Since the baseline is the length of the path of the antenna as observed by the target, and that path is nearly pi times the distance to the target (on which any region is illuminated for up to half a rotation), the separation of earthbound antennas is a small drop in a big bucket.
The data is still improved, of course. (Especially if the separation is at right angles to the path if the Earth is over the object's equator.) But other than that the man improvement comes from things like ability to cancel out (or selectively reject) noise, or more samplesj, not the baseline as baseline.
Chemical -> Mechanical is by combustion in a heat engine. That's limited by the Carnot cycle.
Fuel cells are not so limited. They do have their own unavoidable losses, but they are substantially below those of the Carnot cycle - and even farther below a heat engine light and small enough to be built into a car. Electric motors can be very efficient (if you're willing to make the wire thick enough), so a fuel cell in an electric car could beat a hybrid.
The problem with using this particular design to power a car is that it only puts out 2.5 watts. A horsepower is about 750 watts (assuming perfectly efficient motors and control electronics). So you're talking 300 of them PER HORSEPOWER. A car needs maybe 18 HP for cruising - call it 20. That's 6,000 of 'em. Double it (12,000 units or equivalent) to even START to make up for inefficiencies in regenerative breaking. Now you've got something that could cruise on a dead-flat plain and occasionally stop and start - but don't even think of driving through a mountain pass. (Don't forget having enough spacing between the slices to allow cooling air to circulate.)
This appears to be a MEMS device built on a silicon chip - which would limit it to the area of the silicon wafer technology used and probably a single layer - at least in the current iteration. So it's not likely to scale up real soon.
A competing technology - solid oxide fuel cells - is being manufactured by Bloom Energy. This has elements that can be stacked densely and run on gas-main quality gas (mainly methane and butyl mercaptain, but solid oxide is hard to poison). So far they're only building building-sized stationary systems so there may be issues porting it to the extreme vibration and thermal environment of an automobile that would need more engineering to solve.
As the knowledgeable and observant will have noticed: This is very similar to side-looking radar. (In fact, for a flyby of a non-rotating asteroid, with the antenna located at one of the Earth's poles, it would be EXACTLY side-looking radar.)
It just uses a different phase correction and aperture selection on the recorded reflections. We did it on the same equipment, with a slight change to the post-processing arrangement.
Back in the '60s I was working on a project involving using synthetic aperture radar to resolve rotating objects (including NON-rotating objects that were orbiting or flying by - giving you a viewpoint from progressively different directions, which is equivalent.)
Reflection of an illuminating "chirp" (long signal with a constant rate-of-change-of-frequency) gives you a return with a frequency shift that tells you the distance to each feature of the target, added to a doppler-shift term telling you how fast it's approaching or receeding. Coherently combining results from a series of chirps lets you separate the two, giving you distance from the unchanging part and cross-range position from the change. Shazam: A two-dimensional map of the object's radar reflectivity, from a viewpoint over the axis of (apparent) rotation. Right-angle inside folds and corners (and some other concave features) retro-reflect like roadside reflectors, too.
We were working on something that could resolve details of a small satellite in orbit, as if you were looking down on it and seeing every corner, fold, and "ding" as if it had a marker light attached. (The project didn't get followed-on and later I figured out why: A picture leaked during the first shuttle flight when they had lost some tiles and were worried about reentry problems: The spooks had a ground-based telescope camera that could read a license plate from that distance. B-b )
Such techniques can resolve objects to amazingly fine detail. Because phase information is preserved the solution is "analytical" - you can resolve far below the wavelength of the illuminating signal. Your resolution limit is more related to the accuracy of your signal data collection and stability of your electronics than illuminating wavelength (actually - frequency breadth of the "chirp").
The basic technique would give you a map as if you were hovering over the object on its axis of (apparent) rotation. You'd have the "northern" and "southern" hemisphere combined - but if the object's (apparent) rotation axis isn't aligned so you're exactly in the plane of its equator, continued observation through more than one rotation would let you separate the two.
Also: You only need ONE antenna, not a long-baseline array of them. The effective "baseline" is the length of the apparent path of the antenna, while it illuminated a given point, as viewed from the surface of the target. This would be FAR larger than the diameter of the earth - essentially the half-circumference of an "orbit" with the distance from the antenna to the target as the radius , i.e. pi * distance to the rock if it makes at least half a turn (from our viewpoint) during the flyby.
