saying that there was a big bang and all of the universe just came into being is just ridiculous though. something had to have been there first. how do you explain that? is the universe infinitely old?
No, the universe is about 13 billion years old. This is confirmed by both the data taken by the Cosmic Background Explorer (we can see the remnants of quantum fluctuations of the universe's first instants) and the ages of the oldest stars. Nothing had to have been there "first", because "first" implies the presence of time and we cannot say whether time as we know it existed before the big bang.
You're also committing the fallacy of the argument from ignorance. "We don't know what came before X, therefore it must have been God's doing". If you believe such things, you will never learn the actual truth because you will not even recognize that you need to look.
scientifically prove to me that the universe is infinitely old
It's already been proven pretty conclusively that it is not, but what I think you're thinking is that the universe has to be infinitely old if it doesn't have a "first cause". It doesn't. There are un-caused (random) things in quantum mechanics all the time; if one of those happened to be the event which created time in the first (literally) place, there's your "first cause" (no deity required).
and that everything just came to be out of "chaos" because of a "big bang" and i'll believe it. i want some good proof though.
Order arises spontaneously out of chaos in nature. A chunk of crystalline rock candy will form from a random mish-mash of sugar molecules and water, and you can do this right in your kitchen. (If you want real proof, ferment the sugar and distill it instead.;) What really gets me is that you want iron-clad proof of any natural explanation, while you ask none of your theology. That's a pretty blatant bias, and you shouldn't claim an open mind.
the scientific method cannot be applied to all questions in the universe. do an experiment to see if god exists. what conclusion will you arrive at? what do you test? how do you use the scientific method to answer this question?
prove that god does not exist. physically prove it. you can't. you can't prove or disprove it.
In other words, the subject of God has no business appearing in any scientific research or teaching, because there can be no scientific tests. But then you say:
how did the world get here? how were people created? how were all the different animals and plants created? how did all this come to be? answer those questions for me and give me scientific proof for each of your answers.
Science has partial evidence regarding all of that, and has constructed answers consistent with the evidence. The answers pushed by your ilk are inconsistent (sometimes wildly) with much of it. If one were a true believer and a firm logician, you would have to consider the following line of reasoning:
The Bible appears to claim independent creation of the Earth and all species a few thousand years ago, a "great flood", that the stars are just "lights" in the sky, that the Moon is a "light", and many other things.
These apparent claims are either provably false (the Moon is not "a light", stars are other suns, there are far too many species in the world for them all to have been saved from a world-wide flood on a single boat) or highly questionable (e.g for the Earth to appear billions of years old while only being thousands would require extensive "evidence tampering" on the part of God).
Therefore, either:
The Bible is false,
The Bible is true but is badly misinterpreted, or
God faked it all; he and the Prince of Lies are the same.
I think you are stupid; apparently you believe that God gave you one of the finest thinking machines ever to appear on Earth (only a few billion ever made), yet you feel forbidden to use it and stick to "blind faith" as superior to reason. I believe this makes you dangerous; "Those who make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities." -- attributed to Voltaire
What's the density of the cured material? If you are flying this on a spacecraft, it doesn't matter how high a temperature it will stand; if it's too heavy to let the machine get to orbit you can't use it.
... parallel processing units may perform a lot more ops/sec/watt than one single unit. The speed of a processor depends on the time required to charge and discharge the stray capacitances of its connects, and the impedance of its transistors increases as the drive voltage decreases so the RC time constant goes up and the speed goes down. However, the energy required to charge the capacitance scales as voltage squared, so by accepting a hit on the speed (due to the voltage drop) you can do the same calculation with less energy. Clearspeed seems to be taking parallelism to the sub-processor level in order to reduce heat loads; their operations may take longer to complete, but they can do more operations in the same time as long as the code can use the processors in parallel. Thus the emphasis on "multi-threaded", because it wouldn't work otherwise.
I obviously am not taking issue with the results, as I have not seen them. You, on the other hand, seem to be defending them without having seen them either.
Wrong on both counts.
I am not defending the results, but the integrity of the scientists against your groundless assertions.
You certainly did question the validity of the results.
Here's what you said to begin the thread:
But round-trip time is not enough. You must also precisely measure the distance, and you can't measure that without using Einstein's equations.
