Lead acid is most definitely NOT high capacity. NiMH, or NiCd have higher energy densities. The reason lead acid is desirable is because it's really robust (Think about the one in your car and look at the conditions it operates in), and relatively inexpensive when compared to the other two. Even though the energy density is low, it's usually more cost effective to just give up some extra space in the house rather than paying a lot more for a smaller pack.
Also, could you show me where you got the 6 month environmental cost for solar cells? (I'm not trying to be smug or anything, I honestly been looking for this kind of information for a long time).
1. No one will register 2. Government will come after blogger who is embarassing politician for scandal 3. Bloggers post about government attempt at censorship and create huge grassroots backlash 4. Scandal becomes even more popular 5. Law is struck down and politicians back off another attempt for a very long time
I also imagine any challenge in court would have it immediately struck down anyway. Honestly, do politicians think this works anymore? When in the history of the internet have scandals been successfully suppressed by theatening jail time?
I would think the missiles would be better because you can guide them. I would very much doubt that these would be able to hit something as small as a cave entrance accurately from that distance. Also, air/missile/whatever strikes are incredibly damaging to our credibility in these countries because the chance of collateral damage is so high. Yeah, you save a soldier's life, but you take out civilians. Granted, it's not every time (Heck, it could only be 1% of the time for all I know), but even that small percentage is reported heavily, and it's damaging our credibility.
But when is the last time that a destroyer was attacked in such a manner? All the enemies that we fight now are either already vastly outclassed by us in technology, or are not using traditional means to fight us anyway.
Yeah, I guess you could use to intercept bombers, but what would be the advantage of this compared to using traditional ammo? You're probably not firing at a suicide bomber from 5 miles away.
I think it's great that research is being undertaken since this could be useful for other applications, but am I the only one scratching their head as to why the military is making a big push for these?
I assume a gun like this would go onto a destroyer. I can't think of the last time a destroyer was used in any meaningful way in combat since WW2. If I remember correctly, the only reason the navy even keeps destroyers is because congress forces them to. I guess you could put it on a tank or something, but most conflicts that are fought now are on the ground and are more guerilla tactics than formal engagements. It's being shown in Iraq and Afghanistan that all the fancy new technology that the military keeps buying doesn't really mean squat when it comes to fighting a war.
How detailed do you want the label to be? Political opinions vary much more than just right and left.
A libertarian can be considered left (Anti-war and pro gay civil unions) or right (Small government and personal liberty, yes I know current republicans do not really follow this). There are countless other political opinions that wouldn't fit into a standard definition of right or left. It's also not like anyone doesn't know what they're watching. I doubt you will find anyone watching FOX news and being confused if it is left wing or right wing.
If people are believing completely untrue things on TV or radio, then the problem is an uneducated public that can't think critically, and not a problem of fairness.
How do you deem something fair? Have a democrat and republican banter about? What about other parties, even the crazy ones?
How do you even begin to enforce it? It's free speech, it doesn't have to be fair or even remotely factual.
If you don't like how a radio or TV station is broadcasting its news, then you boycott it and convince others to do the same. It doesn't matter anyway, I think most people are realizing that getting the news online is quicker and easier than watching it on TV, and this law wouldn't (Or at least couldn't practically) cover that.
Why does the government have to automatically get involved? It's in the car makers best interests to form a standard. No one would buy a car unless it was easy to recharge. Everyone making their own factor only hurts that (Not to mention it doesn't offer any advantage since they would all be using the same chemistry anyway). Maybe different sizes for different car sizes (Let's say... a heavy duty truck would get more capacity than a compact), but you get the idea.
Yeah, the chemistry differences could complicate things, but I imagine station managers/car makers would find ways to make up for it, or you would just standardize over broad product lines. I would also guess that the more expensive batteries would be charged (monetarily) more, kind of like premium and unleaded are priced differently. Anyway, it's a problem much more easily handled by car makers rather than trying to convince people to wait 8 hours for their car to charge. Also, this might all be moot now as Toshiba and others have announced Li-ion batteries that can charge in mere minutes. Whether it would be practical to use in a car... I have no idea.
For a battery-powered car to carry the same energy as a typical 15 gallon tank, you would need 2000kg of the best performing Li-ion batteries available today (This figure includes the higher efficiency of electric). Your energy figure is also way off (I got about 1/2 the cost of gasoline), but it is definately cheaper.
