Land area isn't really a problem. Problems with agricultural methods usually get in the way long before arable land gets scarce. For example, does this fuel-crop farming require fertilizer? If so, where does it come from? Hopefully not industrially manufactured fertilizer... Perhaps the biggest hurdle that few consider is water for irrigation. Preservation of fresh water reserves is a fairly important topic today, and adding another 10 million acres or so isn't going to improve things.
Perhaps the best long-term solution would be to use or engineer plants that can tolerate salt well, and then you can use seawater for irrigation. Algaes and sea grasses are obviously well suited for this purpose. There is even optimistic calculations to use specially selected, high-oil algae for biodiesel production, which would go a long way towards our energy needs if they ever get that working. =Smidge=
2000 galons of fuel per acre is useless without a time frame.
1 gallon of gasoline is equivalent to 33.53 kWh. 2000 gallons is 67,060 kWh of energy.
100 watts of sunlight per square foot times 43,560 sq.ft. per acre gives 4,356,000 watts per acre, or 4,365 kW per hour.So every 15 hours of peak sunlight conditions the energy equivalent of 2000 gallons of gasoline hits the ground. That's about three sunny days worth.
Killing off a large portion of that due to various inefficiencies... a 5% overall efficiency and you get 2000 gallons per acre year. That's not too bad, and is better than most vegitable oil yields for any crop I can think of by a factor of almost 2. (Algae not included)
Offhand this seems like a reasonable solution. Combine with other technologies and I can see us eventually replacing conventional petrolium fuels... someone check my math! =Smidge=
Just so you know, I'd like to point out two things:
1) The site you linked to regarding solar collector efficiencies talks about heat engines, and mentions nothing about water heating. It makes plenty of mention about blackbody radiation, though, unfortunately all the math about efficiencies is using Carnot formulas and using ambient air temperatures as a heat sink - neither of which apply to this scenario. Try again.
2) The PDF you linked to is a little outdated and talks about using air source heat pumps, not ground source heat pumps like we were talking about (Hence the piss-poor COP ratings). That's a slightly different ball game because air source devices need to operate over a much wider temperature range than ground source devices. Might wanna compare apples to apples instead.
A standard, flat, solar-water panel does peak out at around 60% efficiency (I'll chalk up the similarity between this industry standard value and the site you linked to as coincidence, because the way they were arrived at are completely different). However concentrating designs - or configurations more elaborate than "a bunch of pipes in a box" - can certainly achieve higher efficiencies. Non-concentrating evacuated tube designs get up to about 75% for example... and they work great in colder climates where heat pumps have a really hard time.
As per the summary, solar cells are 17% efficient. The efficiency of a heat pump will vary quite a bit depending on working temperatures, but the compressor motor will doubtfully be more than about 80% efficient (electrically). So overall, at best, 14% of the sunlight makes it into the hot water.
Compare to direct solar heating, where damn near 100% of the energy you absorb gets transferred to the water. After all, the desired end product is heat, and it's trivial to convert 100% of any energy form into heat if you're patient enough. =Smidge=
I'm not sure where you got those numbers from, so I can't argue against them... I agree that truly cutting power to most modern devices will save you in the long run, and power strips are cheap. Just remember that any programming in the device will be lost as a result.
I bought one of those Kill-A-Watt meter things to help me make the same kind of calculations, so I figured I'd share my results. I only tested my PC workstation, though.
Main PC (Core 2 Duo E6600, 2GB RAM, two HDDs, 380W PSU) Off: 4.0 watts Boot: 140 watts (peak) Idle: 137 watts (truly idle, no disk activity) Full: 165 watts (both HDDs thrashing, both CPU cores 100%)
If I switched to an LCD monitor of comparable size, it would use about 75 watts continuous (so sayeth the manufacturer's spec sheets). At the rate I'm paying - among the highest in the USA (Long Island, NY) - and figuring I use the monitor 10 hours a day every day... that saves me about $0.12 a day, or a whopping $44 a year.
That's about 4-5 years for a payback on the investment. I wouldn't expect an LCD monitor to last that long without developing some fatal anomaly. Plus, a low quality CRT is still better than all but the best LCD displays out there, so ultimately I decided the poor payback prospects did not outweigh the benefits of having a CRT.
In my defense, I'm pretty anal about turning off lights and monitors when I leave a room, even turning off other people's monitors if they're not around. It's a habit.:) =Smidge=
Not to sound like I condone the DNS hijacking... but what, if anything, are the networks hosting these botnets doing to stop criminal activity? You would think they would be in a much better position to detect and deal with such activity.
What might be more interesting is to dock 10,000k from the salaries of the security team everytime someone finds a serious exploit. Sometimes punishments are far more effective than rewards.
Let's fire one police officer for every crime that isn't prevented. Brilliant!
Here's a thought. Read the entire summary - the theory is to have an incentive for white/gray hats to get more involved, and so decrease the value of exploits by finding and patching them sooner. There is nothing you can do about the people who would look to sell them on the black market anyway, but you can entice other, more ethical people to get involved and tip the scales. =Smidge=
1 gallon of BioDiesel is about 130,000 BTUs or energy. 150,000 gallons is thus 19,500,000,000 BTUs.