This was the sort of thing we could do in the '60s, with rudimentary equipment by today's standards. With half a century of technological advancement I'd expect much better results. B-)
So I hope they're applying this technique, or some improvement of it, to this flyby.
So... in your fantasy country of the United States of No Taxes at All, your politicians get no salary at all?
Nope. We've got the same problem over here - and it's getting worse.
I'm just saying that 1) providing the money for paying their salaries and 2) being their boss and expecting them to follow your orders (or even pay attention to your wishes), are separate issues...... and that I'm sick of the "I pay your salary!" foolishness distracting people from actually DOING something EFFECTIVE to solve the problems.
When will we come to the place where we realize that the Earth doesn't need us to clean up from stuff that it already produces, in the places it produces it? Millions of gallons of crude seep from the Gulf floor every day. Nature/bacteria takes care of it.
Seeps are one thing. Blowouts are more than a tad faster. Nature takes a while and a big, concentrated, spill can cause a lot of havoc before nature gets around to clearing it.
Granted we need to avoid making it worse while trying to make it better. For instance: The attempt to clean the shore after the Exxon Valdez spill washed away the local biosphere as well. Several years later the "cleaned" sections were still barren while the untouched sections had recovered very well. I recall a great picture of a boundary between the two. Think "washed down to bedrock and gravel" or "cold, rocky desert".
Water has its highest density at approximately 4 degrees C - just a tad above freezing. Water at higher OR lower temperatures rises above it, and water at that temperature sinks to the bottom.
Then it tends to sit there: Friction with the ocean bottom causes ocean currents to be very slow, so there's little mixing from turbulence. With all the water around it at the same temperature there's negligible mixing from convection. If there's a local, non-extreme, heat source, the warmed water rises by convection and slowly sucks in 4-ish degree water from around it. Heat transfer is mainly by conduction (which is slow) and diffusion (which is in the years-per-inch range).
So the surface temperature doesn't mean much. Even at the bottom of the gulf (except very close to volcanic vents and the like) the bottom water is quite cold.
The MEPs send armed thugs to STEAL their salaries from the citizens, when they aren't manipulating their banking system to con or cheat them out of the money.
Saying "I pay your salary!" just encourages them to laugh behind closed doors, like any other successful thug having a guffaw over the antics of his victims. You don't "pay their salaries" unless you're in a position to FIRE them and keep the money, at your own, individual, discretion.
(Over here our ancestors had to fire AT them to get these parasites off their backs. But in the couple of centuries since that time a home-grown population has arisen.)
Especially since it's sepcifically statistics that's involved in the push.
Back in the last half of the 1960s hand calculators were just becoming available and affordable. There was a bunch of pressure to ban them and maintain the old curricula, with hand computation everywhere.
The big mover to calculators was the statistics department. That's because the arithmetic involved in statistics calculations is long and tedius. Assignments could only be toys. Computing a chi-square test using pencils and paper was a group term project. So the students had to eat a semester of theory and have hands-on experience of doing the work ONCE.
With hand calculators a chi-square on a reasonably-sized dataset could be done for a daily assignment. The students could move on from crunching and actually SEE the tools work, getting a "feel" for the processes. That, in turn, meant they could learn MORE tools in the same time.
With computers the computation can be faster than the delay can be perceived, so students can apply another factor-of-many multiplier to how much of the subject they can cover and how well they can comprehend it.
There are some subjects where the number of computations small enough that manual arithmetic is occasionally useful at a professional level, complex enough that understanding all the steps to set it up is important, and powerful enough that a small number of complex computations does something important - rather than bogging you down in an impossibly large number of simple, repetitive, and error-prone steps. Statistics is NOT one of these subjects.
By including it inside the product packaging (or building it into the product itself B-) ), a manufacturer can record, not just shipping shocks in the last hop, but all shocks from the time the device was packaged at the factory. He can defend himself (and the customer) against failures (and warranty repair costs) generated by mishandling by a wholesaler, retailer, or what-have-you, not just the final shipper.
The device would report significant events with time stamps, so the final shipper wouldn't get blamed for mishandling further up the chain.
With integrated accelerometers and the like, the silicon-with-MEMS product would be a rather tiny chip attached to a battery - which (with modern battery tech) could power it for the shelf life of the product's design. Given Moore's law the prices for the electronic versions might come out lower than those of the mechanical version.
