However, there's a ton of margin for the oil companies. Just look at their record profits for 2007 to tell the real story: yes, the price is going up due to conflicts and reduction in supply and other factors; but their profitability tells a different story, and profits tend to tell a real story (except in unsustainable cases like Enron).
I think you're missing my point. There's profit MARGIN, and there's Return On Investment (ROI).
ROI is what matters for the "record profits" on the balance sheet. Sell more refined oil and that will rise, even if the margin remains the same.
Profit margin matters when prices are set and is multiplied by "inventory turns" to produce the gross profit that feeds into the calculation of the net profit on the balance sheet (after costs other than the incremental cost of making that particular thing are deducted).
If you have 12 turns per year (it takes a month to go from crude oil at the wellhed to refined product at the pump) a 2% profit margin on the money spent for the crude and its processing becomes a 24% rate of return on the portion of the company's capital spent on the crude and its processing. If you cut the turn time to half a month the 2% margin becomes a 48% rate of return - and your gross profits will double IF you can sell twice as much oil. When you consider how much oil a company processes you can see how this can add up to very large bucks.
But drop the price of the product 2% and the company makes nothing, no matter how much product they sell. Meanwhile their other expenses haven't gone away. So they make record losses and go broke very fast.
So record profits don't necessarily mean price gouging. (In fact they may mean the company had capacity to make more than they were selling, so it LOWERED its prices in order to sell enough more that they more than made up the difference.) Setting prices is a balancing act between losing your margin and losing your customers - and this is the force that drives down prices when there is real competition - or the threat of it, when prices must be low enough to avoid the creation of new competitors.
I would be more worried about the drag myself from being under the surface. I would assume that it would be significant enough to pull the Earth down into a progressively lower and lower orbit given a few million years.
Depends on the spin rate of the star and its alignment with the planet.
With the star spinning in the same direction as the planet's orbit and spinning more than one rev per year the drag RAISES the planet's orbit. (This is the case with the Sun and earth currently - and perhaps also once the Sun expands into a red dwarf, with the bulk of its mass in the inner core which shrinks and speeds up.)
The Earth/Moon system works the same way, except that the drag is gravitational, from tidal friction. The Earth gradually slows down and the Moon gradually moves farther out.
For that matter, the Sun/Earth system is also working that way now - though MUCH slower than the Earth/Moon system - due to tides in the Sun from the Earth's gravity.
It's not unreasonable to expect red dwarf material at a given altitude to be moving at roughly the orbital rate for that altitude, given that the pressure from below is a pretty hard vacuum and provides negligible support. In fact it's not unreasonable to expect it to be averaging a bit FASTER than the orbital velocity, given that some of it is moving out to fly away as solar wind.
The problem is once you buy this widget to make hydrogen to power your car, you don't need to buy anything ever again except some power to run it. Bulk oil/gasoline sales to the power plant has nowhere near the margin of retail sales for cars. That logic goes double for solar panels. Once you've bought 'em you don't even need to buy electricity from the grid (some of which also puts bucks into oil companys' pockets). So why did ARCO spend their investors' money like water to develop practical solar panels and become for a while the biggest manufacturer of them for consumers? (The division has since been sold to BP and rebranded, and has to compete with the likes of Siemens and others, but last I looked was still a major player in that market.)
Answer: They're not an OIL company, they're an ENERGY company. They understand this. If something else displaces oil they don't want it to displace THEM. Instead they want a piece of the new thing, too. They're just as happy to invest in developing and manufacturing solar panels and pocket some money when you buy them (or to run solar farms and sell electricity) as they are to invest it in exploring for oil and taking a cut when you buy that (while passing on the bulk to the people sitting on the land over the oil.) And meanwhile it gives them a power source to run some of their own remote equipment. B-)
There's a lot of money in oil. But there's little margin. Virtually all of it goes to pay for the crude feedstock and the infrastructure to extract, refine, and ship it. (That's OK. Like groceries, oil goes from purchased raw material to sold product in a short time. So the company's money gets cycled through the buy/refine/sell process several times a year, making a small profit margin add up to a good rate of return on investment.)
As with solar panels, energy companies have more incentive to develop new processes than to buy and sit on them. Because they won't be the ONLY processes to achieve results. So if company A buys process a to develop product whiz-bang, then sits on it, company B eats their lunch when it buys and develops process b and owns the market as whiz-bang displaces refined oil.
The potential energy of the hydrogen gas on recombination with oxygen is claimed to be at best 96% of what it took to extract it from water in the first place.
But once you have the hydrogen, how do you get it to run your car?
1) Burn it in a heat engine.
2) Run it through a fuel cell to generate electricity to run an electric motor.
