Who needs He3? B11 + p is is aneutronic. ( -> 3x He4, with the occasional neutron or other crud from side-reactions). The Alphas come out at well-enough defined energies that you can capture well over 80% of the fusion energy as DC at a couple megavolts by decelerating and capturing them.
Lots of B11 and H1 around. If Polywell, Focus, or some other ignition system works out we're home free.
Seriously though this is pathetic. $130million isn't shit It's a laughable sum for any kind of major research project...
But it's a tidy sum for a crony of the government administrator who decides who gets it.
And it's also a major boon to the crony who's actually trying to go to market - in competition with some non-crony who had to raise his capital himself. $130 million in free money is a big competitive advantage.
Let's bring out the Corps of Engineers' bulldozers and tilt the playing field - like about 45 degrees. ; THEN let the market decide. Yeah, right.
A great example of this is Mexico City. When the "highly elevated" radiation levels were talked about in Tokyo, and streets were largely deserted because of the scaremongering... radiation levels were approximately HALF of those in Mexico City at that same (normal) day.
One problem with that idea is that the cells of the body produce protective enzymes to intercept the free radicals caused by ionizing radiation and repair the DNA damage. They're not perfect but they're pretty good. And they are expensive for the cell to produce, so they are "inducable" - the cell detects the level of an ionizing radiation product and adjusts the production of the enzymes to keep it low - like a thermostat adjusting the air conditioner. (The sensor is actually a bit more exposed to ionizing radiation than the DNA it protects, so constant low-level exposure to ionizing radiation actually LOWERS things like cancer risks, by overproducing the enzymes.)
The problem is that it takes a long time for the inducible enzymes to be produced. So a sudden increase in ionizing radiation can do a bunch of damage before the system achieves the new equilibrium.
The OTHER problem is that some of the radioactive materials released are concentrated by biological processes. A special risk are the radioactive iodine isotopes, which the human body will concentrate on its own. Another is strontium-90, which is virtually indistinguishable chemically from calcium, concentrated by both land and sea life, and laid down in bones, where it irradiates the bone marrow rather than shielding it.
The local radiation readings tell you little about the material released into the ground water and ocean, and from there into the food chain. And the area is (of course) right at sea level rather than part way up a mountain range, so the people will have been experiencing a low background exposure and have a low level of protective inducible enzymes.
Americans like monosyllabic or abbreviated words wherever possible.
It's about quick clear communication, not just a fetish for monosyllables. Polishing things down to single syllables without obscuring them is the ideal. But a two- or three-syllable term that rolls from the tongue rather than twisting it, and that doesn't collide with something else, is quite acceptable.
Metric PREfixes a power of ten to the unit. This doesn't just lengthen the term. It also puts the designation of WHAT KIND of unit you mean at the end, rather than the beginning. Bad enough that you have to work through the count before you get to the unit in "United States customary" (NOT Imperial, by the way) units. With metric you also have to get past the power of ten before you find out what you're talking about. Notice that, when abbreviating metric units, they shorten differently: A kiloMETER is a "K" or "klick", for instance, while a kiloGRAM is a "key". The tendencies of language and the centrally-planned systematization are at odds.
Then there's the issue of scale: Imperial and US customary units are mainly human-sized. A pound, for instance, is something that you can hold in your hand, with just enough heft to give you the impression of weight, while a gram is an anonymous pebble that has to be scaled up by three orders of magnitude to be comparable (about 2.2 lb). Yet a litre is about a quart - a handy bottle size for serving four. (And a litre is a cubic DECImeter? Why isn't it a cubic METER? So much for consistency...)
Then there's the use of the decimal system when scaling. Convenient for doing arithmetic for scaling. But the cardinality of the human brain is about six, not ten. So the scaling also is not easily imagined. Meanwhile the common units jump in steps that take you from a human-scaled unit convenient for one purpose to one convenient for another: Inches and feet for measuring objects, miles (a thousand paces) for distance travelled. Quart, gallon, barrel - convenient sizes for trade in liquids. Peck and bushel for dry farm produce. And so on.
But those are just possible reasons for popular distaste for metric units. The core issue is freedom.
The metric system was IMPOSED by governments. The people of the US tend to resist such impositions. As was pointed out in other postings, Regan canned the Metric Board and let the market decide - which means let the people chose which they prefer. The people preferred to stick with the common units. So the common unit markings on food packaging grew big and the metric units grew small and hid inside parenthesis. The states stopped re-signing the roads and the car manufacturers marked the speedometers with MPH in big numbers and a little metric scale inside for reference. And so on.
Seems to me the FOSS ideology fits right in with the one that led to the people of the US sticking with common units.
Also: Nitrogen absorbs thermal neutrons and becomes radioactive carbon, which then reacts with oxygen to form radioactive carbon dioxide.
N14 + n -> C14 + p.
C14 halflife is 5730 years, emitting an electron and antineutrino and returning to N14. Not too hot, and the neutron flux isn't great with the reaction shut down. But it's hardly "inert".
I hope they took into account the possibility that they were exciting a mechanical resonance of the plate, which would cause it to vibrate and as a result occasionally be positioned differently and possibly intercept the neutrons at slightly higher or lower locations, corresponding to higher or lower energy.