I am almost positive car makers know this. The way I see it, the two reasons car makers haven't adopted electric is for two-reasons: 1. Batteries just aren't high enough capacity. You do not get the range that consumers want. 2. No one wants to wait 8 hours for their battery to change, especially if they're on the road. I realize that there are now fast-charging Li-ion batteries that can charge in a few minutes, but they are incredibly expensive and hard to make. The best compromise I can think of is if the packs were swappable. So you basically keep the "gas" stations. When you want to charge up, they take out your battery, put in a freshly charged one, you pay your money and off you go.
I think it's also our history as a capitalist country. Countries that aren't used to it will hesitate to invest in something, especially if they've been burned. For example, the MMM company in Russia was just a large pyramid scheme, but most people weren't aware of the warning signs that it was a scam. Not surprisingly, the whole thing collapsed and many people lost their money. Afterwards, few people wanted to invest in a start-up again. In America, a decade later, is this starting to change. Over here, after something like that happens, people just avoid that company and find a new one. After the dotcom bubble, most people just avoided those companies and reinvested in more "safe" companies, rather than pulling out completely.
The transistor radio was invented in America. Japan was just the first to make them affordable to the point that everyone could buy one. If I remember correctly, part of this is because the profit margin on transistors in other areas was much higher than what you could get from selling radios, so the manufacturers here didn't pay a lot of attention to it.
This sounds an awful lot like Silicon-on-Insulator (SOI). The wikipedia article, however, says that PowerPC chips have had this for a while now, so I'm not sure how it's different. I'm sure if it is some new technology, Intel will be licensing it in no time. They don't really have any other choice.
I worked for a company called Aerovironment over the summer that did a lot of research in this area (They won several DARPA contracts relating to these), and from I've seen, it is very difficult to make these smaller. Now, I am an electrical engineer and not an aero, so I can't really give details of the aero stuff, but you can get the idea...
An amazing amount of electronics has to fit in a very tiny area. Things like cameras, GPS, flight control, servos, batteries, etc... all add up. The batteries are probably the biggest weight on the plane. You also have to consider the effects like propeller wash on the airfoil, and how the small size will affect its handling.
It also isn't that practical to make them smaller for stealth, because like someone mentioned below, they are very quiet. Aerovironment has hand-launched planes that are much bigger than this (Something like a 4-5 foot wingspan) and after they are up a few hundred feet or so, you can't hear the electric motor anymore and you have to struggle to find it in the air if you don't know where it is.
The push to go smaller is to make it easier to transport and carry out into the field. With planes of these sizes, the plane and the base station could all fit into one breifcase instead of a few breifcases as with a typical hand-launched UAV.
Not they can't get smaller, but there are serious tradeoffs for doing so.
I'm not quite sure how they are obsolete, could you explain it to me?
C and D batteries aren't really used on electronic devices (At least not anything meant to be portable). Flashlights are about the only notable exception, but those are cylindrical anyway.
AA and AAA are pretty small. Any smaller and I know a lot of people (including myself) will be complaining about battery life. About the only thing I can think of to make them more efficient is maybe making them square instead cylindrical. And I don't know what that would do to manufacturing costs.
"Something has been built into Photoshop's core coding that can detect something in images of currency and will prevent the user from opening the file."
From the article:
"However, Photoshop CS refuses to open the image, and provides an error message regarding the (il)legality of currency reproduction and an "information" button that takes you to the web."
I just scanned in a 10 dollar US bill (With Photoshop 6) and then saved it as jpeg, and then tried to open it with Photoshop CS. As far as I could tell, there was no problem opening it.
I did this with about 600 dpi resolution. I'm not sure if it supposed to do this by color or by shape, but it seems to me to be complete horseshit. If it isn't, it definately isn't implemented very well. This was a new 10 BTW.
If this feature does indeed exist, it seems to be fooled very easily. If this works for anyone, try negating the image and seeing if it opens then. I would guess it can tell if it's money by the color and negating it would let it pass.
I got one about 4-5 years ago when I was still on dial up. The ISP had really good connections and ping times so I signed up with them.