For 1): Portable heat engines suitable for running an automobile pay a "carnot cycle tax" of about 75%. Throwing away three quarters of your hydrogen's energy is far more fuel inefficient than running an electric motor on batteries charged by the power that otherwise would have been used to make the hydrogen. (And some REALLY GOOD batteries are just coming into production, too.) So it's not a good trade. In particular, it makes little sense to perform the electrolysis onboard as you drive: If you have the electricity, use an electric motor.
For 2): Fuel cells are essentially half a storage battery and not subject to the carnot cycle tax. So using electricity to make hydrogen to power an onboard motor is just a way to split a storage battery into a "charging" and "discharging" part and leave the charging part behind. Unfortunately, a hydrogen-gas fuel cell requires mobile hydrogen gas storage, which is really problematic. (If you're going to do it that way, IMHO it's far better to use a vanadium redox system.) Onboard hydrogen gas generation? If you've already got the electric source on board it makes no sense at all to carry equipment to store the power by freeing hydrogen and more equipment to recover the power from the hydrogen - even if both steps were 100% efficient.
So it sounds to me like a person with a solution looking for investors and hyping a nonsense application to convince them they'd be buying into a chunk of the automotive fuel supply and equipment market.
They thought for a little while that the Earth might just make it, but now it's pretty clear to everybody that's not going to happen.
OK, so the earth will apparently orbit under the "surface" of the eventual red dwarf rather than above it.
So what?
I was under the impression that the outer regions of a red dwarf are REALLY tenuous - more like a solar wind that happens to include some low-velocity excited neutral atoms that glow as they rise to a limited altitude and then fall back.
Do these atoms deposit enough heat by conduction and radiation to heat the planet's surface to a similar red glow? Or are they (as I had thought) a minor nuisance - something like trying to warm yourself by the light from a neon sign?
Which in turn reminds me of a time, just after WWII, when Japan was famous for cheap stamped-metal toys (prior to their quality optics, reliable cars and heavy equipment, then progressively higher tech.)
A Japanese manufacturing town renamed itself "Usa". Then the manufacturers located in that town put stickers on their products saying "Made in usa".
Somebody needs to apply for a patent on being a patent troll. Whoever does that would be a multigazillionare over night. Too much prior art - going back more than a century.
So much so that even the worst of patent examiners would notice. B-)
... releasing a SunOS version for 386 then pulling it back... Sorry, that was a Solaris version - back when their marketing department hadn't smeared the naming across the boundary so the distinction had meaning (SunOS = their earlier BSD variant, Solaris = their later SVRx development line).
This is the first I'm hearing of Sun hating. I'm a Java programmer and am quite happy with Sun and their doings as of late. What did they do back in the day? Sun wasn't hated - it was more like annoyance and exasperation. Unlike Microsoft's predatory and often illegal business practices, Sun was a proprietary vendor that legitimately (though sometimes unwisely) chose to keep its technology tight. This made it unnecessarily hard to write drivers and design third-party hardware to interface with their stuff. (IMHO this is a big part of why Intel-ish PCs have essentially won - and was certainly the main cause of my own abandonment of Sun products for the technically-less-clean but more-open PCs.)
There were a few particular annoyances - like when they cut a deal with Grasshopper Group to merge their NeWS GUI implementation into Sun's X implementation to form X-NeWS, then abandoned the project but refused to release or relicense the NeWS rights back to the developers to continue on their own - either as a product or to open-source it (which they would have loved to do).
They were also one of the major players in the consortium that created the SystemV reimplementation of Unix. IMHO was primarily a move, after copyright was extended to software and patentability of software was established in federal court, to sidestep several questions about whether the original Unix had fallen into the public domain by moving further work to a Unix variant with major components that were unquestionably proprietary.
When it came to opening their stuff up they went for years in a "toe in the water then pull it back out" mode: Opening then reclosing the SPARC architecture to Sun-cloners, releasing a SunOS version for 386 then pulling it back, etc. You'll see traces of this in the Star Office vs. Open Office business, or the proprietary nature of some aspects of Java.
Starting with the true open-source release of the Star/Open Office code they've been much more onboard with FOSS, and have earned some high marks and gratitude. But they still have a way to go - at least in terms of time - before they have demonstrated enough commitment to shed the reputation of being a reluctant bride. (And buying that SCO license when Darryl's operation was running out of cash didn't really help.)
Until I see some real actual interoperability I'm forced to believe that it's the same lie we've heard over and over again. I'll no more believe Microsoft's lies than I'll let Bighead in my house again. As with individual psychology so with corporate psychology: "The best predictor of future behavior is past behavior."