Main downside might be that the battery might make the device unsuited for air freight. B-)
Moving to a new client's site gave me a taste of using a browser without noscript and flashblock. I discovered a number of sites are displaying multiple ads that consist of flash movies.
To view a few paragraphs of text (a couple kilobytes or so) I USED to be downloading perhaps a quarter megabyte of graphic imagery. Now I'm downloading perhaps a minute of video for each of several self-starting video ads.
Not to mention popovers-on-mouseover - including some that that darken the whole page rather than just obscuring part of it - and if I want to kill them without "pushing a 'close' button" supplied by the popover ("Push me! Push me! I'll just close the window and not download malware! I promise!) I have to reload the page all over again. Listen to that meter whir!
IMHO, much of the correlation with broadband and wealth may have to do with the security model of Microsoft: A multi-billion dollar industry building add-on malware protection that works largely by comparing incoming traffic to an ever-growing list of malware "signatures".
To use one of these protection-and-cleanup services you need to do two things:
- Pay a fee periodically. (The poor need not apply.)
- Download an ENORMOUS table of new signatures from time to time. (Those without broadband need not apply.)
At a site with "slow DSL" I have a laptop with a windows install that I use when I must use certain windows tools. I recently left it off for about two months before I needed it again. Just downloading the new signatures, at about a half megabyte per second, took several hours. Adding in software updates meant it was a couple days before it was ready to go again.
The machine would have been totally unusable if only dialup were available, unless I only loaded updates rarely or selectively and disabled (or never installed) the anti-malware product. That would mean a user would have to take his chances with malware and depend on the malware people to keep themselves in business by not totally trashing the victims' machines.
Or loading a Linux (or other open-source Unix-family) distribution. B-)
I wonder what the numbers would be like if only the FOSS users' machines were examined?
Can they violate GPL for American written software?
As I understand it.
They can sell up to a limited dollar value of COPIES of a GPL-violating work in Antigua and you can't (effectively) sue them (outside of the US) for failing to distribute the source or linking GPL and non-GPL object code. The purchasers of those copies could resell them, too - as long as they didn't do so into the US (which will still be enforcing the copyright).
But additional copies, which were not sold through Antigua, are still unauthorized, both in the US and elsewhere, unless the terms of the GPL are met. So they can only sell a few before they hit the wall.
What would be even more convincing would be reversing the phase of one and summing them....
However, while the phasing effect from such a recording would pop out at you, if you have good stereoscopic hearing this is just as convincing: The instrumental is heard at the center, one lyric performance on the left, the other on the right. If the instrumentals were a cover rather than phase-identical they'd be heard as a "chorus" - unison performances - by two guitars, one on each side.
https://soundcloud.com/alacrion/joco-v-glee Here is a demonstration of the claim's truth.
Well done! Kudos to alacrion.
What would be even more convincing would be reversing the phase of one and summing them. If aligned and level-corrected perfectly the music would drop out. If not, it would do a "phaser" effect. That happens when the waveforms themselves align and add or cancel. You can't get it to happen with a cover, or even two performances by the same artist on the same acoustic instrument. It only happens if it's the same performance, and it's only exact if it's two copies of the same microphone outputs and mix.
The point of this one is that it's a new record for the (potentially) cheap, continuous, roll-to-roll manufacturing process.
A lot of stationary sites are more sensitive to $/installed-watt and $/(installed-watt * ammortized-lifetime). If a process is half as efficient as other alternatives but an eighth as expensive, and there's plenty of surface area to pave (like on a house roof).
What would make it BIG news is if the win is enough to jump it substantially beyond breakeven vs. grid power.
Most of us understand that energy us fungible and don't always make proper distinctions for pedantic pricks.
Except it's NOT. Transforming energy from one form to another involves losses - often very substantial losses. And that's the whole point of this thread.
For a number of reasons, non-electric vehicles are limited mainly to heat engines driven by fuels liquid at weather-range temperatures and with a number of other limiting characteristics. Converting, say, electricity to a suitable liquid fuel would lose most of its energy. Going from biomass to gasoline and diesel fuel substitutes (which can use the legacy infrastructure of vehicles and fuel distribution) can be very efficient - especially with this development in the path to a diesel fuel.
... article mentioned that if we took all the biomass from all of the farmland both producing and fallow and were able to convert it all directly to ethanol that it would STILL only account for 14% of the US energy budget.
