for wind or tidal/wave generators, and Bio requires entirely too much of the earths surface in competition with food sources. Together, they might just be up to the task of replacing Today's *electricity* demand, but when you add in the energy consumed by transportation, its goodnight nurse. Then add in 5% growth in demand for the next 30 years while you build all of the alternative energy sources, and you're once again 75% short of the mark.
How's that, if you covered 2% of the uninhabitable portions of the Sahara with photovoltaic cells, it would supply 100% of the world's needs. Of course renewables are up to the challenge. And no I'm not saying that the Sahara should be caked in PV, although a company called DESERTEC are giving it a go.
so your answer is to somehow create 200,000 square miles of solar cells? The cost of the cells alone would be around 600 Trillion US Dollars, or Roughly ten times the Gross World Product. That means that if every productive adult in the world did *nothing* but work on this project, it would take ten years to complete. If you take just the "luxury" product (things that are not essential to survival), then it would take 30 years to complete, and by that time it would all have to be replaced because of normal wear and tear combined with wind storms, etc...
Now if somehow you could automate the construction and maintenance, You are still stuck with the worlds supply of the raw materials needed for this endeavor would be exhausted after less than 3% of the project was complete.
Renewables are *not* up to the challenge, at least not with current state of the art technology. In the future maybe, but it will require a breakthrough technology, and that is unpredictable Simple incremental improvements to current technology are not sufficient to the task. If they were, it would be cost effective, and would thus create a sustainable business model, and someone would be doing it. The fact that no profitable company is doing it tells me that it is still pie in the sky.
The fact remains that there is only one technology in our current arsenal that is "up to the challenge". Nuclear. In 200 years either we will derive the majority of our power from nuclear or we will be back in the middle ages, and the majority of people alive today will have no living descendants...
Mostly, with massive explosions, the debris and smoke is scattered closely enough behind the shock wave that you cant see the optical effects of the wave. With a translucent explosion, however...
Prompt criticality would be suspiciously like an atomic bomb, because that's how they work. But it seems like there was only very minor fallout, of short-term fission products (iodine, etc), which indicates that it just released existing product.
Perhaps the explosion was larger because there was more hydrogen? Also, don't underestimate the power of explosions like that - Chernobyl's steam explosion threw (much heavier) graphite moderator blocks a tremendous distance.
The size of the explosion was only part of the issue. Two other issues also contradict a hydrogen-only hypothesis. The first is the bright orange flash at reactor building 3. Hydrogen burns/explodes translucent. This can be seen with the explosion at building 1: No fireball, but massive and highly visible shock-wave. That had all the hallmarks of a hydrogen explosion. Issue two was the shaped nature of the second explosion. Both the primary (probably hydrogen) blast, and the anomalous orange flash had a distinct upward vector, indicating that some factor was tamping these explosions upward. These two observations together suggest the spent fuel pool, or the primary containment. As there are lots of reasons to believe the primary containment is still intact, this leaves the spent fuel pool as the next most likely candidate.
actually, LEU can still go boom, it just requires a far larger critical mass than is practical for making bombs. A reactor however has plenty of mass for such an event. Even more so since as the reactor operates, it enriches the fuel... Granted the yield / yield % effective will be really low, but one doesn't need a very high efficiency with 100 tons of fuel to make a pretty big boom. Even the equivalent of couple of tons of TNT is a pretty nasty explosion, never mind 10 kilotons... Anyone who wants to know what 1 ton of TNT does, watch the myth-buster episode where they take on a cement truck.
Slashdot Mirror
I dunno. He was an IT manager capable of installing software and changing a presentation; that's more IT knowledge than most IT managers have.
But he also left a number of vulnerabilities in the systems he was administering. Whether deliberate or accidental this is a dangerous failure. He has since demonstrated that even if he didn't know about the vulnerabilities, he had the ability to find out, and failed to do so.
-=Geoskd
They don't expect people to base their future on Silverlight. Why would anyone think that at this point?
Because a few years ago, MS was selling Silverlight to anyone they could convince. They told everyone Silverlight was the future, and many developers were dumb enough to believe them.
What will be Microsoft's next Silverlight, and who will buy?
-=Geoskd
Responding to the market and building stuff that will work on the machines of your target market is called flexibility and responsiveness.
It can also be referred to as "fickle". Business people don't like fickle, it is unreliable, and lends itself poorly to a business environment. Sooner or later MS will have exhausted the supply of suckers willing to spend time and money supporting MS bottom line when it doesn't really help anyone else. MS has a very poor track record of follow through, and they have a mixed record as far as new products are concerned. Customers are better off building for Apple, for whom everything turns to gold. Even Linux/GNU has the advantage that you will always be able to get support, and the documentation is in the public domain so you can support it yourself if absolutely necessary.
