Sunlight pouring into a room through older windows will really heat up the room. There are several things you can do about this, including installing reflective window films (from Tap Plastics for example), or even painting some white paint onto the outside of the windows (great for places where there is no view anyway). To clean it off you just scrape with a razor blade. If you have fancy modern low-e coatings on your windows, DON"T do this.
In california, nevada, arizona, etc Evaporative cooling almost always works very well. You want to watch out for mold growth on the pads or condensation in the room. Last year Home Depot had a portable unit from "Bonaire". Anyone know where to get replacement pads?
Proper reflective roofing is a fantastic way to reduce the cooling load of your house. Google for "cool roofs" for more information. Unfortunately the most common type of roof is asphalt shingle, and there is no way to make them cool. White painted metal roofs, or built up roofs with a special white foam coating are both good ways to go.
Deciduous trees on the sunward side of the house are fantastic in the long run, but take years to grow. Perhaps instead you might prefer to plant a trellis of climbing plants on the sunward side of your house.
Indoor plants cool the room through transpiration of water, similar to evaporative cooling. This is a small effect, and works only in low-humidity environs.
Lastly, when it comes to air conditioning, multiple smaller units are usually better than one big unit. You can better modulate the cooling effect, have different zones, and run the units at higher efficiency (less starts and stops).
If you're looking to efficiently cool things on a commercial scale, absorption cooling systems can run off solar heat, or cogenerated heat.
Homebrewing Gardening (vegetable/food) Pottery/Ceramics Painting (art and walls) Reloading (cartridge ammunition) Woodworking (as storage space allows) Cooking (most days) Metalsmithing (lathe, welding, etc) Breadmaking (several times a month) Photography and developing/printing (too expensive at the moment) Cloth dyeing (well, more my mom and sister than me)
I usually pick these up when the timing is convenient, learn enough to be competent, then move on to the next thing, but eventually come back around in a circle later to learn more about the subject when it's relevant again.
Ultimately my goal is to have a smallish farm in a semi-rural area near a university town, build my own house, and include lots of greenhouse, storage, and workshop space.
Oh yes, and cogenerate my electricity and heating with net metering or mutex switched grid/local electric. Not to mention passive solar heating, cool reflective roofing, and a combination of thermal mass and evaporative cooling.
if you start acting like an economist and figuring out "economic profits" it turns out that there are none. But that's true in any market economy, you can't make anything more than anyone else does doing similar things.
We do it because we like it. We like it because that's the kind of people we are. We're drawn to quality and efficiency. See Paul Graham's article on hackers and painters. To quote:
"What hackers and painters have in common is that they're both makers. Along with composers, architects, and writers, what hackers and painters are trying to do is make good things."
As someone who essentially (though not officially) minored in philosophy I can assure slashdot readers that:
1) Not all philosophers are elitist assholes, though some of them are.
2) Not all philosophy is worthless masturbation but some of it is.
3) The Matrix has nothing particularly interesting with respect to philosophy, it is essentially a retread of the story of christ, and the idea that Descartes had about dreams vs reality.
The most interesting philosophy courses I took were from Michael Bishop. His classes were thought provoking and relevent to everyday life. (Hi Mike!)
The most interesting philosophy, to me, is philosophy of science, and philosophy of economics. The essential questions are what should we consider as rational reasons for making decisions about the world? How should we evaluate theories that others create? Why should we study science, or human action, and what constitutes the best types of scientific studies and discourse.
Notice that the Matrix is not particularly relevent to any of those issues.
My comment was actually geared towards higher math than the college level calc classes.
I did quite well as a math major through college, but when it comes to trying to read professional math books and learn anything much from them, it's virtually hopeless.
Even with the standard mathematician's trick of skimming first, and repeating several times in deeper and deeper depth, there comes a time when you start to say "Why are they doing this, and what were they trying to show, and why does it matter?"
Those are the questions that mathematicians almost never answer. How many times have you read a chapter in a math book and had it say something like:
"By the end of this chapter you will have a good feeling for the well known theorems in basic knot theory. we'll proceed by showing blablaba which will require 3 theorems from basic algebra. Then we will show xyz which is a consequence of well known theorems from topology which we will remind you of as we go along. Then in the end we'll show that all knots are pdq, this requires that you know some basics about coloring theorems but we will state those theorems approximately rather than proving them in depth...."