As I understand it they went through the same thing back in the day. People HATED IBM venomously but in time as IBM changed their ways people stopped caring about what they did in the past. It took IBM DECADES to get over their bad rep. Literally two generations of new programmers had to grow up while they were being good guys before they were trusted. It started with opening the hardware of the PC (and took a massive financial hit over a number of years rather than trying to suppress the clones), built as they reorganized themselves into a software-services company that supported and contributed to FOSS, and was finally complete when they took on SCO.
Sun is partway down a similar path and Apple keeps backtracking.
If Microsoft starts now (and doesn't screw up along the way) they can probably be considered a good guy by the FOSS community some time around 2040 or so.
Let the crew and passengers carry concealed weapons (under the normal rules for carrying them elsewhere).
The security check - if any airline wants to continue it - can be to make sure they are using ammunition that won't damage the plane or penetrate the cockpit door/bulkhead. B-)
Pity any hijackers that try to take a plane then. They'd be in the same situation as the idiot who tried to hold up the hotel desk at the hotel in Oregon where the NRA convention was being held - and the bulk of the convention-goers were taking advantage of Oregon's weapons-carry laws.
(For those of you who aren't familiar with this: One of the convention-goers noticed the action, quietly entered the restaurant, and recruited a bunch more. When the cops arrived it was like the scene at the end of The Blues Brothers - with the crook on the floor inside a thick circle of grinning NRA members all pointing their personal pistols at him, BEGGING the cops to take him away.)
Even if the passengers and/or crew have to actually shoot some hijackers the result would be less innocent life lost than in the fourth 9/11 plane (where the UNarmed passengers overpowered the hijackers - and the plane crashed in a farmer's field).
The article is vague on how it works, but as a once upon a time chemical analyst (way way back), this sounds like it is doing the equivalent of an infra red scan, using rapid chopping the frequency the vibrations.
The fourier transform of a train of identical pulses is a "comb" - a series of sharp, equally-spaced frequencies where the spacing (difference in frequency between consecutive component "colors") is the same as the repetition rate of the pulse train.
A laser consists of a resonant cavity and an amplifier (maybe plus some optional extras).
The cavity, like a guitar string, has a SET of equally-spaced resonances ("resonance modes"), all those frequencies where a round trip of a wave is an exact integer number of wavelengths of the frequency (of light in this case). So it will resonate for light colors where a billion wavelengths fit, or a billion-and-one, or a billion-and-two, and so on. This resonant response is also a "comb" of equally spaced frequencies. And this comb has a LOT of teeth.
The amplifier is electrons in atoms, pumped up to high energy states stimulated by passing photons to make a transition from a particular high state to another particular lower state and emit this energy as another photon of the same frequency and phase. It amplifies a particular frequency. This response WOULD be very sharp - at absolute zero. But it is broadened by such things as doppler shifts from thermal vibration.
Combine the frequency response curves of the amplifier and the resonant cavity and you'll find a significant number of "teeth" in the resonant cavity's "comb" where the gain on a photon's round trip is greater than one, i.e. a photon is more likely to release a partner than to get lost on any given round trip. These are the modes where the laser will oscillate.
But pumping energy into a mode removes energy from the amplifier, momentarily lowering its gain. So (as with an organ pipe or a brass horn) the mode (or modes) which get "pumped up" steal energy that would otherwise be available to other modes. As a result (if nothing else is done), only a small number of modes near the peak of the amplifier's response actually end up having significant energy. Further, while the total output is controlled by the available power from the amplifier, the distribution of this power among the active modes varies with time, as the noisy nature of the amplifier's individual mode-pumping transitions happens to pump-up one or another of them more while they're all being attenuated by the loss of power through the output and other mechanisms. Finally, each mode oscillates separately, so there's no particular phase relationship between them (and the phases of each mode also drift independently with time). The amplitude variations correspond to a slight broadening of the spectrum of the individual modes, while the phase variations correspond to a slight wandering in frequency.
A small number of frequencies, each varying considerably in strength, is not too good for measuring light absorption. You could measure them to construct a moment-to-moment calibration. But there's a better approach.
This approach is "mode locking". One of those extras. a variable-refractive-index crystal, is inserted in the cavity and excited with a radio signal. The frequency of the signal is the DIFFERENCE between any two consecutive modes (i.e. the radio frequency for which the cavity length is a half-wavelength). This phase-modulator "detunes" the cavity's resonances except for waves with a particular phase relationship to the exciting frequency. So all the modes are phase-locked to the excitation frequency - and thus to each other. This is the "mode-locked" laser. It's usually done to produce narrow and tightly-controlled pulses. But for this device it's about producing a large number of stable colors, with the pulsing as a side-effect of how it's done.