Resonant modes of the plate would also be a function of frequency.
TFA says that the rebels wrested control of the infrastructure away from Kadaffi. However, I expect that Kadaffi's government has the equipment and know-how to monitor calls. Therefore, I wonder if the rebels' calls will end up being insecure.
If you'd read it more closely you'd have seen that this was much of the point of the exercise.
The original network, physically and logically, worked through a NOC in Tripoli and under Gadaffi's control. Yes they turned it off and jammed the signals - no doubt when spying on it was less effective than cutting it off. But a big part of bringing it back up was cutting the rebel-held equipment off from the Tripoli infrastructure and replacing that core with a new one that was under rebel control.
Assuming they got it right and don't have any leaks, all the traffic is now going through a satellite uplink in rebel-held territory and doesn't travel through Gadaffi-held territory. To tap it now Gadaffi's people would have to intercept and decode the satellite link or the individual cellphone-cell links, or make their own (probably physical) crack of the wire/fiber infrastructure in rebel-held areas.
Actually, I think it was somewhat disturbing that it took a month to get this communication system back online.
It wasn't a matter of "getting it back on line". Doing that would have routed all the calls through its hub which was in Gadhafi's hands.
What they were doing was reengineering the network, cutting off its original (physical!) connections and route to its original hub, obtaining and installing a replacement network operations infrastructure, cell phone database server, and links to out-of-country telecoms, hacking and installing a siezed database into the server, negotiating peering agreements, and bringing it all on line. All without any help from the (Chinese) manufacturer of the equipment, which stonewalled them.
This was NOT "plug the ethernet into a new hub".
Four weeks, of which one was sitting on their thumbs while the replacement equipment was hung up in customs? Sounds like they've got some FANTASTIC people doing the work.
I recognize them as "hackers" (in the old-school sense). They earned it big time. Hats off to 'em.
Maybe where you live only the poor take public transportation, but not every city is saddled with a crappy system.
I've been in exile to the San Francisco Bay area at the moment.
Back in the day I lived near enough Chicago (southeastern Michigan) to visit there from time to time. It was one of the few cities that had mass transit usable and safe enough that the better off would consider using it. A well designed system.
I considered mentioning in my post that Chicago might be an exception. But I left the area in '85 and didn't know if things had changed in the ensuing quarter century.
Given their gun bans and the resulting criminal field day, at least on the south side, I thought it might have. The news reports are consistent with that. But I've also seen how mainstream newsies systematically distort everything so that's no indicator.
If I'm not mistaken, though, it won not because it was video game music, but because it was released on an actual album and was actually good.
IMHO "actually good" is the understatement of the year. I looked up that music on youtube after the grammy award and it FLOORED me. And not just one version but:
- The official music/video version (of just the baba yatu song)
- The PBS special on the first live performance (including the "coronation" intro, TWO videos, and a duet). This is the version that won the Grammy.
- At least one of the user-generated alternate videos worked out with even better sync-to-the-music, and
- The Dubai Fountain display based on / inspired by it was also phenomenal (with several different youtube videos from different angles).
It's not just me that was impressed, too. Think about it: How good does a piece of work whose lyrics are a Swahili translation of the Lord's Prayer have to be to inspire a composition for the Dubai Fountain? (Even if you DO know that Islam claims Allah == Jehova, explicitly recognizes the bible as a form of "the book" and Christians as "people of the book", treats Jesus as their second most important prophet and predicts his second coming.)
I thought this was a reference to early sightings of over the horizon nuclear tests that needed to be suppressed, during the time of Oppenheimer.
I had been assuming the stories were a "second cover".
This is a psychological ploy allegedly used by security agencies to hide things that are really important and worth the effort. They set up two cover stories: The first cover story is public and something plausible. The second cover story is nutty and withheld, but evidence for it is planted. When somebody realizes that the first cover is a lie and digs deeper they encounter the planted evidence for the mind-numbingly wild second cover. Then they are placed in the position of either looking like a fruitcake or giving up. (After all, anything they dig up on the REAL story could also be another lie.)
If it is a second cover, the existence of such a memo in the archives could just be a leftover piece of the planted evidence.
As for what's behind the hypothetical second cover, an explanation released a few years back seems plausible: Balloon-lofted high-altitude drop tests of a predecessor to the mercury capsule reentry heat shield - which looked a lot like the contemporary depictions of flying saucers.
The Cold War was raging at the time and the early space program was military and extremely secret. So tests on the first cut at retrieving people and devices from orbit would logically be performed at a remote, highly-classified, military aircraft test site, with the agencies going to extreme lengths to cover the work from spies, just as they did with the Manhattan Project.
Didin't RTFA but I did watch the video. They claim 3X [is versus] 15%... 45% is an extrodinary claim but not theorectically impossible, even if it works out at 30-35%, the significant weight reduction should give it an advantage.
I did RTFA and their efficiency improvement comes largely from running the combustion in a detonation wave, raising the peak temperature and increasing the area of the carnot cycle graph. So going up to 45% is not unreasonable.
