> Have you imagined sitting in front of your TV with it turned off?
All the time. I call it "reading in the comfy chair". And yes, it's far more interesting that playing Steam games on my TV. For instance, I'm currently about 2/3rds of the way through "Physics on the Fringe", which is highly entertaining.
"I think Ouya would have been fine if it weren't for steam box."
I think both platforms are doomed. I already have a perfectly good platform for playing all of these games. I can't imagine anything less interesting to me that playing those games on my television. Add in crappier controllers, the lack of any other platform content, and that I have to pay for the privilege?
I don't think I'm alone in my total lack of enthusiasm. I'm finding it difficult to justify upgrading the PS3, which spends the vast majority of its time turned off.
I suspect, but have no way of knowing, that they got great results out of small samples, and believed scale-up was all that was needed.
Similar problems infected the room-temperature superconductor field for a while. People would see sudden drops in resistance and interpret that as small portions of a larger mass going super. Then someone noticed that copper does the same thing not far below zero, yet no floating magnets
Click to the article, and from there to the original paper. Look for Figure 4. Extract energy density of 5 Wh/kg. Wiki up "energy density" and extract super capacitors at 0.018 MJ/kg. Ask Google to convert 0.018 MJ to Wh. Google returns 5, so 50 Wh/kg.
So this new super device has exactly the same performance as existing super caps.
Clicked to the linked article, clicked from there to the original paper.
Figure 4 clearly shows a peak energy density of about 5 Wh/kg. Existing production super caps are about 5 Wh/kg (see Maxwell or Wiki for many examples), so the "significant" improvements being claimed are not in the data.
Claims in the original article, copied here without examination, include making cell phones last for weeks. Li-ion batteries in cell phones have about 210 Wh/kg, so if your phone lasts you a day now, using this tech would make that 1/2 hour.
"website that claims a certain professional Wikipedia editing service indeed has a group of Wikipedia admins on its payroll"
And the key word, for everyone else reading this, is "claimed".
This whole debate is about a PR firm fluffing the image of it's customers. It is highly probably they did the same to themselves.
As the example of the one and only customer who talked about the issue shows, it appears they have nothing remotely like what they say they do, and are unable to get even the most minor articles protected from almost instant deletion.
> Having policies in place that forbid official statements just begs for sock puppet tactics
And if such a thing existed, you might have an argument worth considering.
But as no such thing exists, and anyone can insert any statement from any source *as long as it is independent* then I don't see what you're caterwauling about.
Using the example in the previous post, if Toyota wants to refute claims of sudden acceleration in the Wiki, all they have to do is publish an article on the topic in a major source - say the Wall Street Journal or IEEE Spectrum. Such an event will quickly result in the information being included in the article, as well as also informing many people that wouldn't have seen it otherwise.
A lot of these complaints boil down to "well I don't think you should have to have a 3rd party reference". That's just laziness. If the topic in question isn't interesting enough to warrant such publication, then there's probably nothing worth complaining about in the first place. YMMV, because if it's about *you* then it's hyper-focused. But just because you find something important doesn't mean anyone else will, and that's the *whole point* of the wiki's policy,
The Wiki article in question says nothing of the sort. It does state that Team B *stated* the CIA reports fell short.
There is no actual evidence that the CIA was wrong, at least not in the article. Given the history of previous similar estimates, and the public record of Team B's predictions, all evidence suggests the CIA reports were correct, or at least "more correct". This was certainly the case in the past too, consider the missile gap numbers.
But we must not forget the most direct evidence. Through the 1970s the NIE repeatedly noted that the Soviet civilian economy was failing, and predicted a collapse some time in the 1980s. Team B predicted that the Soviet GDP was growing, showed no signs of trouble, and stated that the CIA was flatly wrong.
How did that turn out again? Oh, right. I recall watching the news as the pick axes went at The Wall. It is sometimes rather obvious when the whole world is changing.
Who would have thunk it? That a non-partisan group who's express purpose is to develop strategic intelligence using highly trained professionals would have better results that an ad hoc panel of appointees selected on a political basis with limited access and now previous history of producing such reports?