Realistically, sunlight energy at ground level is about 100 watts per square foot, plus or minus. At 43,560 sq.ft. per acre, that's 4,356,000 watts per acre of raw sunlight.
Assuming a cautious 5 hours a day, every day, of sunlight at that wattage, a year will net you 4356000 watts * 365 days * 5 hours/day * 3600 sec/hour = 28,618,920,000,000 total incident joules of sunlight.
19.50E9 is only about 0.07% of 26.62E12
Of course, you can't realistically use 100% of an acre for collection area, you won't get 5 hours of perfect sunlight every single day of the year, you won't get 100% absorption of the sun's energy, or 100% conversion to algae oil, or 100% BioDiesel conversion efficiency, and there's probably some kind of mixing/circulating thing going on so no single algae cell gets a full day's exposure anyway... but 0.07% theoretical is way, way off your 85% figure. I'm curious as to how you arrived at that, actually... =Smidge=
But it doesn't come with RAID! If you buy a decent RAID controller, it'll have the ports on it for the drives, so what's the point of having 10 slots on the mobo, and no RAID controller?
From the article, page 2:
The 6 main ports are powered by the 680i chipset and support multiple RAID modes, but the purple ports along the bottom edge come by way of a pair of individual controllers and arrays can't be built across them; individually they do support two-drive RAID, however.
So not only does it have built-in RAID ability, it's got THREE controllers; One six port and two dual port.
We trust all hand tools like wrenches and sockets to be exactly the size on the label
If the wrench is mislabeled or out of spec, the worst that happens is it doesn't fit right. Attempting to use a wrench that doesn't fit right will, at worst, damage the nut or bold. Since you're using the tool to begin with, you should have the mechanical aptitude necessary to say "hey, this doesn't fit right..." - which is exactly the opposite of "trusting" the tool. (The decision to use it anyway is up to the individual)
We trust all of our doctor's opinions whether or not a second opinion is recommended
A doctor is a LICENSED professional who is HELD ACCOUNTABLE for his mistakes. How many consumer-level software applications are certified and insured against malfunction?
We trust our math applications to do math properly
You shouldn't. Not that the two previous examples are in the same category as this one, though. If you explicitly trust whatever data the computer spits out for anything but the most trivial of tasks then you have absolutely no business using one. At the very least you should be running subconscious "sanity checks" to see if the results even make sense. ("2 + 2 = 247.13 huh? Okie dokie!")
We trust our spell checkers to check properly
It is still up to you to proofread it and make sure the spellings chosen are still the correct word. Again, if you explicitly trust whatever data the computer spits out for anything but the most trivial of tasks then you have absolutely no business using one. E-mail to a friend is one thing, but if simple language mistakes show up on your resume I don't think I'd put you at the top of the list.
Enforcing copyright law isn't about proving damages or economic harm.
It's not about levying arbitrary fines and coercing people into licensing agreements either. A C&D letter would suffice just as well, but the profit margin on that isn't too great.
Your argument is also a good one for piracy: "If I distribute this new CD via BT, it will help get the word out to others, who might take an interest in the artist. Plus, it doesn't hurt the artist's bottom line, since I probably wouldn't have paid for it anyway."
There's an important difference you are missing. One could actually make a case that a person who downloaded a CD is potentially a lost sale of a real CD. It's a difficult case to prove, but at least it's a reasonable conclusion.
Can you make a case that someone witnessing a cover band or radio performance in a public space will result in a lost ticket sale? Lost CD sale? Lost merchandising revenue? Lost venue for the original artist?
When I was a kid, my teachers would occasionally read books aloud to the class. Why don't we coerce all of the elementary schools in the country into licensing agreements for "public performance" of copyrighted works? Because it's absurd, that's why. =Smidge=
So, performance rights, from radio airplay and -- yes -- bars and coffee houses -- are a great way of making money by doing what they love.
I would think that, in order to claim damages, you would have to prove that Band X playing a cover in some downtown hole-in-the-wall has somehow impinged upon the original artist's ability to perform, to sell tickets to performances, or otherwise make money doing what they do.
I would possibly argue the opposite. If someone does a cover by an artist someone doesn't recognize, they would possibly be interested in learning more about that artist. Free exposure for them, and I can't see any rational argument that cover bands hurt the artist's bottom line. =Smidge=
Perhaps you are overestimating just how advanced our "civilization" is...
It would not be terribly strange, for example, for someone who bolts tires to cars on an assembly line his entire life to not know much about computer programming.
However, it would be kinda strange for an individual or crew capable of navigating a craft at least twenty four trillion miles to not know how to fly a spacecraft well enough to avoid crashing.
I'd say her requirements are reasonable counter-balances to the presence of an identical "control" in the experiment.
Except nowhere was it suggested that the machines would be compared to each other, or even another machine or system image, so there is no "control" in this case either.
Your average home user won't (and probably isn't qualified to) do manual inspection of results. Not even once in a while, certainly not on a routine basis as would be required to protect a real system.