That would only be a 1.5x over the grandfather poster's highly optimized piston engine. But piston engines inherently limit the peak gas temperatures by wall conduction (and the necessity to avoid detonation waves which would quickly wear out the hardware). So it doesn't look impossible to me.
Another constraint that you don't mention is emissions.
Sorry. Lost it in an edit. (Emission testing software was part of the consulting I was doing, that got me into the engineering departments in question.)
Even if it meets all of your other criteria but can't meet air quality requirements it is worthless. I suspect that will be a problem with this proposed engine.
Actually they have an answer for that, if you visit the original dox and the wikipedia writeup:
- The rotating pulse-wave combustion chamber slings the unburned fuel in the near-wall boundary layer out into the still-hot exhaust stream, where its combustion is completed.
- The efficiency boost comes from running the combustion in a detonation wave, resulting in higher temperature and thus higher carnot cycle efficiency. Me interpolating: That makes for more NOx and less CO and unburned HCs. But reacting the NOx and the remaining CO and HCs into N and CO2 in a catalytic converter, with oxygen sensing feedback on mixture to get the balance right, is well developed technology.
33ish HP is more than enough for cruising and recharging. So using this for the prime mover power plant on a hybrid looks sweet. (Especially since it doesn't need a cooling system, doing all the heat management with the intake and exhaust gasses, and dispenses with a plethora of valving and cranking overhead. So the weight is way down.)
Seems to be an airmotor rather than a combustion engine.
Torque doesn't mean squat without either RPM or HP ratings, low RPM implies low HP even at high torque.
Low RPM with all that metal exposure to the working fluid implies rapid heat loss and inefficiency. (Improves efficiency for an airmotor, though, due to heating the air as it expands.)
As someone consulting in the auto industry at the time, I can tell you that the auto company engineering departments at the time - including the upper executives - were DESPERATE for ANYTHING that would give them another MPG within the emission and performance constraints. The federal regulations were draconian and tightening while the Japanese competition was whipping their butts - especially on the west coast and among they new generation which was setting its lifetime car-buying preferences.
If your granddad had something that would give it to them - even if it meant redesigning the power train and retiring an engine production line - they'd have been on it like a shot. It would have been in the labs and undergoing testing. If it proved even marginal it would have been in a "concept car" prototype at auto shows. And if it had performed well enough to be a significant improvement, manufacturable at reasonable cost, and causing a car to perform well enough that it would sell, they'd have put it on the market to see if the public would accept it.
The problem is that there are a HOST of constraints, besides raw efficiency, on what ends up in cars. You can't have a car that accelerates so poorly that it gets rear-ended by road-raged drivers. You can't have one that only gets good MPG at some particular speed range. You can't have one that stalls about a car length after a stop sign. You can't have one that doesn't run when the temperature is below 10 degrees farenheit. you can't have one that needs an engine replacement every 20,000 miles. And I could go on for pages. There was a BUNCH of stuff they knew at the time would be fantastic - like hybrids for instance. Batteries weren't up to it but flywheels were. But it couldn't be done reliably until control and extreme power electronics was good enough to do the job - and were just getting there now.
And it has to be buildable, reliably, for an affordable price. Have you ANY IDEA what a tiny cost difference means when you are making millions of units? Figuring out how to eliminate a single screw that costs five cents to buy and install, at the cost of living at the time, would pay for TWO FULL TIME ENGINEERS to figure out how to do it. A big-three company spent many millions developing a flash-boiler steam engine during that period. If they could have gotten the construction cost down to $75 per unit it would have been their new power plant. They could only get it down to about twice that, so it only saw a racing car and a handful of prototypes.
So I call bull.
If it's real, the patent has expired by now. Give us the patent number. If it's still enough of an improvement over modern engines, and the patent attorneys didn't totally obfuscate some "secret sauce", a power plant like that could still be worth pursuing and could be engineered from the patent description. And there are a lot of applications BESIDES the US big-three... two... one car companies who could use it.
"Nothing stops you throwing a 'smartphone' on a plan without cellular data and still using it to make calls and SMS."... if you [use] a phone that THEY consider a smartphone [...] they will automatically detect what kind of phone you [are using] and change your plan to a smartphone plan without telling you.
Sounds like smartphones need a "user agent switcher" feature, to let them masquerade as dumb phones when using no-data calling plans.
Well I'm not American so I wasn't aware [US telecom carriers mandate data plans for smartphone terminals, rather than being terminal-agnostic]. That's ridiculous. I buy a calling/data plan from my carrier, not my phone. What phone I choose to use on that plan is completely irrelevant and none of their business.
That's because the US laws are set up to encourage telecom cartels.
On one hand they keep hands off the contractual arrangements between the carriers and customers, on the stated theory that competition will drive the carriers to voluntarily write reasonable contracts.
On the other hand other regulations - especially those on access to radio bandwidth and the subsidized legacy landline infrastructure and rights-of-way - have had the effect of drastically limiting the number of competitors in any given area and erected barriers to entry for new competitors.
When the number of effective competitors is limited to two or so, while barriers to entry avoid "virtual competitors" - the risk that somebody will start up a new venture and undercut the existing players - market forces DON'T drive prices down and service up. Instead they encourage defacto price fixing and cartel formation - driven solely by market signals without need for any collusion.