"The proposed Chemistry and Metallurgy Research Replacement plant (CMRR) building at Los Alamos would replace a Cold War-era site at a cost of $6 billion. It is intended to assist in ensuring new and existing plutonium pits are in working order absent a return by the country to nuclear-weapons testing"
Which is, of course, precisely the mission requirement that the National Ignition Facility was supposed to solve.
But given that NIF was never really very useful for that role (ask anyone that doesn't work at LLNL) and continues to behave precisely like every other ICF device built at the lab (fail) I can't say I'm surprised that another $6 billion is being called for.
SSMP has now cost well into the tens of billions, consists of dozens of major devices, and still says it doesn't have the answers. All this to keep up appearances on weapons that have no realistic release scenario, in spite of all the bright minds trying to think up ways to use them.
Enough already. There's plenty of jobs for physicists in industry, let them go and make things that will actually improve the world rather that flogging the dead horsemen of the apocalypse.
> Wikipedia needs to embrace that companies want to get their products on a website with that much traffic
No we don't. It's one of the most successful web sites on the planet, and arguably the most successful example of collaboration in human history. Why would we possibly want to change that?
Did anyone bother to read the article? Don't bother, it's shite. It consists entirely of supposition and equivocation.
Only one actual example is offered, and this example demonstrates the company in question is utterly incapable of controlling the process, the article in question was quickly removed and remains deleted.
The rest is entirely arm-waving about the "scale of the problem" and "perhaps tens of thousands of articles" being involved. Various quotes from uninvolved people who's opinions add nothing of substance, and then a laughable comment from the Wikimedia Foundation that effectively says "not our problem" because it isn't.
But I'm not sure this serves Google any better than dropping Android entirely and partnering with Apple. Isn't it the single-vendor bake-in that led them to do Android in the first place?
I just read in another article that the Nexus 5 will sell for $349. That must be at or below the cost of production, comparing to similar models and iPhones of like generation.
So Google can sell phones for zero profit, and then make their money how? *IS* it advertising? Or is it apps and media? Or nothing at all, they just want to take over the market?
It seems to me that they're best off capturing share until the ad revenue means the bottom line is negative. Then even a few pennies per box will mean real income.
> Even assuming that means September 30th, that's 7 days the US press has had to sit on this
Actually the first press release on this was announced in September, and numerous US sites already published stories on it. Physics Today is one example (although I can no longer find the URL). Google News will turn up lots of examples.
The difference is that the BBC claimed it was break-even, which it's not. As a result, this story has crowded out all the others.
"The input absorbed by the fuel is less than the output at the fuel"
No, this is wrong. Go and read the actual release. The statement is contrived, the energy delivered to "the fuel" was about 170 kJ and they got 8 kJ out. What they did was select the tiny bit of fuel that was hotter than the rest and said that the amount of energy delivered to *that part* of the fuel was only 5 kJ.
This is pure spin.
Every once in a while a tokamak will develop a hot spot that quickly runs away and "blows up" the plasma. In that spot rapid fusion may take place. If I'm willing to ignore all the energy I used to heat the rest of the fuel, which is what NIF has done, then those divergences have been reaching break-even for decades.
This is not news. Even during the NIP failure, conditions reached 1/3rd of ignition. Breakeven occurs at about 20% self-heating, which is somewhere around what they saw.
The input to the lasers is 422 MJ. The output is 1.8 MJ. So if the input/output was ~1.8 MJ, then the system as a whole is operating at about 0.4% of break even.
This is not an "important step" towards anything. The NIF system cannot be used as the basis for a power plant, something everyone, including the NIF, is very much aware of. It is an experimental system for studying matter at high densities, and not even very good at that.
> I'm thinking that at some point electrical utilities will lobby to stop people from connecting PV systems directly into their household grid.
That's what we have here in Ontario. It's not the solution you might imagine. It requires the removal of the existing meter base and its replacement by a dual base. This costs a lot of cash on the labour side. Additionally, since the grid comes in through the meter, that means you have to cut power at the grid to do the work. That means a call to the local power company, and a bill somewhere around $1750. All told it adds about $2500 or more to the install costs, which these days is the same as 1.5 kW worth of kit.