Even so, such an "idiot light" system is unreasonable. The whole idea is not that is it difficult for John Q. Public to detect - most everyday viruses and trojans already fall into THAT cetegory - it's that the rootkit is impossible to detect.
If their stuff is "100% undetectable" then they shouldn't have to impose all sorts of conditions to prevent an expert from examining thoroughly. These added requirements suggest that the cloaking isn't perfect after all, and could be detected if someone looks any harder than yor typical home user - which is to say, not looking at all. =Smidge=
The counter-requirements sound suspiciously lopsided to reduce the chance of detection.
In summary:
-Multiple machines. Fine.
-"bluepill.exe and bluepill.sys" wil be installed on ALL machines. Okay, I guess they don't want them to just check the drive's free space to see if extra files were added?
-ALL machines will have the driver loaded, but not necessarily be "infected". Is that a reasonable condition for a rootkit "in the wild"? If the rootkit is doing it's job you shouldn't be able to detect the driver being loaded in the first place.
-Detector.exe must be completely autonomous and return only a single flag value to indicate infection. This sounds like a completely unreasonable requirement, since even rudamentary human review of the results is a realistic real-world scenario.
-The detector can not cause system crash or halt the machine. I fail to see why this would be a requirement, unless you argue that whatever system that might be tested is mission critical and can't afford ANY unplanned downtime... unexpected crashes are bad, but shouldn't be an instant-lose condition.
-The detector can not consume significant amount of CPU time. Why not? If the user is scanning for a rootkit, they probably understand it's a fairly serious issue and should be willing to devote resources to it. Inconvenient? Sure, but again not a condition of failure.
-Compensation for working on the project. I can understand this, but really... even if Blue Pill fails to stay hidden, they "win" 6 months of full employment with no repercussions for failure to deliver a working project other than bad reputation.
Basically, it sounds to me that they aren't really claiming Blue Pill is "undetectable" - only that it is undetectable by one-click idiot-proof software that is run under conditions unlikely to be seen in the wild. I see no reason why the detection team would be prevented from using a boot CD to examine the contents of the hard drive, for example, perhaps even loading their OWN virtual machine to virtualize the malware-infected system and monitor for suspicious activity. I see it as completely fair game. =Smidge=
Net Neutrality is a bigger issue than just the Last Mile. You know of any plans to build a trans-continental or trans-oceanic wifi connection?
Eventually, your data will have to run through some middleman's wires. It's practically inevitable unless your data is going to someone with the same ISP in the same town. That middleman is going to sell his bandwidth to your ISP so they can send data to my ISP. I believe the term "common carrier" is what I'm looking for here.
If we let the free market forces do their magic, the middleman will sell the best service to the highest bidder. Where does that leave your locally owned providers? High and dry.
Imagine if all the bridges in the country were privately owned, and the owners were allowed to set prices based on auctions. Only those who could afford the premium price could use the bridge during rush hour, while everyone else would have to wait until the other traffic has died down. This becomes an even bigger problem if the guy that owns the bridge also offers their own freight and taxi services... ("Verizon vs. Vonage 2: QOS Boogaloo" anyone?)
You can say "well, with open competition, someone could build their own bridge and offer lower rates!" - until you realize that no matter what you do you will have to cross someone else's bridge eventually since not everyone uses the same ISP. The only solutions are for every provider to build their own global network or to enforce a reasonably level playing field through regulation.
You raise very good points, and I agree that once you get to the last mile it can work out much better - but that only addresses a tiny slice of the Net Neutrality problem. This assumes, of course, that such a thing as "a truly competitive marketplace" can actually exist in the first place. =Smidge=
"pound for pound, ten times as strong as steel" (which would indicate 950 kg/m^3)
That statement does not in any way indicate how dense the material is, only how strong it is compared to another material. Neither does "ultra-high molecular weight polyethylene" - that only indicates the weight of the materia at the molecular level, not the actual density.
I'm not disagreeing that the value is wrong, only that there is little to indicate the value is blatantly wrong. At least to me, since I'm not a chemist or expert in plastics. Maybe you are, and so it's obvious to you... but I see the material is more dense than air and less dense than water so I had little reason to immediately suspect it. *shrug* =Smidge=
Spectra is a mere 3.5G GPa UTS and *950* kg per cubic meter [elevator2010.org]. You converted g/cm to kg/m^3 wrong. It's not even within an order of magnitude of what is needed. Furthermore, you represented SWNTs wrong. They're SWNTs, not graphite; it's a completely different form that just happens to use the same SP2 bonding structure. Their density is about 1300 kg/m^3.
I said between 3.0 GPa and 18.8 GPa, so we agree there.
Honeywell's site lists the fiber's SG as 0.097. The site you linked to lists it as 0.97. They disagree by a factor of 10. I used the number from the Honeywell site, thus arriving at 97 kg/m^3. While it's not impossible for it to be wrong, I don't think it's unreasonable to assume the manufacturer's posted data is correct... at least for these types of back-of-the-envelope quality calculations.
