Actually, I'm sure that there are a number of ways
to make money and still keep the customers happy.
In an airport, I could charge the customer a buck
for unlimited time. When the carrier drops, I
assume he's done and gone. Since the bandwidth is
shared, I can accomodate the occasional person
who stays on all day, and the guy in the house
across the street with a directional antenna.
But I don't understand the point of your comment
about security. You seem to be saying that since
locks can be cut, broken, or picked, that there is
no point in having locks.
By providing WEP keys, you are giving the customer
a reasonable expectation of privacy, especially
if the keys are changed faster than current
technology can decrypt them. This expectation of
privacy is an important legal distinction, and
can be useful in prosecuting the person who cracks
the security and abuses the information gained.
Many people rely on the legal system to deter
theft and vandalism, rather than relying on locks
and fences.
Don't let the best be the enemy of the good.
We may not be able to prevent all armed robberies,
but reducing the odds of my getting robbed at
gunpoint is a worthwile endeavor.
Pay phones are going away because they are not
making money.
This idea may save those pay phones, since DSL
and voice can co-exist. And having a phone by the
WiFi terminal allows you to get tech support (for
another quarter?) when things aren't working.
As for people who can't afford cell phones not
having access to 911, I don't know if this is more
of a problem since the cell phone was invented, or less. Finding someone with a cell phone nearby
these days may be easier than finding a pay phone
nearby was in the bad old days.
Would this work the same way? I feed coins into
a slot, and then my WiFi card sees a carrier?
Maybe it is even somewhat secure. Suppose after
I drop the coins, an LCD screen tells me what to
use for WEP keys. If every 10 minutes, I need to
drop more coins and get a new WEP key, I can stay
ahead of the guy in the van outside who is trying
to collect a day's worth of data to break that
first WEP key.
Or, it could be an open WiFi channel, on the cafe
jukebox model. I drop the coins, and share the
bandwidth with everyone else within range. I
then use a VPN and/or PGP when I want privacy.
Of course it isn't that simple. Stopping it
would probably be similar to stopping another
clock in you, such as your heart or your
breathing.
What interested me was the comment about
crystallizing it (to get X-ray crystallography).
This might be one of those cases where the
crystal form is not as useful as something like
attosecond laser freeze-frames. We want to see
this thing in action. I suppose one could
crystallize it in each of its forms, and then
guess which one did what.
Publishers and authors have a right to profit from there work regardless of what it is.
That right is given by the people through their
representatives in Congress in accordance with the
Constitution.
The reason the people gave that right is to
encourage authors to write. By giving a limited
time monopoly on their expression, we are giving
them an oportunity to make money by giving us the
results of their talents.
Now, personally, I believe that current law gives
way too long a monopoly. Walt Disney was encouraged
to create Mickey Mouse when the monopoly was much
shorter. Mark Twain was also encouraged and well
compensated, despite a shorter copyright.
Do we think that by extending the copyright to 70
years, we are getting more creative effort and
better literature than we did back then? What
are we getting for those extra years?
I someone can't make a profit from their efforts
in, say, 10 years, maybe the benefit to the people
from those efforts has already been expressed by
the marketplace.
My latest book is coming out later this year in
paper form, and will cost money.
The same book (actually bigger, since the
publisher has asked to pare down the number of
pages) is currently available on the web for free.
It will continue to be on the web for free after
the paper form is published. In fact, the web
version is a significant part of the marketing
of the paper version.
I will sell more paper versions by giving away
the web version than I would if the web version
were not available.
The web version of the book has been available
in ever-growing form for about seven years now.
I am constantly getting email asking if the paper
version is available for sale. Those email
inquiries alone (if they were actual sales) would
make the book quite profitable.
The web and paper publishing are complementary
(and the web version of the book is complimentary).
I suspect the same is true of music sharing on
the net -- after all, it seems to be true of
music sharing on the radio. Without hearing the
music for free on the radio, I expect fewer CDs
would be sold.
Your last point is the key to how very efficient
distillation systems work.
You put the heat into the water to make the vapor.
Then you take the heat back out of the vapor to
get pure water.
Using the heat from step 2 in step 1 is how you
get high efficiency.
Since the two temperatures need only be on either
side of the dew point, you can run the system at
any average temperature you like. Instead of
heating the water to make vapor, you can cool the
vapor to make water.
One scheme pumped cold water from low ocean depths
to chill air below the dew point. Pumping water
is cheap compared to raising the temperature.
As for worrying about high salinity, that need not
be a problem. You need only remove enough water
that the salinity changes by one or two percent
(i.e. from 0.0035 to 0.0036). The seawater can
be continuously pumped through the system, with
only a small amount of water removed at any one time.
