But if one copyrights the fixes or upgrades to a software work, it gives them standing to claim that an equivalent fix or upgrade infringes their copyright.
Similarly, copyrighting a "compilation" of a set of otherwise free works - for instance, a Linux distribution - would give the holder of that copyright standing to claim that another, later, linux distribution was an infringing work derived from theirs.
Even if the claim is provably bogus the ability to assert it in court, especially in combination with the draconian penalties for infringement in current copyright law, is a major burden on the targets of such claims.
Copernicus claimed that the sun, and not the earth, was the center of the universe.
I was under the impression that his claim was a smaller - and more nearly correct - one: That the Earth orbited the Sun rather than the other way around, not that the sun was the center of the entire universe.
(Though it does a good job of approximating the center of the collection of readily observable heavenly bodies distinguishable from the "fixed stars".)
Does anyone have a link that would disambiguate his claim between "Earth orbits Sun" and "Sun is the center of the universe."?
Unfortunately, part of the structure of copyright law is its explicit recognition that a game of whack-a-mole is impractical as an enforcement tool if damages are limited to the actual damages from the particular infringement that is caught and successfully prosecuted - because only a tiny fraction of those infringing will be caught. So it provides a draconian minimum penalty to serve as a deterrent and to help make up for the losses on the moles that are missed.
Whether this is the right thing to do is another issue. But because this punitive function was explicitly contemplated in the structure of the law it will make arguments that the penalties are excessive more difficult.
Heh. Described a different copyright problem than I named.
Compilation copyrights are copyrights on collections of otherwise free (i.e. public-domained) works. A bad guy could also get a copyright on a piece of freed software by including it with several other pieces in a distribution and copyrighting that.
Both this and copyrights on derived works based on a public-domain work are copyright recapture. Both are defended against by open licenses built on copyright. And both cease to be a problem if copyright goes away.
No one in their right mind on Slashdot should want to abolish copyright. As authors of free software under licenses like the GPL, we actually depend on copyright law to keep our creations free.
But what we're keeping them free from is mainly compilation copyrights.
The problem is that software couldn't be safely released into the public domain because somebody else could fix a bug or make a useful mod, copyright the fix or upgrade, and everybody else (including the original author) are hosed. They can't fix or upgrade it in the same way themselves without being in trouble. So putting software in the public domain means losing, not just control of its future (which is OK), but possibly the use of future versions (which is not).
GPL and other "free" licenses head this off by keeping the copyright alive, using it as a bludgeon to prevent others from capturing the freed software, while allowing its use by those who agree to leave it free, including its future versions.
But while killing coypyright would kill free licenses, it would also kill the thing they were created to prevent. Yes you wouldn't be able to use the copyright underlying the license to force somebody who didn't distribute the upgrade source to chose between releasing it or stopping distribution of the object (and paying big penalties). But then he couldn't use copyright to keep you from reverse-engineering his object code and distributing equivalent source, either. B-) With the original problem solved we could dispense with open licenses and some of their additional downsides (such as mutual incompatibility).
(Granted GPL has since been upgraded to provide some protection against patents, which WOULD be lost. But that's a kludge providing very limited protection. Meanwhile software patents are being attacked separately.)
= = = =
Having said all that:
My own opinion is that copyright (with reasonable term, without a ban on reverse-engineering, and without junk like "look and feel", "interface operation is a 'performance'", and "similar function is a derived work") is the right protection for software. It bans straight copying, giving adequate time for original developers to get a product established in a market before clones can appear and imposes adequate development costs on cloners, without setting patent-style boobytraps for others who independently develop the same ideas.
... As he cycles from village to village the bike-mounted machine associates with the local machine and UUCP does its usual magic, transferring mail, files, and download requests....
[Citation needed]
A simple google search for "uucp bicycle motorcycle wifi" brought up a number of such things.
One was the "motoman" project, which is essentially what I described but with mororcycles in Cambodia.
Here's a page in the OLPC project Wiki the motoman page on the OLPC project Wiki, which gives this and several other links to info on it.