Now (the dual of what I said above) a "comb" of equally-spaced frequencies, all in phase, is the fo
Some of these puppies are volatile. Others may end up in breath due to their inclusions in the aerosols formed when the exhalations pick up droplets - which rapidly evaporate in the dry environment of the test equipment's nitrogen carrier gas - or microscopic bits of debris. Also: Once you have an ionic molecule floating in the test cell, the energy of the laser photons should kick the ions apart - allowing them to be analyzed separately. This will simplify the analysis because the instrument will be looking for the signatures of a small number of ions rather than the much larger number of their combinations.
I noted that hydrogen peroxide was now hydro-peroxide, and the nitrite and nitrate ions were somehow volatile. I think they were talking about the hydroperoxide radical ( -OOH ), either free or attached to some other radical to form a molecule. Also they said "nitrites" and "nitrates" - molecules rather than the free radical.
Some of these puppies are volatile. Others may end up in breath due to their inclusions in the aerosols formed when the exhalations pick up droplets - which rapidly evaporate in the dry environment of the test equipment's nitrogen carrier gas - or microscopic bits of debris.
Production of free radicals and peroxides are part of the inflammation mechanism - as the body attacks what it perceives to be foreign matter or organisms. So it's reasonable to find peroxides and free radicals - including free hydroperoxide radicals - in the breath of an asthma sufferer, whose bronchial tubes are inflamed. Ditto for inflammation of the airways due to any other pathology. And volatile compounds from elsewhere in the body that make it to the bloodstream will make it to the breath as well.
Downside is that inflammation is the body's response to darned near anything abnormal. (Thus the prevalence of "flu-like symptoms" in the diagnostic signs of many diseases.) So to the extent that it identifies inflammation-specific products this device should be good for a general state-of-health assay - and it might be able to distinguish inflammation in the airways versus the rest of the body by the differing ratios of products as a result of bloodstream transport and blood-air crossing. Beyond that it will have trouble distinguishing different pathologies unless they generate or suppress characteristic compounds that would make it to the breath.
So it's not a panacea. But it should be VERY useful as both a general-health measure and a screen for a considerable number of diseases and disease processes.
The FCC didn't say "turn it off by...". They said "You don't have to keep it on after..."
The advantage of the digital alternatives is that they can get many more calls into a given swath of spectrum. That's a really big deal in a city (especially one where carving the cells up finer is no longer an option due to regulatory resistance to installing more cell sites). Thus the urban service providers want to make the switch.
In the deep-boonies having more calls on a cell is not an issue - while having a single cell cover a wider service area due to the higher power limit on AMPS transmission is a benefit.
Fox news built its audience by (claiming to) fill in the hole in coverage left by the left-wing old media. It seemed to be doing that by including (but not limiting itself to) coverage of the conservative side of things. It did seem to be giving the libertarian viewpoint short shrift. But it still gave the appearance of filling in the big dead spot.
But over the last year it has shown itself to be massively biased, not just toward conservative positions, but toward a PARTICULAR one of the four-or-so major factions - the neoconservatives. As the primary campaigns progressed Fox News became progressively more blatant in its opposition to, and suppression of, the other factions' issues, positions, and candidates.
This was particularly visible with their hatchet job on the candidacy of the Ron Paul (a libertarian-faction conservative). But with a little looking you can easily see a similar treatment of the other candidates and factions.
You'll find lots of libertarians, libertarian-conservatives, and a fair number of non-neoconservative conservatives among the denizens of the internet - including those who post to Slashdot. So don't be surprised to see slams on Fox News (and their parent Newscorp) from right-leaning people who, last year, might have strongly defended them.
Poorly maintained, bad coverage, iffy signal, rotten roaming (and occasional charges), it's ready to go.
You may have a point on most of those issues. But AMPS has FAR more coverage than the digital alternatives.
AMPS was deployed back when the phone companies thought the point of a cellular phone system was to be able to use the phone virtually anywhere. It covers nearly all of the continental US except for some very remote locations.
The digital alternatives were deployed late in the game, installed initially in large population centers and with the rural cells installed or converted largely after the telecom crash, when the tellcos were having trouble getting capital and were cutting costs wherever possible to keep their competitors from eating their lunch. The result is that cells that exist to fill in rural holes but don't generate enough calls to pay for themselves directly didn't get converted - and even some of the more suburban cells didn't get upgraded until the last few months.
If AMPS really goes dark now, much of rural America (at least the part not adjacent to an interstate highway) would have no cell service at all. That would mean that, even if you paid for a digital upgrade for your OnStar it would not work.