And then have them complete the chapter with the same level of explanation of why and what they are doing throughout? Almost NEVER.
Otherwise even to a dedicated and competent mathematician, it starts to look arbitrary if you haven't seen something before. The fact is that the bulk of math papers place NO emphasis on cognitive understanding, and ALL emphasis on short concise (dense) proofs of apparently arbitrary facts followed by a final proof of the main issues, and then move on to an apparently separate part of the authors favorite research topic.
I agree that our math education needs a major overhaul. I think it should concentrate on two things: mathematical modelling, and computational mathematics. These are the things that people will need the most.
Specifically students should be able to take a problem about the real world, and create formulas that describe it. They should have a sense for what statistics mean about the real world, and they should be able to get approximate answers quickly and correct answers efficiently.
When it comes to explaining math though, the mathematicians take all the blame for simply ignoring explanation in favor of correct minimal proof.
>(Any specific recommendations for a compact fluorescent that has a good color & a nice ballast that doesn't flicker sixty times a second?)
I like the GE ones I bought at target in a 3 pack, they're slightly magenta colored, very pleasing, they are definitely electronic ballast and don't flicker.
The Philips ones I bought at Home Depot are pretty good as well. Very bright, but they are very orange, almost exactly like an incandescent. They also take up to 10 minutes or so to come up to full brightness.
Compact fluorescents all do best when you turn them on and leave them on for a while. They are not nearly as good in areas where you turn them on and off a lot (ie. bathrooms)
Also: T8 linear fluorescents do not flicker (well, they do but at 30 KHz or so). They put out a lot of light, and the ballast is not disposable and therefore more env-friendly. They're great for work areas, and areas where you want a lot of light.
If you don't like the spectrum of fluorescent tubes, try some other tube, there are LOTS of tubes available. The difficulty is just finding someone who carries them.
Indeed I forgot that not everyone is familiar with generalized diameters. But I also confused you by referring to 2 different things. My example was to prove the lemma about diameters, but I think the original statement about n gons with straight sides is true as well but I don't have a proof in words, only pictures.
As someone very familiar with mathematics it doesn't bother me to say "the diameter of a triangle is its longest side" because I'm familiar with generalized diameters.
Now although my original proof doesn't work, for a regular n-gon with straight sides, you CAN always find an orientation of the shape that makes it possible to drop the shape through the widest part of its corresponding hole.
But it really requires drawing pictures to show it.
Actually I'm off base, you can not generally inscribe a shape inside a circle with the same diameter.
Proof:
The diameter of an equilateral triangle is the same as its side, but you can't inscribe it into a circle with that diameter.
The real proof is too hard to explain in words, but by fiddling with pictures you should be able to show that unless your shape has curved sides, you can always find some distance across it that is less than the maximum distance across the corresponding hole.
Theorem, every shape other than a circle can be dropped through the corresponding manhole.
Proof:
Take the diameter of the cover (maximal distance across) This minus a small epsilon (lip size) is the maximal distance across the hole.
since you can inscribe this shape inside a circle with the same diameter, but the shape is not a circle, there is some region where the distance across your shape is smaller than the circle diameter.
If this distance is smaller than Diameter - epsilon then the shape can drop through.
Since epsilon can be made arbitrarily small (ie. there is no knowing ahead of time how small the lip is). Only a circle will not fall through.
Of course in the real world, damage to the lip and soforth might make it possible to drop the circle through as well.
The really great thing about this concept would be if you could charge your cell phone while driving in the car, carrying it around in your pocket, and soforth.
There are seiko watches that do a similar thing (and there were mechanical watches that did it for years before quartz became the norm) but I am afraid it would be hard to extract enough power from these small movements to make much difference in a cell phone.
When the power goes out you don't lose anything, even if it goes out for several weeks.
plus, rather than basing its heuristics on recently used data, it is actually designing around having RAM to store files (as opposed to RAM to store disk blocks)
This guarantees that entire files are in RAM and are rapidly available rather than just a few blocks of many different large files.
Plus it stores the metadata in RAM, so the filesystem on disk is much simpler (and thus more robust). If it's smart, it backs up the RAM data onto disk, but only during quiescent periods.
I want it. If I could get 512 MB of battery backed RAM on a PCI card and a robust version of this filesystem in Linux I'd switch rather quickly.
