The same could be said about the theory of a flat earth. At some point 99.9% of the experts were pretty damn sure of that too.
Actually, 99% of the well-educated people today incorrectly believe that 99.9% of the scientists in the middle ages believed in the concept of a flat earth.
The has been a generally accepted notion that the earth is round since the 1st century A.D.. Disputes have only been about (1) whether the sun revolves around the earth or the other way around, and (2) what the radius of the earth is.
No, it's a different thing. I can't imagine that lutefisk (I don't think I've tasted it) is as smelly as surströmming. Lutefisk is at least sterile. Surströmming was invented in an area of Sweden where salt for preservation was expensive. They make it by putting whole herrings, including their intestines, into airtight cans with very little salt. Store these cans at room temperature for a couple of months. Due to the gas produced by the bacteria the cans kind of look like pressurized balls. Imagine for yourself what this smells like.
Seems practical, as we ourselves seem to have a genetically engineered abhorrence for maggots.
I always wondered why. I am usually not very picky on food, at least when it is about organ meat, meat from furry animals, or things with a strong smell. I even ate Swedish surströmming, i.e. fermented herring with a truly repulsive smell.
But finding a couple of tiny white worms in say a prepared mushroom dish makes me loose all my appetite, despite my rational me keeping telling me that they are cooked and dead and consist of healthy protein. Is it nature or nurture, this abhorrence?
Considering you can take the credit card home and wipe the signature off with some water or weak cleaner.
Have you ever tried that? I tried it with an expired card. That little pad you write the signature on magically desintegrates when rubbed with any solvent that might dissolve ink.
The key is that the main company who sells binders, and who has somehow gotten a stranglehold on most of the retail market (you know who I'm talking about) makes crap.
You know, but I don't. Maybe outside USA it's different. The market leader here (Netherlands, Sweden) is Case Logic. Is that whom you mean?
Slashdot started using [rel=nofollow] earlier this week, but it's seemingly inconsistant. Some links (like yours) has it. Others don't.
It seems that people with a karma bonus don't get the nofollow tag. You seem to have aquired your Karma bonus recently, so no more nofollow for you either.
(Men länken med hätten funkar inte! Det är hursomhelst meningslöst!)
So yes: from now on, when you see GoogleGuy on Slashdot, it is the original, tried and true GoogleGuy.
I must admit, the style of your earlier posts fits very well with that of the True GoogleGuy. Too bad that the sysadmins here are not likely to confirm whether your IP address is from Google like they did elsewhere, so we'll never be completely sure.:)
Just add a "This link was useless/spam" icon next to each google result item.
Nice idea, but people who are low enough to spam SEs won't have any problems to write a program that makes automated Google queries (from different IPs) to get their competitors further down on the SERP list.
The Google Toolbar actually has an option to vote for a webpage (any webpage), but I think Google only uses it to improve spam detection algorithms, not to directly affect the position on the SERPs.
I don't think this one is affiliated with Google. Look at this earlier post, which links to googleguy.de, which has the notice:
GoogleGuy.de is not the real GoogleGuy and not affiliated with google
There is someone who actually works for Google (apparently quite high up), who sometimes posts on behalf of Google in forums such as Webmasterworld. This one is someone else.
Since 11 March 2004 it is no longer necessary to justify a right on a name in order to register a domain directly under.fr or.re. [...] all the following people can register any domain name not listed as a forbidden term: 1. holders of a trademark; societies (organisations), enterprises; (something I don't understand with INSEE);
independent professions; artists, etc.
Online poker [wikipedia.org]... Online poker [wikipedia.org]... Online poker [wikipedia.org]... Online poker [wikipedia.org]... Online poker [wikipedia.org]... Online poker [wikipedia.org]...
Google only counts unique URLs on each page; repeating the same one over and over is useless. A professional spammer sets up a couple of interlinked web sites and link to these different web sites.
The Dutch ISP xs4all.nl has been offering this in their terms and conditions (see under 4.4) basically since they were founded somewhere around 1993. The bounty is 6 months of free access if you can get root permissions, under the condition that you tell how you did it and that you didn't cause damage.
By the way, xs4all.nl offers its subscribers ssh access to a FreeBSD system, so you can try from the inside. Xs4all originated from a hacker/cracker club called Hacktic and this deal apparently helped the company to secure their systems extremely tightly.
There is a host of organic compounds that absorb light. Do you think your car painted with Ruthenium?