AT&T FINALLY converted the cell that covers my retirement home, just a couple months ago. So I just converted my cellphones to GSM. But I do a lot of traveling and vacationing in AMPS-only country - nearby that site and otherwise. In those areas the new handset is just a paperweight, while a car breakdown can be a death sentence if help can't be called. So I'm hanging on to my old AMPS-capable handset in the hope that at least some of the AMPS-only towers will stay alive.
I'm betting on the little carriers to keep theirs going and maybe even buy up some the big carriers are abandoning. But I wouldn't put it past the bean-counters at the big carriers to shut down their own low-traffic AMPS-only or AMPS-TDMA cells rather than spending the bux to convert them. (IMHO if they were really interested in keeping the coverage up they'd have ALREADY converted them (rather than just running ads about what great coverage they have), and their coverage maps show they haven't.)
Better yet: A texture map that is virtually invisible to the naked eye but becomes visible when copied by a xerographic process (like the "void" markings on some checks).
Home Basic - cannot join a domain and does not include Media Center; equivalent to XP Home Edition
Home Premium - cannot join a domain but does include Media Center; equivalent to XP Media Center Edition
What are they thinking? MY home has a domain!
Home Basic also does not include... tablet PC support,... or Scheduled Backup.... [only] Business and Ultimate include... Fax and Scan, Finally, only Ultimate Edition includes BitLocker drive encryption. Yeah, that's pretty basic, all right.
Slashdot Mirror
The antivirus industry ITSELF is a multibillion dollar "black eye" on the "dominant vendor of PC operating systems".
However, there's a ton of margin for the oil companies. Just look at their record profits for 2007 to tell the real story: yes, the price is going up due to conflicts and reduction in supply and other factors; but their profitability tells a different story, and profits tend to tell a real story (except in unsustainable cases like Enron).
I think you're missing my point. There's profit MARGIN, and there's Return On Investment (ROI).
ROI is what matters for the "record profits" on the balance sheet. Sell more refined oil and that will rise, even if the margin remains the same.
Profit margin matters when prices are set and is multiplied by "inventory turns" to produce the gross profit that feeds into the calculation of the net profit on the balance sheet (after costs other than the incremental cost of making that particular thing are deducted).
If you have 12 turns per year (it takes a month to go from crude oil at the wellhed to refined product at the pump) a 2% profit margin on the money spent for the crude and its processing becomes a 24% rate of return on the portion of the company's capital spent on the crude and its processing. If you cut the turn time to half a month the 2% margin becomes a 48% rate of return - and your gross profits will double IF you can sell twice as much oil. When you consider how much oil a company processes you can see how this can add up to very large bucks.
But drop the price of the product 2% and the company makes nothing, no matter how much product they sell. Meanwhile their other expenses haven't gone away. So they make record losses and go broke very fast.
So record profits don't necessarily mean price gouging. (In fact they may mean the company had capacity to make more than they were selling, so it LOWERED its prices in order to sell enough more that they more than made up the difference.) Setting prices is a balancing act between losing your margin and losing your customers - and this is the force that drives down prices when there is real competition - or the threat of it, when prices must be low enough to avoid the creation of new competitors.
I would be more worried about the drag myself from being under the surface. I would assume that it would be significant enough to pull the Earth down into a progressively lower and lower orbit given a few million years.
Depends on the spin rate of the star and its alignment with the planet.
With the star spinning in the same direction as the planet's orbit and spinning more than one rev per year the drag RAISES the planet's orbit. (This is the case with the Sun and earth currently - and perhaps also once the Sun expands into a red dwarf, with the bulk of its mass in the inner core which shrinks and speeds up.)
The Earth/Moon system works the same way, except that the drag is gravitational, from tidal friction. The Earth gradually slows down and the Moon gradually moves farther out.
For that matter, the Sun/Earth system is also working that way now - though MUCH slower than the Earth/Moon system - due to tides in the Sun from the Earth's gravity.
It's not unreasonable to expect red dwarf material at a given altitude to be moving at roughly the orbital rate for that altitude, given that the pressure from below is a pretty hard vacuum and provides negligible support. In fact it's not unreasonable to expect it to be averaging a bit FASTER than the orbital velocity, given that some of it is moving out to fly away as solar wind.
Answer: They're not an OIL company, they're an ENERGY company. They understand this. If something else displaces oil they don't want it to displace THEM. Instead they want a piece of the new thing, too. They're just as happy to invest in developing and manufacturing solar panels and pocket some money when you buy them (or to run solar farms and sell electricity) as they are to invest it in exploring for oil and taking a cut when you buy that (while passing on the bulk to the people sitting on the land over the oil.) And meanwhile it gives them a power source to run some of their own remote equipment. B-)
There's a lot of money in oil. But there's little margin. Virtually all of it goes to pay for the crude feedstock and the infrastructure to extract, refine, and ship it. (That's OK. Like groceries, oil goes from purchased raw material to sold product in a short time. So the company's money gets cycled through the buy/refine/sell process several times a year, making a small profit margin add up to a good rate of return on investment.)