Perhaps having sex often would give you the
extra olfactory neurons needed to be a wine
connoisseur or a perfume tester.
Finding out what controls the migration to the
olfactory bulb would also be nice, especially
if the mechanism could be hijacked to direct the
neurons elsewhere. Cure Alzheimer's disease by
having sex? Cram for a test by watching certain
videos?
It might be interesting to see if the brain has
its own mechanisms for directing the stem cells
to places that need them. Suppose damage itself
is a trigger for migration? Perhaps prolactin
injections alone could alleviate stroke damage
by stepping up the stem cell production, with the
new stem cells migrating to the damaged area.
Maybe the reason spinal cord injuries are so hard
to heal is that people paralyzed from the neck
down get less sex than they used to?
It looks to me like about half of the ocean floor
is
too young to have dinosaur fossils.
But that is still a lot of territory.
Most of the old stuff looks pretty deep.
Given the typical paleontologist's budget, it is
easy to see why they pick places like Montana
and the Gobi Desert over the deep ocean.
Not only is it proven, but now you can offer it
as a life boat for the ISS, or join a shuttle mission.
The technology for docking with Soyuz is something
that the other two manned space powers also have,
and that can come in quite handy for any future
joint missions.
If you want to join the club, learn the secret
handshake.
Kids getting arrested for science fair projects
that frighten the principal are too common.
This kid had to hire a lawyer
to get his suspension redacted from his permanent record.
He said he was going to build a Plastic Hydrogen Bomb from plans on the Internet, and that his parents were buying him the parts. The principal
had his house searched by the police.
Not unusual, but in one paragraph they call it a
"polymer molecule actuator" and in the next they
say it works "when the water inside the plate expands in response to electric stimulation".
A better article on artificial muscles can be
found
a MIT. There is enough
information there to actually build one, including
sources for the materials.
The MIT work is most likely quite different from
the work done at Eamex, as there are a number of
approaches to making artificial muscles.
Another article describes yet another approach,
but also gets some of the science wrong.
Actually, the point of the story is that this is
"new". Most of the galaxies we see are billions
of years old. To see one forming only 68 million
years ago is unusual.
Of course, the galaxy was discovered 20 years ago,
so even that "news" is "olds".
My favorite quote from the article is this one:
"the young system sits in a region of comparatively empty space known as a void".
Well, yes...
There are two things that make me think there is
probably no life on Titan.
One is that at 90 Kelvin, not much chemical activity
goes on. Your intuition about hot spots is not
unreasonable, but hot spots come and go on geological
and evolutionary short timeframes, and the life
formed in such a hot spot would have to get to the
next hot spot across a 90 Kelvin desert. Maybe
not impossible, but not really conducive to happy
bacteria.
The second reason is that the current dogma holds
that life started out on Earth in a prebiotic
soup that resembles Titan today, and that life
modified that soup to what we see today. If there
is life on Titan, it doesn't look like it has
modified the soup. Perhaps it doesn't have to,
but Earth-type life is all we know at this time.
The AP article gets some things wrong that are
correctly stated in the articles it points to.
For example, the atmosphere is mostly nitrogen,
not "methane, ethane and hydrogen cyanide".
Also, cloud formation has been seen
on Mars and arguably on other
planets. And the idea of giving such low temperatures
in Fahrenheit is ludicrous, even to people like
me, who use Fahrenheit on a daily basis for the
temperatures I normally encounter. I had to
convert to Kelvins to get an idea of what other
things (superconductors, liquification of gases)
happen at those temperatures.
Some bacteria that have evolved to live in very
salty water at -10 Celsius are unlikely to do
much harm to a human.
On the other hand, the anti-freeze molecules they
make might be quite beneficial. Something like
that might make cryogenic suspended animation
possible, or just better ice cream.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, I'm sure that there are a number of ways to make money and still keep the customers happy. In an airport, I could charge the customer a buck for unlimited time. When the carrier drops, I assume he's done and gone. Since the bandwidth is shared, I can accomodate the occasional person who stays on all day, and the guy in the house across the street with a directional antenna.
But I don't understand the point of your comment about security. You seem to be saying that since locks can be cut, broken, or picked, that there is no point in having locks.
By providing WEP keys, you are giving the customer a reasonable expectation of privacy, especially if the keys are changed faster than current technology can decrypt them. This expectation of privacy is an important legal distinction, and can be useful in prosecuting the person who cracks the security and abuses the information gained. Many people rely on the legal system to deter theft and vandalism, rather than relying on locks and fences.
Don't let the best be the enemy of the good. We may not be able to prevent all armed robberies, but reducing the odds of my getting robbed at gunpoint is a worthwile endeavor.
