Such materials are generally transparent (if thin enough) for photons at energies below the bandgap.
Some amorphous flexible solar panels use exactly the technique you described, with three layers collecting short-wavelength, medium-wavelength, and long-wavelength photons as you go inward.
There are limits to how well you can do this. For starters: With multiple cells (in this case: layers) in series the current is limited by the cell/layer with the least current output. You need a photon to pump each electron across a cell, so you need three photons, one in each of three frequency bands, to pump it across all three.
Thus you try to pick bandgaps so similar numbers of photons will be absorbed in each layer under typical lighting conditions. And you take an big output hit if any one of the bands is obscured - for instance, by overcast.
The nanoparticles improve efficiency by 60% in the ultraviolet spectrum. The visible light spectrum is only nominally affected.
It's still pretty cool, though.
This whole series of "only 60% of the UV part" threads is missing the rest of the article. That was just for ONE size of naonparticle, suitable for converting light to the middle of the visible range. They ran the tests for another size, suitable for converting to visible red, and got a higher conversion result, as expected.
Solar cells completely miss photons below the bandgap energy and only peel off the bandgap energy from those above it. They have a bandgap in the infrared so they get most photons, but only take that first 0.6 electron-volt chunk of their energy and lose the rest as heat. That's great if you have an infrared photon at 0.603 eV, not so hot for visible light photons at 1.8-3.1 eV, and pretty crummy for UV photons at 3.1 to 12 or so eV.
Films of nanoparticles have an interesting property: They absorb photons of various wavelengths and emit photons of particular wavelengths related to their size. But they don't do that in the solar-cell style of chopping the right-sized hunk off a more energetic photon and throwing the rest away. Instead they are able to combine energy from multiple lower-energy photons to generate one of the desired energy, chop several desired energy photons out of a high-energy one (and keep the leftover shavings to combine with others to make more desired-energy photons), and trade energy among their neighboring particles.
So it was expected that a film of nanoparticles on a solar cell would grab the energy from photons all over the spectrum, convert it to the energy characteristic of the nanoparticle size, and re-emit that. The improvement from efficiently salami-slicing and stacking photons should be better than losses from such things as emitting the photon in the wrong direction, giving a big boost to the cell.
And to some extent that was happening: Feed UV photons to nanoparticles that chunk 'em into something in the 3 eV range and you get more out of the UV hitting the cell than you would without the film - without appreciably affecting the output from the visible light. You're averaging about 1 2/3 IR photons worth of energy, instead of 1, for each incoming photon. Feed it to nanoparticles that chunk it up finer, down to 2 eV or so, and you get more out of your UV and also start improving on even visible light.
That's a good sign for doing what you really wanted to do: Use nanoparticles that emit just a tiny squidge above the solar-cell's bandgap, chunking all the photons into the right size for the cell and wasting very little of their energy. (But maybe still losing a bunch by emitting them in the wrong direction. That might be improved by putting the nanoparticles at the bottom of wells in the cell rather than on a flat surface.)
But the experiment produced a surprise: The VOLTAGE went up! WTF?
That means one of two things:
a) The nanoparticles affected the bandgap.
b) The nanoparticles coupled directly into the cell's "circuitry" in some non-obvious way.
b) might lead to something even better: Nanoparticles that capture the photons, chunk and stack them into some desired size (voltage), and deliver them directly to the wiring. That could get virtually ALL the incoming energy into your wires.
A solar cell with efficiencies in the.90s could be a whole heck of a lot better than even the experimenters were originally chasing. So it's no wonder they published now, with only two sizes of particles tested.
Watcha talking 'bout Willis? This, says murders in the USA peaked in 1993 at 24,530 and then has been on the decline ever since. (Along with almost every other Stat.)
1994 (the first year of the big drop) was also the year that the move to shall-issue CCW ({permit for} Concealed Carry of Weapons) took a big jump forward, with a number of states passing such laws and a large number of potential victims starting to carry guns legally.
These laws are continually struck down, one by one, yet the state legislatures still propose them.... Do the state legislatures not look at court rulings? or do they not care?
It's worse than that. In Posner's words they're deliberately ATTEMPTING to "deform" the children and "leave them unequipped to cope with the world as we know it."
It's part of the "culture war". A conscious (if misguided) attempt by the "progressives" to raise non-violent children by insulating them from knowledge of violence and tools of violence.