-=Geoskd
Groups like Anonymous and LulSec could probably do a lot more good for a lot of people if instead of pontificating about leaking government information actually did something useful like erase consumer debts instead of just posting passwords to porn sites online...
Although I agree that eliminating individual debt would be a worthwhile goal, it is very unlikely to succeed in this day of nearly permanent data. There are so many backups that permanently destroying data is damned difficult. You can make the information harder to retrieve, but an attack on the financial system on that scale would galvanize nearly everyone against them. Economic collapse is too easy to cause by messing with banks, and the specter of a new depression terrifies most people old enough to have heard the stories. Even young people who can't get a job because of the current recession will fully understand the implications of economic collapse.
To put in simple terms, a cash economy can only be so big because cash moves around very slowly, and requires large deposits of cash (savings) to allow open spending. Credit accelerates the economy by allowing much more efficient processing of funds. Our current cash economy is roughly 2% of the world economy. If you wipe out the credit economy, the world product drops by 98%, and people start starving by the hundreds of millions. Only the truly crazy, or exceptionally ignorant want to see that. So, we're stuck with the bad side of credit, like it or not, because the alternative is a nightmare.
The basic underpinning of how credit accelerates the economy, is how any large company processes their payroll. Back in the 19th century, a large company would maintain a large cash reserve for paying its employees. That way when employees cashed their checks each month, they would not bounce. This meant that companies had to have earnings *in advance* of their payroll needs. Today, large companies have payroll credit accounts which allow them to pay their employees from an account similar to a Home Equity Line of Credit. They pay a small interest rate on this debt, but it frees up their entire payroll for investment, so instead of having to tie up their entire payroll, they can invest that money in growth, with little or no penalty in financial terms. The entire concept is called leverage, and it is so powerful it has allowed our economy to grow to many tens of times the size it would be without it.
Pull that rug out from under everyone, and companies will not be able to pay their employees, who then will not be able to pay for anything, which will cause every companies revenues to drop which will exacerbate the problem. It s a nasty downward spiral which would make Black Tuesday look like a ticker tape parade. If the banks closed all of the payroll credit lines today, almost no one would get paid for many months. The ensuing run on the banks would collapse all of the banks, which would then default on all payments, preventing credit card payments from being paid out, preventing companies from paying their employees at all and causing the weaker governments to default on their payments. When they collapsed, it would take down the IMF and the world bank, and the snow-ball effect would take down the U.S., China, Germany, and the rest of the worlds "strong" governments withing a few months. If we were lucky, we would not end up in the middle of a global civil war. Food riots would commence in every medium sized and larger city in then world. People would exit the cities in mass and descend on the rural countryside, devastating crops. A very large percentage (50%+) of the population of the world would starve during the first winter, with most of those remaining starving in the next few years. It would be a return to a farm economy, and anything you didn't make with your own hands would be a rare luxury.
the U.S. TARP measures weren't the result of congress people not understanding a problem and responding wrongly, it was a matter of avert
I really think Luls and Anon are not out to do any actual good in the world, they just want to laugh and they really don't care who gets hurt in the process. I mean, it's certainly not them or anyone they know, so who cares, right?
Thats like saying that investigative reporters only write the stories, that they do, to get readers to pay for their publications. Its technically correct, but fails to tell the whole story. Like Journalists, these hackers are shining a bright light on other peoples dirty little secrets, and all of us can choose to benefit from the enlightenment, or embrace the blissfully ignorant darkness.
I, for one, choose the light, and judge others by which they choose. No matter how painful it may be.
-=Geoskd
So instead, we have a union, and the opposite happens. In any environment, you have good workers and lazy workers, and everything in between. With a union, everyone gets paid the same no matter how good or bad they perform, so hard work is not rewarded. Eventually everyone sinks to the lowest level, and the company is crushed by non-union competition, or the jobs are off-shored to somewhere cheaper if possible.
Wages drop, and work loads increase because demand for jobs is greater than supply. The opposite of that process is disruptive technology and business models which allow a "reset" of wages and responsibilities.
Lastly, let me assure you that hard working people don't tend to stay in union shops. They get promoted to management, or simply leave for a place where they can use their work ethic to get ahead. Unions are a race to the bottom.