He specifically mentioned Honeywell Spectra Fiber which is billed to be "pound for pound 10 times stronger that steel"
We need to translate that statement first. They don't mention what KIND of steel. Steel can have a tensile strength of 0.3 GPa to 1.88 GPa depending on type. That gives SF2K a tensile strength between 3.0 GPa to 18.8 GPa. (Wikipedia apparently agrees with this assessment...)
Using Wikipedia as firther source, "A space elevator can be made relatively economically feasible if a cable with a density similar to graphite and a tensile strength of ~65-120 GPa can be mass-produced at a reasonable price." Graphite has a density of 140 lbs/cu.ft, so this imaginary material needs a minimum strength/density ratio of 65/140 = 0.46.
SF2K has a specific gravity of 0.097, which translates to 97 kg per cubic meter (6.055 lbs/cu.ft.) That puts the strength/density ratio at 0.50 to 3.13 - Higher than our theoretical required material, so it should be strong enough.
SF2K also has "High resistance to chemicals, water, and UV light" and "good resistance to abrasion and flex fatigue." These are all desirable qualities.
He mentioned the ribbon would likely be "15 feet wide and less than the thickness of a human hair". Average human hair is about 4 mil (0.004 inches or 0.00033 feet). That's a theoretical cross-sectional area of 0.00495 feet. At that thickness, one pound of material will stretch just over 200 feet. They need about 62,000 miles (327,360,000 ft)of the stuff, so that's only about 820 tons. 820 really isn't THAT much in the grand scheme of things... imagine 28 standard shipping containers, that'll hold 820 tons of cargo.
So as far as the cable itself goes - yeah, that's "doable" right now if you've got the cash. =Smidge=
$4000 buys a good chunk of lawyer time. Consider the volume of lawsuits that have been served, and the almost form-letter like system with which they have been constructed, and I'm not so sure the cost to initiate and settle each lawsuit exceeds $4000.
Plus they probably retain a team of lawyers for a variety of other "Big Business" functions anyway, so I doubt they're paying much if any extra for the legal council to begin with. =Smidge=
Use a pencil or stamp, not physical holes. No chads!
Long history of people cheating them (While the current system sucks, a combo of electtronic + paper if properly done, can double our chances of catching fraud)
Keyword IF. Given that electronic systems have been demonstrated to be laughably easy to tamper with, may as well just use all paper and be done with it. You can also serialize the paper ballots using UV reactive ink, barcodes or RFID tags to be sure none are missing when they're counted. Anything that is reasonably impossible for someone to read would work, so they can't associate a particular person with a particular ballot. (Before you ask, you don't have to hand out the ballots in consecutive order, either.)
Takes too long to count.
Paper ballots can still be machine counted. Use those "bingo card" markers (but in black) and you won't have any problems with half-filled circles or fills that aren't dark enough.
Takes up a lot of space.
I hear the latest electronic systems hold away into your shirt pocket when you're done with them. They're also indestructible and can't possibly be damaged if handled roughly or exposed to less than perfect storage conditions for any length of time.
Costs a lot more money.
Those electronic kiosks are also free for life, never need maintenance or replacement, specially trained handlers and tighter security.
If someone is removed from the ballot, we have to reprint, which may not happen in time
OR you can post flyers and signs at the voting places, and have the attendant (who checks if you're registered to vote and would presumably hand you the ballots) strike off the name with a sharpie.
Delivery must be assured with enough to all, which means a lot of waste
District FOO has QUXX registered voters. Send them 1.10*QUXX ballots. Have someone sign off that they received the alloted amount. And, as we all know from previous elections, there are ALWAYS enough machines to adequately serve everyone who shows up.
Hell, done properly with barcodes, you could even print ballots ON DEMAND. Each district gets to print some limited number of "emergency ballots" should they run out.
Blind people have issues
The electronic machines have special LCD screens that can telepathically project the choices into a voter's brain, too. Those touchscreens? High-res active tactile feedback so the blind guy knows exactly which virtual button he's putting his finger on.
People that don't read english have issues
How'd they manage to register in the first place? I mean, it's not like you can have one set of printed instructions posted somewhere, instead of reprinting them on each and every ballot, right? (I would hope we wouldn't need to translate the candidate's names, too... "George W. Arbusto" would probably be MORE confusing.)
Ballot design for large number of possible candidates - people seriously want to be the guy on the top of the list, it gives a small, but real boost to their numbers
If the ballots are serialized (see above) and/or machine readable data is supplied (Datamatrix 2D barcode, RFID chip) then the names on the printed ballot can be randomized. Need more space? We could even use MULTIPLE A4 sized cards. If they're RFID'd and/or barcoded then we can make sure we have a full set from each voter. I doubt we'll ever get that many candidates on one ticket, though.
Oh wait, you just wanted ONE issue. Hm. Hard too choose just one.
Yeah, especially when they're all closer to excuses than actual issues. =Smidge=
Slashdot Mirror
Land area isn't really a problem. Problems with agricultural methods usually get in the way long before arable land gets scarce. For example, does this fuel-crop farming require fertilizer? If so, where does it come from? Hopefully not industrially manufactured fertilizer... Perhaps the biggest hurdle that few consider is water for irrigation. Preservation of fresh water reserves is a fairly important topic today, and adding another 10 million acres or so isn't going to improve things.