I understand that UUCP mailnet is ALREADY in use in Africa in a very interesting form: - Villages have a WiFi-enabled machine to exchange mails and files with the outside world.
[Citation needed]
Sorry. Heard about it at a conference a couple years ago by one of the participants.
I still have several names registered with the UUCP Mapping Project as of their shutdown (freezing the namespace).
Some of them still exchange mail via UUCP, too. Both with each other and the rest of the net. B-)
(In fact one of those rest-of-the-net links was down for a while and came back up right after McColo was cut off. B-> )
= = = =
Running mailing lists with a periodic UUCP link in the path has an additional side-effect: It limits the traffic explosion from mail loops that are not detected to a manageable volume, giving the admin time to shut down the offending address.
= = = =
I understand that UUCP mailnet is ALREADY in use in Africa in a very interesting form:
- Villages have a WiFi-enabled machine to exchange mails and files with the outside world.
- The local mail carrier has a bicycle with a WiFi-enabled, battery-powered machine with a decently large disk.
- As he cycles from village to village the bike-mounted machine associates with the local machine and UUCP does its usual magic, transferring mail, files, and download requests. (Don't know if they also run netnews groups on it...
- One of the machines on his route has internet connectivity and transfers the mail, files, and download requests to the rest of the world.
All with legacy protocols doing what they always did. And he doesn't even have to stop pedaling. B-)
However I've seen the distinction made as described in the homebrew power community - generally when discussing excitation power lossage and the advantages of magnetos over excited generators.
And I'm sure that, if one of us were to bring it up there, some of the community members would also claim that magnetos/PMGs ARE generators. Then we could have at least as lively a discussion as we're having on Slashdot. B-)
By the way: I've also seen a distinction made between "alternators" and "generators" in the automotive industry, where "generators" are DC machines with the output windings on the rotor and commutators for rectification, while alternators put the output windings on the stator and use diodes.
English is a rich language and different, even if related, technical communities use it differently. (Example: "field" as used in physics and electrical engineering vs. mathematics. Similarly: sqrt(-1) being named "i" in math and "j" in electronics. B-) )
This is just another maximum power point controller.
Some work by using a switching regulator to change the voltage/current ratio.
Some work by switching coil arrangements on the magneto to "shift gears" for efficient operation in more than one range of wind speeds. (Delat/Y switching is an example of this, giving two "gears".)
This appears to be the second approach with a large number of "gears" in the "transmission".
am i the only one worried that with a boom in windfarms, the drag on the earth's rotation will increase, slowing it and lengthening the day, making me stay at work *that* much longer?
With magnetos the voltage goes up with the RPM. In a simple direct drive mill with no pitch adjustment the RPM (for a given efficiency) goes with the wind speed. Operating above the ideal RPM cuts your torque, too far below it also looses you torque by causing the blades to go into aerodynamic stall.
In a battery charging application there is no current, and no load torque, on the blades until the RPM is high enough that the voltage from the genny is above "cutin", the sum of the battery voltage and the diode drop. Above that wind speed the current rises, the torque resistance rises, and the RPM no longer rises as fast as the wind speed. The ratio of RPM to wind speed drops as the wind speed rises further, passing through the efficient ratio and working down toward stall and virtually complete power loss. (If the mill, wiring, and battery guts were all superconductors the mill would freewheel up to the cuting speed and then never go any higher. Due to resistance the RPM still ramps up, though more gradually than wind speed, as voltage working against resistance ramps current.)
A mill with no further way to adjust things can be "tuned" for low cutin - getting some power from low winds but stalling and losing lots of opportunity to generate high power in moderate to high winds. It can be tuned for high cutin and lots of power in storms but nothing in low and normal winds. Usually it's tuned to grab as much as practical in typical winds and lose out in low winds and storms.
A "maximum power point controller" adjusts the load to get the most out of a range of winds. Typically this consists of a "buck converer" on a mill tuned for low cutin, which lets the mill run at the efficient RPM for the wind and trades away the excess voltage for higher current, getting enough extra charging to more than pay for its own losses. It's a hunk of potentially failing electronics.