-=Geoskd
Do you really believe that is easy? Getting a new job involves time searching for it. Also, not having a job even for a short period of time is not an attractive option for most people, which complicates the matter further. There's a lot of friction in the job market, which is why it doesn't work well at all without unions and regulation.
Were talking about a part time sales job, not a white collar career. Changing part time jobs is as easy as changing underwear. You stop showing up for one, and go down to the mall and spend 3 hours wandering store to store asking if they are looking for help. Job found. Pretty soon they'll decide that the job at the apple store wasn't really so bad, the employee just wanted far more than their contribution to the company was worth...
-Geoskd
why shouldn't employees (who are free to associate, right?) try to leverage the sunk costs of their training into higher salary? assuming (for sake of argument) that there is no government interference on their behalf and that the unionizers don't initiate "violence" against the non-unionizers, why is this not a rational approach compatible with Libertarianism(tm)?
Because the government does interfere. The company should have a right to fire them all and start over if that is what they want to do, but the law makes that impossible.
-=Geoskd
It makes perfect sense for the employees to expect the same values in like kind, doesn't it? Sure it does! They will offer the highest value they can, and they know the company can afford that loyalty and excellent service, because it's a hall mark of how their CEO does things.
It only makes sense if the employees are contributing significantly to the margins. Why should an employee who performs poorly get the same compensation as one who performs well? Unions are a form of socialism. Would you advocate we switch to communism as well?
-=Geoskd
The magnetic field would need to exist outside the porous metal by at least a few millimeters to as much as a couple inches. Whether or not the metal is destroyed depends on the metal and its melting point. Thereby the metal used would have to have a melting point considerably higher than the temperature of the plasma.
In order to have any real cutting power, the plasma would have to be really hot. Plasma cutting torches spew between 5000 and 10,000 F, and those don't cut terribly fast. Tungsten and carbon both melt around 5000 to 6000 F. Even if the plasma was just cool enough not to melt the rod, it would loose all its strength at those temperatures, and your light saber would be a limp noodle.
Nothing drives me nuts more than armchair engineers. They have this insane faith in engineering to produce impossible solutions, and feel that if engineers haven't created their device for them, then the engineers just aren't trying. The original poster for this falls under the category of wing nut / whack job. Go out and read a book or two on plasma dynamics before you post somewhere claiming to have "solved" a plasma engineering problem.
-=Geoskd
heh heh yup. I also thought that the largest problem with a lightsaber being plasma is that to cut as efficiently as portrayed it would roast anyone within a football field of it. Little problem called convection and the laws of thermodynamics.
Not to mention that "metal rod" he's so proud of being obliterated the moment the plasma was turned on.
-=Geoskd
Actually, the cool part is that the kid is making hundreds of pounds out of this.
Only because two telcos are too stupid to realize what they are buying, and are hoping that someone will actually buy them. Someone made several million selling "pet rocks" once too, that didn't make the product any good.
-=Geoskd
With "Shipper Release" why does the carrier even deliver the package? They should just throw it in the trash at the sorting centre.
Because that would be fraud...
He invented this? How come I had one before he was born?
I think I still have it saved somewhere in my old "Cool" alarm equip. I used to do installs in the pre-computer (pre 386 days). This was a box, with triggers and a phone module. Event triggers, allowed for voice out, mic in.
Exact same thing. So... innovation?
Kudos to him for a great innovation.
-@|
AC til I find it...
You were using 3G in the pre-386 days?
the 3G part is not that part that people think is the cool part. In fact, the 3G part is entirely irrelevant to the operation of the invention. You could rig one of these things to work over a ham radio, or better, as was suggested earlier, VOIP through a pre-existing connection and save a fortune. The 3G part was because the kid is 13, and all the components of this setup are fairly easy to wire together (probably doesn't even require a breadboard). All of the parts are standard off the shelf modules. Hell, someone with some programming skill could make an old 486 with a sound card and a network connection do everything this does through VOIP, with only needing to make about half a dozen wiring connections through the game port and the speaker connections. Not that I have put any thought into this or anything.
-=Geoskd
I think more people knock than ring doorbells, even when they are available.. UPS has over the years gotten bad about just dumping the package on the porch.. I think most do attempt a knock (or ring), but they are trying to get on to the next address so they are not going to wait too long before they just leave it.. If you are really concerned and unable to be there to make sure you get you package, Fed Ex has a hold for pickup and you can get your package at the nearest office.
