Placing the tubes at a right angle makes perfect sense... because you don't know which way the gravity wave will come from.
What you are saying makes sense only if there were some way a gravity wave could make one tube shorter and one tube longer the same amount at the same time, AND the same photon had to travel through both tubes.
However, it seems that blue/red shift issues are moot anyway, since the device works by basically measuring a relative shift in arrival time between two photons, not my measuring spectrum shift. =Smidge=
That's funny, in the U.S. the "Gymnasium" is where all the jocks hang out:)
But you're right. If everyone is a nerd, nobody gets picked on. One of the benefits of going to an engineering college... everyone is equally geeky, and everyone gets along! =Smidge=
Reminds me of a bumper sticker someone suggested for people who drive SUVs:
"Who cares about Global warming? I've got AC!"
Humans evolving? Maybe not. Evolution depends on stress from the environment (to severely paraphrase the theory). If the environment isn't changing, there's no "pressure" to force evolution.
Thanks to human inginuity, we can bottle ourselves up in nice little climate-controlled houses, eat carefully prepared and nutritionally balanced foods, get regimented exercise, and receive all manner of medical treatment that cancel out pretty much everything that evolution has to work with. =Smidge=
But the government already collects tax when you purchase the panels. Twice. (One sales tax from you, again as income tax for the company). They also collect tax if you hire a contractor to install them.
What they're proposing here is basically to put an electric meter on your panels and charge you for the sunlight you collect.
Sounds to me like the power companies are lobbying this to try and make up for lost revenue, just in case too many people decide solar would be a good investment. (Which is probably would be)
I didn't see anything about solar thermal heating, though. Hmm... =Smidge=
First, I'd like to ask the obvious question: How is this the government's fault, exactly? You sound as if you found some way to link this with GW Bush botching one of his speeches.
Second, I'd like to ask how blasting an unmanned probe billions of miles into space and having it send back useful information for 14 years despite severe damage to just about every part of it is anything remotely like making change at the corner drug store.
Maybe if you were blind, had no arms or legs, and could only access the cash register by holding a 10-foot pole in your teeth with a stick of chewing gum on the end, it might be a slightly better analogy... but you'ld still have more of an advantage that that probe. =Smidge=
The reason the writers on Star Trek don't write reentry plumes into Star Trek is because they assume that the shuttles are powerful enough to slow themselves down from orbital speed to landing speed
Star Trek is also a Television Show/Movie. Those Reentry burns require fuel. Fuel that you had to take up with you and store to begin with... at about $10k per pound to lift.
Exceptional compared to what exactly?
Well, if you like to twist statistics, let's look at it this way...
In transportation, you generally define "risk factor" as meaning how many fatalities there are per however many miles travelled using that system. I refer you to the following chart:
http://hazmat.dot.gov/riskcompare.htm
We see here that, for example, a regular car has about 1.7 deaths per 100 million miles travelled.
Now, the average space shuttle mission takes it through a grand tour of near-space, typically about 200 orbits, or about 8 million miles per trip. (Backwards, I might add, as it flies through space tail-first!)
There have been two "incidents" so far, for a total of 14 fatalities. And 107 missions.
14 fatalities in 856 million miles travelled, or about 1.7 death per 104 million miles travelled. So based on this kind of risk assesment, the space shuttle it about as safe as a car. Which is really friggin' impressive, because I've never seen a car going Mach 18, endure 15+ G's of acceleration, face 400+F temperatures on one side and -400F temperatures on the other at the same time, get pented with grains of sand that have the same kinetic energy of.50 calibre bullets, irradiated and placed in a hard vacuum... and not only be reusable with relatively minor maintainance, but keep the occupants alive the whole time.
=Smidge=
Re:Temperature detectors...
on
Columbia Coverage
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
So let's assume that you had a temperature sensor behind every protective tile on the shuttle.
One of the tiles becomes damaged during takeoff, but perhaps not so bad that there is any concern. The tiles are designed to take some amount of damage from space debris after all.
You begin re-entry with a damaged tile. Maybe the damage was a little more than you could have suspected, and it comes off! Now your temperature sensor is screaming and you kow you've got a real problem......but unfortunately you're already going about Mach 18 in what is basically a high-tech meteor. You have only a few minutes before the heat buildup destroys the shuttle. What are you going to do, pull over?