(Ignoring for the moment whether the claim is accurate...)
The idea is not to replace the whole energy needs of the country with biomass fuels. Smelting steel or refining aluminum with it, for instance, would be downright silly. Ditto running power plants: (Even if you wanted to use biomass there'd be no reason to waste part of its energy liquifying it - just burn it directly. But there are lots of cheaper alternatives.)
But there's a small-but-substantial fraction of the load for which liquid fuels is ideal: Vehicles. Liquid fuels provide enormous power-to-weight ratios, which is what you want there. Keeping a vehicle light pays dividends in fuel savings, as does providing energy using easy-to-handle liquid with high energy content.
The base process ferments cellulose into butanol, acetone, and ethanol. Even without this new post-processing hack, butanol is a drop-in replacement for gasoline, ethanol works in otto-cycle engines with a little tweaking and acetone with more tweaking. This new post-process turns the mix into something akin to fuel oil, which is a similar drop-in for diesel cycle engines. So it covers both major types of portable engines.
Even if you can't come up with enough fuel to run the whole economy, or even the whole transportation industry, from locally-grown biomass, there's a LOT of low-value byproducts grown in the process of growing crops. Turning it into high-value portable liquid fuel could make a substantial dent in oil requirements while improving the financial picture both for vehicle users and farmers.
Solar and wind aren't well suited for the enormous energy and energy-density needs of land vehicles (though we're getting closer with modern electric vehicles for limited ranges). But they can make a similar dent in the energy needs of stationary loads.
The death star petition failed with the old threshold.
IMHO they're just trying to head off a slew of petitions as fallout from the recent gun restriction proposals.
The NRA, starting from 4 million members, added another quarter million new recruits in less than a month and is still expanding rapidly. Watch for the white house staffers to raise the threshold again. B-)
Your statement would lead one to believe that it was the wild west out here, when it isnt.
Which is a pity. Because the wild west would be far better than what we have now (radio, television, and movie portrayals nonwithstanding).
Heck: It had a lower per-capita rate of shootings and murders than cities like New York had back THEN.
Then you have the occasional thing like the gunfight at the OK Corral - which was a gang of corrupt cops executing some local businessmen. Look it up.
It's apropos to the current debate, too. The Earp Gang (also known as "The Pimp Gang") instituted gun control in Dodge City in order to make it easier to enforce their monopoly on prostitution and crooked gambling halls. (The concealed-carry shoulder holster was invented in response to them.) There are still descendants of the families in the area (including some of my in-laws) who occasionally find time to visit - and urinate on - Wyat's grave.
(3) although special relativity is consistent with the existence of faster-than-light particles (tachyons), it is not consistent with the existence of faster-than-light observers in a universe with 3 spatial dimensions and 1 time dimension, a.k.a. 3+1 dimensions. Result #3 (no tachyonic observers in 3+1 dimensions) has been known for a long time, but it seems to keep getting rediscovered.
I'm curious (but can't deal with 30 pages of relativistic physics right now). Can you answer one summarizing question, please?
Is the conclusion that such observers can't exist because:
1) tachyonic particles can't interact to form an observer,
2) if they could form an observer, the space of the observer would have something other than a 3 + 1 dimensionality, or
3) Such an observer couldn't interact with non-tachyonic matter in our 3+1 spacetime in a way that would qualify as "observing"?
What makes little sense is the complaining about a shortage in hospitals, where a dose is less then an ounce, when oil drillers are pumping the stuff into the ground by the ton...daily...all over the world.
As was pointed out elsewhere in this article: The ores used for drilling mud (notably those from US sources) contain far too much hard-to-remove toxic impurities (notably barium-strontium-sulfate) for medical use. Also, chemical processes to refine out the toxic impurities create FAR MORE TOXIC compounds in the intermediate steps, which must in turn be very carefully and completely removed. (And one supplier went belly-up, and earned long prison terms for an exec and a chemist, after killing several patients by attempting to substitute poorly "purified" cheaper ore.)
While the good stuff from the Chinese ore was cheap and plentiful there's been no reason to try to substitute anything else.
Slashdot Mirror
He'll just have to yell. B-)
Since the baseline is the length of the path of the antenna as observed by the target, and that path is nearly pi times the distance to the target (on which any region is illuminated for up to half a rotation), the separation of earthbound antennas is a small drop in a big bucket.
