Given that the tether will be attached to both the ground and a geostationary satellite, won't there be a continuous voltage gradient between the top of the elevator and the bottom. Wouldn't the elevator just ground any thunderstorm that happens to drift along. I remember that one of the space shuttles did an experiment where they rolled out a long copper cable behind the shuttle - the copper cable ended up melting due to the high voltage gradient between the far end and the space shuttle.
some ultra small DVD players won't have SCART because of its space issues.
And you can go out to your local European supermarket, buy a 15 euro composite video to SCART connector cable, and you are all set to go. I had old Nintendo Ultra-64 I wanted to try out. Worked first time out of the box. The only problem was with a cartridge which had some oxidised copper on one pin. That was fixed through the use of a wipe with a slightly damp cloth, and everything worked perfectly.
Microsoft's strategy has always been to bundle everything together, so no product ever really had to survive on its own. Bundle Windows 3.0 with MS-DOS. Bundle the internet browser with the OS and make it part of the desktop. Bundle Windows 95/99/NT/XP/Vista with new PC's being sold. Bundle Microsoft Word with Excel and Powerpoint, and so on...
Five years ago, a corporate environment had to use Microsoft word for creating documents and Outlook Express to send/receive E-mail. Now, you can use OpenOffice or PDF files to exchange documents, and use any type of client to send/receive E-mail.
Nobody would really want to buy each item individually when they could get the equivalent applications from the open source community.
That happened to some laptops I have seen - the entire system would shutdown if the system CPU temperature exceeded some particular threshold. Linux systems would display this "CPUX: Temperature above threshold" on every terminal window. The solution was to clear the fluff out of the cooling fan intake installed on the underside of the laptop. Then make sure there was nothing underneath the laptop to obstruct the airflow. Although I have to ask why any engineer would think of placing an airvent on the underside of a laptop in the first place.
I used to dread that double blue arrow icon on package-updater. It used to mean a good hour or two of searching, downloading, compiling Nvidia driver files (those NVIDIA*.run files) and editing/etc/X11/xorg.conf to get the driver working. Always having to change the module name "nv" to "nvidia", and making sure the screen resolutions were there.
At least now there is a installable kernel module which eliminates the hassle now.
Now upgrading from one release to another is just a matter of ensuring that every font/theme/style that was installed before is installed again.
His son has invented his own hieroglyphic language - to him it is obvious what it means, and if his parents have it framed, he will probably remember what it means for his whole life. But anyone else will have no clue what it means.
A real world archeological example is Rongo Rongo, an Easter Island language that was found written on wooden tablets. The unfortuate part is that while the authors may have stored the most advanced knowledge of their civilisation, they never anticipated that knowledge of their language would die out, so no one can decipher what they mean.
So the lesson is that if anyone develops a storage format for audio/video, they should always make sure that there exists some means to reproduce that information.
You can also read the history of the combustion engine . The first combustion engines were based on gunpowder, then coal powered steam engines, coal gas, and finally petroleum. At the same time, engineers experimented with one stroke, two stroke and four stroke engines with vertical and V slant pistons.
. Cell towers grant leases based on which tower has the strongest signal from a particular phone. When the user of the phone moves from one tower's coverage to another, the lease is transferred. If a plane full of people flew over a metropolitan area with 150 cell phones negotiating leases, chaos ensues as the system is not designed to support a 3 dimensional model.
Wouldn't a bunch of passengers on a high-speed train have the same problem? Especially the Intercity ones doing 120 miles/hour? From using a wireless modem card, it seems that it takes the modem card five or more minutes to pick up every nearby cellphone tower and lock onto the home network. Then a whole bunch of passengers zipping across the sky would skip through the honeycomb arrangement of cell towers, connecting with every N'th tower?
I'm not too much of a fan of Java or Microsoft, but at least it shows what the computer industry would be like if Microsoft hadn't been able to dominate the application development process.
C may have been simple, but in retrospect it really made complex applications development awkward, even when you were using ADT's. C++ was an improvement, but it does have a limitation in that it doesn't allow the inheritance of constructors (you can get around this with using typedef's, but then you can't extend class members). The downside was that you were more or less forced to use MFC or.Net for Windows development, unless you chose to use Qt, or KDE/Gnome for Linux.
When headhunters want people with 15 years experience in a 12 year old technology, what they mean to say is that they want the original architects of the technology.
The announcement of "cold fusion" 20 years ago really put a damper on research in the field. According to this article there are only 30 desktop fusion reseach systems (they only add 4 neutrons/minute compared to the background level of 36 neutrons from space.