You are asserting that the experimenters did not do their homework. If you have grounds for that assertion, you've not even hinted at them; if you have no grounds for that assertion, you shouldn't be posting.
Sure, you can calculate the elipse of the orbit. But that's not the same as calulating the round-trip distance between two accelerated objects.
On the chance that you might not be, I'll answer you:
The orbit of Cassini is independent of the path its signal takes to Earth.
The influence of the curvature of space around the Sun can be separated from anything which changes the orbit of Cassini (or the Earth) by measuring the delay properties of the signal path when the signal passes nearer or further from the Sun.
We can also make very precise measurements of other signal paths, such as the timing of signals from pulsars. We can even do this at the same time as we measure the signal from Cassini....
If you want to take issue with the results (and be taken seriously), you need to make an effort to understand those results and the previous work which underpins it. This is not the same as repeating buzzwords; it takes much more in the way of both effort and raw intelligence.
Grid-interactive inverters shut down automatically if the grid goes away (it's part of the "anti-islanding" requirement). Besides, your 1 KW (peak) of PV isn't going to be able to keep your block powered. The inverter would shut down from undervoltage/overload even if the loss of frequency reference didn't get it.
Interestingly, for all the complaining I hear about underfunded schools, some schools refused free computers because they didn't look like the others that they had purchased. Even more refused because they had to choose between using Linux free or paying for an OS.
You might want to think about appealing these decisions to the court of public opinion. Have you considered writing letters to an editor or three? Parents who are upset that their kids can't get on computers at school might decide that it matters enough to push the issue for you.
If you roughly assume an average of 5 hours of good sunlight per day and roughly assume a house consumes 500KWh per month, then you need 3,333W of generated power (before taking storage into account). In previous price ranges, you're talking $15,000 for that many solar cells (not counting power storage cost or a multiple for storage efficiency). If they can successfully bring solar cells of 20 cents per Watt to market, then you're talking about enough solar cells to cover a house's usage for possibly around $2000.
500 KWH/month / 150 hours/month = 3.333 KW; so far, so good.
3333 W * $0.20/watt = $666. That's way UNDER $2000. Total system cost might multiply that, but the cells won't.
If these things work, daytime electricity will be something close to free. That is going to amount to a sea change in energy economics, and it can't come too soon.
From typical prices. Your average 75 watt (peak, rated) solar panel costs about $300 or so, wholesale.
I can currently buy a 75 watt solar panel for my RV, with all the hardware (mounting, converter, charging, etc) for about $1000 (CDN) with a 20 warranty on the panel: 1000 / 75 / 20 = 0.6667 dollars per watt.
That would be $0.67 per peak watt per YEAR; your total system is over $13 CDN/peak watt. Watch your units.
good AGM (advanced glass mat) battery
Thats absorbed glass mat. (Watch your nomenclature, too; mess it up, and it'll mess up your thinking.)
All that aside, $.20 per peak watt is freaking incredible. At that price you can probably make electric awnings out of the stuff. Let's just hope that this doesn't turn out to be vaporware like so many other stunning "advances" in energy have turned out to be (coughcold fusioncough)
How likely is it that their monsterous huge aerials will survive the winds ?
Doesn't matter to the V/UHF people very much, nor is it crippling to the HF operators. If the beam on the tower comes down, any decent piece of wire and an antenna tuner become a usable "long wire" antenna. Hams have "Field Day" every year where they go off in a field somewhere, operate from tents and trailers and see how many stations they can contact; this is practice for communications during emergencies.
DSM seems like an obvious solution for short-term (few miniutes) shortages, but I don't think people want their large-load appliances to stop working just because the power company decided they could make more if we didn't use them today.
If I understand correctly, the typical program was to run things on something like a 15 minutes on, 15 off basis. I didn't read about actual programs other than for peak-shaving during the summer heat, so the only appliances I've read about being so controlled in real time were central air conditioners. Electric water heaters on timers are another matter; my electric company has had discounts for timed usage for as long as I can remember seeing their rate schedules.
Maybe it would have to be more fine-grained than "shut off now" but more like "increase AC thermostats 3 degrees." Anyway, how are the air conditioner, electric heater and other big loads (and the power meter) supposed to "know" when to conserve? Would the power company send some signal? Or would they just use voltage/frequency of the lines?
