What I would like to know is if this device can produces net energy over its lifetime after the total energy to produce and maintain it is taken into account
Umm, I hate to break it to you, but all devices use more energy than they produce
Yes, but he's concerned about the payback of the already-captured energy invested to capture more, not in the solar energy captured. There's a rumor going around that solar panels take more (caputred) energy to build than they ever produce - and these are less efficient becuase there are more lossy steps between sunlight and output.
The rumor, of course is bogus: Solar panels pay off manufacturing energy costs in well under a year.
Further: Much of the energy of their construction is low-quality heat (for things like melting glass and metals), not post-carnot-cycle pure electric power. You use this power in large, efficient, processes located where it's plentiful and cheap. You'd be nuts to burn electricity from solar panels to provide raw heat: If you must go solar for heat, a thermal system gets you several times as much power per square yard at far less cost.
But even if the panels never paid off the energy investment, the measure is an apples-oranges comparison: Most solar panels are used to deliver high-quality electricity at or near the point of consumption. So they're more about getting the power to the place it's needed than about capturing it. To compare them to grid power you'd have to count the energy cost of building and installing the site's share of the electrical grid: Smelting the metal for that transformer and those power lines, cutting down trees for the poles, melting sand for the insulators, etc. Then think about the other alternatives for such sites: Shipped-in batteries and fuel-driven generators are about all that's practical for most of 'em.
The cost of things like solar systems is a good summary measure of the human-impacting costs (labor, energy, and material, pollution from mining, consumption of land for industrial sites, use of money early rather than late, other opportunity costs, etc.) of their production. In areas with adequate sunlight, solar electric systems are currently past breakeven compared to grid power for new construction in remote sites (where running a grid connection costs thousands of dollars) and for small loads (like street signs, emergency phones, lawn lights,...) If the price of quality UL-approved panels were down to about a buck per watt they'd beat grid power even in sunny urban areas. (About another factor of 3 to go last I looked.)
...let the off-gas float up a large hill through tubes, burn/redox the hydrogen for power generation, cool the exhaust, store the water at the top of the hill, let it return to the bottom of the hill at night to smooth out energy production...
The gravitational energy from pumping the water up the hill is several orders of magnitude less than the energy of separating the water into hydrogen and oxygen.
If you really want to use sunlight to pump hydro, just evaporate the water at the bottom of the hill and condense it at the top.
Same applies to the proposal by the comment author for using it to purify water. Sure, if you are already cracking the water and burning the stored gasses already you can also use the purified "exhaust" water for drinking supplies. But if all you want is to purify water, solar-powered distillation works quite well enough and you'll get a LOT more purified water.
When I look at DHS, I can't find a single area in which they are competent. They can't... . What in hell CAN they do? Suddenly, they are in the business of issuing cyber security warnings?
They DID, a few years ago, issue a warning to businesses to migrate off Windows and other Microsoft products, due to their security flaws and the resulting vulnerability of the US private-sector infrastructure to attack.
Of course they managed to hide this warning under a bushel rather than pressure the exectuives to actually HEED it. (Did YOU hear about it before now? Even on Slashdot?)
It's called an air gap firewall. Don't connect shit to the Internet that has no business being connected to the Internet,
Not being connected to the Internet didn't keep STUXNET out of Iran's centrifuge SCADA systems. That propagated as a snearkernet virus from consultants' laptops to the machines on the air-gapped networkk which controlled and monitored the PLCs.
Back in 1965-66 a consultant talked with some college students, including me, about consulting. One thing he mentioned was a rule of thumb for computing a consulting rate.
For a middle-to-long-term consult the rule of thumb was one percent of an annual salary per day. This comes out to the billing rate being 2.5x the salary-only cost (assuming a 40 hour work week).
The multiplier covers a lot of stuff. Notable items include: The work done by the consulting firm (including sales, billing, carrying receivables, government forms, and non-billable consultant time) and their profit margin. Benefits for the consultant - both ordinary benefits such as medical and the company's part of social security and replacement of retention benefits such as bonuses and stock options. Paying the consultant enough that he can absorb "dead spots" between contracts, risk of them being long, and other fallout from the company's lack of interest in retaining him past a project's end. And a premium for the actual work because he's expected to be more expert in the field than those who take salaried positions rather than risk and succeed in the consulting market.