Young guys don't feel like learning decades worth of back material to catch up with old hands. Far easier to jump on a new thing where you're not anywhere near as far behind as the rest of the world. Nobody has THAT much experience with Ajax, or.NET, or whatever.
You can try and learn all the decades worth of back material in order to catch up, but if you try and apply for one of those jobs that requires those skills, the HR department will still want someone with decades of experience. So attempting to enter those fields is rather futile.
That's happened at two of the places I have worked... The first was a company that had a "There shall be no fighting in the main reception during office hours" clause in the employment contract and the other was in a university research lab. In both cases the can of beer had been hidden in the very back of a filing cabinet, below the racks of papers, over three years old, slightly rusted but still airtight. Other items included similarly aged boxes of sugar cubes, blobs of blue tack and pizza discount vouchers.
Same in the UK. Usually the first things to be threatened by the local councils are the daycare centres, urban city farms (a community project to allow poor neighbourhood kids to understand the food chain), and recreational leisure centres (teaching kids to swim) and meals on wheels (food for elderly people).
California's state government threatened to sell off the state parks. I don't know how whether that has happened or not.
The second problem is that as the clock speed of these connections becomes faster, synchronisation becomes a problem. While CPU's are running in the GHz frequencies, the system bus is still running in the hundreds of MHz.
If the chip could connect to the circuit board through optical connections, then all this could be simplified. You would eliminate the need for all the copper connections while simultaneously speeding up the external clock speed.
Anyone who went to school back 20 years ago would remember that the kids who had a complete home encyclopedia, dictionary, thesaurus, biographies on famous historical people, or had parents who were members of book clubs, found it much easier to write essays or coursework assignments and get good grades than any kid who did not. If you were in luck, you might have a friend or neighbour who had relevant literature. You could try going with an adult to the library (which was probably on the other side of town and only opened late one evening), but you were still taking the chance that someone else had already been there and already taken out the related books. Another chance was a second hand bookstore or the magazine racks of the local shop. Otherwise, you had exhausted all your options. Even the local bookstore would take two weeks to have an order come through.
Even if it weren't a school project or coursework, if you were a kid curious about some piece of technology, you would be lucky if one of the documentary series had an article on that item, or if you found a science magazine in the local shop.
These days, anyone can do a Google search, look for online published research papers, visit online magazine articles, look at online secondhand bookstores or Amazon. All before even having to leave home. That is, if you do have a home computer, internet connection and are familiar with the various applications (desktop, login process, web browser, search engines, touch typing).
That is, if your family can afford a computer and internet access. Many employers complain that their applicants don't have basic computer literacy skills: knowing how connect a system together, keyboard skills, word processing, spreadsheets, E-mail, database packages (Maybe because anyone who does have those skills can find a better job, but it's sad that people don't already have those skills in the first place).
Just by having a computer with internet access is going to allow you to learn many more basic skills in your own time, as well as keep in touch with the rest of the community (forums, job search pages, community college courses).
Why the hell would you destroy RAM? Hard drives I can understand but any data in RAM is going to be gone after a few seconds of power being off. In the early days of computing, computer memory was implented using Magnetic core memory, Bubble memory and Drum memory. All of these were non-volatile storage, so it would be obvious that the decommission standards would include the destruction of computer memory as well as external storage.
According to the LA Times, the Republican party in Washington had two separate E-mail systems - one for party communications, and another for government communications. This setup was implemented to avoid charges of using government money for political campaigns, except now they are being accused of using the private network to avoid federal record and disclosure rules.
If they were successful in carrying out an experiment that proved that the particle existed, I am sure they would probably get to name the particle after themselves, their team or research center.
In the video, the inventors mention that the Argon gas at the centre of the bulb (size of a christmas tree bulb) reaches the temperature of the surface of the sun (6000C). Given the small size of the bulb, there is probably a very steep temperature gradient (otherwise the glass tube would melt). But the energy is dissipated by emitting light of all wavelengths, not just in the infra-red region of the spectrum. I'd be worried about getting sunburn or cataracts from something like this.
Slashdot Mirror
I found a lcouple of links to NASA's "tethered satellite program":
Failed satellite experiment a devastating blow
The final conclusions
Given that the tether will be attached to both the ground and a geostationary satellite, won't there be a continuous voltage gradient between the top of the elevator and the bottom. Wouldn't the elevator just ground any thunderstorm that happens to drift along. I remember that one of the space shuttles did an experiment where they rolled out a long copper cable behind the shuttle - the copper cable ended up melting due to the high voltage gradient between the far end and the space shuttle.
some ultra small DVD players won't have SCART because of its space issues.