In the US you don't use Social Security cards for identification. They're basically a piece of paper with your name and number printed on them.
Generally drivers licenses and passports (both of which have photographs on them) are the usual means of identification.
On the other hand, I don't believe you are generally required to have a license or ID card of any kind. This may vary from state to state.
In your example of a cop arresting you for being in a fight, the 5th amendment in the US gives you the right not to incriminate yourself. You need not say ANYTHING to the police about your identity. Of course, eventually they'll probably figure out who you are, and you'll probably stay in jail until they do.
The NRA is basically correct. Lots of people don't like this fact. It doesn't make it any less true.
Now I disagree with the NRA's support of the "war on drugs" and their concept that we generally need more imprisonment of all sorts of criminals (as opposed to basic economic changes that reduce the incentives for criminal behavior), but when it comes to believing in the domino effect of gun rights concessions, they are dead on.
Privacy people sound the same because they are dead on about the Domino effect as well.
Armedby Gary Kleck, and Don Kates gives a very good synopsis of this issue.
"Real Languages" use garbage collection (ha, just trolling).
Seriously, the ability to use an address space that is gignormous is really worth a lot for garbage collection algorithms. For example, you can allocate into reserved portions of the address space and then the type of an object can be determined by its location. You can also use copying collectors without a big hit. Reserving half your address space for copying sucks at 2GB, it doesn't matter much for 17179869184 GB.
Also the "single address space" operating system concept needs more research. However, to get that research going now would require low cost plentiful hardware.
The fact is, there are tons of useful reasons to have 64 bits, we just don't know what they are because we haven't had 64 bits on a commodity platform.
If you have 64 bit addresses and about 1GB of flash RAM, you can completely avoid all the trouble of traditional filesystems. Have your OS use the disk like one big area of RAM, buffer into the NV RAM, keep all the metadata in NV ram, and use a journaled approach for metadata. Speed and simplicity instead of B-trees and inodes and such.
If you're using the engine to directly drive the transmission this would be an issue. But if you're using the engine to generate electricity for a hybrid setup, or using a hybrid setup that only spins up the engine during highway miles or some similar thing, then you can run the engine only at optimal speed and have a simple centrifugal clutch or something.
I can totally understand why you wouldn't want a turbine to replace a diesel or gasoline engine connected to a traditional drivetrain, but I can't see why you wouldn't want a turbine to generate electricity or cruising highway torque for a hybrid.
I have had an amateur radio license since 1989 and have my share of communications and radio frequency theory.
WiFi is just the barest beginning and restricted to as you say a propagationally challenged spectrum.
The point that you have missed is that the investment required takes economic incentive that doesn't exist in the current regulatory structure.
You have missed the point that at first "we" want our own band with good propagation that won't interfere with current usage. One good example would be unused UHF television frequencies, most of these are unused in most areas, and it would be relatively simple to detect them and not interfere.
The fancy multi-array antenna systems and mesh protocols will come a lot faster when it's possible to sell 160 million units a year unlicensed.
Once they come, the current users will migrate away from their outdated broadcast technologies VOLUNTARILY because the new technologies will offer so much more... And if they don't so what...
So what you're saying is that the reason we can't move forward with radio technology is that people in the back woods will have no way to watch "Must Miss TV" (TM)?
The sheer failure to grasp the concept is so amazing to me. Even the geeks don't get it.
1) Open up some portion of the spectrum to unlicensed transmitters that are limited only by reasonable health concerns and basic mode of operations limits(ie. a few watts effective radiated power in the UHF band with "minimal required output power" type regulations).
2) Allow modern economics, silicon engineering, and market demand factors to create useable mesh communications technologies, software defined radios, and software defined directional antennas.
3) Sit back and reap the rewards of human ingenuity.
Outside of the bandwidth assigned for unlicensed use you will not see interference due to the requirements that the devices not generate it.
When we have enough experience and/or have created a system that truly offers reliable communications without the need for pre-assigned frequencies, then we can completely remove all frequency assignments and recover all the spectrum
The RF engineers that jump on people's back about antenna sizes and power outputs and distortion and soforth are stuck in their tunnel vision that the future will look just like today.
The futurists (Lessig, Reed, etc) publishing in a venue like Salon are not supposed to spell out the nitty gritty details of each step along the way, they are supposed to show us where we should be headed. I'm apalled that even the geeks can't take the ball and run with it.