I don't own a car, but there is probably not much ruthenium in my bikes.:)
Dyes in dye-sensitized semiconductor photovoltaics need to satisfy different requirements than those in paint. Most importantly, it should release an electron to the semiconductor when it absorbs a photon and should have a low probability of recapturing that electron from the semiconductor. How DSSC cells operate is very different from purely organic cells. The latter still have very low efficiencies and often a mediocre lifetime---they won't survive 25 years in full sunlight.
Now 10 percent effiency, that is something to be skeptical about.
Indeed, at least if it had been a fully organic system. The first nanocrystalline DSSC cell ever made directly had an efficiency of 7%. Actually it is more disappointing than too good to be true that the efficiency has climbed so little in 15 years time.
what about the tech that we use for soda bottles (i.e. HDPE/EVOH/HDPE,
No idea about those polymers; maybe that's what these guys are doing. But note that there's only one gram of dye on a square meter,and 100 mg of oxygen over the course of 10 years suffices to kill the cell. The surface-to-volume ratio kind of sucks.
the cost of ruthenium has also gone up a bit, i think right now it is somewhere around $50 per gram. Yeah, something like that -- if you get the trichloride stuff. Still not all that expensive.
I was mistaken about the amounts. You need about 1 g RuN3 dye per square meter of solar cells, which corresponds to maybe 100 mg of pure Ru, or $5. Glass is actually more expensive than you'd think from looking at a wine bottle, as most parents of football players know.
The organics CAN be expensive. Though i belive that you can get decent effeciency using just bipyridine ligands. (correct me if i am wrong)wich are not all that much. (~$4 a gram)
I didn't realize that they're easy to sythesize. However, I believe that there are patents on many of these dyes, so they are not free as in speech. Neither as in beer for that matter.
While it is impractical to drive the entire machine from solar power, it should be possible to get around 7W from coating the back of the screen in solar cells, giving a nice boost
Good luck while using your laptop with TFT screen while sitting outside in bright sun light, while squeezing a mirror between your legs in order to direct the sunlight to the back side of the screen...
I remember hearing once at a conference that the amount of ruthenium expected to be in the earth's crust is only enough to make enough solar cells to cover the state of north dakota or something like that.
Hmm. The abundance of ruthenium is about 1 ppb in the crust, so that would be about 10^14 kg. IIRC, you need only a few mg of pure Ru per square meter, so I don't think this is the issue. Of course, it might be hard to extract that kind of amounts from the crust, but that is a different story. My old 1986 edition of the CRC Handbook of Chemistry and Physics lists a price of US$4 per gram.
I agree that the dye is expensive, but I think that that has more to do with the fact that it is a complicated organic molecule that surrounds the ruthenium atom.
The company's website is a bit low on details that would make the
reader understand what it all is about. The article in The Hindu isn't
much better and mostly copies the hollow phrases from the site.
From what I read on the website: nanostructured materials,
estimated lifetime of 25 years, made of "nontoxic semiconductor paint"
suggests that it is about dye-sensitized
solar cells. These are based on small TiO2 particles, the same
that is used as a pigment in white paint. These do not absorb visible
light by themselves, but can catch and transport electrons from
certain light-absorbing dyes. These solar cells were invented around
15 years ago; the necessary components of such a solar cell, TiO2,
dye, solvents, sandwiched between two glass plates, are relatively
cheap, but the yield is still below 10% (sunlight power to electrical
power).
Apparently, this company has found a way to mass-produce cells
based on this principle using plastic films instead of glass. The
glass was the most expensive component; the problem with plastic films
is that it is hard to make them last a long time while still being
impermeable to oxygen and the liquid solvent inside the cell.
Candela essentially measures the same things as watts.
The candela is a weird unit, but it is not equivalent to watts. There are three units related to light:
lumen -- comparable to watts, but weighted with a defined sensitivity curve that is supposed to represent the response of an average human eye;
lux -- lumens per square meter
candela -- lumens per steradian (unit of solid angle). It represents brightness, i.e. how bright the light source looks if you look into it from a specified distance.
For some reason the candela was chosen to be the base unit, rather than the lumen; probably because it is easier to calibrate for. The sensitivity curve is rather arbitrary. It is fundamentally impossible to measure this curve with high precision since individual humans are different and it requires test persons to judge subjectively whether, say, a red and a green light source are equally bright.