I think the model will eventually be that distribution costs will have to be born entirely in the distribution cost line of your bill, instead of being spread around in the other numbers like it is now. People with PV systems will pay for two connections, one in and one out, and then the problem basically just disappears.
> blanket in solar panels unless they were literally invisible
Do you mean like this? http://www.dowpowerhouse.com
> Even then, assuming we invent a perfect solar convertor, and blanket every square inch of my property, and > chop down every tree casting a shadow, there's an absolute maximum of sunlight energy coming to my house and land
Indeed, and in, say, London that would be about 1MWh per meter per year. I strongly suspect that if you add up all the area you mention, and multiply by this number, it will be far in excess of what you use every year.
To put this in more practical terms, I installed a small array on my garage. It provides about 1/3rd of all the power I use. I could provide 100% of my power by adding additional panels on the house itself.
> There's only so much land you can steal solar energy from
A recent calculation by Queen's University noted that if we covered only the most useful unused portions of low-rise flat-roof commercial buildings in Ontario, it would be 5 GW worth of panels. And that would use exactly zero "land". Neither do installations on parking lots, residential homes, and many other places. All told there is something like 8 to 15 GW worth of "landless" PV capacity in Ontario, which is just about the same number as the peak load, or much greater than it.
> it's still not viable in the long-term
Which is why it is the fastest growing power source in the world, right? Because everyone in the world is moron, except you?
Slashdot Mirror
> Have you imagined sitting in front of your TV with it turned off?
All the time. I call it "reading in the comfy chair". And yes, it's far more interesting that playing Steam games on my TV. For instance, I'm currently about 2/3rds of the way through "Physics on the Fringe", which is highly entertaining.
"I think Ouya would have been fine if it weren't for steam box."
I think both platforms are doomed. I already have a perfectly good platform for playing all of these games. I can't imagine anything less interesting to me that playing those games on my television. Add in crappier controllers, the lack of any other platform content, and that I have to pay for the privilege?
I don't think I'm alone in my total lack of enthusiasm. I'm finding it difficult to justify upgrading the PS3, which spends the vast majority of its time turned off.
> There was a company, I think it was EEStor
Yeah. Long and short, they couldn't make it work.
I suspect, but have no way of knowing, that they got great results out of small samples, and believed scale-up was all that was needed.
Similar problems infected the room-temperature superconductor field for a while. People would see sudden drops in resistance and interpret that as small portions of a larger mass going super. Then someone noticed that copper does the same thing not far below zero, yet no floating magnets
Click to the article, and from there to the original paper. Look for Figure 4. Extract energy density of 5 Wh/kg. Wiki up "energy density" and extract super capacitors at 0.018 MJ/kg. Ask Google to convert 0.018 MJ to Wh. Google returns 5, so 50 Wh/kg.
So this new super device has exactly the same performance as existing super caps.
Power my phone for a week my ass.
Clicked to the linked article, clicked from there to the original paper.
Figure 4 clearly shows a peak energy density of about 5 Wh/kg. Existing production super caps are about 5 Wh/kg (see Maxwell or Wiki for many examples), so the "significant" improvements being claimed are not in the data.
Claims in the original article, copied here without examination, include making cell phones last for weeks. Li-ion batteries in cell phones have about 210 Wh/kg, so if your phone lasts you a day now, using this tech would make that 1/2 hour.
Total BS.
"website that claims a certain professional Wikipedia editing service indeed has a group of Wikipedia admins on its payroll"
And the key word, for everyone else reading this, is "claimed".
This whole debate is about a PR firm fluffing the image of it's customers. It is highly probably they did the same to themselves.
As the example of the one and only customer who talked about the issue shows, it appears they have nothing remotely like what they say they do, and are unable to get even the most minor articles protected from almost instant deletion.
> Having policies in place that forbid official statements just begs for sock puppet tactics
And if such a thing existed, you might have an argument worth considering.
But as no such thing exists, and anyone can insert any statement from any source *as long as it is independent* then I don't see what you're caterwauling about.