Pay phones are going away because they are not making money.
This idea may save those pay phones, since DSL and voice can co-exist. And having a phone by the WiFi terminal allows you to get tech support (for another quarter?) when things aren't working.
As for people who can't afford cell phones not having access to 911, I don't know if this is more of a problem since the cell phone was invented, or less. Finding someone with a cell phone nearby these days may be easier than finding a pay phone nearby was in the bad old days.
I understand how pay phones make money.
Would this work the same way? I feed coins into a slot, and then my WiFi card sees a carrier?
Maybe it is even somewhat secure. Suppose after I drop the coins, an LCD screen tells me what to use for WEP keys. If every 10 minutes, I need to drop more coins and get a new WEP key, I can stay ahead of the guy in the van outside who is trying to collect a day's worth of data to break that first WEP key.
Or, it could be an open WiFi channel, on the cafe jukebox model. I drop the coins, and share the bandwidth with everyone else within range. I then use a VPN and/or PGP when I want privacy.
Of course it isn't that simple. Stopping it would probably be similar to stopping another clock in you, such as your heart or your breathing.
What interested me was the comment about crystallizing it (to get X-ray crystallography). This might be one of those cases where the crystal form is not as useful as something like attosecond laser freeze-frames. We want to see this thing in action. I suppose one could crystallize it in each of its forms, and then guess which one did what.
What was your name again?
You said:
That right is given by the people through their representatives in Congress in accordance with the Constitution.
The reason the people gave that right is to encourage authors to write. By giving a limited time monopoly on their expression, we are giving them an oportunity to make money by giving us the results of their talents.
Now, personally, I believe that current law gives way too long a monopoly. Walt Disney was encouraged to create Mickey Mouse when the monopoly was much shorter. Mark Twain was also encouraged and well compensated, despite a shorter copyright.
Do we think that by extending the copyright to 70 years, we are getting more creative effort and better literature than we did back then? What are we getting for those extra years?
I someone can't make a profit from their efforts in, say, 10 years, maybe the benefit to the people from those efforts has already been expressed by the marketplace.
I am an author.
My latest book is coming out later this year in paper form, and will cost money.
The same book (actually bigger, since the publisher has asked to pare down the number of pages) is currently available on the web for free. It will continue to be on the web for free after the paper form is published. In fact, the web version is a significant part of the marketing of the paper version.
I will sell more paper versions by giving away the web version than I would if the web version were not available.
The web version of the book has been available in ever-growing form for about seven years now. I am constantly getting email asking if the paper version is available for sale. Those email inquiries alone (if they were actual sales) would make the book quite profitable.
The web and paper publishing are complementary (and the web version of the book is complimentary).
I suspect the same is true of music sharing on the net -- after all, it seems to be true of music sharing on the radio. Without hearing the music for free on the radio, I expect fewer CDs would be sold.
That's my opinion, and I'm taking it to the bank.
Your last point is the key to how very efficient distillation systems work.
You put the heat into the water to make the vapor.
Then you take the heat back out of the vapor to get pure water.
Using the heat from step 2 in step 1 is how you get high efficiency.
Since the two temperatures need only be on either side of the dew point, you can run the system at any average temperature you like. Instead of heating the water to make vapor, you can cool the vapor to make water.
One scheme pumped cold water from low ocean depths to chill air below the dew point. Pumping water is cheap compared to raising the temperature.
As for worrying about high salinity, that need not be a problem. You need only remove enough water that the salinity changes by one or two percent (i.e. from 0.0035 to 0.0036). The seawater can be continuously pumped through the system, with only a small amount of water removed at any one time.
Perhaps having sex often would give you the extra olfactory neurons needed to be a wine connoisseur or a perfume tester.
Finding out what controls the migration to the olfactory bulb would also be nice, especially if the mechanism could be hijacked to direct the neurons elsewhere. Cure Alzheimer's disease by having sex? Cram for a test by watching certain videos?
It might be interesting to see if the brain has its own mechanisms for directing the stem cells to places that need them. Suppose damage itself is a trigger for migration? Perhaps prolactin injections alone could alleviate stroke damage by stepping up the stem cell production, with the new stem cells migrating to the damaged area.
Maybe the reason spinal cord injuries are so hard to heal is that people paralyzed from the neck down get less sex than they used to?
That would be an interesting grant proposal...
I agree. Building your own chemistry set would be more fun, and you would learn more.
The best way to learn is to teach. Collecting a bunch of good chemistry experiments, and the sources for the materials, would make a great project.
And you aren't the only one who benefits...
Some places to start:
Delights of Chemistry
Demonstration Lab
Lecture Demonstrations
Chemistry Resources
Some Sources of chemicals:
CHEM Scientific
Fisher
Sagent Welch
Carolina
I am certain you will get lots more from other Slashdaughters...