No matter what you do, no matter how careful you are, no matter how much redundancy or how large a safety factor you have, there will always be something that can go wrong in a very bad way.
All things considered, the shuttle is an extremely well built and carefully looked after machine with an exceptional safety and performance record. I don't feel anyone is at fault for what happened... it was just the luck of the draw.
If you really want your nicotine fix, there will always be the gum and patches and inhailers.
Don't get me wrong... I'm not one of those anti-drug maniacs. If you want to drink/smoke/shoot up, I could care less as long as I don't have to deal with it.
The problem with tobacco smoking is that non-smokers still have to deal with it. I find absolutely nothing attractive about smoking. It's expensive, it's inconvienient (Especially since most workplaces/public areas have banned smoking indoors), and it's smells nasty.
And don't take this personally, but I certaintly could care less about YOUR (collective) health. If overall health and prosperity improve if tobacco use disappears from society, that's just a bonus. =Smidge=
Hypothetically speaking, what would happen if this strand got into the wild?
Not being a smoker, I'd think it hilarious if a large portion of the tobacco crop ended up tainted with the "phony" tobacco. Just on the principle of the matter.
Phillip Morris would have a collective heart attack if their biggest profit maker became non-additive! =Smidge=
What's worse, chances are that you probably would have uploaded that bad chunk to someone else, thinking it was innocent because it passed MD5
The solution would be to take the time to filter out all the "bad" files as soon as you get the chance. Active user participation can completely eliminate "second-hand" distribution of bad files.
Of course, I'm not the kind of person who downloads everything in sight, so generally I'm looking for something very specific and only download 2 or 3 files - which makes it easy to check the quality right away and delete/unshare the bad ones.
Same thing goes for virus distribution. If everyone actually bothered to check/scan their shared folders on a semi-regular basis, distribution of that crap will virtually vanish.
Talk about fancy checking methods all you want, but the only way the RIAA and co. are going to be kept out is if you get the individual participants to be a little more pro-active. =Smidge=
A patent is 'hard'. That is, the form of the invention is concrete and not open to much interpretation. Either it's the same technology or it isn't. A creative person will always find a way to do the same thing in another (possibly better?) way. This makes patents useless in the long run, from the standpoint of a money grubbing board of executives.
A copyright, on the other hand, is very subjective. If another company comes out with a black-colored cartoon mouse character (please don't interpret that as a racist remark!), Disney could take them to court and argue for years about how they 'stole' Mickey's design and how they're trying to use their character's popularity to 'confuse' people and make a profit. There's a lot of room for legal bullshit here, with the company who can afford to keep the laywers on retainer the longest coming out on top......hence, trying to preserve a copyright indefinately is likely to be a finantially worthwhile endevour! =Smidge=
But if you also want the same computer to run your GPS and your MP3 player, how would you do it without an OS?
Why would you want the same computer to run both? You can't justify it with decrease costs, because developing a combined system is a lot more expensive than buying off-the-shelf components that already exist.
This is especially concerning when these "do-all-be-all" boxes start controlling important things... like fuel monitoring and transmission control. Stuff like that needs to be reliable above all else, and creating a single unit to control it all creates a single point of failure for the whole system. The more complex it is, the more likely something will go wrong, and if it's all in the same box it could take the rest of the system down with it.
But just look at NASA and space vehicles, which are often fully controlled by just one or very few computers.
The space shuttle has five main computer systems and dozens of smaller firmware subsystems. Four of the main computers are all identical and run in parallel, checking their results with eachother and issuing redundant commands on seperate data busses. (If any two machines decide that one is malfunctioning, it is shut down!) This is because there are many, many important aspects to the shuttle's flight that need to be handled simultaneously, and these systems cannot fail.
There is nothing in a car that requires that level of integration. At best, fuel, ignition, brake and transmission systems can be integrated to a large extent (since these systems work in concert for optimal performance). You are right that a standard 8061/8052 controller isn't the best choice for the task, but at the same time a mini PC is overkill.
