I'd like to hear someone explain why a turbine which allows 98% of the air to escape between the blades is a good idea?
It's probably more complicated than that. These things work more like airplane wings than rotary compressors. The entire mass of air moving near the blades is likely affected by vortices and other aerodynamic effects. You probably want to give each section of disturbed air enough time to move back out of the way before the next blade slices through. Cutting through the previous blade's vortex isn't likely to be very efficient.
Solar cells are one thing; they require large amounts of silicon painstakingly grown from molten ingots and processed in small batches in high-temperature furnaces. I have long believed that photovoltaics will only make economic sense if they figure out how to make them out of plastic sheets.
Let's make a WAG about these wind turbines. If each blade is 18 tons, the whole thing might be ~100 tons or 1e8 grams. Assume it takes several grams of oil or coal to make a gram of plastic or steel. To cover manufacturing and overhead, let's round it all the way up to 10 grams of oil to produce 1 gram of turbine. That would be 1e9 grams of oil to make the turbine. At 36KJ/gram, that's 3.6e13 joules. At 5MW, that's 2000 hours of operation. Assuming it has enough wind to run 50% of the time, that would be 166 days; not too bad.
I probably AM more likely to be struck by lighting than hit by malicious code.
I wouldn't be so sure about that. This report says that the US has lightning injuries+fatalities of around 500 per year. That means the average person gets hit by lightning about once every 600,000 years.
The odds that somebody is going to develop a blockbuster zero-day exploit are much higher than that. For example, what if some person or organization discovers something like new flaws in both Cisco routers and the standard JPEG rendering.DLL or.so? And instead of posting it to security mailing lists, they write effective exploits to hijack the routers to serve up infected JPEGs?
Most of the computers on the Internet could be compromised within minutes just by ordinary browsing. No amount of patching, firewalls or care on the part of the user would prevent the attack. That is just one scenario; it's not hard to think up countless variations. It may be unlikely that this will happen in any given year, but I doubt that it would be as rare as once every 600K years.
How is it government interference when the agencies are part of the government itself? That's simply a case of the boss deciding what the organization is going to buy.
IMO, the reason for their newfound attention to government is more like this:
Personal computing was originally like a vast new uninhabited continent that was discovered some time in the 70s. Microsoft was one of a few pioneers exploring the land and building new settlements. Up until the 90s, there was still enough exploring to do that the "lawless frontier" way of life worked out fine for them. They didn't need the government.
Now, the boundaries of personal computing are pretty well defined, and most of the areas have been surveyed and settled. It's time for Microsoft to build fences around the territories that they've claimed. Now they need the government to help them enforce their claims, kick out trespassers, and keep out new immigrants that might threaten the way they make a living off their land.
They need to make sure that the government is paying attention to their new needs, so they're taking the appropriate actions. This is a pretty natural process as new areas mature, and similar progressions of events have taken place many times in history.
There are plenty of people who are clever enough to have found something that makes them feel happy and pay the bills at the same time. It's not an either/or situation.
Hmmm... I was under the impression that they used a chained list of bogus directory entry headers to hold space for the long filename characters. Maybe that was an earlier incarnation. I agree a translation file would be a boring way to do it.
The loss of this patent strikes no blows against the freedom to innovate, believe me.
The FAT long filename kludge gets a lot of flack, but I always thought that is was actually one of the more innovative things that Microsoft did. It did provide some measure of forwards and backwards compatibility during the painful transition from DOS/Win3 filesystems to more modern ones.
However, does anybody seriously think that the promise of a patent reward is what spurred Microsoft to develop this innovation? No way. They came up with it because their desperate need to maintain compatability between their OS generations. They would have done it even if there were no such thing as patents.
Awarding them a patent on this effort now, even if it were valid, serves only to add more barriers to the software marketplace. It is not going to somehow spur them on to create more invaluable innovations in the area of kludging filesystem namespaces.
The problem that this technology solved no longer really exists. Almost nobody is using 11-character-max filesystems today. The only reason to continue to use this technique is so that this filesystem can maintain backwards compatibility with itself, not with older filesystems as originally intended. There is no longer any intrinsic value in a patent on this technology other than to lock out competition.
I would hate to be a grammar fascist but it just happens to outrage me when people try to sound smart using words which they do not understand. "Panacea" is plural of "panaceum," so it is either "Running as a non-administrator are not panacea" or "Running as a non-administrator is not a panaceum." Please try to pay attention to correct grammar. Thanks.
From dictionary.com:
panacea P Pronunciation Key (pn-s)
n.