This has been going on at least since the Vietnam-era anti-war movement, which discussed and promoted this form of child-rearing - though primarily as a way to head off future wars. Some of the things done then were refusing to allow children to have toy guns or play games involving fighting or conflict: "soldier", "cowboys and indians", "cops and robbers", etc.
Over time this has been institutionalized and escalated into things like the "zero tolerance on weapons in schools" program (which expels children for having a gun-shaped charm-bracelet ornament or a plastic knife in their brown-bag lunch) disciplinary policies that give a pass to bullies striking their victims but severely disciplines any victim who strikes back in self-defense.
Of course the unintended consequences included raising a large fraction of several generations with no understanding - or worse, an erroneous understanding - of how to react to violence and threats - at personal, group, and political levels.
Of course such mind-stunted people are much easier to rule. So it's politically expedient to continue and expand the programs to "deform" progressively more of each generation.
Sounds more like a complicated steam engine to me.
I did RTFA - at least the first level.
Yes, it's a steam engine. (The steam is switched through valves and pushes on pistons to achieve motion.)
Not a rocket. (No blast of burning gases out an opening causing motion by recoil.)
Not a fuel-cell or even a steam generator. (The steam powers the motion directly by pressure, not indirectly by driving a generator to power an electric motor.)
The problem I can see with this, that unless they plane to lock down all the sewer caps and manhole covers, it would be pretty easy to hack into the lines at some point; perhaps I'm mistaken.
I'm more concerned about whether the fibers will hold up to ongoing sewer maintainence and whether they will snarl in debris and be pulled loose, severed, or cause a blockage.
Imagine what happens to a fiber-down-the-drain when Roto Rooter does its thing...
Talk about making it easy for Chinese secret police as well...
It also makes it easy for the operators of the firewall:
Spamming with lists of proxies guarantees that the list ends up in the hands of the authorities. Then they know what IP addresses to block AND to flag when somebody tries to use them.
If you're going to puree the babies anyhow (or dump 'em in an incinerator), why not salvage a few of the cells first and use them in research to save lives?
= = = =
By the way: The "babies" we're talking about here are typically blastocysts - unimplanted clusters of a few cells. These are the spare, cryonically-frozen, fertilized eggs that are left over when an in-vitro fertilization attempt succeeds and the new parents don't want to go through another dozen pregnancies and raise the resulting couple dozen children.
But even if it were a first-trimester abortion that was going to be done anyhow, or an in-vitro fertilization that was done specifically to create a cell line (and thus using eggs and sperm that otherwise would never have combined) what's your gripe?
... Ad Block Plus, a plug-in that blocks advertisement on web sites and also prevents site owners from blocking people using it.... site owners install scripts that prevent people using ad blocking software from accessing their site.... Ad Block Plus [does not let] individual site owners... block people using their plug-in.
Hot DAMN! That's the best ad I've seen in years.
Gotta make this short so I can grab a copy of Ad Block Plus. B-)
... they are running a lot of fiber, but most of it is just to the neighborhoods where they will then run VDSL to each home from remote terminals. With the amount of money the behemoths have, you think they would just run fiber straight to every home and get it over with. Eventually they will have to do it anyways.
It costs a LOT more money to run fiber to every house than it does to just run it to a new box beside the one where the neighborhood copper drops already join a fat cable toward the CO or a local T-carrier concentrator.
Another point that's being missed: Removing the preinstalled version of Windows on a PC (by installing something else over it) is NOT free.
The cost includes:
- the perceived risk of loss of the machine (and the money invested in it) if the install of the alternative OS goes wrong so badly that it can't be backed out and the machine recovered to its previous working configuration.
- the cost of porting his data and working procedures to a new environment and learning to be efficient in this new environment.
The cost is even higher if the machine isn't fresh, but he's been working on it for a while. Now he's risking his current working environment and the associated data.
(And yes I know about backups and having to reinstall Windows from time to time. So what? That's also fraught with risks of loss. The cost of having to recover from backups is something he knows in his guts from past experience. So now he should volunteer to incur this cost when he doesn't NEED to, in order to switch to an unfamiliar environment and incur the porting cost as well? You have to be perceived as a LOT better to get him over that hump.)
The way to break this cycle is what Dell is doing now: Provide new machines with Linux preinstalled for less than the same machine with Windows preinstalled. Then he has a known-good-system with support and only has to incur the porting cost, much of which he'd incur in migrating to a new machine. (And how good it is that this is happening at the same time as the rollout of Vista, increasing the porting cost for sticking with Windows by adding the migration to a new version.)
