"You can grab an electric fence designed for cattle and get more of a shock [due to several quintillion electrons travelling through your body]."
I don't get it. Are you somehow under the impression that there is a single particle (or one in each direction) circulating in the LHC with an energy of 1 TeV (or thereabouts)? Or perhaps you think that the the total energy of the LHC beam is 1 TeV?
Neither of these is true. Each particle in this beam has an energy of 1 TeV and there are lots of particles. To go back to the light bulb comparison, the LHC is quite a lot brighter than a lightbulb (in terms of particles per second) and each one of the particles in it's beam is a hell of a lot more energetic than the photons spewed out by that lightbulb.
Let's take a look at your electric fence. The maximum output of an electric fence is apparently limited to 5 Joules.
Compare to the LHC. According to this CERN page, at full power each beam has a total energy of about 362 MJ, and there are two of them. Some illustrative comparisons from the same page:
1) The kinetic energy of a British aircraft carrier going 11.7 knots (or an American supercarrier going 5.6 knots (*2 for both beams)
2) A Subaru + driver going 1712 km/h (*2 for both beams)
3) Both beams together can melt almost one tonne of copper
4) A high speed train going 150 km/h (* 2 for both beams)
5) 77.4 kg of TNT (*2)
So yeah, quite a bit of energy. I'd much rather take the little tingle from an electric fence as opposed to standing in front of a train going 150 km/h or a car going mach 2.
Unless you guys run your fire houses a LOT differently than ours, firefighters get paid while their on duty (including lounging around the fire house). Nobody starts a stop watch when they hit the threshold of the burning house and then stops it when they exit.
There are a few ways of looking at it. The more energy you pump into a particle, the shorter it's wavelength gets. The size of features you can see is proportional to the wavelength. Smaller wavelengths mean you can see smaller features.
The more important factor when you're looking for new particles is that, because E=mc^2, you need a certain amount of energy in an interaction for particles of a given mass to be produced. If you want to see something heavier, you need to input more energy. To do that you give the particles you're colliding more energy - i.e., you make them go faster.
The God Particle" by Leon Lederman is a good book and covers the history of accelerator development.
One can be disappointed that the world is the way it is while still understanding that it is so and realizing that it could not be otherwise.
I'm disappointed that I don't have my own private jet but I understand why that is and furthermore I continue to support the decisions I've made that result in my not having a private jet.
By that argument you could say that no human activity is environmentally friendly.
Take the rocket fuel H2 + O2 = H20. The reactants and products all exist in the environment and the reaction itself occurs within the cells of almost every living thing on the planet (if not all living things). Yet you say it's not environmentally friendly? Why not? Because of the energy needed to produce the H2 and O2 in the first place? The term "environmentally friendly" becomes absolutely meaningless if you interpret it so rigorously. Go ahead, find ANYTHING that doesn't require some energy to produce. Rocket fuel is actually pretty efficient at what it does (rockets are engineered so that as much of the energy as possible goes into accomplishing the goal) and in this case, as I mentioned, much of the energy to produce the fuel likely comes from renewable, "clean" energy sources like hydro.
Besides, carbon dioxide, despite the hype, isn't the one and only pollutant we can produce. A bit of aluminum oxide is certainly more environmentally friendly than the drop-anything-dead-on-contact compounds used in some current rocket fuels.
However you get that energy, you can have rocket fuels that are nasty pollutants or rocket fuels that are not, and rocket fuels that produce exhaust that is a nasty pollutant or not. Hydrogen + oxygen = water is probably the best, but some of the solid fuel rockets are nasty. Both the reactants and the products are a little more toxic than "may be linked to brain disease [but we drink it anyway]."
Besides, most aluminum plants are located near some cheap source of energy specifically because aluminum requires so much electricity to refine. The really cheap sources of lots of energy tend to be hydroelectric, not fossil fuel. Boeing isn't based in Seattle because they like the weather.
Aluminum will not burn without an oxidizer. In fact, nothing will burn without an oxidizer. There are a few compounds that can be their own oxidizers, but since aluminum is an element it is not one of these.
