The tens of thousands of dollars an off grid system costs (and you have to basically build a brand new custom house to make the energy load even feasible for an off grid system) would buy an awful lot of power, even if you have to sign up for "screw me over" 2 year contracts.
Kind of like how the $10,000 premium for a Nissan Leaf would buy an awful lot of gasoline, even at $4/gallon.
It's one thing to want to stick to principles, it's another to actually have the extra money to burn to really do it...
Step 1 is the hardest part : you have to find a place to build a custom house that is a reasonable distance from where you work. AND, you have to not move after that...(which means you can't change jobs unless it is somewhere else nearby)
Well I looked at the dome as well, but I think it's a terrible idea.
There already is a commercial solution that has all of the advantages you listed above, for the most part.
It's one of these domes : www.aidomes.com
1. It's not only a dome, but you can order it with ridiculous R-factor insulation. (R-36 from bonded in foam, which is just about the highest you can achieve in housing anywhere) The concrete pieces hermetically seal to each other as well, preventing virtually all air from exchanging, which is a big factor in energy loss in humid climates.(you have to install an energy recovery ventilator for controlled ventilation)
Also, since the insulation is bonded to the concrete panels, it doesn't slide out of place which is what happens with fiberglass insulation in the walls of conventional "stick-built" houses.
2. The company claims that their domes can take a magnitude 8 earthquake and at least 230 mph winds. Given the dome is basically a reinforced concrete bunker to live under, this is quite plausible. They have an account of a tornado picking up several thousand pound horse trailer and slamming it into the dome, with minimal damage.
3. The company claims that construction costs are about the same as conventional housing. The catch-22 is because they are so rare, and they look uglier than conventional housing, it is difficult to get mortgage financing for a dome and/or build in existing neighborhoods. The financing thing is one of the big reasons they aren't more common. If I ever build one, I'm going to save my money for as many years as it takes to buy the structure outright. (I'll have the bank give me a loan on the land)
It doesn't rotate, but that doesn't matter : R-36 insulation is so good that you don't need passive solar heating. It takes minimal fuel to heat the place in a cold climate anyway. If you use solar panels, you can just have those rotate. And the added expense for a rotation mechanism has got to be tens of thousands of dollars, making the rotating dome a poor financial idea..
4. Is lumber more environmentally friendly than concrete? I doubt it : a concrete dome will last for a century or more, while lumber rots and burns. Long term, the impact on the environment will be less with concrete.
Funny you mention that...the officer in charge of the prison Manning is in confirmed everything in the Salon article. Is solitary confinement torture? It probably is, but even if you don't believe that, you have to admit it is pretty harsh punishment for someone who has yet to be convicted of a crime.
I think you meant to say "peak acceleration". You graph the acceleration at a bunch of time intervals during the launch and the peak is the highest value. (or there's a way to figure it out using calculus if you have an equation for acceleration vs time)
Except that the chemical supplier of sulfur is going to affect the mass just as much as what some table says. The updated table is an AVERAGE of possible naturally occurring sources of sulfur.
If your experiment is this sensitive to pH you'd have to handle this problem through ongoing measurements of it, since any teensy error anywhere would cause a similar effect.
Actually, an hour of prime time television nets less than $1 per viewer to the network. $0.99 an episode would be an extremely sustainable business model if there were a sufficient number of subscribers.
Chemistry students don't need this many significant figures. Last time I took classes in that, I remember using about 4 significant figures (2 after the decimal) for everything.
The hard part of any problem in science is solving it : performing the calculations with any arbitrary number of significant figures is trivial.
And for real world uses, the atomic weight of an element is going to depend on exactly what ore you are using of that element. If your problem is affected by significant figures this far to the right of the decimal, you probably need data on exactly what you are working with.
But wouldn't a text message have been equally viable? Or a data message that was a short, recorded and compressed audio file? (not a real time call, so it could upload more slowly over a heavily used satellite link)
As many other posters have mentioned, a cheaper network using less orbital hardware would work equally well for the rare users that operate outside of cell phone covered regions.
Not if failures are independent events isolated to individual engines. As long as each individual engine has a reasonable number of moving parts, and a failure in one engine cannot usually cause a failure in a different engine, then having 27 times as many moving parts is not a bad thing at all.
Technically, the human body uses many trillions of quite unreliable moving parts and yet it still achieves excellent reliability compared to current technology..
These young ladies have offensive tattoos. Clearly this is obscene content by the standards of my community. Ban is justified. (sound of gavel pounding)
Also, the ladies are showing their anatomy used for feeding infants. Clearly this is offensive and should not bee viewed by children under 17.