Using the example in the previous post, if Toyota wants to refute claims of sudden acceleration in the Wiki, all they have to do is publish an article on the topic in a major source - say the Wall Street Journal or IEEE Spectrum. Such an event will quickly result in the information being included in the article, as well as also informing many people that wouldn't have seen it otherwise.
A lot of these complaints boil down to "well I don't think you should have to have a 3rd party reference". That's just laziness. If the topic in question isn't interesting enough to warrant such publication, then there's probably nothing worth complaining about in the first place. YMMV, because if it's about *you* then it's hyper-focused. But just because you find something important doesn't mean anyone else will, and that's the *whole point* of the wiki's policy,
> Today. One doesn't prepare for the future by assuming it'll be the same as today
And that's your argument for keeping weapons that are the better part of a century old?
Perhaps we should bring back the Z Batteries and phosgene gas? You never know
The Wiki article in question says nothing of the sort. It does state that Team B *stated* the CIA reports fell short.
There is no actual evidence that the CIA was wrong, at least not in the article. Given the history of previous similar estimates, and the public record of Team B's predictions, all evidence suggests the CIA reports were correct, or at least "more correct". This was certainly the case in the past too, consider the missile gap numbers.
But we must not forget the most direct evidence. Through the 1970s the NIE repeatedly noted that the Soviet civilian economy was failing, and predicted a collapse some time in the 1980s. Team B predicted that the Soviet GDP was growing, showed no signs of trouble, and stated that the CIA was flatly wrong.
How did that turn out again? Oh, right. I recall watching the news as the pick axes went at The Wall. It is sometimes rather obvious when the whole world is changing.
Who would have thunk it? That a non-partisan group who's express purpose is to develop strategic intelligence using highly trained professionals would have better results that an ad hoc panel of appointees selected on a political basis with limited access and now previous history of producing such reports?
"nearly all of our long-term space missions rely on plutonium-powered radioisotope thermal generators"
That's because it was available.
It is, obviously, possible to make RTG's out of other materials.
Or use other power sources entirely, like TOPAZ.
"The proposed Chemistry and Metallurgy Research Replacement plant (CMRR) building at Los Alamos would replace a Cold War-era site at a cost of $6 billion. It is intended to assist in ensuring new and existing plutonium pits are in working order absent a return by the country to nuclear-weapons testing"
Which is, of course, precisely the mission requirement that the National Ignition Facility was supposed to solve.
But given that NIF was never really very useful for that role (ask anyone that doesn't work at LLNL) and continues to behave precisely like every other ICF device built at the lab (fail) I can't say I'm surprised that another $6 billion is being called for.
SSMP has now cost well into the tens of billions, consists of dozens of major devices, and still says it doesn't have the answers. All this to keep up appearances on weapons that have no realistic release scenario, in spite of all the bright minds trying to think up ways to use them.
Enough already. There's plenty of jobs for physicists in industry, let them go and make things that will actually improve the world rather that flogging the dead horsemen of the apocalypse.
> Wikipedia needs to embrace that companies want to get their products on a website with that much traffic
No we don't. It's one of the most successful web sites on the planet, and arguably the most successful example of collaboration in human history. Why would we possibly want to change that?
Did anyone bother to read the article? Don't bother, it's shite. It consists entirely of supposition and equivocation.
Only one actual example is offered, and this example demonstrates the company in question is utterly incapable of controlling the process, the article in question was quickly removed and remains deleted.
The rest is entirely arm-waving about the "scale of the problem" and "perhaps tens of thousands of articles" being involved. Various quotes from uninvolved people who's opinions add nothing of substance, and then a laughable comment from the Wikimedia Foundation that effectively says "not our problem" because it isn't.
Terrible, terrible writing.
That is a very interesting concept.
But I'm not sure this serves Google any better than dropping Android entirely and partnering with Apple. Isn't it the single-vendor bake-in that led them to do Android in the first place?
I just read in another article that the Nexus 5 will sell for $349. That must be at or below the cost of production, comparing to similar models and iPhones of like generation.
So Google can sell phones for zero profit, and then make their money how? *IS* it advertising? Or is it apps and media? Or nothing at all, they just want to take over the market?