Since these units are defined to some hard-to-measure property of the human body, I think they shouldn't have a status as an SI base unit. Inches and feet don't have that status either, after all.
The article defines a gadget as a small (can be carried easily) thing with electronic or moving parts. Hardly any of your examples satisfies these conditions.
DC wiring? Voltage dividers at each location? Are you nuts?
And in addition to the things you mention, you will get horrible grounding problems as soon as you connect two devices that were supposed to have independent power supplies. Maybe one of them uses a virtual ground at +2.5 V (e.g. computer loudspeakers), while the other doesn't (most digital electronics). Connect both to a computer and you will burn both of them, and possibly the router downstairs that is connected through the ethernet cable as well. And if you don't burn anything, the least you'll get is noise problems due to grounding loops.
AC transformers can easily be greater than 90% efficient. [...]
will draw around 65 mW with no load - far less than the 1-5 watts you've claimed.
I doubt that an AC transformer designed for a maximum load of 5 W will have 90% efficiency if the load is only 0.05 W. Most wall warts that I know feel slightly warm to the touch even if the connected device is switched off. That must be much more than 65 mW.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, 99% of the well-educated people today incorrectly believe that 99.9% of the scientists in the middle ages believed in the concept of a flat earth.
The has been a generally accepted notion that the earth is round since the 1st century A.D.. Disputes have only been about (1) whether the sun revolves around the earth or the other way around, and (2) what the radius of the earth is.
No, it's a different thing. I can't imagine that lutefisk (I don't think I've tasted it) is as smelly as surströmming. Lutefisk is at least sterile. Surströmming was invented in an area of Sweden where salt for preservation was expensive. They make it by putting whole herrings, including their intestines, into airtight cans with very little salt. Store these cans at room temperature for a couple of months. Due to the gas produced by the bacteria the cans kind of look like pressurized balls. Imagine for yourself what this smells like.
I always wondered why. I am usually not very picky on food, at least when it is about organ meat, meat from furry animals, or things with a strong smell. I even ate Swedish surströmming, i.e. fermented herring with a truly repulsive smell.
But finding a couple of tiny white worms in say a prepared mushroom dish makes me loose all my appetite, despite my rational me keeping telling me that they are cooked and dead and consist of healthy protein. Is it nature or nurture, this abhorrence?
Have you ever tried that? I tried it with an expired card. That little pad you write the signature on magically desintegrates when rubbed with any solvent that might dissolve ink.
You know, but I don't. Maybe outside USA it's different. The market leader here (Netherlands, Sweden) is Case Logic. Is that whom you mean?
It seems that people with a karma bonus don't get the nofollow tag. You seem to have aquired your Karma bonus recently, so no more nofollow for you either.
(Men länken med hätten funkar inte! Det är hursomhelst meningslöst!)
I must admit, the style of your earlier posts fits very well with that of the True GoogleGuy. Too bad that the sysadmins here are not likely to confirm whether your IP address is from Google like they did elsewhere, so we'll never be completely sure. :)
Nice idea, but people who are low enough to spam SEs won't have any problems to write a program that makes automated Google queries (from different IPs) to get their competitors further down on the SERP list.
The Google Toolbar actually has an option to vote for a webpage (any webpage), but I think Google only uses it to improve spam detection algorithms, not to directly affect the position on the SERPs.
I don't think this one is affiliated with Google. Look at this earlier post, which links to googleguy.de, which has the notice:
There is someone who actually works for Google (apparently quite high up), who sometimes posts on behalf of Google in forums such as Webmasterworld. This one is someone else.Yes, a couple of years back, there was a similar story:
I don't recall a story when the clock hit the 10^9 mark, though.From the French domain registration site (translated):
Google only counts unique URLs on each page; repeating the same one over and over is useless. A professional spammer sets up a couple of interlinked web sites and link to these different web sites.
... and one at mirrordot.org
Here is the coralized mirror.
By the way, xs4all.nl offers its subscribers ssh access to a FreeBSD system, so you can try from the inside. Xs4all originated from a hacker/cracker club called Hacktic and this deal apparently helped the company to secure their systems extremely tightly.
I don't own a car, but there is probably not much ruthenium in my bikes. :)
Dyes in dye-sensitized semiconductor photovoltaics need to satisfy different requirements than those in paint. Most importantly, it should release an electron to the semiconductor when it absorbs a photon and should have a low probability of recapturing that electron from the semiconductor. How DSSC cells operate is very different from purely organic cells. The latter still have very low efficiencies and often a mediocre lifetime---they won't survive 25 years in full sunlight. Now 10 percent effiency, that is something to be skeptical about.