Perhaps the best long-term solution would be to use or engineer plants that can tolerate salt well, and then you can use seawater for irrigation. Algaes and sea grasses are obviously well suited for this purpose. There is even optimistic calculations to use specially selected, high-oil algae for biodiesel production, which would go a long way towards our energy needs if they ever get that working.
=Smidge=
2000 galons of fuel per acre is useless without a time frame.
1 gallon of gasoline is equivalent to 33.53 kWh. 2000 gallons is 67,060 kWh of energy.
100 watts of sunlight per square foot times 43,560 sq.ft. per acre gives 4,356,000 watts per acre, or 4,365 kW per hour.So every 15 hours of peak sunlight conditions the energy equivalent of 2000 gallons of gasoline hits the ground. That's about three sunny days worth.
Killing off a large portion of that due to various inefficiencies... a 5% overall efficiency and you get 2000 gallons per acre year. That's not too bad, and is better than most vegitable oil yields for any crop I can think of by a factor of almost 2. (Algae not included)
Offhand this seems like a reasonable solution. Combine with other technologies and I can see us eventually replacing conventional petrolium fuels... someone check my math!
=Smidge=
Just so you know, I'd like to point out two things:
1) The site you linked to regarding solar collector efficiencies talks about heat engines, and mentions nothing about water heating. It makes plenty of mention about blackbody radiation, though, unfortunately all the math about efficiencies is using Carnot formulas and using ambient air temperatures as a heat sink - neither of which apply to this scenario. Try again.
2) The PDF you linked to is a little outdated and talks about using air source heat pumps, not ground source heat pumps like we were talking about (Hence the piss-poor COP ratings). That's a slightly different ball game because air source devices need to operate over a much wider temperature range than ground source devices. Might wanna compare apples to apples instead.
A standard, flat, solar-water panel does peak out at around 60% efficiency (I'll chalk up the similarity between this industry standard value and the site you linked to as coincidence, because the way they were arrived at are completely different). However concentrating designs - or configurations more elaborate than "a bunch of pipes in a box" - can certainly achieve higher efficiencies. Non-concentrating evacuated tube designs get up to about 75% for example... and they work great in colder climates where heat pumps have a really hard time.
=Smidge=
Forgot to factor in the COP.
A decent heat pump will have a COP of around 3.5-4.0. So that 14% becomes 56%. Still losing to direct solar heat.
=Smidge=
As per the summary, solar cells are 17% efficient. The efficiency of a heat pump will vary quite a bit depending on working temperatures, but the compressor motor will doubtfully be more than about 80% efficient (electrically). So overall, at best, 14% of the sunlight makes it into the hot water.
Compare to direct solar heating, where damn near 100% of the energy you absorb gets transferred to the water. After all, the desired end product is heat, and it's trivial to convert 100% of any energy form into heat if you're patient enough.
=Smidge=
I'm not sure where you got those numbers from, so I can't argue against them... I agree that truly cutting power to most modern devices will save you in the long run, and power strips are cheap. Just remember that any programming in the device will be lost as a result.
:)
I bought one of those Kill-A-Watt meter things to help me make the same kind of calculations, so I figured I'd share my results. I only tested my PC workstation, though.
Main PC (Core 2 Duo E6600, 2GB RAM, two HDDs, 380W PSU)
Off: 4.0 watts
Boot: 140 watts (peak)
Idle: 137 watts (truly idle, no disk activity)
Full: 165 watts (both HDDs thrashing, both CPU cores 100%)
20" CRT Monitor (Mitsubishhi Diamond Pro 91TXM)
Off: 0 watts (Duh)
Boot: 463 watts (Peak, self-degaussing cycle - very brief)
Idle: 100 watts (Power-save mode)
Full: 141 watts (100% white screen)
If I switched to an LCD monitor of comparable size, it would use about 75 watts continuous (so sayeth the manufacturer's spec sheets). At the rate I'm paying - among the highest in the USA (Long Island, NY) - and figuring I use the monitor 10 hours a day every day... that saves me about $0.12 a day, or a whopping $44 a year.
That's about 4-5 years for a payback on the investment. I wouldn't expect an LCD monitor to last that long without developing some fatal anomaly. Plus, a low quality CRT is still better than all but the best LCD displays out there, so ultimately I decided the poor payback prospects did not outweigh the benefits of having a CRT.
In my defense, I'm pretty anal about turning off lights and monitors when I leave a room, even turning off other people's monitors if they're not around. It's a habit.
=Smidge=
Not to sound like I condone the DNS hijacking... but what, if anything, are the networks hosting these botnets doing to stop criminal activity? You would think they would be in a much better position to detect and deal with such activity.
=Smidge=
What might be more interesting is to dock 10,000k from the salaries of the security team everytime someone finds a serious exploit. Sometimes punishments are far more effective than rewards.
Let's fire one police officer for every crime that isn't prevented. Brilliant!