Switching coils to different current/voltage tradeoffs can do a similar variable tuning with considerably simpler circuitry and less failure risk. (A typical arrangement is delta/Y conversion of a three-phase alternator, which just about doubles the output in high winds - but causes a sudden jump in torque load on the spinning blades and a spike in current and resistive heating when it "downshifts" to delta.)
This looks like they have a LOT of coils to switch around, allowing fine enough adjustment to be more practical than delta/Y without the high-frequency electronic switching and failure modes of a buck converter.
And yes they would want to pick some small amount of power at low wind speeds (it's better than nothing) and add more coils as the wind speed rises. Power goes up with cube of wind speed but RPM, and thus magneto voltage, with the first power. So torque (produced by load currents) goes up with the square. At higher winds it's simpler to add more electromagnets dragging on the rotating permanant magnets than to increase the current in each of them with the square of the voltage rather than the first power of ohm's law.
Whoever added the tag has no clue. This IS a generator.
It generates. So loosely speaking it's a generator.
But there is a terminology distinction when you get into TYPES of things that generate. They all have coils and a field in relative motion to create the output voltage. But a "generator" creates the field with electromagnets (generally using more coils driven by an external electrical source, a side-effect of the current in the output coils, or otherwise by pulling power from the input shaft) as opposed to a "magneto" which uses permanent magnets.
For wind generators this is a significant distinction: The field coils can gobble up a lot of power - and more when the wind is lower, when you have less (or none) to spare. Paying for that up front, by shelling out for somewhat pricey permanent magnets, is (at least for small mills) far better than paying as-you-go by pulling power off the top of your output. With magnetos you get it all. Thus the recent availability of high-strength neodymium magnets has led to a revolution in magneto design.
But with magnetos you have a harder time controlling the "wild AC" from the wind-speed variation: With generators you can adjust the field to regulate them. With magnetos you're stuck with the output voltage you get, driven by the RPM. This is a problem: The power available from the wind with a given rotor size varies with the third power of the wind speed. But (assuming you don't vary the blade pitch or have a variable transmission between the turbine and the magneto) the RPM and voltage go with the first power. That means the available current goes up with the second power of wind speed and the resistive heating in the coils with the FOURTH power.
Burnout is the limit on your output. So there are a number of ways of matching a wind turbine to a load and avoiding self-destruction. Some of them work by throwing away a lot of power in high winds that it would be nice to keep.
The sound was done by the Foley man going through the same motions as each actor, holding a directional microphone, in a room with a loudspeaker in the position corresponding to the camera. The speaker played a continuous drone with a lot of harmonics.
Result: The microphone picked up a sound corresponding to what would be heard at the camera position if the lightsaber emitted such a buzz with the higher frequency components directed progressively more tipward.
I'd assumed, from the movies, that there had to be an advantage. And that the advantage was it would cut through stuff that was proof against most other weapons.
Sample: The elephant-inspired, heavily-armored, large Imperial Walkers that were bouncing shots from ground-based heavy artillery. One fast swipe through the belly from a lightsaber and one of 'em comes apart in spectacular fashion.
... often in circumstances where some "bad guys" get to pick over the remains. And there were quite a few Jedi in the past.
It's well established in the StarWars universe that there is a big-time market in surplus/junk tech - especially items that were stolen or otherwise have chancy ownership history.
So it seems reasonable that, along with other material picked off the losers on battlefields that isn't regulation for the winners, there would be quite a number of them for sale on various "military surplus" markets.
Also Jedi weapons get handed down in families and the offspring don't necessarily become Jedi, so they may get lost in attics, sold (by mistake or otherwise) at housecleanings or estate sales,... Additional (or used/borrowed) weapons are used for training before the "young Padawan" makes his own. So if the trainee is using a hand-me-down he'll retire it when he makes his own.