The cartel-forming economics was built into the original cellular phone bandwidth allocation, where "competition" was deemed to be TWO carriers in any area and only two band slots were allocated. This has since been relaxed. But with the expiration of the antitrust barriers to the reformation of the national "phone companies" and their reconstitution (ala Terminator II in the case of the Bell system), a new competitor must be able to deploy nationally, simultaneously, to be an competitive with the incumbents.
After the "dot-com bust", where too many companies deployed simultaneously with "needs to get most of the traffic" business plans and the resulting shakeout cost investors billions, new players have difficulty getting investment capital with a "start a price war" business plan.
Isn't it remarkable how something that started as a trick to get around online profanity filters is on the verge of receiving official academic recognition?
(Or hypothesized law enforcement spyware...)
Not at all.
Many linguistic constructions, from slang to entire dialects, started as a way to communicate without being understood and attacked by an opposing group with power over the speakers.
I thought only correctly spelled words went into the dictionary?
Absolutely not. A dictionary attempts to document the language as it is actually used, not prescribe some standard for it. Different dictionaries concentrate on different parts of the language for different purposes. The OED's range is one of the broadest, as it tries to cover all variants of the English language and its entire history.
(Exceptions to this are languages (notably: French) which have a ruling body prescribing a single "correct" form.)
Standardized spelling and grammar, on the other hand, was something the education establishment in the United States attempted to impose. This has had limited success. Its main effect has been to promote the east-coast regional variant of the language as "correct" and that users of other variants do so because they are stupid or ignorant. This helps the self-proclaimed urban elites delude themselves - and others - that they are more intelligent and thus suited to rule.
As I recall the original thrust of 1337-speak was to attempt to avoid automated network keyword detectors (hypothetically operated by investigative and law enforcement agencies) by distorting the words so they were still readable (with some effort) but would be missed by simple word and phrase detection software. As such they were supposed to be continually warping.
Of course the distortions (both of symbol or symbol group substitution and word contraction and modification) quickly became sufficiently standardized that the original purpose was defeated. The practice continued as a shibboleth (a linguistic marker of social group membership) or as satire or self-satire. And a few of the constructions (such as 1337 / l33t) became sufficiently stable and commonly used to become persistent words in their own right.
(Or at least that's my impression, as someone who observed but didn't play along.)
In the case of leet / l33t / 1337, OED is just living up to its charter if it decides to include it.
Also the inverse-nth-power approsimations assume the radiation isn't absorbed by air at all (a good approximation for gamma, wildly pessimistic for beta)
Just outside the door levels are high; 200 meters away, levels are dropping off by inverse cube law.
This would be true if there was only a point source of radiation. But for a month now radionuclide particulate has issued from the reactors and is scattered around the countryside. There have been high levels of radiation measured on the ground many miles from the reactor.
Also, if the law in question were inverse SQUARE, not cube. (WIth something approximating a line source and being close to it compared to the distance to the ends, it would be inverse first power. With something approximating an area source and being close to it compared to the distance to the edges, it wouldn't fall off with distance AT ALL.)
Inverse cube applies to things like dipole fields, where you get increasing cancellation as the apparent angle between two opposite-sense sources decreases with increasing distances. Not at all applicable to (incoherent) particle radiation like this.
Also the inverse-nth-power approsimations assume the radiation isn't absorbed by air at all (a good approximation for gamma, wildly pessimistic for beta)
Some of the electronics (capacitors I think?) are made of paper and after all this time have dried out and are prone to catching fire.
You're thinking of electrolytic capacitors. These have one plate made of rolled up metal foil, the other of a conductive liquid, and a thin insulator made as a coating on the metal plate by electrochemical reaction between the metal and chemicals in the liquid, driven by the applied voltage. They don't dry out unless the seals fail. Minor defects in the insulating coating are healed by the current through them.
They're used mainly for power supply filtering, where you need a LOT of capacitance in a reasonably-sized package.
The problem you have heard about is that, if the set is left unpowered for a couple decades, the insulating coating degrades. If it is then switched back on with normal supply voltage, the coating is too thin to resist the applied voltage. It breaks down, large current is drawn, the liquid boils, and the can ruptures, releasing a jet of stinky crud or possibly a small detonation.
The cure is to initially apply a LOW voltage to a decades-idle set for a few hours, ramping it up to normal volatge over a day or so. This rebuilds the insulating coating and things then operate normally. A "variac" variable transformer between the line cord and the wall power is the usual tool for this.
Ceramic capacitors and foil/waxed-paper capacitors don't have this breakdown mode. They'll survive long shutdowns just fine (unless roaches eat the waxed paper versions or the device is stored in extreme heat that melts the wax). Their main failure mode is insulation puncture due to overvoltage spikes. Carbon and metal resistors also survive long shutdowns just fine, with failures mainly from overheating due to other flaws putting too much current through them.
Slashdot Mirror
Who needs He3? B11 + p is is aneutronic. ( -> 3x He4, with the occasional neutron or other crud from side-reactions). The Alphas come out at well-enough defined energies that you can capture well over 80% of the fusion energy as DC at a couple megavolts by decelerating and capturing them.