Here's a thought. Read the entire summary - the theory is to have an incentive for white/gray hats to get more involved, and so decrease the value of exploits by finding and patching them sooner. There is nothing you can do about the people who would look to sell them on the black market anyway, but you can entice other, more ethical people to get involved and tip the scales.
=Smidge=
Looking at your calculation, you seem to have forgotten to convert BTUs into joules
D'oh.
I hereby promise; no more maths after my third drink of the night. My apologies, as that accounts the difference.
=Smidge=
I think your math was off...
1 gallon of BioDiesel is about 130,000 BTUs or energy. 150,000 gallons is thus 19,500,000,000 BTUs.
Realistically, sunlight energy at ground level is about 100 watts per square foot, plus or minus. At 43,560 sq.ft. per acre, that's 4,356,000 watts per acre of raw sunlight.
Assuming a cautious 5 hours a day, every day, of sunlight at that wattage, a year will net you 4356000 watts * 365 days * 5 hours/day * 3600 sec/hour = 28,618,920,000,000 total incident joules of sunlight.
19.50E9 is only about 0.07% of 26.62E12
Of course, you can't realistically use 100% of an acre for collection area, you won't get 5 hours of perfect sunlight every single day of the year, you won't get 100% absorption of the sun's energy, or 100% conversion to algae oil, or 100% BioDiesel conversion efficiency, and there's probably some kind of mixing/circulating thing going on so no single algae cell gets a full day's exposure anyway... but 0.07% theoretical is way, way off your 85% figure. I'm curious as to how you arrived at that, actually...
=Smidge=
From the article, page 2:
The 6 main ports are powered by the 680i chipset and support multiple RAID modes, but the purple ports along the bottom edge come by way of a pair of individual controllers and arrays can't be built across them; individually they do support two-drive RAID, however.
So not only does it have built-in RAID ability, it's got THREE controllers; One six port and two dual port.
=Smidge=
We trust all hand tools like wrenches and sockets to be exactly the size on the label
If the wrench is mislabeled or out of spec, the worst that happens is it doesn't fit right. Attempting to use a wrench that doesn't fit right will, at worst, damage the nut or bold. Since you're using the tool to begin with, you should have the mechanical aptitude necessary to say "hey, this doesn't fit right..." - which is exactly the opposite of "trusting" the tool. (The decision to use it anyway is up to the individual)
We trust all of our doctor's opinions whether or not a second opinion is recommended
A doctor is a LICENSED professional who is HELD ACCOUNTABLE for his mistakes. How many consumer-level software applications are certified and insured against malfunction?
We trust our math applications to do math properly
You shouldn't. Not that the two previous examples are in the same category as this one, though. If you explicitly trust whatever data the computer spits out for anything but the most trivial of tasks then you have absolutely no business using one. At the very least you should be running subconscious "sanity checks" to see if the results even make sense. ("2 + 2 = 247.13 huh? Okie dokie!")
We trust our spell checkers to check properly
It is still up to you to proofread it and make sure the spellings chosen are still the correct word. Again, if you explicitly trust whatever data the computer spits out for anything but the most trivial of tasks then you have absolutely no business using one. E-mail to a friend is one thing, but if simple language mistakes show up on your resume I don't think I'd put you at the top of the list.
=Smidge=
Enforcing copyright law isn't about proving damages or economic harm.
It's not about levying arbitrary fines and coercing people into licensing agreements either. A C&D letter would suffice just as well, but the profit margin on that isn't too great.
Your argument is also a good one for piracy: "If I distribute this new CD via BT, it will help get the word out to others, who might take an interest in the artist. Plus, it doesn't hurt the artist's bottom line, since I probably wouldn't have paid for it anyway."
There's an important difference you are missing. One could actually make a case that a person who downloaded a CD is potentially a lost sale of a real CD. It's a difficult case to prove, but at least it's a reasonable conclusion.
Can you make a case that someone witnessing a cover band or radio performance in a public space will result in a lost ticket sale? Lost CD sale? Lost merchandising revenue? Lost venue for the original artist?
When I was a kid, my teachers would occasionally read books aloud to the class. Why don't we coerce all of the elementary schools in the country into licensing agreements for "public performance" of copyrighted works? Because it's absurd, that's why.
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So, performance rights, from radio airplay and -- yes -- bars and coffee houses -- are a great way of making money by doing what they love.
I would think that, in order to claim damages, you would have to prove that Band X playing a cover in some downtown hole-in-the-wall has somehow impinged upon the original artist's ability to perform, to sell tickets to performances, or otherwise make money doing what they do.
I would possibly argue the opposite. If someone does a cover by an artist someone doesn't recognize, they would possibly be interested in learning more about that artist. Free exposure for them, and I can't see any rational argument that cover bands hurt the artist's bottom line.
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Espresso has about half the caffeine of coffee due to the dark roast.