Many of these costs have equivalents that actually are paid for salaried personnel, but don't show up in the salary itself. For instance: Recruiting costs correspond to the consulting firm sales costs PLUS possibly the firm's recruiting costs to get the consultant onboard in the first place, but because consultants are onboard for less time the sales costs occur more often.
Right now consulting prices are depressed, due to a flood of laid-off hi-tech workers taking consulting positions at low rates as a stop-loss. But it looks to me like the government is still getting a bargain.
Last time I looked, "milk" was liquid secreted by blood-fed specialized glands for the nurishment of offspring.
Mamals happen to use glands on their chests that apparently evolved from sweat or scent glands.
Looks like birds, such as pigeons, use glands in their digestive tract that evolved from saliva or other digestive enzyme emitting glands (judging by the location).
In both cases the secretion is nourishing and white (no doubt due to the calcium content).
Looks like "pigeon milk" is "milk" by that definition.
No the summary is not correct. It did not happen "hours ago" from any reference frame.
Sure it did - in a reference frame moving from it toward us at nearly the speed of light. B-) "any" is a very strong word when you're talking about reference frames and relativity.
However it's obvious that they're talkiing about "hours ago plus the light lag from the distance", i.e. the timescale of the obervability of the event.
That's where a lot of renewable energy people hang out. (Among them is "Wild In Alaska", who built a wind turbine out of a scrap garbage disposal motor to power his pickup camper.)
Obvious choices for Alaska are:
- Wind power.
- Thermoelectric on exhaust from wood-burning house heating systems.
- Heat engines ditto. Sterling or steam. (Note that these are mainly experimental at this point. No commercial systems are available as far as I know for generation from waste heat at less than industrial size instalations.)
- Diesel generators running on biodiesel fuel (from food production waste) with exhaust heat scavenged for heating.
- Solar in SUMMER. All of these - along with related battery storage, control systems, house heating, energy conservation, etc., are discussed extensively on that board.
And most of them are impractical in much of Alaska.
Why are the Alaska schools hosting and promoting this? Alaska is NOT a good site for renewable energy: Extreme cold. Winter storms that can knock down, tear up, or ice up a wind turbine - in an environment where repair work is hazardous. Negligible to zero solar input for months when energy is most needed. Main available energy resources are wood, crude oil, natural gas, and animal fat. The price/performance ratio on virtually all renewable energy systems is even more horrendous there than in the contiguous forty-eight.
This sounds to me like the politically correct school administrators have run amok. Unless it is intended to teach them what they'll find if they move to other states.
I strongly recommend that you ALSO teach them that the current systems are not cost-effective in their area.
When the laws are so complex and convoluted that everybody is a criminal and lack of intent is no excuse, the police can bust whomever they want and MUST select. So the polity becomes an arbitrary tyranny and the people who chose which laws to enforce on whom become the dictators.
Petty tyrants love this situation and do their best to encourage it.
Look up the Ford Trimotor for starters. Also, see the Henry Ford Museum for some of the early radio beacon navigation equipment.
They also made the Lunar Landers (among the other products of Ford Aerospace).
However, if Ford were to STOP MAKING CARS in order to focus on aerospace it WOULD be as stupid as HP dropping the PC business to focus on IT services.
(Especially given the DISASTER that the company I was with at the time experienced when they were bought out and the "bigger fish" replaced the local IT department with HP contracted IT services. Given the level of competence I observed, I'm betting that the main Chinese competitor now has the entire set of design files and documents, along with all the business secrets, by now.)
As I understand it, both Open BTS and the Range Networks commercial appliance version of it handle the voice/text part of GPS but the IP/Internet data part is still under construction. Is that correct?
Woot.com is one of the sponsors of a conference I attend. A couple years back they began giving each attendee a box of random swag - with the company logo: WOOT! on the box.
When I brought it home after the conference and my wife saw it she couldn't stop laughing for several minutes.
She's one of the several hundred remaining speakers of Chinook Jargon - a west-coast American Indian trade language that has become an L1 on at least one multi-tribe reservation. It seems that WOOT-l'et (my phonetic approximation, not one of the canonical spellings) is a word in that language for penis.
I thought perpetual motion was settled a long time ago. The only way converting backlight to energy works is by stealing photons (effectively dimming the display),
An LCD display works like this:
- The back light emits light.