They had their servers automatically disconnect you after 8 hours (To prevent idling). This didn't really bother me though, I had my routing program just reconnect, mainly for 2 reasons: 1. My dad is a retard about computers and I got tired of explaining how to connect everyday 2. I was downloading a LOT, so if I wanted the files anytime soon, I had to have it download it overnight.
Now, the service was also advertised as unlimited, and I wasn't idling. So when I got the letter saying that my time online was considered "excessive" (over 600 hours/month) and there was no way I could be online the whole time, I was pissed. They were threatening to charge me extra every month for violating their acceptable user policy (Which was incredibly vague on the subject). So I went over there and tried to explain that yes, I was downloading the whole time. Basically they didn't care and still threatened me so I quit my service right on the spot. I went to another ISP that didn't care that was just as good.
I found out later that their own employees got the same letters and not even they could get out of it.
Now this is of course more difficult for people who are on broadband and don't really have much of a choice outside of maybe one other company, but you can vote with your money.
"Solution: capacitors. GM is planning to use them instead of car batteries in the relatively near future."
Could you give me a reference to this? As a EE student, I can't see why this would make any sense at all.
Capacitors can't store any amount of energy even close to a car battery and they wouldn't be able to hold it very long without making it very expensive.
Car batteries are fairly inexpensive and reliable. It doesn't make sense to replace that with something won't be, unless somehow GM has radically improved capacitor technology and I haven't heard of it.
We had them at our school. After the whole system was up and running, there were a couple locker break-ins with money stolen. Not a single person was caught because the face couldn't be made out. Soon after this, violence in the hallways returned to previous levels. Whether it was because they got used to it, or because everyone realized that they wouldn't get caught, I have no idea. I just know in the end they became pretty much worthless.
What really gets me is that even with no change in behavior, they'll never get rid of them. Even though they cost a lot, it'll make the administration look bad.
Slashdot Mirror
Lead acid is most definitely NOT high capacity. NiMH, or NiCd have higher energy densities. The reason lead acid is desirable is because it's really robust (Think about the one in your car and look at the conditions it operates in), and relatively inexpensive when compared to the other two. Even though the energy density is low, it's usually more cost effective to just give up some extra space in the house rather than paying a lot more for a smaller pack.
Also, could you show me where you got the 6 month environmental cost for solar cells? (I'm not trying to be smug or anything, I honestly been looking for this kind of information for a long time).
1. No one will register
2. Government will come after blogger who is embarassing politician for scandal
3. Bloggers post about government attempt at censorship and create huge grassroots backlash
4. Scandal becomes even more popular
5. Law is struck down and politicians back off another attempt for a very long time
I also imagine any challenge in court would have it immediately struck down anyway.
Honestly, do politicians think this works anymore? When in the history of the internet have scandals been successfully suppressed by theatening jail time?
I would think the missiles would be better because you can guide them. I would very much doubt that these would be able to hit something as small as a cave entrance accurately from that distance. Also, air/missile/whatever strikes are incredibly damaging to our credibility in these countries because the chance of collateral damage is so high. Yeah, you save a soldier's life, but you take out civilians. Granted, it's not every time (Heck, it could only be 1% of the time for all I know), but even that small percentage is reported heavily, and it's damaging our credibility.
But when is the last time that a destroyer was attacked in such a manner? All the enemies that we fight now are either already vastly outclassed by us in technology, or are not using traditional means to fight us anyway.
Yeah, I guess you could use to intercept bombers, but what would be the advantage of this compared to using traditional ammo? You're probably not firing at a suicide bomber from 5 miles away.
I think it's great that research is being undertaken since this could be useful for other applications, but am I the only one scratching their head as to why the military is making a big push for these?
I assume a gun like this would go onto a destroyer. I can't think of the last time a destroyer was used in any meaningful way in combat since WW2. If I remember correctly, the only reason the navy even keeps destroyers is because congress forces them to. I guess you could put it on a tank or something, but most conflicts that are fought now are on the ground and are more guerilla tactics than formal engagements. It's being shown in Iraq and Afghanistan that all the fancy new technology that the military keeps buying doesn't really mean squat when it comes to fighting a war.
Am I missing something here?
How detailed do you want the label to be? Political opinions vary much more than just right and left.
A libertarian can be considered left (Anti-war and pro gay civil unions) or right (Small government and personal liberty, yes I know current republicans do not really follow this). There are countless other political opinions that wouldn't fit into a standard definition of right or left. It's also not like anyone doesn't know what they're watching. I doubt you will find anyone watching FOX news and being confused if it is left wing or right wing.