Will someone please link to the part of the website for that tabloid that contains the alleged prurient content? I would like to verify myself to determine if the offending content warrants censorship. Let's not be hasty about condemning apple for their possibly righteous behavior without examining very carefully page 9 to see if it offends our sensibilities.
Can you poison the fuel used in the rods so that it can't be used in weapons at all without starting the enrichment process over from the beginning? I understand that you need 70-90% U-235 for a weapon and only about 3% to run a reactor. But 3% enriched fuel is a better starting point for making a weapon than raw ore, is it not?
I hope the designers of this system know what they are doing. A very obvious design goal would be to make it so that a computer virus loaded in one country couldn't shut down the ballistic missile defenses of another. After all, if one country writes most of the software they could easily insert back doors to allow them to shut down any node of the system at will.
Heck, this system will uses lots of RF antennas for input (such as the tracking radars)...a good back door could be triggered remotely, so long as you were running the same firmware revision as before. So even if you cut the cables linking the control centers together, one country could still remotely disable the defenses of another.
Eh, if it's the Federal government I know, the government probably bought the entire super computer and abandoned it when it broke down a couple years later. Also, since they didn't get any help installing it, it took them months to get it working.
No. A reasonable design goal for a first generation system would be to cut the death rate by 10 times. Still, for extraordinary drivers who are far, far better than average this would actually increase their risk perhaps.
Over the years I have gradually begun to realize that China developing advanced technology is a good thing for the world as a whole.
First of all, as China has developed their standards of living and the quality of their products has increased enormously. It is true that occasionally they cut the wrong corner and you end up with lead contaminated products. But the overwhelming trend is towards higher and higher quality, like the Japanese economy was in the 1960s.
Second, China is now growing past the point of merely copying (or pirating) other nation's technology and is starting to actually create things that were never seen before. That benefits the U.S. as much as it benefits China.
One concrete example I know of : the smokeless cigarettes that deliver nicotine without the carcinogens were invented by a Chinese scientist. These things are a major advance, and if developed fully could eliminate most deaths from Tobacco usage.
In the long run, everyone in the world will benefit once China converts even a fraction of it's billion person population into scientists, engineers, and artists.
The reason for this is because with the latest OSes they have added many, many layers of abstraction. I've heard that Vista has at least 50 distinct layers. They also write most of this code in higher level languages.
What all this accomplishes is that it allows one to have a system that has orders of magnitude more complexity than those old OSes you remember and to be MORE stable with fewer noticeable bugs than the software of the old days. I remember both Mac OS and Win 3.1 would system crash all the time.
The layers of abstraction let a single programmer understand what "his" part of the code does with other people's code encapsulated away. Humans have extremely limited short to medium term memory capacity. The high level language improves readability and productivity.
Internally Vista/Win 7 is more complex and has more lines of human level code than nearly any other piece of software ever created. Yet it is stable enough to run for several weeks without a reboot. (which is "good enough" for most desktop users. Yes Unix is better)
I suspect OS X is similar internally : Apple has less programming resources than Microsoft does, so they have to add and support all of those advanced features but they don't have the staff to hand optimize their code line by line. That's one reason for why it feels sluggish on your machine.
Anyways, get used to it. If you think programming is inefficient now, wait 20 more years. Have you ever studied neural nets? Do you have any idea how much redundant processing a biological brain does to work on a problem? (because of the high noise level of the hardware each problem gets solved a thousand times in parallel and the answers averaged)
Once we start getting hundred and thousand core CPUs we'll need to write our code more like a distributed neural net just to take advantage of all the CPU power.
I've got an i7 running at 4100 mhz, an SSD holding the apps and data, and 12 gigs of ram. I'm trying to replicate the delays of your post but having trouble. What programs, exactly, have a noticable latency on a machine like mine? I'm guessing that the extremely high memory bandwidth and clock on this machine is able to do all that overhead you are complaining about before my slow brain can notice a delay. (I noticed the machine did get snappier once I increased the ram from 4 gigs in dual channel to 12 gigs in triple channel)
You're just saying that because it's never happened to you. The losses you would face if you ever did have your info stolen would be huge. (many, many hours of time and some money you would probably not get back) Token based authentications can be quick and easy.
What if the person's a little crazy and lacks the kind of resources to actually carry out the crime? There's been some big terrorism convictions where they have given people monstrous sentences for planned crimes that they could not have actually committed.