As for radio waves "interfering" they create a superposition, but that superposition is different at different locations. You are assuming that these radios will be stupid and have antennas at a single location. With several antennas seperated by even short distances combined with motion on th e part of some stations, and reflections, you can recover a tremendous amount of information from multiple sources.
What are the real barriers to creating a modern gas turbine powered hybrid?
Gas turbine engines can burn just about any reasonable fuel, including methanol/ethanol, methane, CNG, diesel, gasoline, and soforth. They do it efficiently, probably similar to diesel. They have fewer moving parts, and are more amenable to computer control. They work best at constant speed, and therefore are great when used in hybrid configuration.
Ceramics research since the 80s or so have produced high quality high temperature ceramics materials that require little machining for example at ORNL (at one point I wanted to be a ceramics engineer).
Gas turbine engines need not make a lot of noise. In fact you can buy them as smallish backup generators.
The main thing as far as I can tell is that the infrastructure isn't in place (parts, repair centers, etc). But it would be a lot easier to ship out some parts and run some repair training than to convert every gas station in america to something other than petroleum products.
In terms of emissions, efficiency, power, and ability to use multiple fuels (an hence oil independence), the gas turbine and hybrid electric drivetrain seems like the way to go.
Chrysler built some back in the 50s and 60's but as near as I can tell most of the problems would be solved with ceramic parts and a hybrid electric configuration.
Slashdot Mirror
Sunlight pouring into a room through older windows will really heat up the room. There are several things you can do about this, including installing reflective window films (from Tap Plastics for example), or even painting some white paint onto the outside of the windows (great for places where there is no view anyway). To clean it off you just scrape with a razor blade. If you have fancy modern low-e coatings on your windows, DON"T do this.
In california, nevada, arizona, etc Evaporative cooling almost always works very well. You want to watch out for mold growth on the pads or condensation in the room. Last year Home Depot had a portable unit from "Bonaire". Anyone know where to get replacement pads?
Proper reflective roofing is a fantastic way to reduce the cooling load of your house. Google for "cool roofs" for more information. Unfortunately the most common type of roof is asphalt shingle, and there is no way to make them cool. White painted metal roofs, or built up roofs with a special white foam coating are both good ways to go.
Deciduous trees on the sunward side of the house are fantastic in the long run, but take years to grow. Perhaps instead you might prefer to plant a trellis of climbing plants on the sunward side of your house.
Indoor plants cool the room through transpiration of water, similar to evaporative cooling. This is a small effect, and works only in low-humidity environs.
Lastly, when it comes to air conditioning, multiple smaller units are usually better than one big unit. You can better modulate the cooling effect, have different zones, and run the units at higher efficiency (less starts and stops).
If you're looking to efficiently cool things on a commercial scale, absorption cooling systems can run off solar heat, or cogenerated heat.
Check em off:
Homebrewing
Gardening (vegetable/food)
Pottery/Ceramics
Painting (art and walls)
Reloading (cartridge ammunition)
Woodworking (as storage space allows)
Cooking (most days)
Metalsmithing (lathe, welding, etc)
Breadmaking (several times a month)
Photography and developing/printing (too expensive at the moment)
Cloth dyeing (well, more my mom and sister than me)
I usually pick these up when the timing is convenient, learn enough to be competent, then move on to the next thing, but eventually come back around in a circle later to learn more about the subject when it's relevant again.
Ultimately my goal is to have a smallish farm in a semi-rural area near a university town, build my own house, and include lots of greenhouse, storage, and workshop space.
Oh yes, and cogenerate my electricity and heating with net metering or mutex switched grid/local electric. Not to mention passive solar heating, cool reflective roofing, and a combination of thermal mass and evaporative cooling.
if you start acting like an economist and figuring out "economic profits" it turns out that there are none. But that's true in any market economy, you can't make anything more than anyone else does doing similar things.
We do it because we like it. We like it because that's the kind of people we are. We're drawn to quality and efficiency. See Paul Graham's article on hackers and painters. To quote:
"What hackers and painters have in common is that they're both makers. Along with composers, architects, and writers, what hackers and painters are trying to do is make good things."
As someone who essentially (though not officially) minored in philosophy I can assure slashdot readers that:
1) Not all philosophers are elitist assholes, though some of them are.
2) Not all philosophy is worthless masturbation but some of it is.