If people are believing completely untrue things on TV or radio, then the problem is an uneducated public that can't think critically, and not a problem of fairness.
How do you deem something fair? Have a democrat and republican banter about? What about other parties, even the crazy ones?
How do you even begin to enforce it? It's free speech, it doesn't have to be fair or even remotely factual.
If you don't like how a radio or TV station is broadcasting its news, then you boycott it and convince others to do the same. It doesn't matter anyway, I think most people are realizing that getting the news online is quicker and easier than watching it on TV, and this law wouldn't (Or at least couldn't practically) cover that.
Why does the government have to automatically get involved? It's in the car makers best interests to form a standard. No one would buy a car unless it was easy to recharge. Everyone making their own factor only hurts that (Not to mention it doesn't offer any advantage since they would all be using the same chemistry anyway). Maybe different sizes for different car sizes (Let's say... a heavy duty truck would get more capacity than a compact), but you get the idea.
Yeah, the chemistry differences could complicate things, but I imagine station managers/car makers would find ways to make up for it, or you would just standardize over broad product lines. I would also guess that the more expensive batteries would be charged (monetarily) more, kind of like premium and unleaded are priced differently. Anyway, it's a problem much more easily handled by car makers rather than trying to convince people to wait 8 hours for their car to charge. Also, this might all be moot now as Toshiba and others have announced Li-ion batteries that can charge in mere minutes. Whether it would be practical to use in a car... I have no idea.
For a battery-powered car to carry the same energy as a typical 15 gallon tank, you would need 2000kg of the best performing Li-ion batteries available today (This figure includes the higher efficiency of electric). Your energy figure is also way off (I got about 1/2 the cost of gasoline), but it is definately cheaper.
I am almost positive car makers know this. The way I see it, the two reasons car makers haven't adopted electric is for two-reasons:
1. Batteries just aren't high enough capacity. You do not get the range that consumers want.
2. No one wants to wait 8 hours for their battery to change, especially if they're on the road. I realize that there are now fast-charging Li-ion batteries that can charge in a few minutes, but they are incredibly expensive and hard to make. The best compromise I can think of is if the packs were swappable. So you basically keep the "gas" stations. When you want to charge up, they take out your battery, put in a freshly charged one, you pay your money and off you go.
I think it's also our history as a capitalist country. Countries that aren't used to it will hesitate to invest in something, especially if they've been burned. For example, the MMM company in Russia was just a large pyramid scheme, but most people weren't aware of the warning signs that it was a scam. Not surprisingly, the whole thing collapsed and many people lost their money. Afterwards, few people wanted to invest in a start-up again. In America, a decade later, is this starting to change. Over here, after something like that happens, people just avoid that company and find a new one. After the dotcom bubble, most people just avoided those companies and reinvested in more "safe" companies, rather than pulling out completely.
The transistor radio was invented in America. Japan was just the first to make them affordable to the point that everyone could buy one. If I remember correctly, part of this is because the profit margin on transistors in other areas was much higher than what you could get from selling radios, so the manufacturers here didn't pay a lot of attention to it.
Now, you know that ALL microprocessors have bugs in them, right? This isn't unusual or noteworthy in the least.
This sounds an awful lot like Silicon-on-Insulator (SOI). The wikipedia article, however, says that PowerPC chips have had this for a while now, so I'm not sure how it's different. I'm sure if it is some new technology, Intel will be licensing it in no time. They don't really have any other choice.
I worked for a company called Aerovironment over the summer that did a lot of research in this area (They won several DARPA contracts relating to these), and from I've seen, it is very difficult to make these smaller. Now, I am an electrical engineer and not an aero, so I can't really give details of the aero stuff, but you can get the idea...
An amazing amount of electronics has to fit in a very tiny area. Things like cameras, GPS, flight control, servos, batteries, etc... all add up. The batteries are probably the biggest weight on the plane. You also have to consider the effects like propeller wash on the airfoil, and how the small size will affect its handling.
It also isn't that practical to make them smaller for stealth, because like someone mentioned below, they are very quiet. Aerovironment has hand-launched planes that are much bigger than this (Something like a 4-5 foot wingspan) and after they are up a few hundred feet or so, you can't hear the electric motor anymore and you have to struggle to find it in the air if you don't know where it is.