What has happened here is that the organization has confused it's goals and long term plans with being "right". The reason CO2 building up in the atmosphere is a problem is mainly due to the heating effects. But the climate change folks in the UN have had long term plans to force everyone to cut their carbon emissions for decades to solve this problem. These folks now see the CO2 emission itself as evil, not the effects of it.
Another example : what if a drug chemist created a recreational drug that was perfectly safe, almost impossible to overdose on, and the effects could be reversed with a simple injection of an antidote. The DEA/Congress would still make the drug illegal and throw in prison everyone involved in supplying it. They would hire scientists to "research" the drug who would "discover" that it was in fact incredibly dangerous and that taking it was putting your life into your own hands. Again, the organization confuses it's purpose (protect people from the harm of dangerous drugs) with it's implementation (throw anyone in prison caught with any substance declared to be illegal)
A final example : those electronic cigarettes. There is talk of making them illegal, not because they cause harm, but because the government's advisors sees smoking/nicotine addiction itself as being evil. The electronic cigarettes are many, many times safer than the burning paper ones, yet the government wants to ban them because the devices are not intended to help a user quit their addiction.
The reason for getting people to quit smoking was original because cigarettes are dangerous, but now the goal has been perverted into being an end in itself.
Isn't a small displacement engine coupled to a turbocharger a 'hybrid' solution with some of the advantages of both? I thought that was why GM was developing a 1 liter turbocharged engine that would be used to drive a generator.
Cell phone companies do NOT operate in a free market. The spectrum rights they are granted amount to legally authorized monopolies. Also, the vast array of towers a company needs in order to have reasonably broad coverage means that not only do cell phone companies have a legal monopoly, their market niche is also a natural monopoly.
Monopolies are one of the common reasons for capitalism/the market failing. The only way we know to patch this hole in our economic system is to have the government make rules and enforce them.
Anyhow, for this reason, in order to stop the cell phone companies legally scamming us by charging us ridiculous rates for overages and not telling us until the end of the month, they need to mandate notifications when our bill goes over.
I think notifications aren't enough : I think a user should be able to set a maximum dollar cap for a month of service, and if the bill goes over that the cell phone company must either get the user to agree to lift the cap or to cut off service until the end of the month. (except for emergency calls or calls on night/weekend minutes, etc)
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And effectively pay 2 or 3 times as much...
The tens of thousands of dollars an off grid system costs (and you have to basically build a brand new custom house to make the energy load even feasible for an off grid system) would buy an awful lot of power, even if you have to sign up for "screw me over" 2 year contracts.
Kind of like how the $10,000 premium for a Nissan Leaf would buy an awful lot of gasoline, even at $4/gallon.
It's one thing to want to stick to principles, it's another to actually have the extra money to burn to really do it...
Step 1 is the hardest part : you have to find a place to build a custom house that is a reasonable distance from where you work. AND, you have to not move after that...(which means you can't change jobs unless it is somewhere else nearby)
I have looked into this.
Well I looked at the dome as well, but I think it's a terrible idea.
There already is a commercial solution that has all of the advantages you listed above, for the most part.
It's one of these domes : www.aidomes.com
1. It's not only a dome, but you can order it with ridiculous R-factor insulation. (R-36 from bonded in foam, which is just about the highest you can achieve in housing anywhere) The concrete pieces hermetically seal to each other as well, preventing virtually all air from exchanging, which is a big factor in energy loss in humid climates.(you have to install an energy recovery ventilator for controlled ventilation)
Also, since the insulation is bonded to the concrete panels, it doesn't slide out of place which is what happens with fiberglass insulation in the walls of conventional "stick-built" houses.
2. The company claims that their domes can take a magnitude 8 earthquake and at least 230 mph winds. Given the dome is basically a reinforced concrete bunker to live under, this is quite plausible. They have an account of a tornado picking up several thousand pound horse trailer and slamming it into the dome, with minimal damage.
3. The company claims that construction costs are about the same as conventional housing. The catch-22 is because they are so rare, and they look uglier than conventional housing, it is difficult to get mortgage financing for a dome and/or build in existing neighborhoods. The financing thing is one of the big reasons they aren't more common. If I ever build one, I'm going to save my money for as many years as it takes to buy the structure outright. (I'll have the bank give me a loan on the land)
It doesn't rotate, but that doesn't matter : R-36 insulation is so good that you don't need passive solar heating. It takes minimal fuel to heat the place in a cold climate anyway. If you use solar panels, you can just have those rotate. And the added expense for a rotation mechanism has got to be tens of thousands of dollars, making the rotating dome a poor financial idea..
4. Is lumber more environmentally friendly than concrete? I doubt it : a concrete dome will last for a century or more, while lumber rots and burns. Long term, the impact on the environment will be less with concrete.