- The rear polarizer eats the half of it that isn't polarized a particular way, letting the other half through as polarized light . - A color filter eats the 2/3s of the light that is the wrong color for each dot.
- Liquid crystals in each dot rotate the polarization of the light by an amount that varies depending on how bright the dot should be.
- The front polarizer eats the fraction of the light that isn't supposed to be emitted.
This invention is about replacing the totally lossy front and maybe rear polarizers with something that uses the energy in the absorbed light to generate electricity, rather than wasting it as heat. Even if the backlight and generating polarizers were 100% efficient, you also replace the color filters with generating equivalents that were ALSO 100% efficient, and there were no other losses in things like the liquid crystals, you'd STILL have to supply the power for the light that actually gets out to form the image.
But with the back polarizer absorbing half of the emitted light ALL THE TIME and the front one absorbing up to a third of what's left when there are dark pixels, even a couple tens of percent efficiency will recycle useful amounts of power, extending battery life.
Far more significant is the half of the incident sun/room light that is absorbed by the front polarizer and the fraction that makes it through the color filters and liquid crystals to be absorbed by the back polarizer - or combine with the back light and be fractionally absorbed on the way back out. THAT is a major bonus on a sunny day. Your screen doubles as a big solar panel (at half efficiency) while still working as a screen.
Re:Modified, Harmless HIV Used
on
Cancer Cured By HIV
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
If I understand it correctly what they did was engineer a gene-tweaking organic machine by assembling the subsystems from HIV that enter the target immune system cells and reverse-transcribe an RNA payload with an unrelated payload to do what they want. The subsystems don't have to be purified from live virus, risking contamination with functional HIV: Instead they can be separately produced by such techniques as inserting the each of the desired HIV genes into another lifeform, such as E. coli, producing just one "working part".
If so this is not a "modified HIV strain, nor any lifeform at all. It's some pieces of a virus with a completely unrelated (except for the "insert me" tags) hunk of nucleic acid "data tape". No program from the virus is left at all, just its cellular machinery.
Given the target and the desired transformation, HIV was the logical virus to reverse-engineer for the moving parts.
Or, how long until big medicine gets their hands on it and makes it too expensive for the average cancer patient?
It's ALREADY too expensive for the average cancer patient. New treatments ALWAYS are. The trick is to get "big medicine" to invest in making it CHEAP ENOUGH for the average patient.
Most of the cost is convincing the FDA to let the new treatment be used. Much of that cost is doing enough research to convince bureaucrats that you haven't discovered a new Thalidomide. (They get dinged for flipper babies but not for millions of dead UNtreated patients.)
However, it would appear that once the HIV RNA has been reverse-transcribed to cDNA and integrated into the genome, then the approach presented in this paper would not work--i.e. if you have AIDS, this won't help you.
Won't CURE you, because it won't clean out the dormant virus. But if you're taking it when the virus activates it will kill off the affected cells. So taking it in an ongoing fashion should stop the effects of AIDS and gradually reduce the population of dormant infected cells as they become activated and then die.
Might be interesting to see if it could be combined with another drug to trigger the activation of dormant HIV (preferably activating just the virus, not the normal functions of uninfected cells). A couple rounds of that should clean out most of the dormant infection.
I'm not an immunologist/molecular biologist, but if this drug works by targeting the infected cells to eliminate the infection, then by the time an HIV-infection is apparent, you might as well target the whole human,
I'm not either, but this is how I understand it:
The HIV will only have infected a subset of the cells. The remainder are just fine. Full-blown AIDS occurs when enough of them have been infected that the immune system is working below par - at least partly because some of the cells reacting to a current infection are HIV infected and respond by releasing more HIV (compromising things further) rather than performing their normal function.
Kill off the infected ones and the immune system should be immediately improved (though not fully recovered) because there are still significant numbers of uninfected cells and the reactions to other infections will not amp up the HIV infection.
Of course if the patient is so close to gone that he needs to live in a bubble there's not much left. But (if I have it right) this drug wouldn't touch properly functioning cells so it's not going to make things worse even temporarily. (Except perhaps for other reactions to the dieoff of infected cells.O)
I believe it looks at th packet's TTL value. Traffic from the phone has one value and traffic originating elsewhere has that value -1.