The data is still improved, of course. (Especially if the separation is at right angles to the path if the Earth is over the object's equator.) But other than that the man improvement comes from things like ability to cancel out (or selectively reject) noise, or more samplesj, not the baseline as baseline.
Chemical -> Mechanical is by combustion in a heat engine. That's limited by the Carnot cycle.
Fuel cells are not so limited. They do have their own unavoidable losses, but they are substantially below those of the Carnot cycle - and even farther below a heat engine light and small enough to be built into a car. Electric motors can be very efficient (if you're willing to make the wire thick enough), so a fuel cell in an electric car could beat a hybrid.
The problem with using this particular design to power a car is that it only puts out 2.5 watts. A horsepower is about 750 watts (assuming perfectly efficient motors and control electronics). So you're talking 300 of them PER HORSEPOWER. A car needs maybe 18 HP for cruising - call it 20. That's 6,000 of 'em. Double it (12,000 units or equivalent) to even START to make up for inefficiencies in regenerative breaking. Now you've got something that could cruise on a dead-flat plain and occasionally stop and start - but don't even think of driving through a mountain pass. (Don't forget having enough spacing between the slices to allow cooling air to circulate.)
This appears to be a MEMS device built on a silicon chip - which would limit it to the area of the silicon wafer technology used and probably a single layer - at least in the current iteration. So it's not likely to scale up real soon.
A competing technology - solid oxide fuel cells - is being manufactured by Bloom Energy. This has elements that can be stacked densely and run on gas-main quality gas (mainly methane and butyl mercaptain, but solid oxide is hard to poison). So far they're only building building-sized stationary systems so there may be issues porting it to the extreme vibration and thermal environment of an automobile that would need more engineering to solve.
As the knowledgeable and observant will have noticed: This is very similar to side-looking radar. (In fact, for a flyby of a non-rotating asteroid, with the antenna located at one of the Earth's poles, it would be EXACTLY side-looking radar.)
It just uses a different phase correction and aperture selection on the recorded reflections. We did it on the same equipment, with a slight change to the post-processing arrangement.
... of the "rotating target" variety?
Back in the '60s I was working on a project involving using synthetic aperture radar to resolve rotating objects (including NON-rotating objects that were orbiting or flying by - giving you a viewpoint from progressively different directions, which is equivalent.)
Reflection of an illuminating "chirp" (long signal with a constant rate-of-change-of-frequency) gives you a return with a frequency shift that tells you the distance to each feature of the target, added to a doppler-shift term telling you how fast it's approaching or receeding. Coherently combining results from a series of chirps lets you separate the two, giving you distance from the unchanging part and cross-range position from the change. Shazam: A two-dimensional map of the object's radar reflectivity, from a viewpoint over the axis of (apparent) rotation. Right-angle inside folds and corners (and some other concave features) retro-reflect like roadside reflectors, too.
We were working on something that could resolve details of a small satellite in orbit, as if you were looking down on it and seeing every corner, fold, and "ding" as if it had a marker light attached. (The project didn't get followed-on and later I figured out why: A picture leaked during the first shuttle flight when they had lost some tiles and were worried about reentry problems: The spooks had a ground-based telescope camera that could read a license plate from that distance. B-b )
Such techniques can resolve objects to amazingly fine detail. Because phase information is preserved the solution is "analytical" - you can resolve far below the wavelength of the illuminating signal. Your resolution limit is more related to the accuracy of your signal data collection and stability of your electronics than illuminating wavelength (actually - frequency breadth of the "chirp").
The basic technique would give you a map as if you were hovering over the object on its axis of (apparent) rotation. You'd have the "northern" and "southern" hemisphere combined - but if the object's (apparent) rotation axis isn't aligned so you're exactly in the plane of its equator, continued observation through more than one rotation would let you separate the two.
Also: You only need ONE antenna, not a long-baseline array of them. The effective "baseline" is the length of the apparent path of the antenna, while it illuminated a given point, as viewed from the surface of the target. This would be FAR larger than the diameter of the earth - essentially the half-circumference of an "orbit" with the distance from the antenna to the target as the radius , i.e. pi * distance to the rock if it makes at least half a turn (from our viewpoint) during the flyby.
This was the sort of thing we could do in the '60s, with rudimentary equipment by today's standards. With half a century of technological advancement I'd expect much better results. B-)
So I hope they're applying this technique, or some improvement of it, to this flyby.