Lots of B11 and H1 around. If Polywell, Focus, or some other ignition system works out we're home free.
Seriously though this is pathetic. $130million isn't shit It's a laughable sum for any kind of major research project ...
But it's a tidy sum for a crony of the government administrator who decides who gets it.
And it's also a major boon to the crony who's actually trying to go to market - in competition with some non-crony who had to raise his capital himself. $130 million in free money is a big competitive advantage.
Let's bring out the Corps of Engineers' bulldozers and tilt the playing field - like about 45 degrees. ; THEN let the market decide. Yeah, right.
A great example of this is Mexico City. When the "highly elevated" radiation levels were talked about in Tokyo, and streets were largely deserted because of the scaremongering... radiation levels were approximately HALF of those in Mexico City at that same (normal) day.
One problem with that idea is that the cells of the body produce protective enzymes to intercept the free radicals caused by ionizing radiation and repair the DNA damage. They're not perfect but they're pretty good. And they are expensive for the cell to produce, so they are "inducable" - the cell detects the level of an ionizing radiation product and adjusts the production of the enzymes to keep it low - like a thermostat adjusting the air conditioner. (The sensor is actually a bit more exposed to ionizing radiation than the DNA it protects, so constant low-level exposure to ionizing radiation actually LOWERS things like cancer risks, by overproducing the enzymes.)
The problem is that it takes a long time for the inducible enzymes to be produced. So a sudden increase in ionizing radiation can do a bunch of damage before the system achieves the new equilibrium.
The OTHER problem is that some of the radioactive materials released are concentrated by biological processes. A special risk are the radioactive iodine isotopes, which the human body will concentrate on its own. Another is strontium-90, which is virtually indistinguishable chemically from calcium, concentrated by both land and sea life, and laid down in bones, where it irradiates the bone marrow rather than shielding it.
The local radiation readings tell you little about the material released into the ground water and ocean, and from there into the food chain. And the area is (of course) right at sea level rather than part way up a mountain range, so the people will have been experiencing a low background exposure and have a low level of protective inducible enzymes.
Americans like monosyllabic or abbreviated words wherever possible.
It's about quick clear communication, not just a fetish for monosyllables. Polishing things down to single syllables without obscuring them is the ideal. But a two- or three-syllable term that rolls from the tongue rather than twisting it, and that doesn't collide with something else, is quite acceptable.
Metric PREfixes a power of ten to the unit. This doesn't just lengthen the term. It also puts the designation of WHAT KIND of unit you mean at the end, rather than the beginning. Bad enough that you have to work through the count before you get to the unit in "United States customary" (NOT Imperial, by the way) units. With metric you also have to get past the power of ten before you find out what you're talking about. Notice that, when abbreviating metric units, they shorten differently: A kiloMETER is a "K" or "klick", for instance, while a kiloGRAM is a "key". The tendencies of language and the centrally-planned systematization are at odds.
Then there's the issue of scale: Imperial and US customary units are mainly human-sized. A pound, for instance, is something that you can hold in your hand, with just enough heft to give you the impression of weight, while a gram is an anonymous pebble that has to be scaled up by three orders of magnitude to be comparable (about 2.2 lb). Yet a litre is about a quart - a handy bottle size for serving four. (And a litre is a cubic DECImeter? Why isn't it a cubic METER? So much for consistency...)
Then there's the use of the decimal system when scaling. Convenient for doing arithmetic for scaling. But the cardinality of the human brain is about six, not ten. So the scaling also is not easily imagined. Meanwhile the common units jump in steps that take you from a human-scaled unit convenient for one purpose to one convenient for another: Inches and feet for measuring objects, miles (a thousand paces) for distance travelled. Quart, gallon, barrel - convenient sizes for trade in liquids. Peck and bushel for dry farm produce. And so on.
But those are just possible reasons for popular distaste for metric units. The core issue is freedom.
The metric system was IMPOSED by governments. The people of the US tend to resist such impositions. As was pointed out in other postings, Regan canned the Metric Board and let the market decide - which means let the people chose which they prefer. The people preferred to stick with the common units. So the common unit markings on food packaging grew big and the metric units grew small and hid inside parenthesis. The states stopped re-signing the roads and the car manufacturers marked the speedometers with MPH in big numbers and a little metric scale inside for reference. And so on.
Seems to me the FOSS ideology fits right in with the one that led to the people of the US sticking with common units.
"Nitrogen is an inert gas"
Not really. [Chemical reactivity.]
Also: Nitrogen absorbs thermal neutrons and becomes radioactive carbon, which then reacts with oxygen to form radioactive carbon dioxide.
N14 + n -> C14 + p.
C14 halflife is 5730 years, emitting an electron and antineutrino and returning to N14. Not too hot, and the neutron flux isn't great with the reaction shut down. But it's hardly "inert".
I hope they took into account the possibility that they were exciting a mechanical resonance of the plate, which would cause it to vibrate and as a result occasionally be positioned differently and possibly intercept the neutrons at slightly higher or lower locations, corresponding to higher or lower energy.
Resonant modes of the plate would also be a function of frequency.