If so that's easy to spoof (assuming initial value from the phone isn't the field max) by hacking the tethered device to start with a higher TTL.
You could also hack the phone to bump up the TTL of the toward-network forwarded packet - at the risk of immortalizing a looping packet (which is what TTL exists to prevent).
Ummm, yes, a lowish steady inflation IS a good thing. Without it, there's no incentive to continue investing money in the economy instead of under your mattress.
Inflation consists of printing more money and "charging" it by stealing the value from all the money already out there. It's a good thing only for the people who are first in line for the new money. For everybody else with savings or dollar-denominated assets it's a disaster - yet another hidden tax.
Of course if you can turn your savings into something stable, like gold, and be net in dollar-denominated debt, like with a big mortgage, it can be a big win. If we get 18 months of hyperinflation like the one in post-WWI Weimar Germany you'll be able to pay off your mortgage for the price of a slice of toast.
Would you prefer deflation? The last time that was arranged we called it The Great Depression.
Damn right I'd prefer deflation. Technology has been continually reducing the amount of labor and resources needed to make consumer goods, capital equipment, and other "stuff". The prices SHOULD be dropping like a rock, passing these savings on to the consumers and startups. Instead the money is artificially inflated, keeping the prices up and passing the savings, instead, to the bankers, government functionaries, and their cronies.
You need to stop reading Keynes and start reading von Mises and Hayek.
How do you come up with signals that not only constructively and destructively interfere in precisely the right spot in precisely the right way to deliver data to a device, but also for those same signals to simultaneously interfere at other points to deliver different data?
For each of the N partners you compute a signal that puts a null on all the N-1 OTHER partners but not on the partner of interest. That can be heard everywhere except near the other partners - and the one you're talking to is somewhere other than on top of the other N-1. Do this N times and add the results.
This takes a minimum of N separate antennas.
For reception, you use the same NxN amplitude/phase[antenna,partner] matrix to compute N virtual reception patterns, each with a null on all but one of the partners.
802.11n already does this, they call it "beam-forming". Cisco features it in their high-end access points, using multiple antennae to send the same payload but with varying phase shift, which recombine at the receiver to produce a stronger coherent wave.
Which is a variant on "steerable null" - a multi-antenna hack that lets the antennas at a cell site send out beams configured such that, at each active remote device paired with the site, the signals intended for all the OTHER active receivers cancel out. (Ditto with those coming FROM the remote devices to the cell: A combination of the multiple antennas' signals is computed for each remote terminal, in such a way that the signals from all the OTHER remote terminals cancel.)
This one seems to be a 3-D version of the above. Instead of a tight cluster of antennas at a site making beams with nulls pointed at all-but-one of the remote termals, it uses an array of synchronized transmitters to give each partner a signal distribution that has a dead spot on each of the other partners.
Both require (at least) as many cooperating antennas as remote partners, by the way. You can't generate more than one spectrum of signal from each antenna.
"And we should be denying patents on the vast majority of the most important inventions, since most seem to involve near-simultaneous invention." How the hell do we do that?
For starters, if another application comes in for essentially the same invention during the period between the first patent application and publication, it should produce the rebuttable presumption that the invention is obvious to one versed in the art, invalidate both, and be recorded as prior art to invalidate future applications. Rebutting the presumption would require one party to show that the other had stolen their technology.
(Aside: I think software and business method patents should not be granted, as separate issues. The above is directed toward fields where patents are appropriate, which are also suffering.)
The distinction between "Big" and "Little" Oil exists so that US politicians can go after major oil companies without endangering such oil company interests as Al Gore's family (Occidental Petroleum) and the Kennedy family trust. (I'm not sure whether the Bush family still has such interests also.)
Just FYI, Sky Broadband uses the same infrastructure as BT Broadband (both use BT OpenReach cabling). If you find BT laggy at peak times, you'll find Sky just the same.
If they're using Redback edge routers for the BRAS function (and I think they are) they can configure the metering separately for the BT and Sky customers using the virtual routing feature. As long as the link(s) from the DSLAM to the BRAS and the paths from the BRAS to the respective carriers' backbones aren't saturated, the two services don't interfere.