But regardless of it's form, there is NO reason to have that same unit worrying about luxury items like climate control, entertainment and GPS. Absolutely none. That's how people get killed. =Smidge=
In an attempt to sidestep the "Windows + (vehicle) = crash LOLOL!!!!111!!one" line of comments, which I'm sure there will be many of, I'd like to ask why you need an "embedded operating system" to begin with.
What is so preferable to this approach than more traditional imbedded computer systems? Does the functionality of the system really outweigh the overhead of an entire OS/computer system? Are they really doing anything a halfway decent microcontroller unit can't handle?
Maybe the developers are just too lazy to build their systems "from scratch" like they used to. I personally can't see the benefit of using an embedded OS. What am I missing? =Smidge=
A 'cubit' is the distance from your elbow to your fingertip. It's about 20 inches.
Of course, he didn't specify what kind of cubit. (Biblical, Babylonian, Mexican/Aztec, Greek, Chinese, etc...) So a 'square cubit' could be anywhere from 324 to 707 square inches!
(And people were bitching about the meter being arbitrary?!)
Oh yeah... and cubits have nothing to do with the Imperial system, at least not that I know of. Bits/in^2 makes a lot more sense. (As opposed to square meters, then your numbers get ungodly huge!
If he could push the idea of the CueCat as far as it got, blow $185 mil and not lose any sleep over it... maybe he's thinking of becoming a lawyer for the RIAA!
"Kids, as of this moment, Lionel Hutz no longer exists. Say hello to Miguel Sanchez!"
Seriously, though. I've got a few of those CueCats. A father of a friend runs a soup kitchen, and I helped hack together a barcoded ID card system to keep track of who visited and how often. Cuecats were perfect because they were free and really easy to write software for!
We're not extracting work out of it, remember. This isn't bound by cycle efficiencies. If all you're doing is heating stuff up, solar energy can be upwards of 80% efficient easily. I compensated a bit by using 90 watts/sq.ft. instead of a 'real' value, which for northern Mexico would be more around 120 or so.
But yes, the overall math was ambitious (especially neglecting the cooling part), but not entirely off-base. Total output is going to be limited by how fast you can condense the vapor. =Smidge=
I decided, as an afterthought, to run a quick calculation based on my last comment:)
I've been told that the average person required about 2 liters of water (64-70 ounces) daily, as a healthy requirement. That's about 2kg worth. (More if you're a large guy, and/or do a lot of strenuous activity)
Water has a latent heat of vap. of about 2300 joules per gram. So evaporating 2000 grams of water (Assuming it's already at boiling temp) would require 4.5 million joules.
A very conservative estimate of solary energy would be 90 watts per square foot.
Assuming you would want to distill at least a day's supply of water every day (10 hours), you would need about 1.5 sq. feet of collection area.
A collector the size of a peice of plywood (32 sq. foot), under these operating assumptions, could provide over 40 liters of fresh water daily!
This does not include cooling the vapor back into drinkable liquid. You could use the feedwater for that, which will help preheat the feedwater and improve output.
...and many Mexican communities have been lost, all because people keep moving to LA......Like Mexicans;)
Not to understate the importance of desalinization, of course!
The main problem here is energy. It takes a lot of energy to desalinate/purify water, which is not always practical to deliver when you want to supply towns or cities.
A simple, smallish solar-powered distillation system, using heat from the sun to evaporate water, may be enough to supply one person's daily requirements. No moving parts, either. Cheap to build, easy to maintain, zero cost of operation. I think these types of systems would be better suited for those remote areas. =Smidge=
Slashdot Mirror
The laws of thermodynamics for instance.
I get this a lot in these types of discussions. It's usually pretty easy to refute.
Praytell, which law(s) would you be referring to?
=Smidge=
Placing the tubes at a right angle makes perfect sense... because you don't know which way the gravity wave will come from.
What you are saying makes sense only if there were some way a gravity wave could make one tube shorter and one tube longer the same amount at the same time, AND the same photon had to travel through both tubes.
However, it seems that blue/red shift issues are moot anyway, since the device works by basically measuring a relative shift in arrival time between two photons, not my measuring spectrum shift.