3) The Matrix has nothing particularly interesting with respect to philosophy, it is essentially a retread of the story of christ, and the idea that Descartes had about dreams vs reality.
The most interesting philosophy courses I took were from Michael Bishop. His classes were thought provoking and relevent to everyday life. (Hi Mike!)
The most interesting philosophy, to me, is philosophy of science, and philosophy of economics. The essential questions are what should we consider as rational reasons for making decisions about the world? How should we evaluate theories that others create? Why should we study science, or human action, and what constitutes the best types of scientific studies and discourse.
Notice that the Matrix is not particularly relevent to any of those issues.
Whoa, you definitely need Unison.
Unison will synchronize any two file trees in The Right Way (TM).
Get the gtk version for interactive conflict resolution.
My comment was actually geared towards higher math than the college level calc classes.
I did quite well as a math major through college, but when it comes to trying to read professional math books and learn anything much from them, it's virtually hopeless.
Even with the standard mathematician's trick of skimming first, and repeating several times in deeper and deeper depth, there comes a time when you start to say "Why are they doing this, and what were they trying to show, and why does it matter?"
Those are the questions that mathematicians almost never answer. How many times have you read a chapter in a math book and had it say something like:
"By the end of this chapter you will have a good feeling for the well known theorems in basic knot theory. we'll proceed by showing blablaba which will require 3 theorems from basic algebra. Then we will show xyz which is a consequence of well known theorems from topology which we will remind you of as we go along. Then in the end we'll show that all knots are pdq, this requires that you know some basics about coloring theorems but we will state those theorems approximately rather than proving them in depth...."
And then have them complete the chapter with the same level of explanation of why and what they are doing throughout? Almost NEVER.
Otherwise even to a dedicated and competent mathematician, it starts to look arbitrary if you haven't seen something before. The fact is that the bulk of math papers place NO emphasis on cognitive understanding, and ALL emphasis on short concise (dense) proofs of apparently arbitrary facts followed by a final proof of the main issues, and then move on to an apparently separate part of the authors favorite research topic.
I agree that our math education needs a major overhaul. I think it should concentrate on two things: mathematical modelling, and computational mathematics. These are the things that people will need the most.
Specifically students should be able to take a problem about the real world, and create formulas that describe it. They should have a sense for what statistics mean about the real world, and they should be able to get approximate answers quickly and correct answers efficiently.
When it comes to explaining math though, the mathematicians take all the blame for simply ignoring explanation in favor of correct minimal proof.
Isn't it a theorem that every rational number has a decimal expansion that either repeats or terminates?
If that's true (and I think it is) your number is definitely irrational.
What's more, your number is recursively enumerable (it's easy to write a turing machine to compute it).
Ah math. Fascinating stuff. If only there were more mathematicians who were truly gifted at explaining it.
>(Any specific recommendations for a compact fluorescent that has a good color & a nice ballast that doesn't flicker sixty times a second?)
I like the GE ones I bought at target in a 3 pack, they're slightly magenta colored, very pleasing, they are definitely electronic ballast and don't flicker.
The Philips ones I bought at Home Depot are pretty good as well. Very bright, but they are very orange, almost exactly like an incandescent. They also take up to 10 minutes or so to come up to full brightness.
Compact fluorescents all do best when you turn them on and leave them on for a while. They are not nearly as good in areas where you turn them on and off a lot (ie. bathrooms)
Also: T8 linear fluorescents do not flicker (well, they do but at 30 KHz or so). They put out a lot of light, and the ballast is not disposable and therefore more env-friendly. They're great for work areas, and areas where you want a lot of light.
If you don't like the spectrum of fluorescent tubes, try some other tube, there are LOTS of tubes available. The difficulty is just finding someone who carries them.
Well, it wasn't too hard to find something via google:
Reason Magazine came up towards the top of my search.
That article has lots of good info.
Indeed I forgot that not everyone is familiar with generalized diameters. But I also confused you by referring to 2 different things. My example was to prove the lemma about diameters, but I think the original statement about n gons with straight sides is true as well but I don't have a proof in words, only pictures.
As someone very familiar with mathematics it doesn't bother me to say "the diameter of a triangle is its longest side" because I'm familiar with generalized diameters.
Now although my original proof doesn't work, for a regular n-gon with straight sides, you CAN always find an orientation of the shape that makes it possible to drop the shape through the widest part of its corresponding hole.