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What I would like to know is if this device can produces net energy over its lifetime after the total energy to produce and maintain it is taken into account
Umm, I hate to break it to you, but all devices use more energy than they produce
Yes, but he's concerned about the payback of the already-captured energy invested to capture more, not in the solar energy captured. There's a rumor going around that solar panels take more (caputred) energy to build than they ever produce - and these are less efficient becuase there are more lossy steps between sunlight and output.
The rumor, of course is bogus: Solar panels pay off manufacturing energy costs in well under a year.
Further: Much of the energy of their construction is low-quality heat (for things like melting glass and metals), not post-carnot-cycle pure electric power. You use this power in large, efficient, processes located where it's plentiful and cheap. You'd be nuts to burn electricity from solar panels to provide raw heat: If you must go solar for heat, a thermal system gets you several times as much power per square yard at far less cost.
But even if the panels never paid off the energy investment, the measure is an apples-oranges comparison: Most solar panels are used to deliver high-quality electricity at or near the point of consumption. So they're more about getting the power to the place it's needed than about capturing it. To compare them to grid power you'd have to count the energy cost of building and installing the site's share of the electrical grid: Smelting the metal for that transformer and those power lines, cutting down trees for the poles, melting sand for the insulators, etc. Then think about the other alternatives for such sites: Shipped-in batteries and fuel-driven generators are about all that's practical for most of 'em.
The cost of things like solar systems is a good summary measure of the human-impacting costs (labor, energy, and material, pollution from mining, consumption of land for industrial sites, use of money early rather than late, other opportunity costs, etc.) of their production. In areas with adequate sunlight, solar electric systems are currently past breakeven compared to grid power for new construction in remote sites (where running a grid connection costs thousands of dollars) and for small loads (like street signs, emergency phones, lawn lights, ...) If the price of quality UL-approved panels were down to about a buck per watt they'd beat grid power even in sunny urban areas. (About another factor of 3 to go last I looked.)
...let the off-gas float up a large hill through tubes, burn/redox the hydrogen for power generation, cool the exhaust, store the water at the top of the hill, let it return to the bottom of the hill at night to smooth out energy production...
The gravitational energy from pumping the water up the hill is several orders of magnitude less than the energy of separating the water into hydrogen and oxygen.
If you really want to use sunlight to pump hydro, just evaporate the water at the bottom of the hill and condense it at the top.
Same applies to the proposal by the comment author for using it to purify water. Sure, if you are already cracking the water and burning the stored gasses already you can also use the purified "exhaust" water for drinking supplies. But if all you want is to purify water, solar-powered distillation works quite well enough and you'll get a LOT more purified water.
When I look at DHS, I can't find a single area in which they are competent. They can't ... . What in hell CAN they do? Suddenly, they are in the business of issuing cyber security warnings?
They DID, a few years ago, issue a warning to businesses to migrate off Windows and other Microsoft products, due to their security flaws and the resulting vulnerability of the US private-sector infrastructure to attack.
Of course they managed to hide this warning under a bushel rather than pressure the exectuives to actually HEED it. (Did YOU hear about it before now? Even on Slashdot?)
It's called an air gap firewall. Don't connect shit to the Internet that has no business being connected to the Internet,
Not being connected to the Internet didn't keep STUXNET out of Iran's centrifuge SCADA systems. That propagated as a snearkernet virus from consultants' laptops to the machines on the air-gapped networkk which controlled and monitored the PLCs.
Back in 1965-66 a consultant talked with some college students, including me, about consulting. One thing he mentioned was a rule of thumb for computing a consulting rate.
For a middle-to-long-term consult the rule of thumb was one percent of an annual salary per day. This comes out to the billing rate being 2.5x the salary-only cost (assuming a 40 hour work week).
The multiplier covers a lot of stuff. Notable items include: The work done by the consulting firm (including sales, billing, carrying receivables, government forms, and non-billable consultant time) and their profit margin. Benefits for the consultant - both ordinary benefits such as medical and the company's part of social security and replacement of retention benefits such as bonuses and stock options. Paying the consultant enough that he can absorb "dead spots" between contracts, risk of them being long, and other fallout from the company's lack of interest in retaining him past a project's end. And a premium for the actual work because he's expected to be more expert in the field than those who take salaried positions rather than risk and succeed in the consulting market.