=Smidge=
That's funny, in the U.S. the "Gymnasium" is where all the jocks hang out :)
But you're right. If everyone is a nerd, nobody gets picked on. One of the benefits of going to an engineering college... everyone is equally geeky, and everyone gets along!
=Smidge=
Eat your veggies, die a fairly quick death from heart attack.
Don't eat them, die a slow, agonizing death from cancer...
Hmm...
=Smidge=
It's funny you should mention how internet traffic is like highway traffic.
h tm l
There's an amusing, if not somewhat interesting, article writting up on how you can single-handedly relieve traffic congestion here:
http://www.amasci.com/amateur/traffic/traffic1.
It's basically the same idea: If a few people just give a little slack, everybody wins out.
=Smidge=
...but Moses gets the rebound!
=Smidge=
Reminds me of a bumper sticker someone suggested for people who drive SUVs:
"Who cares about Global warming? I've got AC!"
Humans evolving? Maybe not. Evolution depends on stress from the environment (to severely paraphrase the theory). If the environment isn't changing, there's no "pressure" to force evolution.
Thanks to human inginuity, we can bottle ourselves up in nice little climate-controlled houses, eat carefully prepared and nutritionally balanced foods, get regimented exercise, and receive all manner of medical treatment that cancel out pretty much everything that evolution has to work with.
=Smidge=
But the government already collects tax when you purchase the panels. Twice. (One sales tax from you, again as income tax for the company). They also collect tax if you hire a contractor to install them.
What they're proposing here is basically to put an electric meter on your panels and charge you for the sunlight you collect.
Sounds to me like the power companies are lobbying this to try and make up for lost revenue, just in case too many people decide solar would be a good investment. (Which is probably would be)
I didn't see anything about solar thermal heating, though. Hmm...
=Smidge=
I'll bite...
First, I'd like to ask the obvious question: How is this the government's fault, exactly? You sound as if you found some way to link this with GW Bush botching one of his speeches.
Second, I'd like to ask how blasting an unmanned probe billions of miles into space and having it send back useful information for 14 years despite severe damage to just about every part of it is anything remotely like making change at the corner drug store.
Maybe if you were blind, had no arms or legs, and could only access the cash register by holding a 10-foot pole in your teeth with a stick of chewing gum on the end, it might be a slightly better analogy... but you'ld still have more of an advantage that that probe.
=Smidge=
When's someone going to challange a computer to a DRINKING game?
One beer should be enough to tell who the real superior being is!
=Smidge=
The reason the writers on Star Trek don't write reentry plumes into Star Trek is because they assume that the shuttles are powerful enough to slow themselves down from orbital speed to landing speed
.50 calibre bullets, irradiated and placed in a hard vacuum... and not only be reusable with relatively minor maintainance, but keep the occupants alive the whole time.
Star Trek is also a Television Show/Movie. Those Reentry burns require fuel. Fuel that you had to take up with you and store to begin with... at about $10k per pound to lift.
Exceptional compared to what exactly?
Well, if you like to twist statistics, let's look at it this way...
In transportation, you generally define "risk factor" as meaning how many fatalities there are per however many miles travelled using that system. I refer you to the following chart:
http://hazmat.dot.gov/riskcompare.htm
We see here that, for example, a regular car has about 1.7 deaths per 100 million miles travelled.
Now, the average space shuttle mission takes it through a grand tour of near-space, typically about 200 orbits, or about 8 million miles per trip. (Backwards, I might add, as it flies through space tail-first!)
There have been two "incidents" so far, for a total of 14 fatalities. And 107 missions.
14 fatalities in 856 million miles travelled, or about 1.7 death per 104 million miles travelled. So based on this kind of risk assesment, the space shuttle it about as safe as a car. Which is really friggin' impressive, because I've never seen a car going Mach 18, endure 15+ G's of acceleration, face 400+F temperatures on one side and -400F temperatures on the other at the same time, get pented with grains of sand that have the same kinetic energy of
=Smidge=
So let's assume that you had a temperature sensor behind every protective tile on the shuttle.
...but unfortunately you're already going about Mach 18 in what is basically a high-tech meteor. You have only a few minutes before the heat buildup destroys the shuttle. What are you going to do, pull over?