Espresso seems to have a lot higher caffeine density than normal coffee... at least twice.
http://coffeetea.about.com/library/blcaffeine.htm
Double Espresso (2 oz): 45-100mg (22 to 50mg per ounce)
Brewed coffee (8 oz): 60-120 mg (7.5 to 15mg per ounce)
http://www.energyfiend.com/the-caffeine-database/
Coffee (Brewed) 13.44 mg/oz
Coffee (Decaf, Brewed) 0.70 mg/oz
Coffee (Decaf, Instant) 0.31 mg/oz
Coffee (Drip) 18.13 mg/oz
Coffee (Espresso) 51.33 mg/oz
To answer the original question: 315 to 720 mg total!
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Perhaps you are overestimating just how advanced our "civilization" is...
It would not be terribly strange, for example, for someone who bolts tires to cars on an assembly line his entire life to not know much about computer programming.
However, it would be kinda strange for an individual or crew capable of navigating a craft at least twenty four trillion miles to not know how to fly a spacecraft well enough to avoid crashing.
Unless they were on the "B" Ark...
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I'd say her requirements are reasonable counter-balances to the presence of an identical "control" in the experiment.
Except nowhere was it suggested that the machines would be compared to each other, or even another machine or system image, so there is no "control" in this case either.
Your average home user won't (and probably isn't qualified to) do manual inspection of results. Not even once in a while, certainly not on a routine basis as would be required to protect a real system.
Even so, such an "idiot light" system is unreasonable. The whole idea is not that is it difficult for John Q. Public to detect - most everyday viruses and trojans already fall into THAT cetegory - it's that the rootkit is impossible to detect.
If their stuff is "100% undetectable" then they shouldn't have to impose all sorts of conditions to prevent an expert from examining thoroughly. These added requirements suggest that the cloaking isn't perfect after all, and could be detected if someone looks any harder than yor typical home user - which is to say, not looking at all.
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The counter-requirements sound suspiciously lopsided to reduce the chance of detection.
In summary:
-Multiple machines. Fine.
-"bluepill.exe and bluepill.sys" wil be installed on ALL machines. Okay, I guess they don't want them to just check the drive's free space to see if extra files were added?
-ALL machines will have the driver loaded, but not necessarily be "infected". Is that a reasonable condition for a rootkit "in the wild"? If the rootkit is doing it's job you shouldn't be able to detect the driver being loaded in the first place.
-Detector.exe must be completely autonomous and return only a single flag value to indicate infection. This sounds like a completely unreasonable requirement, since even rudamentary human review of the results is a realistic real-world scenario.
-The detector can not cause system crash or halt the machine. I fail to see why this would be a requirement, unless you argue that whatever system that might be tested is mission critical and can't afford ANY unplanned downtime... unexpected crashes are bad, but shouldn't be an instant-lose condition.
-The detector can not consume significant amount of CPU time. Why not? If the user is scanning for a rootkit, they probably understand it's a fairly serious issue and should be willing to devote resources to it. Inconvenient? Sure, but again not a condition of failure.
-Compensation for working on the project. I can understand this, but really... even if Blue Pill fails to stay hidden, they "win" 6 months of full employment with no repercussions for failure to deliver a working project other than bad reputation.
Basically, it sounds to me that they aren't really claiming Blue Pill is "undetectable" - only that it is undetectable by one-click idiot-proof software that is run under conditions unlikely to be seen in the wild. I see no reason why the detection team would be prevented from using a boot CD to examine the contents of the hard drive, for example, perhaps even loading their OWN virtual machine to virtualize the malware-infected system and monitor for suspicious activity. I see it as completely fair game.
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Net Neutrality is a bigger issue than just the Last Mile. You know of any plans to build a trans-continental or trans-oceanic wifi connection?
Eventually, your data will have to run through some middleman's wires. It's practically inevitable unless your data is going to someone with the same ISP in the same town. That middleman is going to sell his bandwidth to your ISP so they can send data to my ISP. I believe the term "common carrier" is what I'm looking for here.
If we let the free market forces do their magic, the middleman will sell the best service to the highest bidder. Where does that leave your locally owned providers? High and dry.
Imagine if all the bridges in the country were privately owned, and the owners were allowed to set prices based on auctions. Only those who could afford the premium price could use the bridge during rush hour, while everyone else would have to wait until the other traffic has died down. This becomes an even bigger problem if the guy that owns the bridge also offers their own freight and taxi services... ("Verizon vs. Vonage 2: QOS Boogaloo" anyone?)
You can say "well, with open competition, someone could build their own bridge and offer lower rates!" - until you realize that no matter what you do you will have to cross someone else's bridge eventually since not everyone uses the same ISP. The only solutions are for every provider to build their own global network or to enforce a reasonably level playing field through regulation.
You raise very good points, and I agree that once you get to the last mile it can work out much better - but that only addresses a tiny slice of the Net Neutrality problem. This assumes, of course, that such a thing as "a truly competitive marketplace" can actually exist in the first place.
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"pound for pound, ten times as strong as steel" (which would indicate 950 kg/m^3)
That statement does not in any way indicate how dense the material is, only how strong it is compared to another material. Neither does "ultra-high molecular weight polyethylene" - that only indicates the weight of the materia at the molecular level, not the actual density.