And you can go out to your local European supermarket, buy a 15 euro composite video to SCART connector cable, and you are all set to go. I had old Nintendo Ultra-64 I wanted to try out. Worked first time out of the box. The only problem was with a cartridge which had some oxidised copper on one pin. That was fixed through the use of a wipe with a slightly damp cloth, and everything worked perfectly.
Microsoft's strategy has always been to bundle everything together, so no product ever really had to survive on its own. Bundle Windows 3.0 with MS-DOS. Bundle the internet browser with the OS and make it part of the desktop. Bundle Windows 95/99/NT/XP/Vista with new PC's being sold. Bundle Microsoft Word with Excel and Powerpoint, and so on...
Five years ago, a corporate environment had to use Microsoft word for creating documents and Outlook Express to send/receive E-mail. Now, you can use OpenOffice or PDF files to exchange documents, and use any type of client to send/receive E-mail.
Nobody would really want to buy each item individually when they could get the equivalent applications from the open source community.
That happened to some laptops I have seen - the entire system would shutdown if the system CPU temperature exceeded some particular threshold. Linux systems would display this "CPUX: Temperature above threshold" on every terminal window. The solution was to clear the fluff out of the cooling fan intake installed on the underside of the laptop. Then make sure there was nothing underneath the laptop to obstruct the airflow. Although I have to ask why any engineer would think of placing an airvent on the underside of a laptop in the first place.
I used to dread that double blue arrow icon on package-updater. It used to mean a good hour or two of searching, downloading, compiling Nvidia driver files (those NVIDIA*.run files) and editing /etc/X11/xorg.conf to get the driver working. Always having to change the module name "nv" to "nvidia", and making sure the screen resolutions were there.
At least now there is a installable kernel module which eliminates the hassle now.
Now upgrading from one release to another is just a matter of ensuring that every font/theme/style that was installed before is installed again.
His son has invented his own hieroglyphic language - to him it is obvious what it means, and if his parents have it framed, he will probably remember what it means for his whole life. But anyone else will have no clue what it means.
A real world archeological example is Rongo Rongo, an Easter Island language that was found written on wooden tablets. The unfortuate part is that while the authors may have stored the most advanced knowledge of their civilisation, they never anticipated that knowledge of their language would die out, so no one can decipher what they mean.
So the lesson is that if anyone develops a storage format for audio/video, they should always make sure that there exists some means to reproduce that information.
Not necessarily. The use of bitumen/tar was documented in biblical times. The Romans were thought to have used coal for metalwork. A Greek by the name of Heronas, developed a prototype steam engine. They might have advanced faster technologically, if they weren't afraid of making the slaves unemployed
You can also read the history of the combustion engine . The first combustion engines were based on gunpowder, then coal powered steam engines, coal gas, and finally petroleum. At the same time, engineers experimented with one stroke, two stroke and four stroke engines with vertical and V slant pistons.
. Cell towers grant leases based on which tower has the strongest signal from a particular phone. When the user of the phone moves from one tower's coverage to another, the lease is transferred. If a plane full of people flew over a metropolitan area with 150 cell phones negotiating leases, chaos ensues as the system is not designed to support a 3 dimensional model.
Wouldn't a bunch of passengers on a high-speed train have the same problem? Especially the Intercity ones doing 120 miles/hour? From using a wireless modem card, it seems that it takes the modem card five or more minutes to pick up every nearby cellphone tower and lock onto the home network. Then a whole bunch of passengers zipping across the sky would skip through the honeycomb arrangement of cell towers, connecting with every N'th tower?
Redneck Bumper stickers
"If you can read this, I've lost my trailer."
"I feel like I'm diagonally parked in a parallel universe."
"Honk If Parts Fall Off"
"Chrome don't get ya home"
"If you can read this - you're too damn close!"
I'm not too much of a fan of Java or Microsoft, but at least it shows what the computer industry would be like if Microsoft hadn't been able to dominate the application development process.
.Net for Windows development, unless you chose to use Qt, or KDE/Gnome for Linux.
C may have been simple, but in retrospect it really made complex applications development awkward, even when you were using ADT's. C++ was an improvement, but it does have a limitation in that it doesn't allow the inheritance of constructors (you can get around this with using typedef's, but then you can't extend class members). The downside was that you were more or less forced to use MFC or
When headhunters want people with 15 years experience in a 12 year old technology, what they mean to say is that they want the original architects of the technology.
But, if you walk across a carpet holding a tube lamp, it will light up (intermittently). Ban carpets!