Having learned to make them and making at least one for himself, why would a Jedi stop? Might be a good idea to have a spare, in case of trouble or burnout. Tinker up a variant design for better power/battery life/balance/handling characteristics. We've seen single-ended ones used in saber styles and a double-ended one used in a style like a quarterstaff. But there are two-sword styles in both Europe and Japan. Why shouldn't a Jedi adopt such a style? All these would make for more lightsabers lying about to end up on the market.
(And that's assuming the Jedi don't make 'em for fundraisers. B-) )
I've been reading since the early '50s about the imminent personal flying craft and similar wonders in such august publications as PopSci, Popular Mechanics, etc. I grow weary.
Yeah.
But I've also been reading about flat TV screens for as long, too. (They had a cute one back then: Neon switches, crosspoint matrix, electroluminescent elements at the crosspoints for scan, then transparent conductor, opaque light-controlled-resistor, and another layer of electroluminescent matterial for the screen light source. Plastic "circuit board" so you could wrap it around a pencil.)
It took 'em half a century to get (several types of) TV quality flat screens. And they're all STILL more expensive than CRTs. (Maybe now that the LCD price fixing conspiracy is broken that will FINALLY change.)
Ditto "dynabook". Ditto microscopic robots - some circulating in the blood stream - for microsurgery and/or immune system assist against diseases. Ditto cloned replacement teeth. Ditto age-retarding-or-reversing drugs.
A lot of stuff is FINALLY STARTING to happen. But I've been waiting a LONG time for it. And at this rate maybe I'll get to see prototypes of some of it by the time I retire, but still won't get the benefit of playing with the toys. B-(
Ok, so the grey goo will only consume all organic matter on Earth, instead of all matter. How does this make it any safer?
Or start out that way. So it's a nanotechnnological self-replicating "flesh eating bacterium" - powered, like bacteria, by oxidizing the flesh it's eating, but running faster - and built of fullerines and the like so the immune system is outclassed.
Doesn't have to be nanoscale, either. Microscale works fine. A plague of carnivorous locusts with diamond tipped mandibles. (Or army ants, ditto.) Again made of sterner and/or faster stuff than the biosphere is used to dealing with, so the old solutions don't work - or don't work in time.
Once the organics are out of the way, if there are self-powered replicators that can work on alternate sources of power they can continue the process. (But the stuff that depended on organics is probably gone.) You end up either with everything dead or the only thing left "alive" being the post-organic stuff. (And if it can be carried on solar wind to other planets and solar systems, arriving in functional form, it may end up doing the same to the rest of the galaxy and beyond.)
If it's simple enough and the redundancy is high enough it doesn't evolve. Which, an acquaintance once claimed, "is even worse than the extinction of all organic life. Because, in addition, nothing else interesting happens for the rest of time."
All I'm wondering is why it took so long? They are in the business of selling hardware, and if we can find a new use for it, then we're more likely to purchase AMD/ATI's hardware.
A new driver that would turn a consumer-grade high-end video card into an easy-to-use midrange supercomputer? More powerful than the stuff the US nuclear weapon programs were using when they designed the last batch of bombs?
Maybe they were waiting for a congress and president that they don't think will declare their graphics cards to be weapon manufacturing tools and apply export controls. B-)
Just how many times can one be convicted for one crime? Isn't there a law against this?
As I read TFA they were going after him for a DIFFERENT crime they believe he ALSO participated in.
Now maybe they are more interested in catching him because they think he got off too lightly for the half-life code leak. But if they manage to bust and try him they'll be trying him on this OTHER crime.
Being convicted of one crime doesn't give you a free pass on as many others as you want to commit.
Slashdot Mirror
I still don't understand why the stock price is so high ... What is keeping it up?
a) People making very long-shot bets.
b) People who didn't "do their due diligence" and are buying it without understanding the real situation.
I agree with you on what these copyrights cover.
But if one copyrights the fixes or upgrades to a software work, it gives them standing to claim that an equivalent fix or upgrade infringes their copyright.