This technology looks like it might deposit a large electric charge on the surface of the chip. This will have to be dissipated, before it dissipates itself by creating an electrostatic discharge on (or capacitively coupled to) one of the chips interconnects.
To avoid this the insulating passivation layer will probably have to be topped by an additional conductive layer. This layer, in turn, will increase the capacitive load on the interconnects and likely require additional chip power to switch them.
I expect it will still be a big net improvement. But deploying it won't be trivial.
In other words, the device should self-test critical functions, and if any do not meet requirements, the device needs to indicate the failure AND NOT TRANSMIT.
Dead on. But:
If the "scanner" fails to detect an "in use" channel properly (self test to ensure it does), the transmitter shouldn't just push ahead and transmit, it should alarm and go to standby.
Which breaks if you bring it up in an environment that doesn't have any "in use" channels to detect. Like in a remote environment (such as my place in a lightly-settled section of Nevada desert) which has zero detectable TV signals and virtually no daytime broadcast radio - exactly the sort of place you'd want to "wire for broadband" with wireless.
IMHO the right algorithm is not an up-front self-test, but a CYA check during turn-up:
- Check for in-use channel. If not found:
- Momentarily make a VERY SMALL amount of signal of your own and see if you detect that, to check the detector. If you do:
- THEN turn on normal transmitter power.
Re:Novell to Open Source Unix?
on
SCO Loses
·
· Score: 1
[perhaps] If SCO is unable to come up with these fees then Novell could use that as grounds for termination of the whole contract. Heck, the contract may have an escape clause for Novell if SCO fails to stand up to its side of the agreement, and this decision could be enough for Novell to terminate immediately.
Yep. If Novell can use this to kill the contract I don't see anything else keeping them from open sourcing the whole Unix ball of tar. B-)
(My take on that has been that even if passive geometries are unstable, if you can get it stable enough that instability growth occurs at no more than an HF rate you might be able to use an active system to finish the job of stabilizing the confinement. But that's a separate issue.)
Re:Novell to Open Source Unix?
on
SCO Loses
·
· Score: 2, Informative
It sounds like the courts said that Novell owns the Unix copyrights. If so, could (would?) Novell release the code so no one ever has to question whether Linux contains parts of Unix.
If I understand this correctly:
While Novell owns the copyrights they are still in that pesky exclusive contract for SCO to administer the licensing, for which SCO gets a big cut and for which SCO paid some big bux once upon a time. That contract is the bulk of SCO's remaining assets.
If IBM finishes demolishing SCO and eats the corpse, they'll end up being the other party in that contract. THEN they can get together with Novell and open the source, PD the source, license it to all comers for $1, or whatever. Or just tear it up and free Novell to do whatever they want with the copyrights.
Heck [Darl] might have actually believed that Linux was ripping off SCO's IP.
I figure he probably did believe that.
And by the time the discovery rammed home to him that his yes-men should have said no and he didn't have a leg to stand on, it was too late for him to back out. To say "oops" and throw in the towel would have collapsed what was left of SCO - and brought the investors down on him for "breach of fiduciary duty".
Back in the 50s or so, during the cold-war spy movie craze, there was a Mattel toy called a "Johnny 7-in-1". This was a little briefcase with pieces of a toy gun that could be assembled into seven different toy weapons for playing spy/saboteur.
Then the crooks in Detroit figured out that it was also able to fire a 20-guage shotgun shell (once) without blowing up. And it became "the weapon of choice" for stickups for a few months.
Presumably having Dell's hypervisor load instantly at power-up could prevent other virtualizers from running, including hypervisor-based rootkits like Blue Pill.
Not if it's really doing its job.
A virtual machine should be able to virtualize another layer of similar virtual machines - including instances of itself. Otherwise there's something defective about the virtualization.
Slashdot Mirror
Such materials are generally transparent (if thin enough) for photons at energies below the bandgap.
Some amorphous flexible solar panels use exactly the technique you described, with three layers collecting short-wavelength, medium-wavelength, and long-wavelength photons as you go inward.
There are limits to how well you can do this. For starters: With multiple cells (in this case: layers) in series the current is limited by the cell/layer with the least current output. You need a photon to pump each electron across a cell, so you need three photons, one in each of three frequency bands, to pump it across all three.
Thus you try to pick bandgaps so similar numbers of photons will be absorbed in each layer under typical lighting conditions. And you take an big output hit if any one of the bands is obscured - for instance, by overcast.