But it really requires drawing pictures to show it.
The title of the story made me think:
Seals? With wings?
Time to take that bong away from the aerospace engineers.
Actually I'm off base, you can not generally inscribe a shape inside a circle with the same diameter.
Proof:
The diameter of an equilateral triangle is the same as its side, but you can't inscribe it into a circle with that diameter.
The real proof is too hard to explain in words, but by fiddling with pictures you should be able to show that unless your shape has curved sides, you can always find some distance across it that is less than the maximum distance across the corresponding hole.
Sorry, this only applies to n gons with straight sides.
If your sides are curved then you can have your cake and eat it too.
Not true about equilateral triangles.
The side is longer than the altitude.
Theorem, every shape other than a circle can be dropped through the corresponding manhole.
Proof:
Take the diameter of the cover (maximal distance across) This minus a small epsilon (lip size) is the maximal distance across the hole.
since you can inscribe this shape inside a circle with the same diameter, but the shape is not a circle, there is some region where the distance across your shape is smaller than the circle diameter.
If this distance is smaller than Diameter - epsilon then the shape can drop through.
Since epsilon can be made arbitrarily small (ie. there is no knowing ahead of time how small the lip is). Only a circle will not fall through.
Of course in the real world, damage to the lip and soforth might make it possible to drop the circle through as well.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/ne ws/2002/02/24/nguns24.xml
Gun crime tripled in London, soared in other areas as well.
all after the supposed complete crackdown on guns (which conveniently disarmed the entire law abiding victim pool so the criminals could run rampant).
The UK has soaring gun crimes since their complete crackdown on law abiding gun owners.
your example doesn't even begin to hold water.
The really great thing about this concept would be if you could charge your cell phone while driving in the car, carrying it around in your pocket, and soforth.
There are seiko watches that do a similar thing (and there were mechanical watches that did it for years before quartz became the norm) but I am afraid it would be hard to extract enough power from these small movements to make much difference in a cell phone.
When the power goes out you don't lose anything, even if it goes out for several weeks.
plus, rather than basing its heuristics on recently used data, it is actually designing around having RAM to store files (as opposed to RAM to store disk blocks)
This guarantees that entire files are in RAM and are rapidly available rather than just a few blocks of many different large files.
Plus it stores the metadata in RAM, so the filesystem on disk is much simpler (and thus more robust). If it's smart, it backs up the RAM data onto disk, but only during quiescent periods.
I want it. If I could get 512 MB of battery backed RAM on a PCI card and a robust version of this filesystem in Linux I'd switch rather quickly.
It's a good question.
In the US you don't use Social Security cards for identification. They're basically a piece of paper with your name and number printed on them.
Generally drivers licenses and passports (both of which have photographs on them) are the usual means of identification.
On the other hand, I don't believe you are generally required to have a license or ID card of any kind. This may vary from state to state.
In your example of a cop arresting you for being in a fight, the 5th amendment in the US gives you the right not to incriminate yourself. You need not say ANYTHING to the police about your identity. Of course, eventually they'll probably figure out who you are, and you'll probably stay in jail until they do.
The NRA is basically correct. Lots of people don't like this fact. It doesn't make it any less true.
Now I disagree with the NRA's support of the "war on drugs" and their concept that we generally need more imprisonment of all sorts of criminals (as opposed to basic economic changes that reduce the incentives for criminal behavior), but when it comes to believing in the domino effect of gun rights concessions, they are dead on.
Privacy people sound the same because they are dead on about the Domino effect as well.
Armedby Gary Kleck, and Don Kates gives a very good synopsis of this issue.
There's a field of economics that studies questions like: "why is $2 off a $5 item so much more appealing than $2 off a $100 item?"
In both cases you get $2, why is this scale factor involved? There's really no obvious logical reason to prefer one vs the other.
Garbage Collection
"Real Languages" use garbage collection (ha, just trolling).
Seriously, the ability to use an address space that is gignormous is really worth a lot for garbage collection algorithms. For example, you can allocate into reserved portions of the address space and then the type of an object can be determined by its location. You can also use copying collectors without a big hit. Reserving half your address space for copying sucks at 2GB, it doesn't matter much for 17179869184 GB.
Also the "single address space" operating system concept needs more research. However, to get that research going now would require low cost plentiful hardware.