Funny you mention that...the officer in charge of the prison Manning is in confirmed everything in the Salon article. Is solitary confinement torture? It probably is, but even if you don't believe that, you have to admit it is pretty harsh punishment for someone who has yet to be convicted of a crime.
I think you meant to say "peak acceleration". You graph the acceleration at a bunch of time intervals during the launch and the peak is the highest value. (or there's a way to figure it out using calculus if you have an equation for acceleration vs time)
Except that the chemical supplier of sulfur is going to affect the mass just as much as what some table says. The updated table is an AVERAGE of possible naturally occurring sources of sulfur.
If your experiment is this sensitive to pH you'd have to handle this problem through ongoing measurements of it, since any teensy error anywhere would cause a similar effect.
Actually, an hour of prime time television nets less than $1 per viewer to the network. $0.99 an episode would be an extremely sustainable business model if there were a sufficient number of subscribers.
Chemistry students don't need this many significant figures. Last time I took classes in that, I remember using about 4 significant figures (2 after the decimal) for everything.
The hard part of any problem in science is solving it : performing the calculations with any arbitrary number of significant figures is trivial.
And for real world uses, the atomic weight of an element is going to depend on exactly what ore you are using of that element. If your problem is affected by significant figures this far to the right of the decimal, you probably need data on exactly what you are working with.
But wouldn't a text message have been equally viable? Or a data message that was a short, recorded and compressed audio file? (not a real time call, so it could upload more slowly over a heavily used satellite link)
As many other posters have mentioned, a cheaper network using less orbital hardware would work equally well for the rare users that operate outside of cell phone covered regions.
Not if failures are independent events isolated to individual engines. As long as each individual engine has a reasonable number of moving parts, and a failure in one engine cannot usually cause a failure in a different engine, then having 27 times as many moving parts is not a bad thing at all.
Technically, the human body uses many trillions of quite unreliable moving parts and yet it still achieves excellent reliability compared to current technology..
These young ladies have offensive tattoos. Clearly this is obscene content by the standards of my community. Ban is justified. (sound of gavel pounding)
Also, the ladies are showing their anatomy used for feeding infants. Clearly this is offensive and should not bee viewed by children under 17.
Will someone please link to the part of the website for that tabloid that contains the alleged prurient content? I would like to verify myself to determine if the offending content warrants censorship. Let's not be hasty about condemning apple for their possibly righteous behavior without examining very carefully page 9 to see if it offends our sensibilities.
Can you poison the fuel used in the rods so that it can't be used in weapons at all without starting the enrichment process over from the beginning? I understand that you need 70-90% U-235 for a weapon and only about 3% to run a reactor. But 3% enriched fuel is a better starting point for making a weapon than raw ore, is it not?
I hope the designers of this system know what they are doing. A very obvious design goal would be to make it so that a computer virus loaded in one country couldn't shut down the ballistic missile defenses of another. After all, if one country writes most of the software they could easily insert back doors to allow them to shut down any node of the system at will.
Heck, this system will uses lots of RF antennas for input (such as the tracking radars)...a good back door could be triggered remotely, so long as you were running the same firmware revision as before. So even if you cut the cables linking the control centers together, one country could still remotely disable the defenses of another.
Eh, if it's the Federal government I know, the government probably bought the entire super computer and abandoned it when it broke down a couple years later. Also, since they didn't get any help installing it, it took them months to get it working.
No. A reasonable design goal for a first generation system would be to cut the death rate by 10 times. Still, for extraordinary drivers who are far, far better than average this would actually increase their risk perhaps.
This causes more problems than it solves. Look what happened to the average peon of France after the Revolution...
Over the years I have gradually begun to realize that China developing advanced technology is a good thing for the world as a whole.
First of all, as China has developed their standards of living and the quality of their products has increased enormously. It is true that occasionally they cut the wrong corner and you end up with lead contaminated products. But the overwhelming trend is towards higher and higher quality, like the Japanese economy was in the 1960s.
Second, China is now growing past the point of merely copying (or pirating) other nation's technology and is starting to actually create things that were never seen before. That benefits the U.S. as much as it benefits China.
One concrete example I know of : the smokeless cigarettes that deliver nicotine without the carcinogens were invented by a Chinese scientist. These things are a major advance, and if developed fully could eliminate most deaths from Tobacco usage.
In the long run, everyone in the world will benefit once China converts even a fraction of it's billion person population into scientists, engineers, and artists.
Actually when they rewrote Windows for Vista they added dozens more intermediate layers in the code.