A remedy for all diseases, evils, or difficulties; a cure-all.
[Latin panaca, from Greek panakeia, from panaks, all-healing : pan-, pan- + akos, cure.]
panaceum
No results found
Nope, there's no mention of plural usage. You're probably one of those people who insists on still using grammar rules from the 18th century.
In the future, please focus your efforts to improve slashdot grammar on the people who don't know how the difference between its and it's (assuming you actually know the correct usage yourself). Thanks.
I can't think of a single thing it does that ought to be eligible for a patent, even in a world where software can be patented.
Nevertheless, if somebody were so inclined, they could probably get the USPTO to grant them hundreds of patents covering what Linux does. The prerequisite of novelty is not being enforced because the patent office doesn't do effective prior art searches, and the patent holder is not held accountable if their patent claims are later found to be invalid.
If you aren't running as an administrator, which you shouldn't be, it can't install itself. It's the same as Linux or any other OS with a basic user system.
It can still do anything the user can do, including installing itself in the user's account space, setting itself to run every time the user logs on, uploading all of the files the user can access, logging the user's keystrokes, sending email, pinging for other systems, etc. Running as a non-administrator is not a panacea.
Re:Unknown Error In The Submission
on
Nuclear Batteries
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Any alpha emitter is stopped by the skin. That's not the problem.
The problem is if and when the contents of the battery get mixed into anything that you ingest, including air, water and food. This could happen by discarding the battery where eventually it corrodes and releases its contents, incinerating the battery, or intentional tampering and dispersal or poisoning by evildoers(tm).
Ingesting alpha emitters can create a serious cancer risk. Once they're inside you, the particles only need to travel a few microns before they hit some critical part of a cell.
Well, I'd go with that, except that most of my crappy test systems have analog-only VGA cards.
I'm pretty particular about fonts though, and at least in my case, once the monitor _correctly_ locks on the signal using the bitmap, it looks just as good as my laptop's all-digital display. I would agree however that the vast majority of the people out there don't know how to tweak their display correctly for their video source.
I don't have a site handy, but you can make your own with Windows paint.exe. Just create a black-and-white bitmap, and the color palette is replace with various bit patterns. Floodfill the whole image with the 50% black pattern.
You can probably do the same thing with Gimp, but it's not immediately obvious to me how to do it.
That raises the question: What could they possibly find on another planet that's valuable enough to import?
The universe is comprised of about 100 elements. Most of them are available on earth; Mars would have few if any elements that earth doesn't.
All materials that we use are combinations of one or more elements. It's almost certainly cheaper to synthesize any chemical here on earth from its component elements than it would be to import it from another planet. So that puts us right back to the question of: are we missing any elements on earth? If we are, it still maybe cheaper to synthesize them in a nuclear reactor than to import them from another planet. Alternatively, it's likely to be cheaper to research and invent new supermaterials from abundant earth elements than it would be to import rare elements from space.
The only plausible case I've seen is importing He3 from the moon for fusion fuel. However, I saw one estimate that it would take a strip mining operation on the moon on a scale similar to all of coal mines on earth to glean enough of that rare isotope to supply our energy needs. Even that seems unlikely to be economically feasible.
One thing I noticed is that if you have a screen full of anti-aliased text, the auto adjust may not have enough edges to crunch on. I have a big bitmap of alternating black and white pixels that I put up to test the monitor's synch to the pixel clock.
If I autoadjust while showing normal windows, the bitmap will usually still have fuzzy areas when I pull it up. If I autoadjust while the bitmap is being displayed, the monitor is able to lock onto it perfectly. The text looks noticeably better with a perfect lock, especially when using sub-pixel sampling on the fonts, which needs pixel-perfect alignment to work properly.
I have a shortcut to this image on my systems because I have a KVM switch, so I need to autoadjust a lot. No two systems have the exact same video timings.
OK, I used the term "melt" loosely. Most of the frame only softened like butter, not into pools of liquid. Either way, its strength was totally compromised. I have a picture on a book right here of the early part of the explosion. The entire back half of the airship was already totally crumpled and collapsed in midair. It is obvious that either the physical force of the exploding hydrogen or the temperature of the fireball destroyed the frame of the Hindenburg all the way to its core within seconds. This was not just the paint on the outside burning.
It was literally the size of an ocean liner. I never said that it weighed as much, and I wasn't implying that it would melt a ship, so don't get your panties into a wad. I was pointing out that a coat of paint is not going to destroy anything of that size by itself. The ratio of paint to other material in the airship was miniscule.