The nanoparticles improve efficiency by 60% in the ultraviolet spectrum. The visible light spectrum is only nominally affected.
.90s could be a whole heck of a lot better than even the experimenters were originally chasing. So it's no wonder they published now, with only two sizes of particles tested.
It's still pretty cool, though.
This whole series of "only 60% of the UV part" threads is missing the rest of the article. That was just for ONE size of naonparticle, suitable for converting light to the middle of the visible range. They ran the tests for another size, suitable for converting to visible red, and got a higher conversion result, as expected.
Solar cells completely miss photons below the bandgap energy and only peel off the bandgap energy from those above it. They have a bandgap in the infrared so they get most photons, but only take that first 0.6 electron-volt chunk of their energy and lose the rest as heat. That's great if you have an infrared photon at 0.603 eV, not so hot for visible light photons at 1.8-3.1 eV, and pretty crummy for UV photons at 3.1 to 12 or so eV.
Films of nanoparticles have an interesting property: They absorb photons of various wavelengths and emit photons of particular wavelengths related to their size. But they don't do that in the solar-cell style of chopping the right-sized hunk off a more energetic photon and throwing the rest away. Instead they are able to combine energy from multiple lower-energy photons to generate one of the desired energy, chop several desired energy photons out of a high-energy one (and keep the leftover shavings to combine with others to make more desired-energy photons), and trade energy among their neighboring particles.
So it was expected that a film of nanoparticles on a solar cell would grab the energy from photons all over the spectrum, convert it to the energy characteristic of the nanoparticle size, and re-emit that. The improvement from efficiently salami-slicing and stacking photons should be better than losses from such things as emitting the photon in the wrong direction, giving a big boost to the cell.
And to some extent that was happening: Feed UV photons to nanoparticles that chunk 'em into something in the 3 eV range and you get more out of the UV hitting the cell than you would without the film - without appreciably affecting the output from the visible light. You're averaging about 1 2/3 IR photons worth of energy, instead of 1, for each incoming photon. Feed it to nanoparticles that chunk it up finer, down to 2 eV or so, and you get more out of your UV and also start improving on even visible light.
That's a good sign for doing what you really wanted to do: Use nanoparticles that emit just a tiny squidge above the solar-cell's bandgap, chunking all the photons into the right size for the cell and wasting very little of their energy. (But maybe still losing a bunch by emitting them in the wrong direction. That might be improved by putting the nanoparticles at the bottom of wells in the cell rather than on a flat surface.)
But the experiment produced a surprise: The VOLTAGE went up! WTF?
That means one of two things:
a) The nanoparticles affected the bandgap.
b) The nanoparticles coupled directly into the cell's "circuitry" in some non-obvious way.
b) might lead to something even better: Nanoparticles that capture the photons, chunk and stack them into some desired size (voltage), and deliver them directly to the wiring. That could get virtually ALL the incoming energy into your wires.
A solar cell with efficiencies in the
Hot DAMN!
Watcha talking 'bout Willis? This, says murders in the USA peaked in 1993 at 24,530 and then has been on the decline ever since. (Along with almost every other Stat.)
1994 (the first year of the big drop) was also the year that the move to shall-issue CCW ({permit for} Concealed Carry of Weapons) took a big jump forward, with a number of states passing such laws and a large number of potential victims starting to carry guns legally.
These laws are continually struck down, one by one, yet the state legislatures still propose them. ... Do the state legislatures not look at court rulings? or do they not care?
It's worse than that. In Posner's words they're deliberately ATTEMPTING to "deform" the children and "leave them unequipped to cope with the world as we know it."
It's part of the "culture war". A conscious (if misguided) attempt by the "progressives" to raise non-violent children by insulating them from knowledge of violence and tools of violence.
This has been going on at least since the Vietnam-era anti-war movement, which discussed and promoted this form of child-rearing - though primarily as a way to head off future wars. Some of the things done then were refusing to allow children to have toy guns or play games involving fighting or conflict: "soldier", "cowboys and indians", "cops and robbers", etc.
Over time this has been institutionalized and escalated into things like the "zero tolerance on weapons in schools" program (which expels children for having a gun-shaped charm-bracelet ornament or a plastic knife in their brown-bag lunch) disciplinary policies that give a pass to bullies striking their victims but severely disciplines any victim who strikes back in self-defense.