Cool! A new way to charge up battery powered devices like cellphones and laptops.
The announcement of "cold fusion" 20 years ago really put a damper on research in the field. According to this article there are only 30 desktop fusion reseach systems (they only add 4 neutrons/minute compared to the background level of 36 neutrons from space.
Bela Bartok
Young guys don't feel like learning decades worth of back material to catch up with old hands. Far easier to jump on a new thing where you're not anywhere near as far behind as the rest of the world. Nobody has THAT much experience with Ajax, or .NET, or whatever.
You can try and learn all the decades worth of back material in order to catch up, but if you try and apply for one of those jobs that requires those skills, the HR department will still want someone with decades of experience. So attempting to enter those fields is rather futile.
That's happened at two of the places I have worked ... The first was a company that had a "There shall be no fighting in the main reception during office hours" clause in the employment contract and the other was in a university research lab. In both cases the can of beer had been hidden in the very back of a filing cabinet, below the racks of papers, over three years old, slightly rusted but still airtight. Other items included similarly aged boxes of sugar cubes, blobs of blue tack and pizza discount vouchers.
Same in the UK. Usually the first things to be threatened by the local councils are the daycare centres, urban city farms (a community project to allow poor neighbourhood kids to understand the food chain), and recreational leisure centres (teaching kids to swim) and meals on wheels (food for elderly people).
California's state government threatened to sell off the state parks. I don't know how whether that has happened or not.
There are several major issues:
The first is the size of the packaging of the chip - the actual silicon might only occupy the space a quarter the size of the whole unit. All that extra space is just used to manage the 500+ copper connections between the silicon and the rest of the circuit board.
The second problem is that as the clock speed of these connections becomes faster, synchronisation becomes a problem. While CPU's are running in the GHz frequencies, the system bus is still running in the hundreds of MHz.
If the chip could connect to the circuit board through optical connections, then all this could be simplified. You would eliminate the need for all the copper connections while simultaneously speeding up the external clock speed.
Anyone who went to school back 20 years ago would remember that the kids who had a complete home encyclopedia, dictionary, thesaurus, biographies on famous historical people, or had parents who were members of book clubs, found it much easier to write essays or coursework assignments and get good grades than any kid who did not. If you were in luck, you might have a friend or neighbour who had relevant literature. You could try going with an adult to the library (which was probably on the other side of town and only opened late one evening), but you were still taking the chance that someone else had already been there and already taken out the related books. Another chance was a second hand bookstore or the magazine racks of the local shop. Otherwise, you had exhausted all your options. Even the local bookstore would take two weeks to have an order come through.
Even if it weren't a school project or coursework, if you were a kid curious about some piece of technology, you would be lucky if one of the documentary series had an article on that item, or if you found a science magazine in the local shop.
These days, anyone can do a Google search, look for online published research papers, visit online magazine articles, look at online secondhand bookstores or Amazon. All before even having to leave home. That is, if you do have a home computer, internet connection and are familiar with the various applications (desktop, login process, web browser, search engines, touch typing).
That is, if your family can afford a computer and internet access. Many employers complain that their applicants don't have basic computer literacy skills: knowing how connect a system together, keyboard skills, word processing, spreadsheets, E-mail, database packages (Maybe because anyone who does have those skills can find a better job, but it's sad that people don't already have those skills in the first place).
Just by having a computer with internet access is going to allow you to learn many more basic skills in your own time, as well as keep in touch with the rest of the community (forums, job search pages, community college courses).
According to the LA Times, the Republican party in Washington had two separate E-mail systems - one for party communications, and another for government communications. This setup was implemented to avoid charges of using government money for political campaigns, except now they are being accused of using the private network to avoid federal record and disclosure rules.
GOP-issued laptops now a White House headache
Here is a real world example which had tragic consequences:
Unmasked, policeman who gave two killers their victim's address after road rage row
The UK have solved this problem. All MP's (elected officials) get an extra digit added to their tax number (social security number). Consequently, they are not allowed to use online services.
If they were successful in carrying out an experiment that proved that the particle existed, I am sure they would probably get to name the particle after themselves, their team or research center.
In the video, the inventors mention that the Argon gas at the centre of the bulb (size of a christmas tree bulb) reaches the temperature of the surface of the sun (6000C). Given the small size of the bulb, there is probably a very steep temperature gradient (otherwise the glass tube would melt). But the energy is dissipated by emitting light of all wavelengths, not just in the infra-red region of the spectrum. I'd be worried about getting sunburn or cataracts from something like this.