The fact is, there are tons of useful reasons to have 64 bits, we just don't know what they are because we haven't had 64 bits on a commodity platform.
If you have 64 bit addresses and about 1GB of flash RAM, you can completely avoid all the trouble of traditional filesystems. Have your OS use the disk like one big area of RAM, buffer into the NV RAM, keep all the metadata in NV ram, and use a journaled approach for metadata. Speed and simplicity instead of B-trees and inodes and such.
There are all kinds of reasons for 64 bit.
If you're using the engine to directly drive the transmission this would be an issue. But if you're using the engine to generate electricity for a hybrid setup, or using a hybrid setup that only spins up the engine during highway miles or some similar thing, then you can run the engine only at optimal speed and have a simple centrifugal clutch or something.
I can totally understand why you wouldn't want a turbine to replace a diesel or gasoline engine connected to a traditional drivetrain, but I can't see why you wouldn't want a turbine to generate electricity or cruising highway torque for a hybrid.
I have had an amateur radio license since 1989 and have my share of communications and radio frequency theory.
WiFi is just the barest beginning and restricted to as you say a propagationally challenged spectrum.
The point that you have missed is that the investment required takes economic incentive that doesn't exist in the current regulatory structure.
You have missed the point that at first "we" want our own band with good propagation that won't interfere with current usage. One good example would be unused UHF television frequencies, most of these are unused in most areas, and it would be relatively simple to detect them and not interfere.
The fancy multi-array antenna systems and mesh protocols will come a lot faster when it's possible to sell 160 million units a year unlicensed.
Once they come, the current users will migrate away from their outdated broadcast technologies VOLUNTARILY because the new technologies will offer so much more... And if they don't so what...
So what you're saying is that the reason we can't move forward with radio technology is that people in the back woods will have no way to watch "Must Miss TV" (TM)?
The sheer failure to grasp the concept is so amazing to me. Even the geeks don't get it.
1) Open up some portion of the spectrum to unlicensed transmitters that are limited only by reasonable health concerns and basic mode of operations limits(ie. a few watts effective radiated power in the UHF band with "minimal required output power" type regulations).
2) Allow modern economics, silicon engineering, and market demand factors to create useable mesh communications technologies, software defined radios, and software defined directional antennas.
3) Sit back and reap the rewards of human ingenuity.
Outside of the bandwidth assigned for unlicensed use you will not see interference due to the requirements that the devices not generate it.
When we have enough experience and/or have created a system that truly offers reliable communications without the need for pre-assigned frequencies, then we can completely remove all frequency assignments and recover all the spectrum
The RF engineers that jump on people's back about antenna sizes and power outputs and distortion and soforth are stuck in their tunnel vision that the future will look just like today.
The futurists (Lessig, Reed, etc) publishing in a venue like Salon are not supposed to spell out the nitty gritty details of each step along the way, they are supposed to show us where we should be headed. I'm apalled that even the geeks can't take the ball and run with it.
As for radio waves "interfering" they create a superposition, but that superposition is different at different locations. You are assuming that these radios will be stupid and have antennas at a single location. With several antennas seperated by even short distances combined with motion on th e part of some stations, and reflections, you can recover a tremendous amount of information from multiple sources.
What are the real barriers to creating a modern gas turbine powered
hybrid?
Gas turbine engines can burn just about any reasonable fuel, including
methanol/ethanol, methane, CNG, diesel, gasoline, and soforth. They do
it efficiently, probably similar to diesel. They have fewer moving
parts, and are more amenable to computer control. They work best at
constant speed, and therefore are great when used in hybrid
configuration.
Ceramics research since the 80s or so have produced high quality high
temperature ceramics materials that require little machining for
example at ORNL (at one point I wanted to be a ceramics engineer).
Gas turbine engines need not make a lot of noise. In fact you can buy
them as smallish backup generators.
The main thing as far as I can tell is that the infrastructure isn't
in place (parts, repair centers, etc). But it would be a lot easier to
ship out some parts and run some repair training than to convert every
gas station in america to something other than petroleum products.
In terms of emissions, efficiency, power, and ability to use multiple
fuels (an hence oil independence), the gas turbine and hybrid electric
drivetrain seems like the way to go.
Chrysler built some back in the 50s and 60's but as near as I can tell most
of the problems would be solved with ceramic parts and a hybrid
electric configuration.