As you concluded, it would require hardware at the appliance itself. This presents a big problem of infrastructure, which means there has to be a standard for its function. When I was keeping tabs on it the communications seemed to be tilting toward a more comprehensive SCADA system built around ASN.1 format messaging, but that was 8 years ago.
It seems like it would be better for a computer to decide (for example) that Ohio is going out, so everyone disconnect them at the same time, to save the rest of the grid from whatever is wrong there.
It would have been even better if Ohio had shed load (plants, neighborhoods) as the feeders went down. The rolling blackouts would have been quite newsworthy, but they would have been a local problem.
The ideal situation would have been for Ohio to command non-critical loads down to half power or even less as the situation deteriorated. There are variable-speed A/C compressors which can run at pretty much any power level you command up to 100%, and dimmable fluorescent fixtures could back lighting load down to fractional power as well. If the communications link went all the way down to each outlet, your computer could even do its part by backing down its clock speed. The possibilities are myriad. Unfortunately, we have not even begun to explore them.
Out of curiosity, how much would DSM cost? If it's more than the cost of conservation, then it's easy to see why it never goes anywhere -- because more efficient appliances shed load every day, not just when the grid is unstable.
That's a non-sequitur. As a customer, I want DSM so that the other guy can't overload the grid and take the power down. Conservation saves me a ton of money, but my own use of CF lamps, thrifty computer and open windows instead of A/C doesn't help me if everyone else's load brings the system down. The tragedy of the commons is how we got here.
Something else to add: a while ago in Ohio, a nucler power plant had its control systems down for a while as a result of msblaster.exe.
The article you cites says it was a safety monitoring system (the backup digital one, not the old analog one running in parallel) that went down. This had nothing to do with control systems.
While it is worrisome that any system at a nuke plant could be disabled by worm traffic (appalling breach of good network operating practices), the criticality of a backup radiation monitoring system is very, very low.
It would have been a cinch to handle such problems if we had good DSM (demand-side management). If you could dump load incrementally as required to maintain margins, the massive outages (theoretically) wouldn't be possible (DOS attacks against the communications for the DSM notwithstanding). However, DSM is still "out there" despite at least a decade of talking about it. If you couldn't buy an air conditioner, electric water heater or other big load without DSM hardware, we'd be far less vulnerable than we are now. Unfortunately we are still in the situation of giving discounts for some customers to let their systems be controlled by the power company, and the program is still so little-known that electricians have even bypassed the relays when people complained because their central air wasn't running full blast on the hottest day of the year.
The problem is the "one rate" billing system which gives no incentive to cut back. If you had to pay 25 cents a KWH on the hot afternoons and 4 cents a KWH overnight, you could have an A/C system that makes ice all night and consumes no power at all during the afternoon. But even though the system would benefit hugely from lots of people doing this, it doesn't happen... because the billing system gives all the benefit to the utilities and none to the consumer. That needs to change.
Others have kind of poked at this, but they haven't really explained it for the neophyte. I've had some education in electrical power engineering, so I'll try to fill that gap.
There are two things you need to keep in mind here. The first is that phase in AC systems performs much the same function as voltage in DC systems; just as power flows from higher voltage to lower voltage across a DC connection, power flows from leading phase to lagging phase along an AC connection. (This has to do with reactance; all power lines are inductive.) Counterintuitively, voltage helps move power but it mostly balances VARs (volt-amperes reactive); if you have a local low-voltage situation, you can connect a capacitor to add some VARs and the voltage will come up. This is part of why big inductive loads cause line voltage to dip.
The second thing is that frequency variation is just a phase change over time. If the local frequency falls for a bit, it means that the local phase is moving behind the rest of the grid. This is what you would expect if some large load was added (or a generator lost) and more power had to come from elsewhere on the grid; the delta-phase across the interconnecting lines has to shift to allow more power to flow. What little energy buffering there is is mostly the rotational energy of generators and motors, so phase changes don't quite happen instantaneously.