The push to go smaller is to make it easier to transport and carry out into the field. With planes of these sizes, the plane and the base station could all fit into one breifcase instead of a few breifcases as with a typical hand-launched UAV.
Not they can't get smaller, but there are serious tradeoffs for doing so.
The military has been using water to aid them for a long time.
http://www.howstuffworks.com/hydro-ordnance.htm
I'm looking forward to the tank personally.
I fixed a family friend's computer and instead of cash I asked him for a ride in his BMW Isetta (Infamously known as the Urkel car)
G
Pretty sweet deal
A picture of it is right here: http://expert.ics.purdue.edu/~akovacs/P0005830.JP
Don't think I got so many amazed looks when riding in a car before.
I'm not quite sure how they are obsolete, could you explain it to me?
C and D batteries aren't really used on electronic devices (At least not anything meant to be portable). Flashlights are about the only notable exception, but those are cylindrical anyway.
AA and AAA are pretty small. Any smaller and I know a lot of people (including myself) will be complaining about battery life. About the only thing I can think of to make them more efficient is maybe making them square instead cylindrical. And I don't know what that would do to manufacturing costs.
From the article description:
"Something has been built into Photoshop's core coding that can detect something in images of currency and will prevent the user from opening the file."
From the article:
"However, Photoshop CS refuses to open the image, and provides an error message regarding the (il)legality of currency reproduction and an "information" button that takes you to the web."
I just scanned in a 10 dollar US bill (With Photoshop 6) and then saved it as jpeg, and then tried to open it with Photoshop CS. As far as I could tell, there was no problem opening it.
I did this with about 600 dpi resolution. I'm not sure if it supposed to do this by color or by shape, but it seems to me to be complete horseshit. If it isn't, it definately isn't implemented very well. This was a new 10 BTW.
If this feature does indeed exist, it seems to be fooled very easily. If this works for anyone, try negating the image and seeing if it opens then. I would guess it can tell if it's money by the color and negating it would let it pass.
I got one about 4-5 years ago when I was still on dial up. The ISP had really good connections and ping times so I signed up with them.
They had their servers automatically disconnect you after 8 hours (To prevent idling). This didn't really bother me though, I had my routing program just reconnect, mainly for 2 reasons:
1. My dad is a retard about computers and I got tired of explaining how to connect everyday
2. I was downloading a LOT, so if I wanted the files anytime soon, I had to have it download it overnight.
Now, the service was also advertised as unlimited, and I wasn't idling. So when I got the letter saying that my time online was considered "excessive" (over 600 hours/month) and there was no way I could be online the whole time, I was pissed. They were threatening to charge me extra every month for violating their acceptable user policy (Which was incredibly vague on the subject). So I went over there and tried to explain that yes, I was downloading the whole time. Basically they didn't care and still threatened me so I quit my service right on the spot. I went to another ISP that didn't care that was just as good.
I found out later that their own employees got the same letters and not even they could get out of it.
Now this is of course more difficult for people who are on broadband and don't really have much of a choice outside of maybe one other company, but you can vote with your money.
http://electronics.howstuffworks.com/capacitor.htm
"Solution: capacitors. GM is planning to use them instead of car batteries in the relatively near future."
Could you give me a reference to this? As a EE student, I can't see why this would make any sense at all.
Capacitors can't store any amount of energy even close to a car battery and they wouldn't be able to hold it very long without making it very expensive.
Car batteries are fairly inexpensive and reliable. It doesn't make sense to replace that with something won't be, unless somehow GM has radically improved capacitor technology and I haven't heard of it.
Bitch that it's somehow SCO's fault
I think "My Big Fat Greek Wedding" is a great example of this.
I never even heard of it until friends of mine were telling me to go see it. With virtually no marketing, the movie did amazingly well.
We had them at our school. After the whole system was up and running, there were a couple locker break-ins with money stolen. Not a single person was caught because the face couldn't be made out. Soon after this, violence in the hallways returned to previous levels. Whether it was because they got used to it, or because everyone realized that they wouldn't get caught, I have no idea. I just know in the end they became pretty much worthless.
What really gets me is that even with no change in behavior, they'll never get rid of them. Even though they cost a lot, it'll make the administration look bad.