An SSD and a ton of RAM mean that nothing is paged out to a mechanical hard drive.
The reason for this is because with the latest OSes they have added many, many layers of abstraction. I've heard that Vista has at least 50 distinct layers. They also write most of this code in higher level languages.
What all this accomplishes is that it allows one to have a system that has orders of magnitude more complexity than those old OSes you remember and to be MORE stable with fewer noticeable bugs than the software of the old days. I remember both Mac OS and Win 3.1 would system crash all the time.
The layers of abstraction let a single programmer understand what "his" part of the code does with other people's code encapsulated away. Humans have extremely limited short to medium term memory capacity. The high level language improves readability and productivity.
Internally Vista/Win 7 is more complex and has more lines of human level code than nearly any other piece of software ever created. Yet it is stable enough to run for several weeks without a reboot. (which is "good enough" for most desktop users. Yes Unix is better)
I suspect OS X is similar internally : Apple has less programming resources than Microsoft does, so they have to add and support all of those advanced features but they don't have the staff to hand optimize their code line by line. That's one reason for why it feels sluggish on your machine.
Anyways, get used to it. If you think programming is inefficient now, wait 20 more years. Have you ever studied neural nets? Do you have any idea how much redundant processing a biological brain does to work on a problem? (because of the high noise level of the hardware each problem gets solved a thousand times in parallel and the answers averaged)
Once we start getting hundred and thousand core CPUs we'll need to write our code more like a distributed neural net just to take advantage of all the CPU power.
I've got an i7 running at 4100 mhz, an SSD holding the apps and data, and 12 gigs of ram. I'm trying to replicate the delays of your post but having trouble. What programs, exactly, have a noticable latency on a machine like mine? I'm guessing that the extremely high memory bandwidth and clock on this machine is able to do all that overhead you are complaining about before my slow brain can notice a delay. (I noticed the machine did get snappier once I increased the ram from 4 gigs in dual channel to 12 gigs in triple channel)
You're just saying that because it's never happened to you. The losses you would face if you ever did have your info stolen would be huge. (many, many hours of time and some money you would probably not get back) Token based authentications can be quick and easy.
What if the person's a little crazy and lacks the kind of resources to actually carry out the crime? There's been some big terrorism convictions where they have given people monstrous sentences for planned crimes that they could not have actually committed.
What has happened here is that the organization has confused it's goals and long term plans with being "right". The reason CO2 building up in the atmosphere is a problem is mainly due to the heating effects. But the climate change folks in the UN have had long term plans to force everyone to cut their carbon emissions for decades to solve this problem. These folks now see the CO2 emission itself as evil, not the effects of it.
Another example : what if a drug chemist created a recreational drug that was perfectly safe, almost impossible to overdose on, and the effects could be reversed with a simple injection of an antidote. The DEA/Congress would still
make the drug illegal and throw in prison everyone involved in supplying it. They would hire scientists to "research" the drug who would "discover" that it was in fact incredibly dangerous and that taking it was putting your life into your own hands. Again, the organization confuses it's purpose (protect people from the harm of dangerous drugs) with it's implementation (throw anyone in prison caught with any substance declared to be illegal)
A final example : those electronic cigarettes. There is talk of making them illegal, not because they cause harm, but because the government's advisors sees smoking/nicotine addiction itself as being evil. The electronic cigarettes are many, many times safer than the burning paper ones, yet the government wants to ban them because the devices are not intended to help a user quit their addiction.
The reason for getting people to quit smoking was original because cigarettes are dangerous, but now the goal has been perverted into being an end in itself.
Isn't a small displacement engine coupled to a turbocharger a 'hybrid' solution with some of the advantages of both? I thought that was why GM was developing a 1 liter turbocharged engine that would be used to drive a generator.
Cell phone companies do NOT operate in a free market. The spectrum rights they are granted amount to legally authorized monopolies. Also, the vast array of towers a company needs in order to have reasonably broad coverage means that not only do cell phone companies have a legal monopoly, their market niche is also a natural monopoly.
Monopolies are one of the common reasons for capitalism/the market failing. The only way we know to patch this hole in our economic system is to have the government make rules and enforce them.
Anyhow, for this reason, in order to stop the cell phone companies legally scamming us by charging us ridiculous rates for overages and not telling us until the end of the month, they need to mandate notifications when our bill goes over.
I think notifications aren't enough : I think a user should be able to set a maximum dollar cap for a month of service, and if the bill goes over that the cell phone company must either get the user to agree to lift the cap or to cut off service until the end of the month. (except for emergency calls or calls on night/weekend minutes, etc)