As with solar panels, energy companies have more incentive to develop new processes than to buy and sit on them. Because they won't be the ONLY processes to achieve results. So if company A buys process a to develop product whiz-bang, then sits on it, company B eats their lunch when it buys and develops process b and owns the market as whiz-bang displaces refined oil.
The potential energy of the hydrogen gas on recombination with oxygen is claimed to be at best 96% of what it took to extract it from water in the first place.
But once you have the hydrogen, how do you get it to run your car?
1) Burn it in a heat engine.
2) Run it through a fuel cell to generate electricity to run an electric motor.
For 1): Portable heat engines suitable for running an automobile pay a "carnot cycle tax" of about 75%. Throwing away three quarters of your hydrogen's energy is far more fuel inefficient than running an electric motor on batteries charged by the power that otherwise would have been used to make the hydrogen. (And some REALLY GOOD batteries are just coming into production, too.) So it's not a good trade. In particular, it makes little sense to perform the electrolysis onboard as you drive: If you have the electricity, use an electric motor.
For 2): Fuel cells are essentially half a storage battery and not subject to the carnot cycle tax. So using electricity to make hydrogen to power an onboard motor is just a way to split a storage battery into a "charging" and "discharging" part and leave the charging part behind. Unfortunately, a hydrogen-gas fuel cell requires mobile hydrogen gas storage, which is really problematic. (If you're going to do it that way, IMHO it's far better to use a vanadium redox system.) Onboard hydrogen gas generation? If you've already got the electric source on board it makes no sense at all to carry equipment to store the power by freeing hydrogen and more equipment to recover the power from the hydrogen - even if both steps were 100% efficient.
So it sounds to me like a person with a solution looking for investors and hyping a nonsense application to convince them they'd be buying into a chunk of the automotive fuel supply and equipment market.
They thought for a little while that the Earth might just make it, but now it's pretty clear to everybody that's not going to happen.
OK, so the earth will apparently orbit under the "surface" of the eventual red dwarf rather than above it.
So what?
I was under the impression that the outer regions of a red dwarf are REALLY tenuous - more like a solar wind that happens to include some low-velocity excited neutral atoms that glow as they rise to a limited altitude and then fall back.
Do these atoms deposit enough heat by conduction and radiation to heat the planet's surface to a similar red glow? Or are they (as I had thought) a minor nuisance - something like trying to warm yourself by the light from a neon sign?
I Am Not An Astrophysicist. So what's the story?
Which in turn reminds me of a time, just after WWII, when Japan was famous for cheap stamped-metal toys (prior to their quality optics, reliable cars and heavy equipment, then progressively higher tech.)
A Japanese manufacturing town renamed itself "Usa". Then the manufacturers located in that town put stickers on their products saying "Made in usa".
So much so that even the worst of patent examiners would notice. B-)
... releasing a SunOS version for 386 then pulling it backThere were a few particular annoyances - like when they cut a deal with Grasshopper Group to merge their NeWS GUI implementation into Sun's X implementation to form X-NeWS, then abandoned the project but refused to release or relicense the NeWS rights back to the developers to continue on their own - either as a product or to open-source it (which they would have loved to do).
They were also one of the major players in the consortium that created the SystemV reimplementation of Unix. IMHO was primarily a move, after copyright was extended to software and patentability of software was established in federal court, to sidestep several questions about whether the original Unix had fallen into the public domain by moving further work to a Unix variant with major components that were unquestionably proprietary.
When it came to opening their stuff up they went for years in a "toe in the water then pull it back out" mode: Opening then reclosing the SPARC architecture to Sun-cloners, releasing a SunOS version for 386 then pulling it back, etc. You'll see traces of this in the Star Office vs. Open Office business, or the proprietary nature of some aspects of Java.
Starting with the true open-source release of the Star/Open Office code they've been much more onboard with FOSS, and have earned some high marks and gratitude. But they still have a way to go - at least in terms of time - before they have demonstrated enough commitment to shed the reputation of being a reluctant bride. (And buying that SCO license when Darryl's operation was running out of cash didn't really help.)
Sun is partway down a similar path and Apple keeps backtracking.
If Microsoft starts now (and doesn't screw up along the way) they can probably be considered a good guy by the FOSS community some time around 2040 or so.