Yes, but it was just doping on the outer skin. The entire metal frame of this dirigible, which was the size of a large ocean liner, was melted within seconds. There isn't any way that paint on the skin would provide enough energy to do that, even if it was "rocket fuel". There just wasn't all that much material to burn, and being on the surface, much of that energy would harmlessly dissipate into the air. Moreover, escaping inert helium would probably have absorbed and abated even more of the heat energy.
Maybe it would have scorched the outer beams (maybe melting some small part of them), and ruptured the inner gas bags, but it wouldn't have reduced the entire airship to slag and ashes in under 1 minute. The energy to do that was undoubtedly provided by millions of cubic feet of hydrogen gas.
OK, but I used to incinerate ants and ignite paper in 1 second with a magnifying glass that probably only concentrated a couple of hundred to 1. Even if in the real world my calculation is high by a factor of 100, we still would get roasted.
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It's probably more complicated than that. These things work more like airplane wings than rotary compressors. The entire mass of air moving near the blades is likely affected by vortices and other aerodynamic effects. You probably want to give each section of disturbed air enough time to move back out of the way before the next blade slices through. Cutting through the previous blade's vortex isn't likely to be very efficient.
Let's make a WAG about these wind turbines. If each blade is 18 tons, the whole thing might be ~100 tons or 1e8 grams. Assume it takes several grams of oil or coal to make a gram of plastic or steel. To cover manufacturing and overhead, let's round it all the way up to 10 grams of oil to produce 1 gram of turbine. That would be 1e9 grams of oil to make the turbine. At 36KJ/gram, that's 3.6e13 joules. At 5MW, that's 2000 hours of operation. Assuming it has enough wind to run 50% of the time, that would be 166 days; not too bad.
So I don't have to sign an EULA and a two-year service agreement to use a road to drive the store.
Why should the *government* hire teachers?
To keep everone else's kids out of trouble and off my lawn.
Why should the *government* hire firefighters?
So I don't have to find my credit card before I can get somebody to rescue my family from a burning building.
Why should the *government* give disabled people money?
So I don't have to trip over them on the sidewalk and in stairwells as if I was Charlton Heston in Soylent Green.
Since you're the one who doesn't seem to need anybody else, why don't you head for the border.
I wouldn't be so sure about that. This report says that the US has lightning injuries+fatalities of around 500 per year. That means the average person gets hit by lightning about once every 600,000 years.
The odds that somebody is going to develop a blockbuster zero-day exploit are much higher than that. For example, what if some person or organization discovers something like new flaws in both Cisco routers and the standard JPEG rendering .DLL or .so? And instead of posting it to security mailing lists, they write effective exploits to hijack the routers to serve up infected JPEGs?
Most of the computers on the Internet could be compromised within minutes just by ordinary browsing. No amount of patching, firewalls or care on the part of the user would prevent the attack. That is just one scenario; it's not hard to think up countless variations. It may be unlikely that this will happen in any given year, but I doubt that it would be as rare as once every 600K years.
Yes, it's vitally important to protect the kinds of sources that can provide us the real dirt on John Lennon.
If we play our cards right and avoid compromise, we might be able to utilize those same sources to get to the ultimate truth behind the J. Geils Band!
How is it government interference when the agencies are part of the government itself? That's simply a case of the boss deciding what the organization is going to buy.
Personal computing was originally like a vast new uninhabited continent that was discovered some time in the 70s. Microsoft was one of a few pioneers exploring the land and building new settlements. Up until the 90s, there was still enough exploring to do that the "lawless frontier" way of life worked out fine for them. They didn't need the government.
Now, the boundaries of personal computing are pretty well defined, and most of the areas have been surveyed and settled. It's time for Microsoft to build fences around the territories that they've claimed. Now they need the government to help them enforce their claims, kick out trespassers, and keep out new immigrants that might threaten the way they make a living off their land.
They need to make sure that the government is paying attention to their new needs, so they're taking the appropriate actions. This is a pretty natural process as new areas mature, and similar progressions of events have taken place many times in history.
There are plenty of people who are clever enough to have found something that makes them feel happy and pay the bills at the same time. It's not an either/or situation.
Hmmm... I was under the impression that they used a chained list of bogus directory entry headers to hold space for the long filename characters. Maybe that was an earlier incarnation. I agree a translation file would be a boring way to do it.
The FAT long filename kludge gets a lot of flack, but I always thought that is was actually one of the more innovative things that Microsoft did. It did provide some measure of forwards and backwards compatibility during the painful transition from DOS/Win3 filesystems to more modern ones.