I'm not disagreeing that the value is wrong, only that there is little to indicate the value is blatantly wrong. At least to me, since I'm not a chemist or expert in plastics. Maybe you are, and so it's obvious to you... but I see the material is more dense than air and less dense than water so I had little reason to immediately suspect it. *shrug*
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I said between 3.0 GPa and 18.8 GPa, so we agree there.
Honeywell's site lists the fiber's SG as 0.097. The site you linked to lists it as 0.97. They disagree by a factor of 10. I used the number from the Honeywell site, thus arriving at 97 kg/m^3. While it's not impossible for it to be wrong, I don't think it's unreasonable to assume the manufacturer's posted data is correct... at least for these types of back-of-the-envelope quality calculations.
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He specifically mentioned Honeywell Spectra Fiber which is billed to be "pound for pound 10 times stronger that steel"
We need to translate that statement first. They don't mention what KIND of steel. Steel can have a tensile strength of 0.3 GPa to 1.88 GPa depending on type. That gives SF2K a tensile strength between 3.0 GPa to 18.8 GPa. (Wikipedia apparently agrees with this assessment...)
Using Wikipedia as firther source, "A space elevator can be made relatively economically feasible if a cable with a density similar to graphite and a tensile strength of ~65-120 GPa can be mass-produced at a reasonable price." Graphite has a density of 140 lbs/cu.ft, so this imaginary material needs a minimum strength/density ratio of 65/140 = 0.46.
SF2K has a specific gravity of 0.097, which translates to 97 kg per cubic meter (6.055 lbs/cu.ft.) That puts the strength/density ratio at 0.50 to 3.13 - Higher than our theoretical required material, so it should be strong enough.
SF2K also has "High resistance to chemicals, water, and UV light" and "good resistance to abrasion and flex fatigue." These are all desirable qualities.
He mentioned the ribbon would likely be "15 feet wide and less than the thickness of a human hair". Average human hair is about 4 mil (0.004 inches or 0.00033 feet). That's a theoretical cross-sectional area of 0.00495 feet. At that thickness, one pound of material will stretch just over 200 feet. They need about 62,000 miles (327,360,000 ft)of the stuff, so that's only about 820 tons. 820 really isn't THAT much in the grand scheme of things... imagine 28 standard shipping containers, that'll hold 820 tons of cargo.
So as far as the cable itself goes - yeah, that's "doable" right now if you've got the cash.
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$4000 buys a good chunk of lawyer time. Consider the volume of lawsuits that have been served, and the almost form-letter like system with which they have been constructed, and I'm not so sure the cost to initiate and settle each lawsuit exceeds $4000.
Plus they probably retain a team of lawyers for a variety of other "Big Business" functions anyway, so I doubt they're paying much if any extra for the legal council to begin with.
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Too bad that argument doesn't work for torrent trackers. Yay double standard!
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Use a pencil or stamp, not physical holes. No chads!
Keyword IF. Given that electronic systems have been demonstrated to be laughably easy to tamper with, may as well just use all paper and be done with it. You can also serialize the paper ballots using UV reactive ink, barcodes or RFID tags to be sure none are missing when they're counted. Anything that is reasonably impossible for someone to read would work, so they can't associate a particular person with a particular ballot. (Before you ask, you don't have to hand out the ballots in consecutive order, either.)
Paper ballots can still be machine counted. Use those "bingo card" markers (but in black) and you won't have any problems with half-filled circles or fills that aren't dark enough.
I hear the latest electronic systems hold away into your shirt pocket when you're done with them. They're also indestructible and can't possibly be damaged if handled roughly or exposed to less than perfect storage conditions for any length of time.
Those electronic kiosks are also free for life, never need maintenance or replacement, specially trained handlers and tighter security.
OR you can post flyers and signs at the voting places, and have the attendant (who checks if you're registered to vote and would presumably hand you the ballots) strike off the name with a sharpie.
District FOO has QUXX registered voters. Send them 1.10*QUXX ballots. Have someone sign off that they received the alloted amount. And, as we all know from previous elections, there are ALWAYS enough machines to adequately serve everyone who shows up.
Hell, done properly with barcodes, you could even print ballots ON DEMAND. Each district gets to print some limited number of "emergency ballots" should they run out.
The electronic machines have special LCD screens that can telepathically project the choices into a voter's brain, too. Those touchscreens? High-res active tactile feedback so the blind guy knows exactly which virtual button he's putting his finger on.
How'd they manage to register in the first place? I mean, it's not like you can have one set of printed instructions posted somewhere, instead of reprinting them on each and every ballot, right? (I would hope we wouldn't need to translate the candidate's names, too... "George W. Arbusto" would probably be MORE confusing.)
If the ballots are serialized (see above) and/or machine readable data is supplied (Datamatrix 2D barcode, RFID chip) then the names on the printed ballot can be randomized. Need more space? We could even use MULTIPLE A4 sized cards. If they're RFID'd and/or barcoded then we can make sure we have a full set from each voter. I doubt we'll ever get that many candidates on one ticket, though.
Yeah, especially when they're all closer to excuses than actual issues.
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