Let the crew and passengers carry concealed weapons (under the normal rules for carrying them elsewhere).
The security check - if any airline wants to continue it - can be to make sure they are using ammunition that won't damage the plane or penetrate the cockpit door/bulkhead. B-)
Pity any hijackers that try to take a plane then. They'd be in the same situation as the idiot who tried to hold up the hotel desk at the hotel in Oregon where the NRA convention was being held - and the bulk of the convention-goers were taking advantage of Oregon's weapons-carry laws.
(For those of you who aren't familiar with this: One of the convention-goers noticed the action, quietly entered the restaurant, and recruited a bunch more. When the cops arrived it was like the scene at the end of The Blues Brothers - with the crook on the floor inside a thick circle of grinning NRA members all pointing their personal pistols at him, BEGGING the cops to take him away.)
Even if the passengers and/or crew have to actually shoot some hijackers the result would be less innocent life lost than in the fourth 9/11 plane (where the UNarmed passengers overpowered the hijackers - and the plane crashed in a farmer's field).
... is mind-boggling.
The article is vague on how it works, but as a once upon a time chemical analyst (way way back), this sounds like it is doing the equivalent of an infra red scan, using rapid chopping the frequency the vibrations.
The fourier transform of a train of identical pulses is a "comb" - a series of sharp, equally-spaced frequencies where the spacing (difference in frequency between consecutive component "colors") is the same as the repetition rate of the pulse train.
A laser consists of a resonant cavity and an amplifier (maybe plus some optional extras).
The cavity, like a guitar string, has a SET of equally-spaced resonances ("resonance modes"), all those frequencies where a round trip of a wave is an exact integer number of wavelengths of the frequency (of light in this case). So it will resonate for light colors where a billion wavelengths fit, or a billion-and-one, or a billion-and-two, and so on. This resonant response is also a "comb" of equally spaced frequencies. And this comb has a LOT of teeth.
The amplifier is electrons in atoms, pumped up to high energy states stimulated by passing photons to make a transition from a particular high state to another particular lower state and emit this energy as another photon of the same frequency and phase. It amplifies a particular frequency. This response WOULD be very sharp - at absolute zero. But it is broadened by such things as doppler shifts from thermal vibration.
Combine the frequency response curves of the amplifier and the resonant cavity and you'll find a significant number of "teeth" in the resonant cavity's "comb" where the gain on a photon's round trip is greater than one, i.e. a photon is more likely to release a partner than to get lost on any given round trip. These are the modes where the laser will oscillate.
But pumping energy into a mode removes energy from the amplifier, momentarily lowering its gain. So (as with an organ pipe or a brass horn) the mode (or modes) which get "pumped up" steal energy that would otherwise be available to other modes. As a result (if nothing else is done), only a small number of modes near the peak of the amplifier's response actually end up having significant energy. Further, while the total output is controlled by the available power from the amplifier, the distribution of this power among the active modes varies with time, as the noisy nature of the amplifier's individual mode-pumping transitions happens to pump-up one or another of them more while they're all being attenuated by the loss of power through the output and other mechanisms. Finally, each mode oscillates separately, so there's no particular phase relationship between them (and the phases of each mode also drift independently with time). The amplitude variations correspond to a slight broadening of the spectrum of the individual modes, while the phase variations correspond to a slight wandering in frequency.
A small number of frequencies, each varying considerably in strength, is not too good for measuring light absorption. You could measure them to construct a moment-to-moment calibration. But there's a better approach.
This approach is "mode locking". One of those extras. a variable-refractive-index crystal, is inserted in the cavity and excited with a radio signal. The frequency of the signal is the DIFFERENCE between any two consecutive modes (i.e. the radio frequency for which the cavity length is a half-wavelength). This phase-modulator "detunes" the cavity's resonances except for waves with a particular phase relationship to the exciting frequency. So all the modes are phase-locked to the excitation frequency - and thus to each other. This is the "mode-locked" laser. It's usually done to produce narrow and tightly-controlled pulses. But for this device it's about producing a large number of stable colors, with the pulsing as a side-effect of how it's done.
Now (the dual of what I said above) a "comb" of equally-spaced frequencies, all in phase, is the fo
Some of these puppies are volatile. Others may end up in breath due to their inclusions in the aerosols formed when the exhalations pick up droplets - which rapidly evaporate in the dry environment of the test equipment's nitrogen carrier gas - or microscopic bits of debris.
Production of free radicals and peroxides are part of the inflammation mechanism - as the body attacks what it perceives to be foreign matter or organisms. So it's reasonable to find peroxides and free radicals - including free hydroperoxide radicals - in the breath of an asthma sufferer, whose bronchial tubes are inflamed. Ditto for inflammation of the airways due to any other pathology. And volatile compounds from elsewhere in the body that make it to the bloodstream will make it to the breath as well.