However, does anybody seriously think that the promise of a patent reward is what spurred Microsoft to develop this innovation? No way. They came up with it because their desperate need to maintain compatability between their OS generations. They would have done it even if there were no such thing as patents.
Awarding them a patent on this effort now, even if it were valid, serves only to add more barriers to the software marketplace. It is not going to somehow spur them on to create more invaluable innovations in the area of kludging filesystem namespaces.
The problem that this technology solved no longer really exists. Almost nobody is using 11-character-max filesystems today. The only reason to continue to use this technique is so that this filesystem can maintain backwards compatibility with itself, not with older filesystems as originally intended. There is no longer any intrinsic value in a patent on this technology other than to lock out competition.
I'd like to be able to use the PovRay ray tracer as a game engine at 70FPS, but that's just me.
From dictionary.com:
Nope, there's no mention of plural usage. You're probably one of those people who insists on still using grammar rules from the 18th century.
In the future, please focus your efforts to improve slashdot grammar on the people who don't know how the difference between its and it's (assuming you actually know the correct usage yourself). Thanks.
He probably knows his in-laws better than you do.
Nevertheless, if somebody were so inclined, they could probably get the USPTO to grant them hundreds of patents covering what Linux does. The prerequisite of novelty is not being enforced because the patent office doesn't do effective prior art searches, and the patent holder is not held accountable if their patent claims are later found to be invalid.
It can still do anything the user can do, including installing itself in the user's account space, setting itself to run every time the user logs on, uploading all of the files the user can access, logging the user's keystrokes, sending email, pinging for other systems, etc. Running as a non-administrator is not a panacea.
The problem is if and when the contents of the battery get mixed into anything that you ingest, including air, water and food. This could happen by discarding the battery where eventually it corrodes and releases its contents, incinerating the battery, or intentional tampering and dispersal or poisoning by evildoers(tm).
Ingesting alpha emitters can create a serious cancer risk. Once they're inside you, the particles only need to travel a few microns before they hit some critical part of a cell.
I'm pretty particular about fonts though, and at least in my case, once the monitor _correctly_ locks on the signal using the bitmap, it looks just as good as my laptop's all-digital display. I would agree however that the vast majority of the people out there don't know how to tweak their display correctly for their video source.
You can probably do the same thing with Gimp, but it's not immediately obvious to me how to do it.
The universe is comprised of about 100 elements. Most of them are available on earth; Mars would have few if any elements that earth doesn't.
All materials that we use are combinations of one or more elements. It's almost certainly cheaper to synthesize any chemical here on earth from its component elements than it would be to import it from another planet. So that puts us right back to the question of: are we missing any elements on earth? If we are, it still maybe cheaper to synthesize them in a nuclear reactor than to import them from another planet. Alternatively, it's likely to be cheaper to research and invent new supermaterials from abundant earth elements than it would be to import rare elements from space.
The only plausible case I've seen is importing He3 from the moon for fusion fuel. However, I saw one estimate that it would take a strip mining operation on the moon on a scale similar to all of coal mines on earth to glean enough of that rare isotope to supply our energy needs. Even that seems unlikely to be economically feasible.
If I autoadjust while showing normal windows, the bitmap will usually still have fuzzy areas when I pull it up. If I autoadjust while the bitmap is being displayed, the monitor is able to lock onto it perfectly. The text looks noticeably better with a perfect lock, especially when using sub-pixel sampling on the fonts, which needs pixel-perfect alignment to work properly.
I have a shortcut to this image on my systems because I have a KVM switch, so I need to autoadjust a lot. No two systems have the exact same video timings.
The overall popular vote was close, but not nearly close enough to need a recount.
It would have been an improvement because the whole recount fiasco would have been avoided.
To divide a mass into 1000 pieces, divide each dimension by 10. It's that simple. You fail it. (6th grade, that is)
It was literally the size of an ocean liner. I never said that it weighed as much, and I wasn't implying that it would melt a ship, so don't get your panties into a wad. I was pointing out that a coat of paint is not going to destroy anything of that size by itself. The ratio of paint to other material in the airship was miniscule.
Maybe it would have scorched the outer beams (maybe melting some small part of them), and ruptured the inner gas bags, but it wouldn't have reduced the entire airship to slag and ashes in under 1 minute. The energy to do that was undoubtedly provided by millions of cubic feet of hydrogen gas.
OK, but I used to incinerate ants and ignite paper in 1 second with a magnifying glass that probably only concentrated a couple of hundred to 1. Even if in the real world my calculation is high by a factor of 100, we still would get roasted.