Ah, the good old days. In undergrad we built simple programmable computers out of gates and programmed them by flipping DIP switches and pressing buttons.
Assembly is usually one-to-one translated to machine code though, so they're technically both equivalent as far as bare metal goes.
Don't get your biology from movies. There are lots of organisms that do not reach a natural, internally generated equilibrium. I suspect nearly all, in fact, except for a few oddities.
The populations of the vast majority of organisms, including humans, are ultimately forcibly constrained by the availability of resources. We just think we're special because we haven't yet run into that limit. When we do it's very unlikely we'll suddenly all die off. Civilization might collapse, but the species will probably go on.
Now, if you want to see some real environmental badasses, take a look at those photosynthetic organisms that filled the atmosphere with oxygen. Lots of them DID in fact pollute themselves into extinction.
"I work on firmware for slower microcontrollers that run at clock speeds from 1.8 to 16 MHz"
No wonder you can afford to use C!;)
I can buy a $1.20 microcontroller that's more than an order of magnitude faster than the machine I learned to code on. Still, there are still times when a nice bit of assembly makes a big difference. Not much, just as much as you need.
As for the rest of the thread, assembly IS the bare metal. C is the next best thing to bare metal. Not to say that you should code everything in assembly, that would be silly. But being aware that it exists can't hurt.
Yeah, your argument was in trouble when you hit that point.
Python can be used for spoon feeding too, but it doesn't have to be. A lot of low level networking geeks keep a Python interpreter handy because it makes it easy to hand assemble network packets.
"I love rare meat. There is probably more to it than just that."
It depends on the meat. Chicken has to be cooked thoroughly because salmonella can live in the meat. Steak is meant to be raw on the inside, but must be seared on the outside because some meat packer probably dropped the thing so e. coli could be living on the surface. Ground meat should be cooked through because some meat packer probably dropped it, ground it up (thoroughly mixing the bacteria in) and then dropped it again for good measure.
Does she play Mafia Wars? There's no way that guy could have overlooked such a lucrative business opportunity as selling profile access to interested parties.
So not breaking international law helps you win wars? While I tend to agree with that sentiment, it seems to be antithetical to the rest of your post.
Re:So let me get this straight...
on
Less Than Free
·
· Score: 1
Let me quote the post in question:
"I just got a G1 from my brother to use for development. I thought it was very cool I could wipe the firmware from T-Mobile and put a custom mod on there that allowed me to move apps to the SD card, use WiFi tethering, etc. Show me another phone/OS environment you see that happen on."
Take a close look at the last line:
"Show me another phone/OS environment you see that happen on." "That" being wiping the "firmware" (actually the OS stored in flash memory).
The answer is, you can do the same thing on the iPhone, and probably any smart phone.
Your comments on Apple are fairly accurate but they are completely irrelevant to both the post I replied to and to my reply itself. That suggests you were using a weak pretext to post some Apple hate.
Once you've got them deployed, a shot from a laser system is a lot cheaper than a missile.
Besides, it's experimental. I'm sure in a few years they'll be shooting down all sorts of things. A laser equipped plane would make a fantastic precision assassination weapon.
Do you have a citation for your Vlingo complaint? Vlingo is available on the iPhone and can dial numbers, search, bring up maps and update social networking status. It can't take dictation, but it seems Vlingo has also stopped selling free dictation on the Blackberry (it now costs $17.99) so it may simply be that they haven't written it for iPhone yet. I wasn't able to find anything about Vlingo getting rejected from the app store. The ability for applications to send e-mail is a fully supported feature in iPhone OS 3.0+.
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"You can grab an electric fence designed for cattle and get more of a shock [due to several quintillion electrons travelling through your body]."
I don't get it. Are you somehow under the impression that there is a single particle (or one in each direction) circulating in the LHC with an energy of 1 TeV (or thereabouts)? Or perhaps you think that the the total energy of the LHC beam is 1 TeV?