Similarly, copyrighting a "compilation" of a set of otherwise free works - for instance, a Linux distribution - would give the holder of that copyright standing to claim that another, later, linux distribution was an infringing work derived from theirs.
Even if the claim is provably bogus the ability to assert it in court, especially in combination with the draconian penalties for infringement in current copyright law, is a major burden on the targets of such claims.
Copernicus claimed that the sun, and not the earth, was the center of the universe.
I was under the impression that his claim was a smaller - and more nearly correct - one: That the Earth orbited the Sun rather than the other way around, not that the sun was the center of the entire universe.
(Though it does a good job of approximating the center of the collection of readily observable heavenly bodies distinguishable from the "fixed stars".)
Does anyone have a link that would disambiguate his claim between "Earth orbits Sun" and "Sun is the center of the universe."?
Hear hear.
Unfortunately, part of the structure of copyright law is its explicit recognition that a game of whack-a-mole is impractical as an enforcement tool if damages are limited to the actual damages from the particular infringement that is caught and successfully prosecuted - because only a tiny fraction of those infringing will be caught. So it provides a draconian minimum penalty to serve as a deterrent and to help make up for the losses on the moles that are missed.
Whether this is the right thing to do is another issue. But because this punitive function was explicitly contemplated in the structure of the law it will make arguments that the penalties are excessive more difficult.
Heh. Described a different copyright problem than I named.
Compilation copyrights are copyrights on collections of otherwise free (i.e. public-domained) works. A bad guy could also get a copyright on a piece of freed software by including it with several other pieces in a distribution and copyrighting that.
Both this and copyrights on derived works based on a public-domain work are copyright recapture. Both are defended against by open licenses built on copyright. And both cease to be a problem if copyright goes away.
No one in their right mind on Slashdot should want to abolish copyright. As authors of free software under licenses like the GPL, we actually depend on copyright law to keep our creations free.
But what we're keeping them free from is mainly compilation copyrights.
The problem is that software couldn't be safely released into the public domain because somebody else could fix a bug or make a useful mod, copyright the fix or upgrade, and everybody else (including the original author) are hosed. They can't fix or upgrade it in the same way themselves without being in trouble. So putting software in the public domain means losing, not just control of its future (which is OK), but possibly the use of future versions (which is not).
GPL and other "free" licenses head this off by keeping the copyright alive, using it as a bludgeon to prevent others from capturing the freed software, while allowing its use by those who agree to leave it free, including its future versions.
But while killing coypyright would kill free licenses, it would also kill the thing they were created to prevent. Yes you wouldn't be able to use the copyright underlying the license to force somebody who didn't distribute the upgrade source to chose between releasing it or stopping distribution of the object (and paying big penalties). But then he couldn't use copyright to keep you from reverse-engineering his object code and distributing equivalent source, either. B-) With the original problem solved we could dispense with open licenses and some of their additional downsides (such as mutual incompatibility).
(Granted GPL has since been upgraded to provide some protection against patents, which WOULD be lost. But that's a kludge providing very limited protection. Meanwhile software patents are being attacked separately.)
= = = =
Having said all that:
My own opinion is that copyright (with reasonable term, without a ban on reverse-engineering, and without junk like "look and feel", "interface operation is a 'performance'", and "similar function is a derived work") is the right protection for software. It bans straight copying, giving adequate time for original developers to get a product established in a market before clones can appear and imposes adequate development costs on cloners, without setting patent-style boobytraps for others who independently develop the same ideas.
[Citation needed]
A simple google search for "uucp bicycle motorcycle wifi" brought up a number of such things.
One was the "motoman" project, which is essentially what I described but with mororcycles in Cambodia.
Here's a page in the OLPC project Wiki the motoman page on the OLPC project Wiki, which gives this and several other links to info on it.
I understand that UUCP mailnet is ALREADY in use in Africa in a very interesting form: - Villages have a WiFi-enabled machine to exchange mails and files with the outside world.
[Citation needed]
Sorry. Heard about it at a conference a couple years ago by one of the participants.
I can try to hunt them up but no promises.