TFA says that the rebels wrested control of the infrastructure away from Kadaffi. However, I expect that Kadaffi's government has the equipment and know-how to monitor calls. Therefore, I wonder if the rebels' calls will end up being insecure.
If you'd read it more closely you'd have seen that this was much of the point of the exercise.
The original network, physically and logically, worked through a NOC in Tripoli and under Gadaffi's control. Yes they turned it off and jammed the signals - no doubt when spying on it was less effective than cutting it off. But a big part of bringing it back up was cutting the rebel-held equipment off from the Tripoli infrastructure and replacing that core with a new one that was under rebel control.
Assuming they got it right and don't have any leaks, all the traffic is now going through a satellite uplink in rebel-held territory and doesn't travel through Gadaffi-held territory. To tap it now Gadaffi's people would have to intercept and decode the satellite link or the individual cellphone-cell links, or make their own (probably physical) crack of the wire/fiber infrastructure in rebel-held areas.
Imagine this, what if we set them up as a "democracy" and they all come out and vote in a government that ours HATES! Haha...oh the irony.
Didn't that already happen in Gaza with Hamas (for some value of "we")?
Actually, I think it was somewhat disturbing that it took a month to get this communication system back online.
It wasn't a matter of "getting it back on line". Doing that would have routed all the calls through its hub which was in Gadhafi's hands.
What they were doing was reengineering the network, cutting off its original (physical!) connections and route to its original hub, obtaining and installing a replacement network operations infrastructure, cell phone database server, and links to out-of-country telecoms, hacking and installing a siezed database into the server, negotiating peering agreements, and bringing it all on line. All without any help from the (Chinese) manufacturer of the equipment, which stonewalled them.
This was NOT "plug the ethernet into a new hub".
Four weeks, of which one was sitting on their thumbs while the replacement equipment was hung up in customs? Sounds like they've got some FANTASTIC people doing the work.
I recognize them as "hackers" (in the old-school sense). They earned it big time. Hats off to 'em.
Maybe where you live only the poor take public transportation, but not every city is saddled with a crappy system.
I've been in exile to the San Francisco Bay area at the moment.
Back in the day I lived near enough Chicago (southeastern Michigan) to visit there from time to time. It was one of the few cities that had mass transit usable and safe enough that the better off would consider using it. A well designed system.
I considered mentioning in my post that Chicago might be an exception. But I left the area in '85 and didn't know if things had changed in the ensuing quarter century.
Given their gun bans and the resulting criminal field day, at least on the south side, I thought it might have. The news reports are consistent with that. But I've also seen how mainstream newsies systematically distort everything so that's no indicator.
In Chicago, they had a really cheesy advertising campaign that had adverts plastered all over CTA trains and stations ...
So the target demographic for the product was riders of public transit?
If I'm not mistaken, though, it won not because it was video game music, but because it was released on an actual album and was actually good.
IMHO "actually good" is the understatement of the year. I looked up that music on youtube after the grammy award and it FLOORED me. And not just one version but:
- The official music/video version (of just the baba yatu song)
- The PBS special on the first live performance (including the "coronation" intro, TWO videos, and a duet). This is the version that won the Grammy.
- At least one of the user-generated alternate videos worked out with even better sync-to-the-music, and
- The Dubai Fountain display based on / inspired by it was also phenomenal (with several different youtube videos from different angles).
It's not just me that was impressed, too. Think about it: How good does a piece of work whose lyrics are a Swahili translation of the Lord's Prayer have to be to inspire a composition for the Dubai Fountain? (Even if you DO know that Islam claims Allah == Jehova, explicitly recognizes the bible as a form of "the book" and Christians as "people of the book", treats Jesus as their second most important prophet and predicts his second coming.)
I thought this was a reference to early sightings of over the horizon nuclear tests that needed to be suppressed, during the time of Oppenheimer.
I had been assuming the stories were a "second cover".
This is a psychological ploy allegedly used by security agencies to hide things that are really important and worth the effort. They set up two cover stories: The first cover story is public and something plausible. The second cover story is nutty and withheld, but evidence for it is planted. When somebody realizes that the first cover is a lie and digs deeper they encounter the planted evidence for the mind-numbingly wild second cover. Then they are placed in the position of either looking like a fruitcake or giving up. (After all, anything they dig up on the REAL story could also be another lie.)
If it is a second cover, the existence of such a memo in the archives could just be a leftover piece of the planted evidence.
As for what's behind the hypothetical second cover, an explanation released a few years back seems plausible: Balloon-lofted high-altitude drop tests of a predecessor to the mercury capsule reentry heat shield - which looked a lot like the contemporary depictions of flying saucers.
The Cold War was raging at the time and the early space program was military and extremely secret. So tests on the first cut at retrieving people and devices from orbit would logically be performed at a remote, highly-classified, military aircraft test site, with the agencies going to extreme lengths to cover the work from spies, just as they did with the Manhattan Project.
Didin't RTFA but I did watch the video. They claim 3X [is versus] 15% ... 45% is an extrodinary claim but not theorectically impossible, even if it works out at 30-35%, the significant weight reduction should give it an advantage.