If you had a serious local power shortage leading to shutdown, under-frequency is exactly what you would expect. Generators trip off-line, and the phase of the local grid backs off to pull more power from outside. It would take a full second at 59 Hz to shift one cycle, so this can go on for a fair fraction of a second. If the phase change over a transmission line increases past 90 degrees it will have to trip off-line, and once the local grid is an island you can have just about any frequency that the system will try to operate at. It's my understanding that most generators trip off-line at more than a fractional Hz off 60, if for no other reason than that they aren't designed or certified to operate on a grid that's obviously malfunctioning and such a condition means trouble. Mechanical resonances at off-operating rotational speeds are another reason to shut down.
I hate to break it to you, but cars for a great many people are a discretionary expense. There is a reason that the old clunkers with V8 engines are cheap; nobody wants something so old and inefficient. The urban poor would probably be better off with bicycles rather than a car anyway (no cost to register, insure, fuel or park them, and fewer health costs due to lack of physical activity).
The poor will be buying the cars that were new 5-10 years ago, almost no matter what those cars were. If you demand fuel prices aimed at the poor, you're demanding that nothing change because all the Chevy Caprices cannot be turned into Metros with the passage of a bill; it has to start somewhere. If you are so concerned about the poor, increase the Earned Income Tax Credit to compensate for the higher fuel taxes they'd pay and phase it out as the vehicle fleet is replaced by the more efficient one.
What if you made a full internal combustion car with a lightweight aluminum chasis, a variable speed transmission, low resistance tires and sleek aerodynamics?
You'd have a high-mileage cruising car. It would have a larger engine than a hybrid for the same peak power, and thus greater cruising losses and lower mileage. You would also not benefit from idle cut-off when stopped or at slow speeds.
The hybrids are pretty much the same except they suffer heavy batteries, gain regenerative braking and have smaller lighter IC engines.
The power/weight of the battery pack and motor can be quite a bit higher than a gas engine. The reduced losses from making the engine the optimal size for cruising makes the whole car more efficient; you trade off speed up long hills (who drives up a mountain every day?) for better driving characteristics in traffic. Stop-and-go (a hell I try to stay away from) is where hybrids really shine.
Except he may not have done that. Using someone else's computer is unlikely to be a violation of the AUP, and that appears to have been sufficient to "register" that computer to the defendant in MIT's database (bad idea). What the computer owner does before and after is not under the control of the person who happened to be borrowing it, and cannot be their responsibility in any moral or even legal sense; they would have to at least have had knowledge of the act.
MIT would probably have handled this best by purging records after a period of non-use. Eliminate the problem of false associations by eliminating the incomplete and error-prone data behind them.
Ok, what if they do this when you are not home and leave you a note? Then you are gonna call the police, go thru your house to see if anything is missing, tampered with, etc. This costs money and your time, which in business transalets to even more money.
If you discovered that you left the door open, you would need to check everything even if nobody left you a note. Due dilligence requires that every discovery of a security hole, by whatever means, be followed up; the person who found the door open and left a note might not have been the only one to make the discovery, just the only one to share the information with the person whose things are at risk.
Also, was the lock broken, or is it a design flaw. there is a difference. Reparing a design flaw costs money.
The design flaw is not the responsibility of the person who discovers that the door doesn't lock as it is supposed to.
In the end he caused the companties time and money to recover from his unauthorized access, which BTW is illegal.
The company was risking its integrity for every day the holes remained open, and they would have had to conduct a full intrusion check when they discovered them regardless of whether or not anyone told them that the holes had been used. The NYT could have merely assumed that everything was okay if they didn't know of any intrusions, but that would have been a failure of due dilligence; a proper response would have been to conduct a full audit to make sure that no black-hats had come in. They would have to do this whether or not Lano had ever come into their systems, so the proper evaluation of the cost of Lamo's activities is probably zero.
Although I acknowledge that SCO likely has no IP claim over Linux, it should have a fair case.
A fair case of what? Proving use of trade secrets (which had been widely distributed and taught in universities for decades)? SCO has made no claims of copyright or patent infringement.
SCO is going to get its corporate head handed to it on a platter, and I hope that the courts allow the corporate veil to be pierced so that McBride and company have to bear the cost of their misdeeds personally (and not just the duped stockholders).
why would you need an active focusing mirror when there's no atmosphere and the targets are all at infinity???