Downside is that inflammation is the body's response to darned near anything abnormal. (Thus the prevalence of "flu-like symptoms" in the diagnostic signs of many diseases.) So to the extent that it identifies inflammation-specific products this device should be good for a general state-of-health assay - and it might be able to distinguish inflammation in the airways versus the rest of the body by the differing ratios of products as a result of bloodstream transport and blood-air crossing. Beyond that it will have trouble distinguishing different pathologies unless they generate or suppress characteristic compounds that would make it to the breath.
So it's not a panacea. But it should be VERY useful as both a general-health measure and a screen for a considerable number of diseases and disease processes.
The FCC didn't say "turn it off by ...". They said "You don't have to keep it on after ..."
The advantage of the digital alternatives is that they can get many more calls into a given swath of spectrum. That's a really big deal in a city (especially one where carving the cells up finer is no longer an option due to regulatory resistance to installing more cell sites). Thus the urban service providers want to make the switch.
In the deep-boonies having more calls on a cell is not an issue - while having a single cell cover a wider service area due to the higher power limit on AMPS transmission is a benefit.
Fox news built its audience by (claiming to) fill in the hole in coverage left by the left-wing old media. It seemed to be doing that by including (but not limiting itself to) coverage of the conservative side of things. It did seem to be giving the libertarian viewpoint short shrift. But it still gave the appearance of filling in the big dead spot.
But over the last year it has shown itself to be massively biased, not just toward conservative positions, but toward a PARTICULAR one of the four-or-so major factions - the neoconservatives. As the primary campaigns progressed Fox News became progressively more blatant in its opposition to, and suppression of, the other factions' issues, positions, and candidates.
This was particularly visible with their hatchet job on the candidacy of the Ron Paul (a libertarian-faction conservative). But with a little looking you can easily see a similar treatment of the other candidates and factions.
You'll find lots of libertarians, libertarian-conservatives, and a fair number of non-neoconservative conservatives among the denizens of the internet - including those who post to Slashdot. So don't be surprised to see slams on Fox News (and their parent Newscorp) from right-leaning people who, last year, might have strongly defended them.
The electronics for those frequencies DOES age. The batteries die, too, and replacements aren't readily available.
When new stuff becomes cheap enough it's actually cheaper to replace older stuff than try to keep it alive.
Poorly maintained, bad coverage, iffy signal, rotten roaming (and occasional charges), it's ready to go.
You may have a point on most of those issues. But AMPS has FAR more coverage than the digital alternatives.
AMPS was deployed back when the phone companies thought the point of a cellular phone system was to be able to use the phone virtually anywhere. It covers nearly all of the continental US except for some very remote locations.
The digital alternatives were deployed late in the game, installed initially in large population centers and with the rural cells installed or converted largely after the telecom crash, when the tellcos were having trouble getting capital and were cutting costs wherever possible to keep their competitors from eating their lunch. The result is that cells that exist to fill in rural holes but don't generate enough calls to pay for themselves directly didn't get converted - and even some of the more suburban cells didn't get upgraded until the last few months.
If AMPS really goes dark now, much of rural America (at least the part not adjacent to an interstate highway) would have no cell service at all. That would mean that, even if you paid for a digital upgrade for your OnStar it would not work.
AT&T FINALLY converted the cell that covers my retirement home, just a couple months ago. So I just converted my cellphones to GSM. But I do a lot of traveling and vacationing in AMPS-only country - nearby that site and otherwise. In those areas the new handset is just a paperweight, while a car breakdown can be a death sentence if help can't be called. So I'm hanging on to my old AMPS-capable handset in the hope that at least some of the AMPS-only towers will stay alive.
I'm betting on the little carriers to keep theirs going and maybe even buy up some the big carriers are abandoning. But I wouldn't put it past the bean-counters at the big carriers to shut down their own low-traffic AMPS-only or AMPS-TDMA cells rather than spending the bux to convert them. (IMHO if they were really interested in keeping the coverage up they'd have ALREADY converted them (rather than just running ads about what great coverage they have), and their coverage maps show they haven't.)
(fnord)
Better yet: A texture map that is virtually invisible to the naked eye but becomes visible when copied by a xerographic process (like the "void" markings on some checks).
- Home Basic - cannot join a domain and does not include Media Center; equivalent to XP Home Edition
- Home Premium - cannot join a domain but does include Media Center; equivalent to XP Media Center Edition
What are they thinking? MY home has a domain! Home Basic also does not include