It seems to me that they're best off capturing share until the ad revenue means the bottom line is negative. Then even a few pennies per box will mean real income.
Nokia, inventor of the Pop-Port, is complaining about Apple's non-standard cables?
Blatant link bait, which /. fell for.
"Simon St. Laurent asks 'What do we get for that DRM?'"
Content.
> Even assuming that means September 30th, that's 7 days the US press has had to sit on this
Actually the first press release on this was announced in September, and numerous US sites already published stories on it. Physics Today is one example (although I can no longer find the URL). Google News will turn up lots of examples.
The difference is that the BBC claimed it was break-even, which it's not. As a result, this story has crowded out all the others.
> but I am not aware of another technology that exists to turn power plant levels of heat into electricity, except through a steam cycle
Natural gas turbines, obviously.
"The input absorbed by the fuel is less than the output at the fuel"
No, this is wrong. Go and read the actual release. The statement is contrived, the energy delivered to "the fuel" was about 170 kJ and they got 8 kJ out. What they did was select the tiny bit of fuel that was hotter than the rest and said that the amount of energy delivered to *that part* of the fuel was only 5 kJ.
This is pure spin.
Every once in a while a tokamak will develop a hot spot that quickly runs away and "blows up" the plasma. In that spot rapid fusion may take place. If I'm willing to ignore all the energy I used to heat the rest of the fuel, which is what NIF has done, then those divergences have been reaching break-even for decades.
This is not news. Even during the NIP failure, conditions reached 1/3rd of ignition. Breakeven occurs at about 20% self-heating, which is somewhere around what they saw.
This is fluffing. Here, some background:
http://matter2energy.wordpress.com/2013/04/21/fusion-the-power-of-wishful-thinking/
"So in other words, "almost breaking even!"."
Not even close.
The input to the lasers is 422 MJ. The output is 1.8 MJ. So if the input/output was ~1.8 MJ, then the system as a whole is operating at about 0.4% of break even.
This is not an "important step" towards anything. The NIF system cannot be used as the basis for a power plant, something everyone, including the NIF, is very much aware of. It is an experimental system for studying matter at high densities, and not even very good at that.
> I'm thinking that at some point electrical utilities will lobby to stop people from connecting PV systems directly into their household grid.
That's what we have here in Ontario. It's not the solution you might imagine. It requires the removal of the existing meter base and its replacement by a dual base. This costs a lot of cash on the labour side. Additionally, since the grid comes in through the meter, that means you have to cut power at the grid to do the work. That means a call to the local power company, and a bill somewhere around $1750. All told it adds about $2500 or more to the install costs, which these days is the same as 1.5 kW worth of kit.
I think the model will eventually be that distribution costs will have to be born entirely in the distribution cost line of your bill, instead of being spread around in the other numbers like it is now. People with PV systems will pay for two connections, one in and one out, and then the problem basically just disappears.
> which the local council
Hmmm, suspecting UK
> blanket in solar panels unless they were literally invisible
Do you mean like this? http://www.dowpowerhouse.com
> Even then, assuming we invent a perfect solar convertor, and blanket every square inch of my property, and
> chop down every tree casting a shadow, there's an absolute maximum of sunlight energy coming to my house and land
Indeed, and in, say, London that would be about 1MWh per meter per year. I strongly suspect that if you add up all the area you mention, and multiply by this number, it will be far in excess of what you use every year.
To put this in more practical terms, I installed a small array on my garage. It provides about 1/3rd of all the power I use. I could provide 100% of my power by adding additional panels on the house itself.
> There's only so much land you can steal solar energy from
A recent calculation by Queen's University noted that if we covered only the most useful unused portions of low-rise flat-roof commercial buildings in Ontario, it would be 5 GW worth of panels. And that would use exactly zero "land". Neither do installations on parking lots, residential homes, and many other places. All told there is something like 8 to 15 GW worth of "landless" PV capacity in Ontario, which is just about the same number as the peak load, or much greater than it.
> it's still not viable in the long-term
Which is why it is the fastest growing power source in the world, right? Because everyone in the world is moron, except you?
I wrote the statement you quoted. Feeling proud now.