So ... in your fantasy country of the United States of No Taxes at All, your politicians get no salary at all?
Nope. We've got the same problem over here - and it's getting worse.
I'm just saying that 1) providing the money for paying their salaries and 2) being their boss and expecting them to follow your orders (or even pay attention to your wishes), are separate issues ... ... and that I'm sick of the "I pay your salary!" foolishness distracting people from actually DOING something EFFECTIVE to solve the problems.
When will we come to the place where we realize that the Earth doesn't need us to clean up from stuff that it already produces, in the places it produces it? Millions of gallons of crude seep from the Gulf floor every day. Nature/bacteria takes care of it.
Seeps are one thing. Blowouts are more than a tad faster. Nature takes a while and a big, concentrated, spill can cause a lot of havoc before nature gets around to clearing it.
Granted we need to avoid making it worse while trying to make it better. For instance: The attempt to clean the shore after the Exxon Valdez spill washed away the local biosphere as well. Several years later the "cleaned" sections were still barren while the untouched sections had recovered very well. I recall a great picture of a boundary between the two. Think "washed down to bedrock and gravel" or "cold, rocky desert".
It never gets cold in the Gulf of Mexico.
It does near the bottom of the ocean.
Water has its highest density at approximately 4 degrees C - just a tad above freezing. Water at higher OR lower temperatures rises above it, and water at that temperature sinks to the bottom.
Then it tends to sit there: Friction with the ocean bottom causes ocean currents to be very slow, so there's little mixing from turbulence. With all the water around it at the same temperature there's negligible mixing from convection. If there's a local, non-extreme, heat source, the warmed water rises by convection and slowly sucks in 4-ish degree water from around it. Heat transfer is mainly by conduction (which is slow) and diffusion (which is in the years-per-inch range).
So the surface temperature doesn't mean much. Even at the bottom of the gulf (except very close to volcanic vents and the like) the bottom water is quite cold.
(and I'm SO sick of that bogus meme.)
The MEPs send armed thugs to STEAL their salaries from the citizens, when they aren't manipulating their banking system to con or cheat them out of the money.
Saying "I pay your salary!" just encourages them to laugh behind closed doors, like any other successful thug having a guffaw over the antics of his victims. You don't "pay their salaries" unless you're in a position to FIRE them and keep the money, at your own, individual, discretion.
(Over here our ancestors had to fire AT them to get these parasites off their backs. But in the couple of centuries since that time a home-grown population has arisen.)
Especially since it's sepcifically statistics that's involved in the push.
Back in the last half of the 1960s hand calculators were just becoming available and affordable. There was a bunch of pressure to ban them and maintain the old curricula, with hand computation everywhere.
The big mover to calculators was the statistics department. That's because the arithmetic involved in statistics calculations is long and tedius. Assignments could only be toys. Computing a chi-square test using pencils and paper was a group term project. So the students had to eat a semester of theory and have hands-on experience of doing the work ONCE.
With hand calculators a chi-square on a reasonably-sized dataset could be done for a daily assignment. The students could move on from crunching and actually SEE the tools work, getting a "feel" for the processes. That, in turn, meant they could learn MORE tools in the same time.
With computers the computation can be faster than the delay can be perceived, so students can apply another factor-of-many multiplier to how much of the subject they can cover and how well they can comprehend it.
There are some subjects where the number of computations small enough that manual arithmetic is occasionally useful at a professional level, complex enough that understanding all the steps to set it up is important, and powerful enough that a small number of complex computations does something important - rather than bogging you down in an impossibly large number of simple, repetitive, and error-prone steps. Statistics is NOT one of these subjects.
By including it inside the product packaging (or building it into the product itself B-) ), a manufacturer can record, not just shipping shocks in the last hop, but all shocks from the time the device was packaged at the factory. He can defend himself (and the customer) against failures (and warranty repair costs) generated by mishandling by a wholesaler, retailer, or what-have-you, not just the final shipper.
The device would report significant events with time stamps, so the final shipper wouldn't get blamed for mishandling further up the chain.
With integrated accelerometers and the like, the silicon-with-MEMS product would be a rather tiny chip attached to a battery - which (with modern battery tech) could power it for the shelf life of the product's design. Given Moore's law the prices for the electronic versions might come out lower than those of the mechanical version.