I did RTFA and their efficiency improvement comes largely from running the combustion in a detonation wave, raising the peak temperature and increasing the area of the carnot cycle graph. So going up to 45% is not unreasonable.
That would only be a 1.5x over the grandfather poster's highly optimized piston engine. But piston engines inherently limit the peak gas temperatures by wall conduction (and the necessity to avoid detonation waves which would quickly wear out the hardware). So it doesn't look impossible to me.
Another constraint that you don't mention is emissions.
Sorry. Lost it in an edit. (Emission testing software was part of the consulting I was doing, that got me into the engineering departments in question.)
Even if it meets all of your other criteria but can't meet air quality requirements it is worthless. I suspect that will be a problem with this proposed engine.
Actually they have an answer for that, if you visit the original dox and the wikipedia writeup:
- The rotating pulse-wave combustion chamber slings the unburned fuel in the near-wall boundary layer out into the still-hot exhaust stream, where its combustion is completed.
- The efficiency boost comes from running the combustion in a detonation wave, resulting in higher temperature and thus higher carnot cycle efficiency. Me interpolating: That makes for more NOx and less CO and unburned HCs. But reacting the NOx and the remaining CO and HCs into N and CO2 in a catalytic converter, with oxygen sensing feedback on mixture to get the balance right, is well developed technology.
33ish HP is more than enough for cruising and recharging. So using this for the prime mover power plant on a hybrid looks sweet. (Especially since it doesn't need a cooling system, doing all the heat management with the intake and exhaust gasses, and dispenses with a plethora of valving and cranking overhead. So the weight is way down.)
Seems to be an airmotor rather than a combustion engine.
Torque doesn't mean squat without either RPM or HP ratings, low RPM implies low HP even at high torque.
Low RPM with all that metal exposure to the working fluid implies rapid heat loss and inefficiency. (Improves efficiency for an airmotor, though, due to heating the air as it expands.)
As someone consulting in the auto industry at the time, I can tell you that the auto company engineering departments at the time - including the upper executives - were DESPERATE for ANYTHING that would give them another MPG within the emission and performance constraints. The federal regulations were draconian and tightening while the Japanese competition was whipping their butts - especially on the west coast and among they new generation which was setting its lifetime car-buying preferences.
If your granddad had something that would give it to them - even if it meant redesigning the power train and retiring an engine production line - they'd have been on it like a shot. It would have been in the labs and undergoing testing. If it proved even marginal it would have been in a "concept car" prototype at auto shows. And if it had performed well enough to be a significant improvement, manufacturable at reasonable cost, and causing a car to perform well enough that it would sell, they'd have put it on the market to see if the public would accept it.
The problem is that there are a HOST of constraints, besides raw efficiency, on what ends up in cars. You can't have a car that accelerates so poorly that it gets rear-ended by road-raged drivers. You can't have one that only gets good MPG at some particular speed range. You can't have one that stalls about a car length after a stop sign. You can't have one that doesn't run when the temperature is below 10 degrees farenheit. you can't have one that needs an engine replacement every 20,000 miles. And I could go on for pages. There was a BUNCH of stuff they knew at the time would be fantastic - like hybrids for instance. Batteries weren't up to it but flywheels were. But it couldn't be done reliably until control and extreme power electronics was good enough to do the job - and were just getting there now.
And it has to be buildable, reliably, for an affordable price. Have you ANY IDEA what a tiny cost difference means when you are making millions of units? Figuring out how to eliminate a single screw that costs five cents to buy and install, at the cost of living at the time, would pay for TWO FULL TIME ENGINEERS to figure out how to do it. A big-three company spent many millions developing a flash-boiler steam engine during that period. If they could have gotten the construction cost down to $75 per unit it would have been their new power plant. They could only get it down to about twice that, so it only saw a racing car and a handful of prototypes.
So I call bull.
If it's real, the patent has expired by now. Give us the patent number. If it's still enough of an improvement over modern engines, and the patent attorneys didn't totally obfuscate some "secret sauce", a power plant like that could still be worth pursuing and could be engineered from the patent description. And there are a lot of applications BESIDES the US big-three ... two ... one car companies who could use it.
"Nothing stops you throwing a 'smartphone' on a plan without cellular data and still using it to make calls and SMS." ... if you [use] a phone that THEY consider a smartphone [...] they will automatically detect what kind of phone you [are using] and change your plan to a smartphone plan without telling you.
Sounds like smartphones need a "user agent switcher" feature, to let them masquerade as dumb phones when using no-data calling plans.
Well I'm not American so I wasn't aware [US telecom carriers mandate data plans for smartphone terminals, rather than being terminal-agnostic]. That's ridiculous. I buy a calling/data plan from my carrier, not my phone. What phone I choose to use on that plan is completely irrelevant and none of their business.
That's because the US laws are set up to encourage telecom cartels.
On one hand they keep hands off the contractual arrangements between the carriers and customers, on the stated theory that competition will drive the carriers to voluntarily write reasonable contracts.
On the other hand other regulations - especially those on access to radio bandwidth and the subsidized legacy landline infrastructure and rights-of-way - have had the effect of drastically limiting the number of competitors in any given area and erected barriers to entry for new competitors.