Of course the unintended consequences included raising a large fraction of several generations with no understanding - or worse, an erroneous understanding - of how to react to violence and threats - at personal, group, and political levels.
Of course such mind-stunted people are much easier to rule. So it's politically expedient to continue and expand the programs to "deform" progressively more of each generation.
Make that:
Wonder if that's how "Mr Tock" worked. B-)
Sounds more like a complicated steam engine to me.
I did RTFA - at least the first level.
Yes, it's a steam engine. (The steam is switched through valves and pushes on pistons to achieve motion.)
Not a rocket. (No blast of burning gases out an opening causing motion by recoil.)
Not a fuel-cell or even a steam generator. (The steam powers the motion directly by pressure, not indirectly by driving a generator to power an electric motor.)
So we now have a working steampunk / gaslamp fantasy robot arm.
Wonder if that's how "Mr Tock" worked. B-)
The problem I can see with this, that unless they plane to lock down all the sewer caps and manhole covers, it would be pretty easy to hack into the lines at some point; perhaps I'm mistaken.
I'm more concerned about whether the fibers will hold up to ongoing sewer maintainence and whether they will snarl in debris and be pulled loose, severed, or cause a blockage.
Imagine what happens to a fiber-down-the-drain when Roto Rooter does its thing...
Talk about making it easy for Chinese secret police as well...
It also makes it easy for the operators of the firewall:
Spamming with lists of proxies guarantees that the list ends up in the hands of the authorities. Then they know what IP addresses to block AND to flag when somebody tries to use them.
so puree more babies. That makes sense.
If you're going to puree the babies anyhow (or dump 'em in an incinerator), why not salvage a few of the cells first and use them in research to save lives?
= = = =
By the way: The "babies" we're talking about here are typically blastocysts - unimplanted clusters of a few cells. These are the spare, cryonically-frozen, fertilized eggs that are left over when an in-vitro fertilization attempt succeeds and the new parents don't want to go through another dozen pregnancies and raise the resulting couple dozen children.
But even if it were a first-trimester abortion that was going to be done anyhow, or an in-vitro fertilization that was done specifically to create a cell line (and thus using eggs and sperm that otherwise would never have combined) what's your gripe?
Gotta make this short so I can grab a copy of Ad Block Plus. B-)
Really did it, too. Then turned it off for slashdot.org and fieldlines.com. B-)
... Ad Block Plus, a plug-in that blocks advertisement on web sites and also prevents site owners from blocking people using it. ... site owners install scripts that prevent people using ad blocking software from accessing their site. ... Ad Block Plus [does not let] individual site owners ... block people using their plug-in.
Hot DAMN! That's the best ad I've seen in years.
Gotta make this short so I can grab a copy of Ad Block Plus. B-)
... they are running a lot of fiber, but most of it is just to the neighborhoods where they will then run VDSL to each home from remote terminals. With the amount of money the behemoths have, you think they would just run fiber straight to every home and get it over with. Eventually they will have to do it anyways.
It costs a LOT more money to run fiber to every house than it does to just run it to a new box beside the one where the neighborhood copper drops already join a fat cable toward the CO or a local T-carrier concentrator.
A LOT more money.
Another point that's being missed: Removing the preinstalled version of Windows on a PC (by installing something else over it) is NOT free.
The cost includes:
- the perceived risk of loss of the machine (and the money invested in it) if the install of the alternative OS goes wrong so badly that it can't be backed out and the machine recovered to its previous working configuration.
- the cost of porting his data and working procedures to a new environment and learning to be efficient in this new environment.
The cost is even higher if the machine isn't fresh, but he's been working on it for a while. Now he's risking his current working environment and the associated data.
(And yes I know about backups and having to reinstall Windows from time to time. So what? That's also fraught with risks of loss. The cost of having to recover from backups is something he knows in his guts from past experience. So now he should volunteer to incur this cost when he doesn't NEED to, in order to switch to an unfamiliar environment and incur the porting cost as well? You have to be perceived as a LOT better to get him over that hump.)
The way to break this cycle is what Dell is doing now: Provide new machines with Linux preinstalled for less than the same machine with Windows preinstalled. Then he has a known-good-system with support and only has to incur the porting cost, much of which he'd incur in migrating to a new machine. (And how good it is that this is happening at the same time as the rollout of Vista, increasing the porting cost for sticking with Windows by adding the migration to a new version.)
This technology looks like it might deposit a large electric charge on the surface of the chip. This will have to be dissipated, before it dissipates itself by creating an electrostatic discharge on (or capacitively coupled to) one of the chips interconnects.