From /etc/services:
Still works if you've got UUCP neighbors configured.
UUCPNet, Pathalias, and the UUCP Mapping Project.
Kids, indeed.
I still have several names registered with the UUCP Mapping Project as of their shutdown (freezing the namespace).
Some of them still exchange mail via UUCP, too. Both with each other and the rest of the net. B-)
(In fact one of those rest-of-the-net links was down for a while and came back up right after McColo was cut off. B-> )
= = = =
Running mailing lists with a periodic UUCP link in the path has an additional side-effect: It limits the traffic explosion from mail loops that are not detected to a manageable volume, giving the admin time to shut down the offending address.
= = = =
I understand that UUCP mailnet is ALREADY in use in Africa in a very interesting form:
- Villages have a WiFi-enabled machine to exchange mails and files with the outside world.
- The local mail carrier has a bicycle with a WiFi-enabled, battery-powered machine with a decently large disk.
- As he cycles from village to village the bike-mounted machine associates with the local machine and UUCP does its usual magic, transferring mail, files, and download requests. (Don't know if they also run netnews groups on it...
- One of the machines on his route has internet connectivity and transfers the mail, files, and download requests to the rest of the world.
All with legacy protocols doing what they always did. And he doesn't even have to stop pedaling. B-)
Yep. PMG = magneto.
However I've seen the distinction made as described in the homebrew power community - generally when discussing excitation power lossage and the advantages of magnetos over excited generators.
And I'm sure that, if one of us were to bring it up there, some of the community members would also claim that magnetos/PMGs ARE generators. Then we could have at least as lively a discussion as we're having on Slashdot. B-)
By the way: I've also seen a distinction made between "alternators" and "generators" in the automotive industry, where "generators" are DC machines with the output windings on the rotor and commutators for rectification, while alternators put the output windings on the stator and use diodes.
English is a rich language and different, even if related, technical communities use it differently. (Example: "field" as used in physics and electrical engineering vs. mathematics. Similarly: sqrt(-1) being named "i" in math and "j" in electronics. B-) )
In order to govern the net (and to coin another useless buzzword) we need Government 2.0.
Reinventing government? Let me guess...
1) Without that pesky Bill of Rights.
2) Online (where malware authors can take it over).
Thanks but no thanks.
This is just another maximum power point controller.
Some work by using a switching regulator to change the voltage/current ratio.
Some work by switching coil arrangements on the magneto to "shift gears" for efficient operation in more than one range of wind speeds. (Delat/Y switching is an example of this, giving two "gears".)
This appears to be the second approach with a large number of "gears" in the "transmission".
am i the only one worried that with a boom in windfarms, the drag on the earth's rotation will increase, slowing it and lengthening the day, making me stay at work *that* much longer?
Yes.
With magnetos the voltage goes up with the RPM. In a simple direct drive mill with no pitch adjustment the RPM (for a given efficiency) goes with the wind speed. Operating above the ideal RPM cuts your torque, too far below it also looses you torque by causing the blades to go into aerodynamic stall.
In a battery charging application there is no current, and no load torque, on the blades until the RPM is high enough that the voltage from the genny is above "cutin", the sum of the battery voltage and the diode drop. Above that wind speed the current rises, the torque resistance rises, and the RPM no longer rises as fast as the wind speed. The ratio of RPM to wind speed drops as the wind speed rises further, passing through the efficient ratio and working down toward stall and virtually complete power loss. (If the mill, wiring, and battery guts were all superconductors the mill would freewheel up to the cuting speed and then never go any higher. Due to resistance the RPM still ramps up, though more gradually than wind speed, as voltage working against resistance ramps current.)
A mill with no further way to adjust things can be "tuned" for low cutin - getting some power from low winds but stalling and losing lots of opportunity to generate high power in moderate to high winds. It can be tuned for high cutin and lots of power in storms but nothing in low and normal winds. Usually it's tuned to grab as much as practical in typical winds and lose out in low winds and storms.