Neither of these is true. Each particle in this beam has an energy of 1 TeV and there are lots of particles. To go back to the light bulb comparison, the LHC is quite a lot brighter than a lightbulb (in terms of particles per second) and each one of the particles in it's beam is a hell of a lot more energetic than the photons spewed out by that lightbulb.
Let's take a look at your electric fence. The maximum output of an electric fence is apparently limited to 5 Joules.
Compare to the LHC. According to this CERN page, at full power each beam has a total energy of about 362 MJ, and there are two of them. Some illustrative comparisons from the same page:
1) The kinetic energy of a British aircraft carrier going 11.7 knots (or an American supercarrier going 5.6 knots (*2 for both beams)
2) A Subaru + driver going 1712 km/h (*2 for both beams)
3) Both beams together can melt almost one tonne of copper
4) A high speed train going 150 km/h (* 2 for both beams)
5) 77.4 kg of TNT (*2)
So yeah, quite a bit of energy. I'd much rather take the little tingle from an electric fence as opposed to standing in front of a train going 150 km/h or a car going mach 2.
Unless you guys run your fire houses a LOT differently than ours, firefighters get paid while their on duty (including lounging around the fire house). Nobody starts a stop watch when they hit the threshold of the burning house and then stops it when they exit.
There are a few ways of looking at it. The more energy you pump into a particle, the shorter it's wavelength gets. The size of features you can see is proportional to the wavelength. Smaller wavelengths mean you can see smaller features.
The more important factor when you're looking for new particles is that, because E=mc^2, you need a certain amount of energy in an interaction for particles of a given mass to be produced. If you want to see something heavier, you need to input more energy. To do that you give the particles you're colliding more energy - i.e., you make them go faster.
The God Particle" by Leon Lederman is a good book and covers the history of accelerator development.
Yes, it's not powerful enough to boil water with a single particle.
Put enough of those single particles together and you've got a pretty nice ray gun though.
Don't forget to multiply by the number of particles in the beams.
Or, conversely, divide that lightbulb output by the number of photons it's spewing out.
For comparison, a typical (visible) photon spit out by a light bulb has an energy of about two and a half eV.
One can be disappointed that the world is the way it is while still understanding that it is so and realizing that it could not be otherwise.
I'm disappointed that I don't have my own private jet but I understand why that is and furthermore I continue to support the decisions I've made that result in my not having a private jet.
By that argument you could say that no human activity is environmentally friendly.
Take the rocket fuel H2 + O2 = H20. The reactants and products all exist in the environment and the reaction itself occurs within the cells of almost every living thing on the planet (if not all living things). Yet you say it's not environmentally friendly? Why not? Because of the energy needed to produce the H2 and O2 in the first place? The term "environmentally friendly" becomes absolutely meaningless if you interpret it so rigorously. Go ahead, find ANYTHING that doesn't require some energy to produce. Rocket fuel is actually pretty efficient at what it does (rockets are engineered so that as much of the energy as possible goes into accomplishing the goal) and in this case, as I mentioned, much of the energy to produce the fuel likely comes from renewable, "clean" energy sources like hydro.
Besides, carbon dioxide, despite the hype, isn't the one and only pollutant we can produce. A bit of aluminum oxide is certainly more environmentally friendly than the drop-anything-dead-on-contact compounds used in some current rocket fuels.
Rocket fuel = concentrated energy.
However you get that energy, you can have rocket fuels that are nasty pollutants or rocket fuels that are not, and rocket fuels that produce exhaust that is a nasty pollutant or not. Hydrogen + oxygen = water is probably the best, but some of the solid fuel rockets are nasty. Both the reactants and the products are a little more toxic than "may be linked to brain disease [but we drink it anyway]."
Besides, most aluminum plants are located near some cheap source of energy specifically because aluminum requires so much electricity to refine. The really cheap sources of lots of energy tend to be hydroelectric, not fossil fuel. Boeing isn't based in Seattle because they like the weather.
Aluminum will not burn without an oxidizer. In fact, nothing will burn without an oxidizer. There are a few compounds that can be their own oxidizers, but since aluminum is an element it is not one of these.
Ah, the good old days. In undergrad we built simple programmable computers out of gates and programmed them by flipping DIP switches and pressing buttons.