Main downside might be that the battery might make the device unsuited for air freight. B-)
... and how much is ads?
Moving to a new client's site gave me a taste of using a browser without noscript and flashblock. I discovered a number of sites are displaying multiple ads that consist of flash movies.
To view a few paragraphs of text (a couple kilobytes or so) I USED to be downloading perhaps a quarter megabyte of graphic imagery. Now I'm downloading perhaps a minute of video for each of several self-starting video ads.
Not to mention popovers-on-mouseover - including some that that darken the whole page rather than just obscuring part of it - and if I want to kill them without "pushing a 'close' button" supplied by the popover ("Push me! Push me! I'll just close the window and not download malware! I promise!) I have to reload the page all over again. Listen to that meter whir!
IMHO, much of the correlation with broadband and wealth may have to do with the security model of Microsoft: A multi-billion dollar industry building add-on malware protection that works largely by comparing incoming traffic to an ever-growing list of malware "signatures".
To use one of these protection-and-cleanup services you need to do two things:
- Pay a fee periodically. (The poor need not apply.)
- Download an ENORMOUS table of new signatures from time to time. (Those without broadband need not apply.)
At a site with "slow DSL" I have a laptop with a windows install that I use when I must use certain windows tools. I recently left it off for about two months before I needed it again. Just downloading the new signatures, at about a half megabyte per second, took several hours. Adding in software updates meant it was a couple days before it was ready to go again.
The machine would have been totally unusable if only dialup were available, unless I only loaded updates rarely or selectively and disabled (or never installed) the anti-malware product. That would mean a user would have to take his chances with malware and depend on the malware people to keep themselves in business by not totally trashing the victims' machines.
Or loading a Linux (or other open-source Unix-family) distribution. B-)
I wonder what the numbers would be like if only the FOSS users' machines were examined?
Among the actual conservatives, it's to try to help you GET rich.
Of course the Neocons are just in it for the loot.
Can they violate GPL for American written software?
As I understand it.
They can sell up to a limited dollar value of COPIES of a GPL-violating work in Antigua and you can't (effectively) sue them (outside of the US) for failing to distribute the source or linking GPL and non-GPL object code. The purchasers of those copies could resell them, too - as long as they didn't do so into the US (which will still be enforcing the copyright).
But additional copies, which were not sold through Antigua, are still unauthorized, both in the US and elsewhere, unless the terms of the GPL are met. So they can only sell a few before they hit the wall.
So I don't see the GPL being "broken" by this.
What would be even more convincing would be reversing the phase of one and summing them. ...
However, while the phasing effect from such a recording would pop out at you, if you have good stereoscopic hearing this is just as convincing: The instrumental is heard at the center, one lyric performance on the left, the other on the right. If the instrumentals were a cover rather than phase-identical they'd be heard as a "chorus" - unison performances - by two guitars, one on each side.
https://soundcloud.com/alacrion/joco-v-glee Here is a demonstration of the claim's truth.
Well done! Kudos to alacrion.
What would be even more convincing would be reversing the phase of one and summing them. If aligned and level-corrected perfectly the music would drop out. If not, it would do a "phaser" effect. That happens when the waveforms themselves align and add or cancel. You can't get it to happen with a cover, or even two performances by the same artist on the same acoustic instrument. It only happens if it's the same performance, and it's only exact if it's two copies of the same microphone outputs and mix.
The point of this one is that it's a new record for the (potentially) cheap, continuous, roll-to-roll manufacturing process.
A lot of stationary sites are more sensitive to $/installed-watt and $/(installed-watt * ammortized-lifetime). If a process is half as efficient as other alternatives but an eighth as expensive, and there's plenty of surface area to pave (like on a house roof).
What would make it BIG news is if the win is enough to jump it substantially beyond breakeven vs. grid power.
Most of us understand that energy us fungible and don't always make proper distinctions for pedantic pricks.
Except it's NOT. Transforming energy from one form to another involves losses - often very substantial losses. And that's the whole point of this thread.
For a number of reasons, non-electric vehicles are limited mainly to heat engines driven by fuels liquid at weather-range temperatures and with a number of other limiting characteristics. Converting, say, electricity to a suitable liquid fuel would lose most of its energy. Going from biomass to gasoline and diesel fuel substitutes (which can use the legacy infrastructure of vehicles and fuel distribution) can be very efficient - especially with this development in the path to a diesel fuel.