Many people don't realize that UPS and FedEx now offer a shipping option called "shipper release". It is a discounted shipping option that guarantees that the driver will leave the package, no matter the neighborhood, weather conditions, etc. The building could be on fire and they will leave the package. The catch is that the carrier is not responsible for lost or stolen packages. Many shippers use this option because it is cheaper to replace any packages lost, than it is to pay full shipping price (The shipper release discount is pretty big). Many, many shippers now use it. This in large part why packages are left. Often a driver wont even knock when the package is shipper release, they just drop and run.
Wealthier than average people are driven to succeed. They're driven to finish college and they are driven to find a good job. There is certainly correlation between education and income, but I see no reason to believe the formal education itself has any bearing on ones chances at financial success. It seems that the attributes one has drives them to finish college, then make lots of money. However, if you removed the option of college, they would still be driven to make lots of money.
That right there is what is known as a co-dependent variable, and after you adjust for them, you still get an overwhelming advantage to getting any degree, but especially the "right" degree.
-=Geoskd
So, you're saying that you're willing to gamble the relatively well understood consequences of nuclear disasters with the highly unknown consequences of global warming and air pollution? I would humbly suggest that continuing to burn fossil fuels is the greater of the two evils and that we should move towards nuclear fast. It's entirely possible that we have already pulled the trigger that will kill billions of people, but its also possible we haven't, or there never was a trigger to pull. We simply don't know yet. To put the risk of nuclear in perspective, Chernobyl has been estimated to have killed 5000 people all told. Even if that is off by a factor of ten, compare it to the roughly 50,000 people killed in car crashes in the U.S. last year alone. The risks of nuclear are well understood, and significantly lower than your daily commute, even with the lax safety that was the old soviet union. The risks of fossil fuels are not well understood at all (some are: air pollution, and acid rain). Any businessman would tell you that's an easy choice, and nobody but a true gambling addict would take the bet when the odds are not clear, but that is what you would sign us all up for... If you don't think that the stuff being put out by burning fossil fuels is generally bad, then I propose we hook up your exhaust pipe to your household air ducts and you can breathe what you're spouting. I would simply ask: "who's the nut-job?"
Geoskd
See, this, right here, is why anyone with a halfway-useful education immediately laughs at the green movement. You honestly seem to think that tossing a few billion dollars at a bunch of scientists will result in some magical doohickey which produces limitless energy with no environmental impact or risk to the public. Technology doesn't work that way. Improvements don't scale that way. You may as well suggest prayer; it's just as likely to produce the desired result.
If I had mod points, I would void my other posts in this thread just to give them to that post. It sums up very nicely. Your average 10 year old can understand that having money by itself is no good if you don't know how to buy what you want. Spending a fortune on "science" only does any good if the scientists happen to be on the right track. If they are not, then you get bupkus (See Tokamak). Research and Development is great at making incremental improvements to existing technology, but if the existing technology is fundamentally limited, then all the RnD in the world wont get you more than those limits. What is needed is whats called a "breakthrough", and the those are unpredictable and mostly independent of funding. There is nothing you can do to cause them deliberately (or prevent them).
A good example of this principle is the atomic bomb. Nuclear piles were a common thing for researchers to be working on in the 30s. They were interesting, but making them go boom required a great deal of incremental improvement in yield and size. These improvements could be bought. There was, however, no way that anyone in the 19th century was going to build a nuclear weapon, no matter how much money they spent, because the breakthrough hadn't happened yet.
-=Geoskd
Until people stop believing in electrical genies that can hold vast amounts of power in a thimble, they can't think about the problem rationally because they believe electric is the portable power solution. Electricity is great, but even if you replaced the entire interior of your car with the best battery technology, it wouldn't be but a few percent of the energy stored in your gas tank.
Actually, if you filled the entire car, it would be about 25-40%. Which would be more than enough because the efficiency (Battery to road) is 80-90% whereas I.C. efficiency (Gas to road) is around 20-40%. Batteries are getting better *very* fast. Within 10 years, batteries will come up to about 10% of the volumetric and gravimetric density of gas (currently about 3% and 1% respectively). At that point, Full electrics will be a completely viable alternative to gas. This improvement will come as the increases in performance are a natural extension of the same principles that drove Moores law. Ultra capacitors alone are well above the 10% energy density of gasoline mark, and the only likely remaining hurdle is manufacturing in quantity (quality control).
-=Geoskd
Well, Gas and Coal (which are not the intended replacements) at least don't remain a deadly menace for ten times longer than man has walked this planet until now.