One of the tiles becomes damaged during takeoff, but perhaps not so bad that there is any concern. The tiles are designed to take some amount of damage from space debris after all.
You begin re-entry with a damaged tile. Maybe the damage was a little more than you could have suspected, and it comes off! Now your temperature sensor is screaming and you kow you've got a real problem...
No matter what you do, no matter how careful you are, no matter how much redundancy or how large a safety factor you have, there will always be something that can go wrong in a very bad way.
All things considered, the shuttle is an extremely well built and carefully looked after machine with an exceptional safety and performance record. I don't feel anyone is at fault for what happened... it was just the luck of the draw.
=Smidge=
If you really want your nicotine fix, there will always be the gum and patches and inhailers.
Don't get me wrong... I'm not one of those anti-drug maniacs. If you want to drink/smoke/shoot up, I could care less as long as I don't have to deal with it.
The problem with tobacco smoking is that non-smokers still have to deal with it. I find absolutely nothing attractive about smoking. It's expensive, it's inconvienient (Especially since most workplaces/public areas have banned smoking indoors), and it's smells nasty.
And don't take this personally, but I certaintly could care less about YOUR (collective) health. If overall health and prosperity improve if tobacco use disappears from society, that's just a bonus.
=Smidge=
Hypothetically speaking, what would happen if this strand got into the wild?
Not being a smoker, I'd think it hilarious if a large portion of the tobacco crop ended up tainted with the "phony" tobacco. Just on the principle of the matter.
Phillip Morris would have a collective heart attack if their biggest profit maker became non-additive!
=Smidge=
What's worse, chances are that you probably would have uploaded that bad chunk to someone else, thinking it was innocent because it passed MD5
The solution would be to take the time to filter out all the "bad" files as soon as you get the chance. Active user participation can completely eliminate "second-hand" distribution of bad files.
Of course, I'm not the kind of person who downloads everything in sight, so generally I'm looking for something very specific and only download 2 or 3 files - which makes it easy to check the quality right away and delete/unshare the bad ones.
Same thing goes for virus distribution. If everyone actually bothered to check/scan their shared folders on a semi-regular basis, distribution of that crap will virtually vanish.
Talk about fancy checking methods all you want, but the only way the RIAA and co. are going to be kept out is if you get the individual participants to be a little more pro-active.
=Smidge=
El Niño my ass. It's all /.'s fault!
=Smidge=
On my TI-35x:
:)
5.5 (2nd) (e^x) (*) 5 (=)
8 keystrokes.
=Smidge=
Yes, of course, BUT...
...hence, trying to preserve a copyright indefinately is likely to be a finantially worthwhile endevour!
A patent is 'hard'. That is, the form of the invention is concrete and not open to much interpretation. Either it's the same technology or it isn't. A creative person will always find a way to do the same thing in another (possibly better?) way. This makes patents useless in the long run, from the standpoint of a money grubbing board of executives.
A copyright, on the other hand, is very subjective. If another company comes out with a black-colored cartoon mouse character (please don't interpret that as a racist remark!), Disney could take them to court and argue for years about how they 'stole' Mickey's design and how they're trying to use their character's popularity to 'confuse' people and make a profit. There's a lot of room for legal bullshit here, with the company who can afford to keep the laywers on retainer the longest coming out on top...
=Smidge=
But if you also want the same computer to run your GPS and your MP3 player, how would you do it without an OS?
Why would you want the same computer to run both? You can't justify it with decrease costs, because developing a combined system is a lot more expensive than buying off-the-shelf components that already exist.
This is especially concerning when these "do-all-be-all" boxes start controlling important things... like fuel monitoring and transmission control. Stuff like that needs to be reliable above all else, and creating a single unit to control it all creates a single point of failure for the whole system. The more complex it is, the more likely something will go wrong, and if it's all in the same box it could take the rest of the system down with it.
But just look at NASA and space vehicles, which are often fully controlled by just one or very few computers.