It looks to me like about half of the ocean floor is too young to have dinosaur fossils.
But that is still a lot of territory.
Most of the old stuff looks pretty deep.
Given the typical paleontologist's budget, it is easy to see why they pick places like Montana and the Gobi Desert over the deep ocean.
We have had great success in buildings with thick walls.
We use directional antennas such as these and these to get very high signal strengths and low noise.
We use this antenna to go between buildings. These also work great for long distances.
With two of those antennas, we have spanned 2400 feet (and we are planning a similar setup to span a distance of 5 miles).
Don't give up -- there are easy solutions to thick walls.
Using the Soyuz design is a good idea.
Not only is it proven, but now you can offer it as a life boat for the ISS, or join a shuttle mission.
The technology for docking with Soyuz is something that the other two manned space powers also have, and that can come in quite handy for any future joint missions.
If you want to join the club, learn the secret handshake.
Now that whaling ships know what sounds to follow, will the catch be increased?
Or have they known all along, and just not informed the Navy?
Kids getting arrested for science fair projects that frighten the principal are too common.
This kid had to hire a lawyer to get his suspension redacted from his permanent record.
He said he was going to build a Plastic Hydrogen Bomb from plans on the Internet, and that his parents were buying him the parts. The principal had his house searched by the police.
The plans were included in the police report.
So your value is 2.3 instead of 2.5.
Perhaps the difference is from using different values for the radius of a gas giant.
Perhaps they are only thinking of melting the thin layer of ice that holds the rest onto the wire?
The surface gravity on Jupiter can be calculated from Newton 's Law of Universal Gravitation:
F = G * (mass of Jupiter) * (your mass) / (radius of Jupiter squared)
The ratio of the force of gravity on Earth to that of Jupiter is thus:
Mass of Jupiter / Radius of Jupiter squared
Jupiter has a mass that is 318 times that of the Earth and a radius that is 11.2 times that of the Earth.
The surface gravity would be 318/(11.2)(11.2) = 2.5 times the Earth's.
Now I have pulled 3 G's before -- and I am thicker than a few centimeters, although some still call me a pile of goo.
Astronomers and cosmologists use the term "metal" as a shorthand for anything other than hydrogen and helium.
Not unusual, but in one paragraph they call it a "polymer molecule actuator" and in the next they say it works "when the water inside the plate expands in response to electric stimulation".
A better article on artificial muscles can be found a MIT. There is enough information there to actually build one, including sources for the materials.
The MIT work is most likely quite different from the work done at Eamex, as there are a number of approaches to making artificial muscles.
Another article describes yet another approach, but also gets some of the science wrong.
Oh, well...
Wouldn't that be "matter getting stuffed"?
Actually, the point of the story is that this is "new". Most of the galaxies we see are billions of years old. To see one forming only 68 million years ago is unusual.
Of course, the galaxy was discovered 20 years ago, so even that "news" is "olds".
My favorite quote from the article is this one: "the young system sits in a region of comparatively empty space known as a void".
Well, yes...
It's apparently even simpler than that.
It is already being done, as stated in the last sentence in the New Scientist article:
So don't remove the brain.
Remove the bone around the brain, irradiate the brain, and then replace the bone.
There are two things that make me think there is probably no life on Titan.
One is that at 90 Kelvin, not much chemical activity goes on. Your intuition about hot spots is not unreasonable, but hot spots come and go on geological and evolutionary short timeframes, and the life formed in such a hot spot would have to get to the next hot spot across a 90 Kelvin desert. Maybe not impossible, but not really conducive to happy bacteria.
The second reason is that the current dogma holds that life started out on Earth in a prebiotic soup that resembles Titan today, and that life modified that soup to what we see today. If there is life on Titan, it doesn't look like it has modified the soup. Perhaps it doesn't have to, but Earth-type life is all we know at this time.
The AP article gets some things wrong that are correctly stated in the articles it points to. For example, the atmosphere is mostly nitrogen, not "methane, ethane and hydrogen cyanide".
Also, cloud formation has been seen on Mars and arguably on other planets. And the idea of giving such low temperatures in Fahrenheit is ludicrous, even to people like me, who use Fahrenheit on a daily basis for the temperatures I normally encounter. I had to convert to Kelvins to get an idea of what other things (superconductors, liquification of gases) happen at those temperatures.
Some bacteria that have evolved to live in very salty water at -10 Celsius are unlikely to do much harm to a human.
On the other hand, the anti-freeze molecules they make might be quite beneficial. Something like that might make cryogenic suspended animation possible, or just better ice cream.