Indeed, at least if it had been a fully organic system. The first nanocrystalline DSSC cell ever made directly had an efficiency of 7%. Actually it is more disappointing than too good to be true that the efficiency has climbed so little in 15 years time.
No idea about those polymers; maybe that's what these guys are doing. But note that there's only one gram of dye on a square meter,and 100 mg of oxygen over the course of 10 years suffices to kill the cell. The surface-to-volume ratio kind of sucks.
I was mistaken about the amounts. You need about 1 g RuN3 dye per square meter of solar cells, which corresponds to maybe 100 mg of pure Ru, or $5. Glass is actually more expensive than you'd think from looking at a wine bottle, as most parents of football players know.
The organics CAN be expensive. Though i belive that you can get decent effeciency using just bipyridine ligands. (correct me if i am wrong)wich are not all that much. (~$4 a gram)
I didn't realize that they're easy to sythesize. However, I believe that there are patents on many of these dyes, so they are not free as in speech. Neither as in beer for that matter.
Good luck while using your laptop with TFT screen while sitting outside in bright sun light, while squeezing a mirror between your legs in order to direct the sunlight to the back side of the screen...
Hmm. The abundance of ruthenium is about 1 ppb in the crust, so that would be about 10^14 kg. IIRC, you need only a few mg of pure Ru per square meter, so I don't think this is the issue. Of course, it might be hard to extract that kind of amounts from the crust, but that is a different story. My old 1986 edition of the CRC Handbook of Chemistry and Physics lists a price of US$4 per gram.
I agree that the dye is expensive, but I think that that has more to do with the fact that it is a complicated organic molecule that surrounds the ruthenium atom.
From what I read on the website: nanostructured materials, estimated lifetime of 25 years, made of "nontoxic semiconductor paint" suggests that it is about dye-sensitized solar cells. These are based on small TiO2 particles, the same that is used as a pigment in white paint. These do not absorb visible light by themselves, but can catch and transport electrons from certain light-absorbing dyes. These solar cells were invented around 15 years ago; the necessary components of such a solar cell, TiO2, dye, solvents, sandwiched between two glass plates, are relatively cheap, but the yield is still below 10% (sunlight power to electrical power).
Apparently, this company has found a way to mass-produce cells based on this principle using plastic films instead of glass. The glass was the most expensive component; the problem with plastic films is that it is hard to make them last a long time while still being impermeable to oxygen and the liquid solvent inside the cell.
Actually, that one is defined in terms of the speed of light, which isn't considered a measured constant nowadays.
The candela is a weird unit, but it is not equivalent to watts. There are three units related to light:
- lumen -- comparable to watts, but weighted with a defined sensitivity curve that is supposed to represent the response of an average human eye;
- lux -- lumens per square meter
- candela -- lumens per steradian (unit of solid angle). It represents brightness, i.e. how bright the light source looks if you look into it from a specified distance.
For some reason the candela was chosen to be the base unit, rather than the lumen; probably because it is easier to calibrate for. The sensitivity curve is rather arbitrary. It is fundamentally impossible to measure this curve with high precision since individual humans are different and it requires test persons to judge subjectively whether, say, a red and a green light source are equally bright.Since these units are defined to some hard-to-measure property of the human body, I think they shouldn't have a status as an SI base unit. Inches and feet don't have that status either, after all.
The article defines a gadget as a small (can be carried easily) thing with electronic or moving parts. Hardly any of your examples satisfies these conditions.
And in addition to the things you mention, you will get horrible grounding problems as soon as you connect two devices that were supposed to have independent power supplies. Maybe one of them uses a virtual ground at +2.5 V (e.g. computer loudspeakers), while the other doesn't (most digital electronics). Connect both to a computer and you will burn both of them, and possibly the router downstairs that is connected through the ethernet cable as well. And if you don't burn anything, the least you'll get is noise problems due to grounding loops.
AC transformers can easily be greater than 90% efficient. [...] will draw around 65 mW with no load - far less than the 1-5 watts you've claimed.
I doubt that an AC transformer designed for a maximum load of 5 W will have 90% efficiency if the load is only 0.05 W. Most wall warts that I know feel slightly warm to the touch even if the connected device is switched off. That must be much more than 65 mW.