A "maximum power point controller" adjusts the load to get the most out of a range of winds. Typically this consists of a "buck converer" on a mill tuned for low cutin, which lets the mill run at the efficient RPM for the wind and trades away the excess voltage for higher current, getting enough extra charging to more than pay for its own losses. It's a hunk of potentially failing electronics.
Switching coils to different current/voltage tradeoffs can do a similar variable tuning with considerably simpler circuitry and less failure risk. (A typical arrangement is delta/Y conversion of a three-phase alternator, which just about doubles the output in high winds - but causes a sudden jump in torque load on the spinning blades and a spike in current and resistive heating when it "downshifts" to delta.)
This looks like they have a LOT of coils to switch around, allowing fine enough adjustment to be more practical than delta/Y without the high-frequency electronic switching and failure modes of a buck converter.
And yes they would want to pick some small amount of power at low wind speeds (it's better than nothing) and add more coils as the wind speed rises. Power goes up with cube of wind speed but RPM, and thus magneto voltage, with the first power. So torque (produced by load currents) goes up with the square. At higher winds it's simpler to add more electromagnets dragging on the rotating permanant magnets than to increase the current in each of them with the square of the voltage rather than the first power of ohm's law.
Whoever added the tag has no clue. This IS a generator.
It generates. So loosely speaking it's a generator.
But there is a terminology distinction when you get into TYPES of things that generate. They all have coils and a field in relative motion to create the output voltage. But a "generator" creates the field with electromagnets (generally using more coils driven by an external electrical source, a side-effect of the current in the output coils, or otherwise by pulling power from the input shaft) as opposed to a "magneto" which uses permanent magnets.
For wind generators this is a significant distinction: The field coils can gobble up a lot of power - and more when the wind is lower, when you have less (or none) to spare. Paying for that up front, by shelling out for somewhat pricey permanent magnets, is (at least for small mills) far better than paying as-you-go by pulling power off the top of your output. With magnetos you get it all. Thus the recent availability of high-strength neodymium magnets has led to a revolution in magneto design.
But with magnetos you have a harder time controlling the "wild AC" from the wind-speed variation: With generators you can adjust the field to regulate them. With magnetos you're stuck with the output voltage you get, driven by the RPM. This is a problem: The power available from the wind with a given rotor size varies with the third power of the wind speed. But (assuming you don't vary the blade pitch or have a variable transmission between the turbine and the magneto) the RPM and voltage go with the first power. That means the available current goes up with the second power of wind speed and the resistive heating in the coils with the FOURTH power.
Burnout is the limit on your output. So there are a number of ways of matching a wind turbine to a load and avoiding self-destruction. Some of them work by throwing away a lot of power in high winds that it would be nice to keep.
FYI:
The sound was done by the Foley man going through the same motions as each actor, holding a directional microphone, in a room with a loudspeaker in the position corresponding to the camera. The speaker played a continuous drone with a lot of harmonics.
Result: The microphone picked up a sound corresponding to what would be heard at the camera position if the lightsaber emitted such a buzz with the higher frequency components directed progressively more tipward.
I'd assumed, from the movies, that there had to be an advantage. And that the advantage was it would cut through stuff that was proof against most other weapons.
Sample: The elephant-inspired, heavily-armored, large Imperial Walkers that were bouncing shots from ground-based heavy artillery. One fast swipe through the belly from a lightsaber and one of 'em comes apart in spectacular fashion.
... often in circumstances where some "bad guys" get to pick over the remains. And there were quite a few Jedi in the past.
It's well established in the StarWars universe that there is a big-time market in surplus/junk tech - especially items that were stolen or otherwise have chancy ownership history.
So it seems reasonable that, along with other material picked off the losers on battlefields that isn't regulation for the winners, there would be quite a number of them for sale on various "military surplus" markets.
Also Jedi weapons get handed down in families and the offspring don't necessarily become Jedi, so they may get lost in attics, sold (by mistake or otherwise) at housecleanings or estate sales, ... Additional (or used/borrowed) weapons are used for training before the "young Padawan" makes his own. So if the trainee is using a hand-me-down he'll retire it when he makes his own.