The space shuttle has five main computer systems and dozens of smaller firmware subsystems. Four of the main computers are all identical and run in parallel, checking their results with eachother and issuing redundant commands on seperate data busses. (If any two machines decide that one is malfunctioning, it is shut down!) This is because there are many, many important aspects to the shuttle's flight that need to be handled simultaneously, and these systems cannot fail.
There is nothing in a car that requires that level of integration. At best, fuel, ignition, brake and transmission systems can be integrated to a large extent (since these systems work in concert for optimal performance). You are right that a standard 8061/8052 controller isn't the best choice for the task, but at the same time a mini PC is overkill.
But regardless of it's form, there is NO reason to have that same unit worrying about luxury items like climate control, entertainment and GPS. Absolutely none. That's how people get killed.
=Smidge=
In an attempt to sidestep the "Windows + (vehicle) = crash LOLOL!!!!111!!one" line of comments, which I'm sure there will be many of, I'd like to ask why you need an "embedded operating system" to begin with.
What is so preferable to this approach than more traditional imbedded computer systems? Does the functionality of the system really outweigh the overhead of an entire OS/computer system? Are they really doing anything a halfway decent microcontroller unit can't handle?
Maybe the developers are just too lazy to build their systems "from scratch" like they used to. I personally can't see the benefit of using an embedded OS. What am I missing?
=Smidge=
A 'cubit' is the distance from your elbow to your fingertip. It's about 20 inches.
Of course, he didn't specify what kind of cubit. (Biblical, Babylonian, Mexican/Aztec, Greek, Chinese, etc...) So a 'square cubit' could be anywhere from 324 to 707 square inches!
(And people were bitching about the meter being arbitrary?!)
Oh yeah... and cubits have nothing to do with the Imperial system, at least not that I know of. Bits/in^2 makes a lot more sense. (As opposed to square meters, then your numbers get ungodly huge!
=Smidge=
If he could push the idea of the CueCat as far as it got, blow $185 mil and not lose any sleep over it... maybe he's thinking of becoming a lawyer for the RIAA!
:)
"Kids, as of this moment, Lionel Hutz no longer exists. Say hello to Miguel Sanchez!"
Seriously, though. I've got a few of those CueCats. A father of a friend runs a soup kitchen, and I helped hack together a barcoded ID card system to keep track of who visited and how often. Cuecats were perfect because they were free and really easy to write software for!
Still in service, as far as I know.
=Smidge=
We're not extracting work out of it, remember. This isn't bound by cycle efficiencies. If all you're doing is heating stuff up, solar energy can be upwards of 80% efficient easily. I compensated a bit by using 90 watts/sq.ft. instead of a 'real' value, which for northern Mexico would be more around 120 or so.
But yes, the overall math was ambitious (especially neglecting the cooling part), but not entirely off-base. Total output is going to be limited by how fast you can condense the vapor.
=Smidge=
I decided, as an afterthought, to run a quick calculation based on my last comment :)
I've been told that the average person required about 2 liters of water (64-70 ounces) daily, as a healthy requirement. That's about 2kg worth.
(More if you're a large guy, and/or do a lot of strenuous activity)
Water has a latent heat of vap. of about 2300 joules per gram. So evaporating 2000 grams of water (Assuming it's already at boiling temp) would require 4.5 million joules.
A very conservative estimate of solary energy would be 90 watts per square foot.
Assuming you would want to distill at least a day's supply of water every day (10 hours), you would need about 1.5 sq. feet of collection area.
A collector the size of a peice of plywood (32 sq. foot), under these operating assumptions, could provide over 40 liters of fresh water daily!
This does not include cooling the vapor back into drinkable liquid. You could use the feedwater for that, which will help preheat the feedwater and improve output.
=Smidge=
...and many Mexican communities have been lost, all because people keep moving to LA... ...Like Mexicans ;)
Not to understate the importance of desalinization, of course!
The main problem here is energy. It takes a lot of energy to desalinate/purify water, which is not always practical to deliver when you want to supply towns or cities.
A simple, smallish solar-powered distillation system, using heat from the sun to evaporate water, may be enough to supply one person's daily requirements. No moving parts, either. Cheap to build, easy to maintain, zero cost of operation. I think these types of systems would be better suited for those remote areas.
=Smidge=