I wouldn't be so sure about that. The last ice age lasted 10,000 years. Messing with our planet-wide climate without fully understanding it is like playing Russian roulette without even knowing how many bullets are in the gun. Radioactive waste is almost entirely a localized problem. Even putting 100 tons of highly radioactive debris into the atmosphere at Chernobyl, and detonating however many hundreds of nuclear weapons in the last 5 decades, didn't really affect 99+% of the population of the planet. Fossil Fuels, however have had a demonstrable affect. As with all things technology, Nuclear power will get safer as it gets more mature. All of the planet-wide renewables together are not up to the task of replacing fossil fuels. Only Nuclear can handle the workload. Anyone who believes otherwise is encourage to do the math themselves. Figure out how much raw materials are needed for each of the renewable energy sources / MWH, do the math and you will discover that the raw materials are not available to make solar work. There are not enough workable locations for wind or tidal/wave generators, and Bio requires entirely too much of the earths surface in competition with food sources. Together, they might just be up to the task of replacing Today's *electricity* demand, but when you add in the energy consumed by transportation, its goodnight nurse. Then add in 5% growth in demand for the next 30 years while you build all of the alternative energy sources, and you're once again 75% short of the mark.
Geoskd
He also is involved in a business that rents solar systems
I recently heard about an entire country you can rent for $70,000/day, but now you can rent an entire solar system? How much does that cost?!
I have one you can rent, I'll e-mail you the details...
-=Geoskd
How's that, if you covered 2% of the uninhabitable portions of the Sahara with photovoltaic cells, it would supply 100% of the world's needs. Of course renewables are up to the challenge. And no I'm not saying that the Sahara should be caked in PV, although a company called DESERTEC are giving it a go.
so your answer is to somehow create 200,000 square miles of solar cells? The cost of the cells alone would be around 600 Trillion US Dollars, or Roughly ten times the Gross World Product. That means that if every productive adult in the world did *nothing* but work on this project, it would take ten years to complete. If you take just the "luxury" product (things that are not essential to survival), then it would take 30 years to complete, and by that time it would all have to be replaced because of normal wear and tear combined with wind storms, etc...
Now if somehow you could automate the construction and maintenance, You are still stuck with the worlds supply of the raw materials needed for this endeavor would be exhausted after less than 3% of the project was complete.
Renewables are *not* up to the challenge, at least not with current state of the art technology. In the future maybe, but it will require a breakthrough technology, and that is unpredictable Simple incremental improvements to current technology are not sufficient to the task. If they were, it would be cost effective, and would thus create a sustainable business model, and someone would be doing it. The fact that no profitable company is doing it tells me that it is still pie in the sky.
The fact remains that there is only one technology in our current arsenal that is "up to the challenge". Nuclear. In 200 years either we will derive the majority of our power from nuclear or we will be back in the middle ages, and the majority of people alive today will have no living descendants...
-=Geoskd
Mostly, with massive explosions, the debris and smoke is scattered closely enough behind the shock wave that you cant see the optical effects of the wave. With a translucent explosion, however...
-=Geoskd
Prompt criticality would be suspiciously like an atomic bomb, because that's how they work. But it seems like there was only very minor fallout, of short-term fission products (iodine, etc), which indicates that it just released existing product.
Perhaps the explosion was larger because there was more hydrogen? Also, don't underestimate the power of explosions like that - Chernobyl's steam explosion threw (much heavier) graphite moderator blocks a tremendous distance.
The size of the explosion was only part of the issue. Two other issues also contradict a hydrogen-only hypothesis. The first is the bright orange flash at reactor building 3. Hydrogen burns/explodes translucent. This can be seen with the explosion at building 1: No fireball, but massive and highly visible shock-wave. That had all the hallmarks of a hydrogen explosion. Issue two was the shaped nature of the second explosion. Both the primary (probably hydrogen) blast, and the anomalous orange flash had a distinct upward vector, indicating that some factor was tamping these explosions upward. These two observations together suggest the spent fuel pool, or the primary containment. As there are lots of reasons to believe the primary containment is still intact, this leaves the spent fuel pool as the next most likely candidate.
-=geoskd
actually, LEU can still go boom, it just requires a far larger critical mass than is practical for making bombs. A reactor however has plenty of mass for such an event. Even more so since as the reactor operates, it enriches the fuel... Granted the yield / yield % effective will be really low, but one doesn't need a very high efficiency with 100 tons of fuel to make a pretty big boom. Even the equivalent of couple of tons of TNT is a pretty nasty explosion, never mind 10 kilotons... Anyone who wants to know what 1 ton of TNT does, watch the myth-buster episode where they take on a cement truck.
-=Geoskd