In my lab, we just retired the 486/Win3.11 box that housed the controller card for a 14hp servo motor. Someone found the update disk that let us move to NT4.
However, the ice system still runs on a CIT-80 terminal. And replacing all of our ISA DAQ cards is monetarily out of the question.
You might be thinking of alpha particles (helium nucleus), which cannot penetrate very far due to their large mass and low velocity. Beta particles are very energetic electrons and require a few centimeters of something like polyethylene to block fully. Gamma particles, which are high-energy X-rays, require several feet of lead, steel and concrete to stop.
Now my question is how much radioactive material will these things actually contain? I seem to recall that the largest samples that could be sold to the public (for use in one of my high-school labs) were all well less than a gram for even the lowest level isotopes.
Because the CEO on the biz-jet is probably the only passenger on the plane (CEOs tend to like that) that is owned/operated by the CEO's company but on a 737 there might be upwards of 150 passengers on an airplane operated by an airline very afraid of being sued into being a bus company. The signal from one cellphone will not interfere with the equipment on the airplane except in very rare conditions. But if 150 cellphones are in use at once (the worse case, which is what you are taught to plan for if you can), the level of EM noise generated is such that it can cause harmful interference under a much wider range of conditions. And if that harmful interference leads to a crash, its not Motorola thats going to get sued, its the airline. Hence, no cellphones for the $300 roundtrip ticket you bought, while the guy getting billed $1000+ per flight hour can talk all he wants.
As a side note, the certification procedures for business jets and airliners are almost identical, the certification procedures for airlines are much more stringent than for charter/private jet operators so charters can let their passengers get away with more things than airlines.
There is a new car on the road today. A car built with technology that defies the concept of fossil fuel powered
cars, and can run coast to coast without ever relying on the battery being charged from an outside source.
He is certainly selling it as a closed system, with no requirements that it be refueled or recharged (at least not for very, very long distances), so unless he really does have a 'Mr. Fusion' in there or has made a breakthrough in electro-chemical energy storage (ie. batteries), this is a perpetual-motion machine of the first kind (a PMM1, as my thermo book says) because he claims to be able to do a lot of work (drive from coast to coast) with comparably little energy input (at most, a single battery charge before you leave). If he has managed to invent fusion or a better battery, he wouldn't bother with putting it in a car when he could sell it for billions as is.
Perhaps you should stop reading the spin on the site and try reading a textbook. Us poor engineering students have to read lots of them.
If you read any of the websites linked from the original post you should quickly realize that this almost certainly a perpetual-motion machine as it clearly violates the 1st Law of Thermodynamics. You can not get more energy(work) out of a system then you put into it. Real electric cars that are based on gas-powered models can only go 50-150 miles (depending on model) on a single charge because the amount of energy that can be stored in their batteries is rather small compared to the chemical energy stored in a few gallons of gasoline.
'But it runs' you may say. Well, even an array of twelve 12-volt car batteries (large diesel engines have larger batteries just to start them) has enough energy to make the car go around the track for some distance (up to 52 miles according the most optimistic computer model). And as people who had to suffer through electo-chemistry know, battery voltage does not fall off substantially until the battery is nearly dead, and that the apparent voltage of the battery drops when in use due to the battery's internal resistance. The vehicle has yet to break the laws of thermodynamics, but the 'inventors' claims certainly have.
As for encouraging research into technologies that will reduce our dependance on fossil fuel, I am very supportive. Real research is happening in this area, and at my school, the primary focus is on hybrid and ethanol-powered vehicles. And guess what, much of it is sponsored by the big, evil corporations.
Now as for how to stop people from pushing perpetual-motion machines, we could always unlease my thermo professor on them. She has little tolerance for people you violate the laws of thermodynamics, like the guy in the class who kept trying to leave the condensor out the air-conditioner problems...
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In my lab, we just retired the 486/Win3.11 box that housed the controller card for a 14hp servo motor. Someone found the update disk that let us move to NT4. However, the ice system still runs on a CIT-80 terminal. And replacing all of our ISA DAQ cards is monetarily out of the question.
You might be thinking of alpha particles (helium nucleus), which cannot penetrate very far due to their large mass and low velocity. Beta particles are very energetic electrons and require a few centimeters of something like polyethylene to block fully. Gamma particles, which are high-energy X-rays, require several feet of lead, steel and concrete to stop.
Now my question is how much radioactive material will these things actually contain? I seem to recall that the largest samples that could be sold to the public (for use in one of my high-school labs) were all well less than a gram for even the lowest level isotopes.
Because the CEO on the biz-jet is probably the only passenger on the plane (CEOs tend to like that) that is owned/operated by the CEO's company but on a 737 there might be upwards of 150 passengers on an airplane operated by an airline very afraid of being sued into being a bus company. The signal from one cellphone will not interfere with the equipment on the airplane except in very rare conditions. But if 150 cellphones are in use at once (the worse case, which is what you are taught to plan for if you can), the level of EM noise generated is such that it can cause harmful interference under a much wider range of conditions. And if that harmful interference leads to a crash, its not Motorola thats going to get sued, its the airline. Hence, no cellphones for the $300 roundtrip ticket you bought, while the guy getting billed $1000+ per flight hour can talk all he wants.
As a side note, the certification procedures for business jets and airliners are almost identical, the certification procedures for airlines are much more stringent than for charter/private jet operators so charters can let their passengers get away with more things than airlines.
Like: "reality: 1, humans: 0"?
If you read any of the websites linked from the original post you should quickly realize that this almost certainly a perpetual-motion machine as it clearly violates the 1st Law of Thermodynamics. You can not get more energy(work) out of a system then you put into it. Real electric cars that are based on gas-powered models can only go 50-150 miles (depending on model) on a single charge because the amount of energy that can be stored in their batteries is rather small compared to the chemical energy stored in a few gallons of gasoline.
'But it runs' you may say. Well, even an array of twelve 12-volt car batteries (large diesel engines have larger batteries just to start them) has enough energy to make the car go around the track for some distance (up to 52 miles according the most optimistic computer model). And as people who had to suffer through electo-chemistry know, battery voltage does not fall off substantially until the battery is nearly dead, and that the apparent voltage of the battery drops when in use due to the battery's internal resistance. The vehicle has yet to break the laws of thermodynamics, but the 'inventors' claims certainly have.
As for encouraging research into technologies that will reduce our dependance on fossil fuel, I am very supportive. Real research is happening in this area, and at my school, the primary focus is on hybrid and ethanol-powered vehicles. And guess what, much of it is sponsored by the big, evil corporations.
Now as for how to stop people from pushing perpetual-motion machines, we could always unlease my thermo professor on them. She has little tolerance for people you violate the laws of thermodynamics, like the guy in the class who kept trying to leave the condensor out the air-conditioner problems...