Because the spacecraft gets jostled and buffetted a lot on the way up, and things aren't always in the same relationship at the end of the trip as they were on the ground. Little things like the absence of gravity influence things too. Being able to tweak stuff after launch is probably a lot cheaper and more reliable than building everything heavy enough to be exactly the same before and after.
It's infrared because too much of the universe's interesting phenomena are either behind dust clouds or at extreme red shifts; this puts most or all of their detectable emissions in the infrared, and we can't learn much about them unless we go looking there.
Slashdot Mirror
You're also committing the fallacy of the argument from ignorance. "We don't know what came before X, therefore it must have been God's doing". If you believe such things, you will never learn the actual truth because you will not even recognize that you need to look.
It's already been proven pretty conclusively that it is not, but what I think you're thinking is that the universe has to be infinitely old if it doesn't have a "first cause". It doesn't. There are un-caused (random) things in quantum mechanics all the time; if one of those happened to be the event which created time in the first (literally) place, there's your "first cause" (no deity required). Order arises spontaneously out of chaos in nature. A chunk of crystalline rock candy will form from a random mish-mash of sugar molecules and water, and you can do this right in your kitchen. (If you want real proof, ferment the sugar and distill it instead.- The Bible appears to claim independent creation of the Earth and all species a few thousand years ago, a "great flood", that the stars are just "lights" in the sky, that the Moon is a "light", and many other things.
- These apparent claims are either provably false (the Moon is not "a light", stars are other suns, there are far too many species in the world for them all to have been saved from a world-wide flood on a single boat) or highly questionable (e.g for the Earth to appear billions of years old while only being thousands would require extensive "evidence tampering" on the part of God).
- Therefore, either:
- The Bible is false,
- The Bible is true but is badly misinterpreted, or
- God faked it all; he and the Prince of Lies are the same.
I think you are stupid; apparently you believe that God gave you one of the finest thinking machines ever to appear on Earth (only a few billion ever made), yet you feel forbidden to use it and stick to "blind faith" as superior to reason. I believe this makes you dangerous; "Those who make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities." -- attributed to VoltaireWhat's the density of the cured material? If you are flying this on a spacecraft, it doesn't matter how high a temperature it will stand; if it's too heavy to let the machine get to orbit you can't use it.
... parallel processing units may perform a lot more ops/sec/watt than one single unit. The speed of a processor depends on the time required to charge and discharge the stray capacitances of its connects, and the impedance of its transistors increases as the drive voltage decreases so the RC time constant goes up and the speed goes down. However, the energy required to charge the capacitance scales as voltage squared, so by accepting a hit on the speed (due to the voltage drop) you can do the same calculation with less energy. Clearspeed seems to be taking parallelism to the sub-processor level in order to reduce heat loads; their operations may take longer to complete, but they can do more operations in the same time as long as the code can use the processors in parallel. Thus the emphasis on "multi-threaded", because it wouldn't work otherwise.
- I am not defending the results, but the integrity of the scientists against your groundless assertions.
- You certainly did question the validity of the results.
Here's what you said to begin the thread: You are asserting that the experimenters did not do their homework. If you have grounds for that assertion, you've not even hinted at them; if you have no grounds for that assertion, you shouldn't be posting.- The orbit of Cassini is independent of the path its signal takes to Earth.
- The influence of the curvature of space around the Sun can be separated from anything which changes the orbit of Cassini (or the Earth) by measuring the delay properties of the signal path when the signal passes nearer or further from the Sun.
We can also make very precise measurements of other signal paths, such as the timing of signals from pulsars. We can even do this at the same time as we measure the signal from Cassini....If you want to take issue with the results (and be taken seriously), you need to make an effort to understand those results and the previous work which underpins it. This is not the same as repeating buzzwords; it takes much more in the way of both effort and raw intelligence.
Grid-interactive inverters shut down automatically if the grid goes away (it's part of the "anti-islanding" requirement). Besides, your 1 KW (peak) of PV isn't going to be able to keep your block powered. The inverter would shut down from undervoltage/overload even if the loss of frequency reference didn't get it.
is that the author of the press release is scientifically illiterate.
3333 W * $0.20/watt = $666. That's way UNDER $2000. Total system cost might multiply that, but the cells won't.
If these things work, daytime electricity will be something close to free. That is going to amount to a sea change in energy economics, and it can't come too soon.