When the number of effective competitors is limited to two or so, while barriers to entry avoid "virtual competitors" - the risk that somebody will start up a new venture and undercut the existing players - market forces DON'T drive prices down and service up. Instead they encourage defacto price fixing and cartel formation - driven solely by market signals without need for any collusion.
The cartel-forming economics was built into the original cellular phone bandwidth allocation, where "competition" was deemed to be TWO carriers in any area and only two band slots were allocated. This has since been relaxed. But with the expiration of the antitrust barriers to the reformation of the national "phone companies" and their reconstitution (ala Terminator II in the case of the Bell system), a new competitor must be able to deploy nationally, simultaneously, to be an competitive with the incumbents.
After the "dot-com bust", where too many companies deployed simultaneously with "needs to get most of the traffic" business plans and the resulting shakeout cost investors billions, new players have difficulty getting investment capital with a "start a price war" business plan.
Isn't it remarkable how something that started as a trick to get around online profanity filters is on the verge of receiving official academic recognition?
(Or hypothesized law enforcement spyware...)
Not at all.
Many linguistic constructions, from slang to entire dialects, started as a way to communicate without being understood and attacked by an opposing group with power over the speakers.
I thought only correctly spelled words went into the dictionary?
Absolutely not. A dictionary attempts to document the language as it is actually used, not prescribe some standard for it. Different dictionaries concentrate on different parts of the language for different purposes. The OED's range is one of the broadest, as it tries to cover all variants of the English language and its entire history.
(Exceptions to this are languages (notably: French) which have a ruling body prescribing a single "correct" form.)
Standardized spelling and grammar, on the other hand, was something the education establishment in the United States attempted to impose. This has had limited success. Its main effect has been to promote the east-coast regional variant of the language as "correct" and that users of other variants do so because they are stupid or ignorant. This helps the self-proclaimed urban elites delude themselves - and others - that they are more intelligent and thus suited to rule.
As I recall the original thrust of 1337-speak was to attempt to avoid automated network keyword detectors (hypothetically operated by investigative and law enforcement agencies) by distorting the words so they were still readable (with some effort) but would be missed by simple word and phrase detection software. As such they were supposed to be continually warping.
Of course the distortions (both of symbol or symbol group substitution and word contraction and modification) quickly became sufficiently standardized that the original purpose was defeated. The practice continued as a shibboleth (a linguistic marker of social group membership) or as satire or self-satire. And a few of the constructions (such as 1337 / l33t) became sufficiently stable and commonly used to become persistent words in their own right.
(Or at least that's my impression, as someone who observed but didn't play along.)
In the case of leet / l33t / 1337, OED is just living up to its charter if it decides to include it.
Also the inverse-nth-power approsimations assume the radiation isn't absorbed by air at all (a good approximation for gamma, wildly pessimistic for beta)
Make that "... wildly pessimistic for alpha."
Just outside the door levels are high; 200 meters away, levels are dropping off by inverse cube law.
This would be true if there was only a point source of radiation. But for a month now radionuclide particulate has issued from the reactors and is scattered around the countryside. There have been high levels of radiation measured on the ground many miles from the reactor.
Also, if the law in question were inverse SQUARE, not cube. (WIth something approximating a line source and being close to it compared to the distance to the ends, it would be inverse first power. With something approximating an area source and being close to it compared to the distance to the edges, it wouldn't fall off with distance AT ALL.)
Inverse cube applies to things like dipole fields, where you get increasing cancellation as the apparent angle between two opposite-sense sources decreases with increasing distances. Not at all applicable to (incoherent) particle radiation like this.
Also the inverse-nth-power approsimations assume the radiation isn't absorbed by air at all (a good approximation for gamma, wildly pessimistic for beta)
Some of the electronics (capacitors I think?) are made of paper and after all this time have dried out and are prone to catching fire.
You're thinking of electrolytic capacitors. These have one plate made of rolled up metal foil, the other of a conductive liquid, and a thin insulator made as a coating on the metal plate by electrochemical reaction between the metal and chemicals in the liquid, driven by the applied voltage. They don't dry out unless the seals fail. Minor defects in the insulating coating are healed by the current through them.
They're used mainly for power supply filtering, where you need a LOT of capacitance in a reasonably-sized package.
The problem you have heard about is that, if the set is left unpowered for a couple decades, the insulating coating degrades. If it is then switched back on with normal supply voltage, the coating is too thin to resist the applied voltage. It breaks down, large current is drawn, the liquid boils, and the can ruptures, releasing a jet of stinky crud or possibly a small detonation.
The cure is to initially apply a LOW voltage to a decades-idle set for a few hours, ramping it up to normal volatge over a day or so. This rebuilds the insulating coating and things then operate normally. A "variac" variable transformer between the line cord and the wall power is the usual tool for this.
Ceramic capacitors and foil/waxed-paper capacitors don't have this breakdown mode. They'll survive long shutdowns just fine (unless roaches eat the waxed paper versions or the device is stored in extreme heat that melts the wax). Their main failure mode is insulation puncture due to overvoltage spikes. Carbon and metal resistors also survive long shutdowns just fine, with failures mainly from overheating due to other flaws putting too much current through them.