Having learned to make them and making at least one for himself, why would a Jedi stop? Might be a good idea to have a spare, in case of trouble or burnout. Tinker up a variant design for better power/battery life/balance/handling characteristics. We've seen single-ended ones used in saber styles and a double-ended one used in a style like a quarterstaff. But there are two-sword styles in both Europe and Japan. Why shouldn't a Jedi adopt such a style? All these would make for more lightsabers lying about to end up on the market.
(And that's assuming the Jedi don't make 'em for fundraisers. B-) )
I've been reading since the early '50s about the imminent personal flying craft and similar wonders in such august publications as PopSci, Popular Mechanics, etc. I grow weary.
Yeah.
But I've also been reading about flat TV screens for as long, too. (They had a cute one back then: Neon switches, crosspoint matrix, electroluminescent elements at the crosspoints for scan, then transparent conductor, opaque light-controlled-resistor, and another layer of electroluminescent matterial for the screen light source. Plastic "circuit board" so you could wrap it around a pencil.)
It took 'em half a century to get (several types of) TV quality flat screens. And they're all STILL more expensive than CRTs. (Maybe now that the LCD price fixing conspiracy is broken that will FINALLY change.)
Ditto "dynabook". Ditto microscopic robots - some circulating in the blood stream - for microsurgery and/or immune system assist against diseases. Ditto cloned replacement teeth. Ditto age-retarding-or-reversing drugs.
A lot of stuff is FINALLY STARTING to happen. But I've been waiting a LONG time for it. And at this rate maybe I'll get to see prototypes of some of it by the time I retire, but still won't get the benefit of playing with the toys. B-(
Ok, so the grey goo will only consume all organic matter on Earth, instead of all matter. How does this make it any safer?
Or start out that way. So it's a nanotechnnological self-replicating "flesh eating bacterium" - powered, like bacteria, by oxidizing the flesh it's eating, but running faster - and built of fullerines and the like so the immune system is outclassed.
Doesn't have to be nanoscale, either. Microscale works fine. A plague of carnivorous locusts with diamond tipped mandibles. (Or army ants, ditto.) Again made of sterner and/or faster stuff than the biosphere is used to dealing with, so the old solutions don't work - or don't work in time.
Once the organics are out of the way, if there are self-powered replicators that can work on alternate sources of power they can continue the process. (But the stuff that depended on organics is probably gone.) You end up either with everything dead or the only thing left "alive" being the post-organic stuff. (And if it can be carried on solar wind to other planets and solar systems, arriving in functional form, it may end up doing the same to the rest of the galaxy and beyond.)
If it's simple enough and the redundancy is high enough it doesn't evolve. Which, an acquaintance once claimed, "is even worse than the extinction of all organic life. Because, in addition, nothing else interesting happens for the rest of time."
All I'm wondering is why it took so long? They are in the business of selling hardware, and if we can find a new use for it, then we're more likely to purchase AMD/ATI's hardware.
A new driver that would turn a consumer-grade high-end video card into an easy-to-use midrange supercomputer? More powerful than the stuff the US nuclear weapon programs were using when they designed the last batch of bombs?
Maybe they were waiting for a congress and president that they don't think will declare their graphics cards to be weapon manufacturing tools and apply export controls. B-)
Just how many times can one be convicted for one crime? Isn't there a law against this?
As I read TFA they were going after him for a DIFFERENT crime they believe he ALSO participated in.
Now maybe they are more interested in catching him because they think he got off too lightly for the half-life code leak. But if they manage to bust and try him they'll be trying him on this OTHER crime.
Being convicted of one crime doesn't give you a free pass on as many others as you want to commit.
I wonder how many of the malicious servers the injected SQL dumped the users into were hosted on McColo - and are thus now not available?
Why has backward compatibility trumped security for 8 years?
Well, if you look at the original notice you'll see it ends this way:
Perhaps Microsoft decided to hold off publication of the exploit code until none of their valued customers were using the service. B-)