To avoid this the insulating passivation layer will probably have to be topped by an additional conductive layer. This layer, in turn, will increase the capacitive load on the interconnects and likely require additional chip power to switch them.
I expect it will still be a big net improvement. But deploying it won't be trivial.
Your analysis assumes only the ions are moved, so the entire atmosphere being moved must be ionized.
In fact a single ion carries an enormous number of unionized molecules with it.
In other words, the device should self-test critical functions, and if any do not meet requirements, the device needs to indicate the failure AND NOT TRANSMIT.
Dead on. But:
If the "scanner" fails to detect an "in use" channel properly (self test to ensure it does), the transmitter shouldn't just push ahead and transmit, it should alarm and go to standby.
Which breaks if you bring it up in an environment that doesn't have any "in use" channels to detect. Like in a remote environment (such as my place in a lightly-settled section of Nevada desert) which has zero detectable TV signals and virtually no daytime broadcast radio - exactly the sort of place you'd want to "wire for broadband" with wireless.
IMHO the right algorithm is not an up-front self-test, but a CYA check during turn-up:
- Check for in-use channel. If not found:
- Momentarily make a VERY SMALL amount of signal of your own and see if you detect that, to check the detector. If you do:
- THEN turn on normal transmitter power.
[perhaps] If SCO is unable to come up with these fees then Novell could use that as grounds for termination of the whole contract. Heck, the contract may have an escape clause for Novell if SCO fails to stand up to its side of the agreement, and this decision could be enough for Novell to terminate immediately.
Yep. If Novell can use this to kill the contract I don't see anything else keeping them from open sourcing the whole Unix ball of tar. B-)
I seem to recall one of Bussard's points in his talk Should Google Go Nuclear? was that plasma confinement by magnetic fields is inherently unstable when the confinement is concave toward the plasma, no matter how you twist them. Thus Stellarators, Tokamaks, etc. are (in his opinion) doomed. (And that's why his design is conVEX toward the plasma.)
(My take on that has been that even if passive geometries are unstable, if you can get it stable enough that instability growth occurs at no more than an HF rate you might be able to use an active system to finish the job of stabilizing the confinement. But that's a separate issue.)
It sounds like the courts said that Novell owns the Unix copyrights.
If so, could (would?) Novell release the code so no one ever has to
question whether Linux contains parts of Unix.
If I understand this correctly:
While Novell owns the copyrights they are still in that pesky exclusive contract for SCO to administer the licensing, for which SCO gets a big cut and for which SCO paid some big bux once upon a time. That contract is the bulk of SCO's remaining assets.
If IBM finishes demolishing SCO and eats the corpse, they'll end up being the other party in that contract. THEN they can get together with Novell and open the source, PD the source, license it to all comers for $1, or whatever. Or just tear it up and free Novell to do whatever they want with the copyrights.
Heck [Darl] might have actually believed that Linux was ripping off SCO's IP.
I figure he probably did believe that.
And by the time the discovery rammed home to him that his yes-men should have said no and he didn't have a leg to stand on, it was too late for him to back out. To say "oops" and throw in the towel would have collapsed what was left of SCO - and brought the investors down on him for "breach of fiduciary duty".
This way he can say "I tried!".
Proper name: "Johnny Seven O.M.A." (for one-man-army).
Urban Myth Caveat: I heard about the eighth function from a friend in the gun culture but did not witness or attempt it myself. B-)
Back in the 50s or so, during the cold-war spy movie craze, there was a Mattel toy called a "Johnny 7-in-1". This was a little briefcase with pieces of a toy gun that could be assembled into seven different toy weapons for playing spy/saboteur.
Then the crooks in Detroit figured out that it was also able to fire a 20-guage shotgun shell (once) without blowing up. And it became "the weapon of choice" for stickups for a few months.
Visible means little when you're blind.
Warning: Do not look into LASER with remaining eye.
Presumably having Dell's hypervisor load instantly at power-up could prevent other virtualizers from running, including hypervisor-based rootkits like Blue Pill.
Not if it's really doing its job.
A virtual machine should be able to virtualize another layer of similar virtual machines - including instances of itself. Otherwise there's something defective about the virtualization.
There is a memory leak in your code. Or maybe it's a feature?
Nope. drinkBeer(b) frees the beer instance.
(But there may be a memory leak in the PROGRAMMER after enough iterations.)