It's easier to get forgiveness than permission; go guerrilla.
All that aside, $.20 per peak watt is freaking incredible. At that price you can probably make electric awnings out of the stuff. Let's just hope that this doesn't turn out to be vaporware like so many other stunning "advances" in energy have turned out to be (coughcold fusioncough)
... someone needs an upgraded sarcasm detector.
The ideal situation would have been for Ohio to command non-critical loads down to half power or even less as the situation deteriorated. There are variable-speed A/C compressors which can run at pretty much any power level you command up to 100%, and dimmable fluorescent fixtures could back lighting load down to fractional power as well. If the communications link went all the way down to each outlet, your computer could even do its part by backing down its clock speed. The possibilities are myriad. Unfortunately, we have not even begun to explore them.
That's a non-sequitur. As a customer, I want DSM so that the other guy can't overload the grid and take the power down. Conservation saves me a ton of money, but my own use of CF lamps, thrifty computer and open windows instead of A/C doesn't help me if everyone else's load brings the system down. The tragedy of the commons is how we got here.While it is worrisome that any system at a nuke plant could be disabled by worm traffic (appalling breach of good network operating practices), the criticality of a backup radiation monitoring system is very, very low.
The problem is the "one rate" billing system which gives no incentive to cut back. If you had to pay 25 cents a KWH on the hot afternoons and 4 cents a KWH overnight, you could have an A/C system that makes ice all night and consumes no power at all during the afternoon. But even though the system would benefit hugely from lots of people doing this, it doesn't happen... because the billing system gives all the benefit to the utilities and none to the consumer. That needs to change.
There are two things you need to keep in mind here. The first is that phase in AC systems performs much the same function as voltage in DC systems; just as power flows from higher voltage to lower voltage across a DC connection, power flows from leading phase to lagging phase along an AC connection. (This has to do with reactance; all power lines are inductive.) Counterintuitively, voltage helps move power but it mostly balances VARs (volt-amperes reactive); if you have a local low-voltage situation, you can connect a capacitor to add some VARs and the voltage will come up. This is part of why big inductive loads cause line voltage to dip.
The second thing is that frequency variation is just a phase change over time. If the local frequency falls for a bit, it means that the local phase is moving behind the rest of the grid. This is what you would expect if some large load was added (or a generator lost) and more power had to come from elsewhere on the grid; the delta-phase across the interconnecting lines has to shift to allow more power to flow. What little energy buffering there is is mostly the rotational energy of generators and motors, so phase changes don't quite happen instantaneously.
If you had a serious local power shortage leading to shutdown, under-frequency is exactly what you would expect. Generators trip off-line, and the phase of the local grid backs off to pull more power from outside. It would take a full second at 59 Hz to shift one cycle, so this can go on for a fair fraction of a second. If the phase change over a transmission line increases past 90 degrees it will have to trip off-line, and once the local grid is an island you can have just about any frequency that the system will try to operate at. It's my understanding that most generators trip off-line at more than a fractional Hz off 60, if for no other reason than that they aren't designed or certified to operate on a grid that's obviously malfunctioning and such a condition means trouble. Mechanical resonances at off-operating rotational speeds are another reason to shut down.
Last, I suspect your conclusion is correct.
The poor will be buying the cars that were new 5-10 years ago, almost no matter what those cars were. If you demand fuel prices aimed at the poor, you're demanding that nothing change because all the Chevy Caprices cannot be turned into Metros with the passage of a bill; it has to start somewhere. If you are so concerned about the poor, increase the Earned Income Tax Credit to compensate for the higher fuel taxes they'd pay and phase it out as the vehicle fleet is replaced by the more efficient one.
MIT would probably have handled this best by purging records after a period of non-use. Eliminate the problem of false associations by eliminating the incomplete and error-prone data behind them.
SCO is going to get its corporate head handed to it on a platter, and I hope that the courts allow the corporate veil to be pierced so that McBride and company have to bear the cost of their misdeeds personally (and not just the duped stockholders).
It's infrared because too much of the universe's interesting phenomena are either behind dust clouds or at extreme red shifts; this puts most or all of their detectable emissions in the infrared, and we can't learn much about them unless we go looking there.