... article mentioned that if we took all the biomass from all of the farmland both producing and fallow and were able to convert it all directly to ethanol that it would STILL only account for 14% of the US energy budget.
(Ignoring for the moment whether the claim is accurate ...)
The idea is not to replace the whole energy needs of the country with biomass fuels. Smelting steel or refining aluminum with it, for instance, would be downright silly. Ditto running power plants: (Even if you wanted to use biomass there'd be no reason to waste part of its energy liquifying it - just burn it directly. But there are lots of cheaper alternatives.)
But there's a small-but-substantial fraction of the load for which liquid fuels is ideal: Vehicles. Liquid fuels provide enormous power-to-weight ratios, which is what you want there. Keeping a vehicle light pays dividends in fuel savings, as does providing energy using easy-to-handle liquid with high energy content.
The base process ferments cellulose into butanol, acetone, and ethanol. Even without this new post-processing hack, butanol is a drop-in replacement for gasoline, ethanol works in otto-cycle engines with a little tweaking and acetone with more tweaking. This new post-process turns the mix into something akin to fuel oil, which is a similar drop-in for diesel cycle engines. So it covers both major types of portable engines.
Even if you can't come up with enough fuel to run the whole economy, or even the whole transportation industry, from locally-grown biomass, there's a LOT of low-value byproducts grown in the process of growing crops. Turning it into high-value portable liquid fuel could make a substantial dent in oil requirements while improving the financial picture both for vehicle users and farmers.
Solar and wind aren't well suited for the enormous energy and energy-density needs of land vehicles (though we're getting closer with modern electric vehicles for limited ranges). But they can make a similar dent in the energy needs of stationary loads.
The death star petition failed with the old threshold.
Oops. I heard it had failed, but just checked and found out I'd heard wrong. Mea Culpa.
The death star petition failed with the old threshold.
IMHO they're just trying to head off a slew of petitions as fallout from the recent gun restriction proposals.
The NRA, starting from 4 million members, added another quarter million new recruits in less than a month and is still expanding rapidly. Watch for the white house staffers to raise the threshold again. B-)
Your statement would lead one to believe that it was the wild west out here, when it isnt.
Which is a pity. Because the wild west would be far better than what we have now (radio, television, and movie portrayals nonwithstanding).
Heck: It had a lower per-capita rate of shootings and murders than cities like New York had back THEN.
Then you have the occasional thing like the gunfight at the OK Corral - which was a gang of corrupt cops executing some local businessmen. Look it up.
It's apropos to the current debate, too. The Earp Gang (also known as "The Pimp Gang") instituted gun control in Dodge City in order to make it easier to enforce their monopoly on prostitution and crooked gambling halls. (The concealed-carry shoulder holster was invented in response to them.) There are still descendants of the families in the area (including some of my in-laws) who occasionally find time to visit - and urinate on - Wyat's grave.
(3) although special relativity is consistent with the existence of faster-than-light particles (tachyons), it is not consistent with the existence of faster-than-light observers in a universe with 3 spatial dimensions and 1 time dimension, a.k.a. 3+1 dimensions. Result #3 (no tachyonic observers in 3+1 dimensions) has been known for a long time, but it seems to keep getting rediscovered.
I'm curious (but can't deal with 30 pages of relativistic physics right now). Can you answer one summarizing question, please?
Is the conclusion that such observers can't exist because:
1) tachyonic particles can't interact to form an observer,
2) if they could form an observer, the space of the observer would have something other than a 3 + 1 dimensionality, or
3) Such an observer couldn't interact with non-tachyonic matter in our 3+1 spacetime in a way that would qualify as "observing"?
What makes little sense is the complaining about a shortage in hospitals, where a dose is less then an ounce, when oil drillers are pumping the stuff into the ground by the ton...daily...all over the world.
As was pointed out elsewhere in this article: The ores used for drilling mud (notably those from US sources) contain far too much hard-to-remove toxic impurities (notably barium-strontium-sulfate) for medical use. Also, chemical processes to refine out the toxic impurities create FAR MORE TOXIC compounds in the intermediate steps, which must in turn be very carefully and completely removed. (And one supplier went belly-up, and earned long prison terms for an exec and a chemist, after killing several patients by attempting to substitute poorly "purified" cheaper ore.)
While the good stuff from the Chinese ore was cheap and plentiful there's been no reason to try to substitute anything else.