Many of these costs have equivalents that actually are paid for salaried personnel, but don't show up in the salary itself. For instance: Recruiting costs correspond to the consulting firm sales costs PLUS possibly the firm's recruiting costs to get the consultant onboard in the first place, but because consultants are onboard for less time the sales costs occur more often.
Right now consulting prices are depressed, due to a flood of laid-off hi-tech workers taking consulting positions at low rates as a stop-loss. But it looks to me like the government is still getting a bargain.
Last time I looked, "milk" was liquid secreted by blood-fed specialized glands for the nurishment of offspring.
Mamals happen to use glands on their chests that apparently evolved from sweat or scent glands.
Looks like birds, such as pigeons, use glands in their digestive tract that evolved from saliva or other digestive enzyme emitting glands (judging by the location).
In both cases the secretion is nourishing and white (no doubt due to the calcium content).
Looks like "pigeon milk" is "milk" by that definition.
No the summary is not correct. It did not happen "hours ago" from any reference frame.
Sure it did - in a reference frame moving from it toward us at nearly the speed of light. B-) "any" is a very strong word when you're talking about reference frames and relativity.
However it's obvious that they're talkiing about "hours ago plus the light lag from the distance", i.e. the timescale of the obervability of the event.
Also ask on www.fieldlines.com
That's where a lot of renewable energy people hang out. (Among them is "Wild In Alaska", who built a wind turbine out of a scrap garbage disposal motor to power his pickup camper.)
Obvious choices for Alaska are:
- Wind power.
- Thermoelectric on exhaust from wood-burning house heating systems.
- Heat engines ditto. Sterling or steam. (Note that these are mainly experimental at this point. No commercial systems are available as far as I know for generation from waste heat at less than industrial size instalations.)
- Diesel generators running on biodiesel fuel (from food production waste) with exhaust heat scavenged for heating.
- Solar in SUMMER.
All of these - along with related battery storage, control systems, house heating, energy conservation, etc., are discussed extensively on that board.
And most of them are impractical in much of Alaska.
Why are the Alaska schools hosting and promoting this? Alaska is NOT a good site for renewable energy: Extreme cold. Winter storms that can knock down, tear up, or ice up a wind turbine - in an environment where repair work is hazardous. Negligible to zero solar input for months when energy is most needed. Main available energy resources are wood, crude oil, natural gas, and animal fat. The price/performance ratio on virtually all renewable energy systems is even more horrendous there than in the contiguous forty-eight.
This sounds to me like the politically correct school administrators have run amok. Unless it is intended to teach them what they'll find if they move to other states.
I strongly recommend that you ALSO teach them that the current systems are not cost-effective in their area.
When the laws are so complex and convoluted that everybody is a criminal and lack of intent is no excuse, the police can bust whomever they want and MUST select. So the polity becomes an arbitrary tyranny and the people who chose which laws to enforce on whom become the dictators.
Petty tyrants love this situation and do their best to encourage it.
Look up the Ford Trimotor for starters. Also, see the Henry Ford Museum for some of the early radio beacon navigation equipment.
They also made the Lunar Landers (among the other products of Ford Aerospace).
However, if Ford were to STOP MAKING CARS in order to focus on aerospace it WOULD be as stupid as HP dropping the PC business to focus on IT services.
(Especially given the DISASTER that the company I was with at the time experienced when they were bought out and the "bigger fish" replaced the local IT department with HP contracted IT services. Given the level of competence I observed, I'm betting that the main Chinese competitor now has the entire set of design files and documents, along with all the business secrets, by now.)
As I understand it, both Open BTS and the Range Networks commercial appliance version of it handle the voice/text part of GPS but the IP/Internet data part is still under construction. Is that correct?
Woot.com is one of the sponsors of a conference I attend. A couple years back they began giving each attendee a box of random swag - with the company logo: WOOT! on the box.
When I brought it home after the conference and my wife saw it she couldn't stop laughing for several minutes.
She's one of the several hundred remaining speakers of Chinook Jargon - a west-coast American Indian trade language that has become an L1 on at least one multi-tribe reservation. It seems that WOOT-l'et (my phonetic approximation, not one of the canonical spellings) is a word in that language for penis.
I thought perpetual motion was settled a long time ago. The only way converting backlight to energy works is by stealing photons (effectively dimming the display),
An LCD display works like this:
- The back light emits light.