Assembly is usually one-to-one translated to machine code though, so they're technically both equivalent as far as bare metal goes.
Don't get your biology from movies. There are lots of organisms that do not reach a natural, internally generated equilibrium. I suspect nearly all, in fact, except for a few oddities.
The populations of the vast majority of organisms, including humans, are ultimately forcibly constrained by the availability of resources. We just think we're special because we haven't yet run into that limit. When we do it's very unlikely we'll suddenly all die off. Civilization might collapse, but the species will probably go on.
Now, if you want to see some real environmental badasses, take a look at those photosynthetic organisms that filled the atmosphere with oxygen. Lots of them DID in fact pollute themselves into extinction.
"I work on firmware for slower microcontrollers that run at clock speeds from 1.8 to 16 MHz"
No wonder you can afford to use C! ;)
I can buy a $1.20 microcontroller that's more than an order of magnitude faster than the machine I learned to code on. Still, there are still times when a nice bit of assembly makes a big difference. Not much, just as much as you need.
As for the rest of the thread, assembly IS the bare metal. C is the next best thing to bare metal. Not to say that you should code everything in assembly, that would be silly. But being aware that it exists can't hurt.
Yeah, your argument was in trouble when you hit that point.
Python can be used for spoon feeding too, but it doesn't have to be. A lot of low level networking geeks keep a Python interpreter handy because it makes it easy to hand assemble network packets.
"I love rare meat. There is probably more to it than just that."
It depends on the meat. Chicken has to be cooked thoroughly because salmonella can live in the meat. Steak is meant to be raw on the inside, but must be seared on the outside because some meat packer probably dropped the thing so e. coli could be living on the surface. Ground meat should be cooked through because some meat packer probably dropped it, ground it up (thoroughly mixing the bacteria in) and then dropped it again for good measure.
Does she play Mafia Wars? There's no way that guy could have overlooked such a lucrative business opportunity as selling profile access to interested parties.
If you went geosynchronous you'd need a constellation of them to get proper, full globe coverage.
If you're going to have a constellation anyway you might as well just put them in lower orbit like GPS satellites.
You could call it the GSDS - Global Sudden Death System.
So not breaking international law helps you win wars? While I tend to agree with that sentiment, it seems to be antithetical to the rest of your post.
Let me quote the post in question:
"I just got a G1 from my brother to use for development. I thought it was very cool I could wipe the firmware from T-Mobile and put a custom mod on there that allowed me to move apps to the SD card, use WiFi tethering, etc. Show me another phone/OS environment you see that happen on."
Take a close look at the last line:
"Show me another phone/OS environment you see that happen on." "That" being wiping the "firmware" (actually the OS stored in flash memory).
The answer is, you can do the same thing on the iPhone, and probably any smart phone.
Your comments on Apple are fairly accurate but they are completely irrelevant to both the post I replied to and to my reply itself. That suggests you were using a weak pretext to post some Apple hate.
Your history is too short. It took more like 500 years for gunpowder in Europe to go from a curiosity to the all-round weapon.
Once you've got them deployed, a shot from a laser system is a lot cheaper than a missile.
Besides, it's experimental. I'm sure in a few years they'll be shooting down all sorts of things. A laser equipped plane would make a fantastic precision assassination weapon.
Really? Who do you think decides they want to spend their lives making laser guns to blow stuff up?
So how does shooting them on capture instead of spiriting them away to wherever to be tortured for information help you win the war?
Huh. That's not as high as I thought it would be.
Still ridiculous, but not as much as I thought.
Do you have a citation for your Vlingo complaint? Vlingo is available on the iPhone and can dial numbers, search, bring up maps and update social networking status. It can't take dictation, but it seems Vlingo has also stopped selling free dictation on the Blackberry (it now costs $17.99) so it may simply be that they haven't written it for iPhone yet. I wasn't able to find anything about Vlingo getting rejected from the app store. The ability for applications to send e-mail is a fully supported feature in iPhone OS 3.0+.
Does that button install the Chrome frame plugin?