- The rear polarizer eats the half of it that isn't polarized a particular way, letting the other half through as polarized light
. - A color filter eats the 2/3s of the light that is the wrong color for each dot.
- Liquid crystals in each dot rotate the polarization of the light by an amount that varies depending on how bright the dot should be.
- The front polarizer eats the fraction of the light that isn't supposed to be emitted.
This invention is about replacing the totally lossy front and maybe rear polarizers with something that uses the energy in the absorbed light to generate electricity, rather than wasting it as heat. Even if the backlight and generating polarizers were 100% efficient, you also replace the color filters with generating equivalents that were ALSO 100% efficient, and there were no other losses in things like the liquid crystals, you'd STILL have to supply the power for the light that actually gets out to form the image.
But with the back polarizer absorbing half of the emitted light ALL THE TIME and the front one absorbing up to a third of what's left when there are dark pixels, even a couple tens of percent efficiency will recycle useful amounts of power, extending battery life.
Far more significant is the half of the incident sun/room light that is absorbed by the front polarizer and the fraction that makes it through the color filters and liquid crystals to be absorbed by the back polarizer - or combine with the back light and be fractionally absorbed on the way back out. THAT is a major bonus on a sunny day. Your screen doubles as a big solar panel (at half efficiency) while still working as a screen.
If I understand it correctly what they did was engineer a gene-tweaking organic machine by assembling the subsystems from HIV that enter the target immune system cells and reverse-transcribe an RNA payload with an unrelated payload to do what they want. The subsystems don't have to be purified from live virus, risking contamination with functional HIV: Instead they can be separately produced by such techniques as inserting the each of the desired HIV genes into another lifeform, such as E. coli, producing just one "working part".
If so this is not a "modified HIV strain, nor any lifeform at all. It's some pieces of a virus with a completely unrelated (except for the "insert me" tags) hunk of nucleic acid "data tape". No program from the virus is left at all, just its cellular machinery.
Given the target and the desired transformation, HIV was the logical virus to reverse-engineer for the moving parts.
How long until we never hear about this again?
Or, how long until big medicine gets their hands on it and makes it too expensive for the average cancer patient?
It's ALREADY too expensive for the average cancer patient. New treatments ALWAYS are. The trick is to get "big medicine" to invest in making it CHEAP ENOUGH for the average patient.
Most of the cost is convincing the FDA to let the new treatment be used. Much of that cost is doing enough research to convince bureaucrats that you haven't discovered a new Thalidomide. (They get dinged for flipper babies but not for millions of dead UNtreated patients.)
However, it would appear that once the HIV RNA has been reverse-transcribed to cDNA and integrated into the genome, then the approach presented in this paper would not work--i.e. if you have AIDS, this won't help you.
Won't CURE you, because it won't clean out the dormant virus. But if you're taking it when the virus activates it will kill off the affected cells. So taking it in an ongoing fashion should stop the effects of AIDS and gradually reduce the population of dormant infected cells as they become activated and then die.
Might be interesting to see if it could be combined with another drug to trigger the activation of dormant HIV (preferably activating just the virus, not the normal functions of uninfected cells). A couple rounds of that should clean out most of the dormant infection.
I'm not an immunologist/molecular biologist, but if this drug works by targeting the infected cells to eliminate the infection, then by the time an HIV-infection is apparent, you might as well target the whole human,
I'm not either, but this is how I understand it:
The HIV will only have infected a subset of the cells. The remainder are just fine. Full-blown AIDS occurs when enough of them have been infected that the immune system is working below par - at least partly because some of the cells reacting to a current infection are HIV infected and respond by releasing more HIV (compromising things further) rather than performing their normal function.
Kill off the infected ones and the immune system should be immediately improved (though not fully recovered) because there are still significant numbers of uninfected cells and the reactions to other infections will not amp up the HIV infection.
Of course if the patient is so close to gone that he needs to live in a bubble there's not much left. But (if I have it right) this drug wouldn't touch properly functioning cells so it's not going to make things worse even temporarily. (Except perhaps for other reactions to the dieoff of infected cells.O)
I believe it looks at th packet's TTL value. Traffic from the phone has one value and traffic originating elsewhere has that value -1.
If so that's easy to spoof (assuming initial value from the phone isn't the field max) by hacking the tethered device to start with a higher TTL.
You could also hack the phone to bump up the TTL of the toward-network forwarded packet - at the risk of immortalizing a looping packet (which is what TTL exists to prevent).
Ummm, yes, a lowish steady inflation IS a good thing. Without it, there's no incentive to continue investing money in the economy instead of under your mattress.
Inflation consists of printing more money and "charging" it by stealing the value from all the money already out there. It's a good thing only for the people who are first in line for the new money. For everybody else with savings or dollar-denominated assets it's a disaster - yet another hidden tax.
Of course if you can turn your savings into something stable, like gold, and be net in dollar-denominated debt, like with a big mortgage, it can be a big win. If we get 18 months of hyperinflation like the one in post-WWI Weimar Germany you'll be able to pay off your mortgage for the price of a slice of toast.
Would you prefer deflation? The last time that was arranged we called it The Great Depression.
Damn right I'd prefer deflation. Technology has been continually reducing the amount of labor and resources needed to make consumer goods, capital equipment, and other "stuff". The prices SHOULD be dropping like a rock, passing these savings on to the consumers and startups. Instead the money is artificially inflated, keeping the prices up and passing the savings, instead, to the bankers, government functionaries, and their cronies.
You need to stop reading Keynes and start reading von Mises and Hayek.
How do you come up with signals that not only constructively and destructively interfere in precisely the right spot in precisely the right way to deliver data to a device, but also for those same signals to simultaneously interfere at other points to deliver different data?
For each of the N partners you compute a signal that puts a null on all the N-1 OTHER partners but not on the partner of interest. That can be heard everywhere except near the other partners - and the one you're talking to is somewhere other than on top of the other N-1. Do this N times and add the results.
This takes a minimum of N separate antennas.
For reception, you use the same NxN amplitude/phase[antenna,partner] matrix to compute N virtual reception patterns, each with a null on all but one of the partners.
802.11n already does this, they call it "beam-forming". Cisco features it in their high-end access points, using multiple antennae to send the same payload but with varying phase shift, which recombine at the receiver to produce a stronger coherent wave.
Which is a variant on "steerable null" - a multi-antenna hack that lets the antennas at a cell site send out beams configured such that, at each active remote device paired with the site, the signals intended for all the OTHER active receivers cancel out. (Ditto with those coming FROM the remote devices to the cell: A combination of the multiple antennas' signals is computed for each remote terminal, in such a way that the signals from all the OTHER remote terminals cancel.)
This one seems to be a 3-D version of the above. Instead of a tight cluster of antennas at a site making beams with nulls pointed at all-but-one of the remote termals, it uses an array of synchronized transmitters to give each partner a signal distribution that has a dead spot on each of the other partners.
Both require (at least) as many cooperating antennas as remote partners, by the way. You can't generate more than one spectrum of signal from each antenna.
... wait, I couldn't produce a more obvious article than this...
The point of the shashdot article is not the obvious problems with the current patent system.
The point is the news about this information finally becoming visible to, and absorbed by, the policy makers.
"And we should be denying patents on the vast majority of the most important inventions, since most seem to involve near-simultaneous invention."
How the hell do we do that?
For starters, if another application comes in for essentially the same invention during the period between the first patent application and publication, it should produce the rebuttable presumption that the invention is obvious to one versed in the art, invalidate both, and be recorded as prior art to invalidate future applications. Rebutting the presumption would require one party to show that the other had stolen their technology.
(Aside: I think software and business method patents should not be granted, as separate issues. The above is directed toward fields where patents are appropriate, which are also suffering.)
The distinction between "Big" and "Little" Oil exists so that US politicians can go after major oil companies without endangering such oil company interests as Al Gore's family (Occidental Petroleum) and the Kennedy family trust. (I'm not sure whether the Bush family still has such interests also.)
Just FYI, Sky Broadband uses the same infrastructure as BT Broadband (both use BT OpenReach cabling). If you find BT laggy at peak times, you'll find Sky just the same.
If they're using Redback edge routers for the BRAS function (and I think they are) they can configure the metering separately for the BT and Sky customers using the virtual routing feature. As long as the link(s) from the DSLAM to the BRAS and the paths from the BRAS to the respective carriers' backbones aren't saturated, the two services don't interfere.