I think you may have missed the point of combined heat and power. The idea is to generate electricity and heat simultaneously in the winter instead of just heat.... Combined heat and power in a home can be MORE efficient overall than a power station even if it produces less electricity from the input because it can use a large amount of what would have been waste heat.
Another place it would be VERY useful is for travel trailers - for both recreation and construction.
Self-contained trailers normally carry water and propane. They can be self-contained for water and sewage for about a week, and on fuel for far longer. But electricity is a big problem: Batteries are heavy, so they typically only last for a day or two for lighting, ventilation, and the motor in the furnace. Beyond that (or if you want to run something more energy-intensive, like an air conditioner or a microwave oven) you need to run a generator.
But such a trailer will have several flames running all or much of the time: Burner for the ammonia-cycle refrigerator, pilot and main burner for the water heater, burner for the furnace. If those "burners" were actually these ceramic fuel cells you could get enough power to keep the batteries charged, run major appliances, and have plenty to spare.
All three use the heat of combustion at a far lower temperature than the flame is capable of. These cells give you all the heat of combustion in their output gas, getting their electrical power by producing that exhaust gas at a lower temperature. So (after the capital cost of the fancier "burner" is absorbed) the electricity is "free". You burn no more fuel than you would without the ceramic fuel cell being involved in the process - rather than consuming lots of extra propane in a noisy, high-maintenance generator.
First one to convert would be the propane refrigerator. Though its power level varies (to regulate the box temperature as the door is opened and warm food is added) it is "on" all the time, making up the heat loss through the refrigerator's insulation.
Propane/ammonia refrigerators that also generate enough "free" power for lighting and small appliances would also be useful in off-grid housing.
Actually you don't even need to gassify the fuel. All you need is to burn it in a way that sucks the oxygen out of the air and pipe the hot, oxygen-depleted air that results through (or around) the tubes.
The device is an oxygen-concentration cell. Oxygen dissolves into the ceramic on one side, donating two electrons per molecule to the electron there, migrates through the ceramic, and picks up two electrons from the electrode on the other side. (It has to be hot for the oxygen to migrate rapidly, but that heat is not a consumable.)
Of course it's easy to use with a fuel gas on the low-oxygen concentration side to consume the oxygen (and donate the electrons) in its stead. (The ceramic is hot enough to light the fresh fuel, and some of the energy of combustion goes to keep it hot.) But anything that gets it hot and with an oxygen-gradient will work fine.
These devices are also the "exhaust gas oxygen sensors" in your modern car's control system.
I read a similar rah-rah for these devices in an Analog magazine science-fact article back in the '60s or so, and have been wondering why we don't hear more about them or have them more widely deployed. (Fuel cells capture a lot more of the chemical energy of a fuel than heat engines do. In principle they can get it ALL - less a small delta to keep the second law of thermodynamics happy.) Perhaps the stuff in this article about solutions to fragility and ablation tells us why.
What are the advantages to converting the heat to sound first, rather than directly to electricity via thermoelectric processes?
Current thermopiles are pretty inefficient. The main problem is that they unavoidably leak heat from the hot to the cold side. In peltier cells (the ones in those cheap "coolers" and CPU heatsinks) leak several times as much heat as they make use of when running as generators (and leak most of the heat they pump, so they have to pump it several times to get it dumped). There's a more efficient one in the labs, which doesn't have a lot of charge (and thus heat) carriers in the hot/cold bridge. But it's still far from perfect.
They also have to operate at temperatures that don't destroy their materials - typically semiconductors. That limits how hot the hot end can get, and thus how much energy you can get out of the heat (since they can't break the carnot cycle rules).
These devices are gas-working-fluid heat engines, with the gas (and the piezo power takeoff) as the only moving part(s). In principle the gas "prime mover" should be able to approach carnot cycle efficiency (which is as good as you CAN get) - and that's what this group is trying for. Being made of gas and metal, the "hot end" can get very hot, too, so you aren't as limited as with semiconductor heat converteres. Meanwhile, piezos are extremely efficient as well - and some (like quartz) can also handle very high temperatures.
As simple mechanical systems they should also be easier to fabricate than semiconductors, making them a garage-shop item that doesn't require your garage to be a clean-room in silicon valley with 100 megabux of specialized equipment.
The problem is that using DeCSS on a DVD is not going to be considered to be "in the ordinary course of its [the DVD's] operation".
IMHO (IANAL):
It might be if DeCSS software becomes widely enough used.
It might also be in the case of platforms that can ONLY play DVDs by using a player based on DeCSS because the "legitimate licensees" have not seen fit to make anything "legit" available, or if the DeCSS based software becomes more common than the "legit" products.
With the existing electoral system, only those in swing states matter. Most of the other votes are essentially discarded.
As opposed to direct election, where only the political machines in a handfull of heavily-populated states matter.
With popular election of a president, such political machines can manufacture enough votes to swing the popular total. (Faked counts can have a much larger margin than real ones, so a big state can override the actual will of tens of times as many people in the rest of the country.) With the electoral college they can only corrupt their own state's electroal votes.
You also have to recount the WHOLE COUNTRY if there's a close election.
Finally: The little states will NEVER be swing states in a popular election of president, and with small populations will have little effect. The candidates would become efficient by pandering to a few giant states and the "flyover country" would NEVER have any voice in the executive branch. With the Electoral College the presidential candidates have to pay attention to essentially ALL the states - certainly all the different SORTS of states - in order to accumulate enough electoral votes.
This was known by the founders, which was why the electoral college was set up in the first place. By giving one vote per senator or representative, with a minimum of one representative no matter how small the state was, it gives a slight extra weight to little states, to keep the giant states from riding rooughshod over them. This was done deliberately, to get the little states to join up and keep participating. Going back on the deal would be a destabilizing event - possibly kicking off a new secessioinist movement.
The electoral college tends to make presidents try to be president of ALL the regions of the country, not just of a few big states.
'Scuse me for topic-hopping a near-top thread, but this needs to be seen.
Dell updated the article TFA was based on to correct a pricing typo and someone posted a followup to summarize the corrected price differences.
If the compared boxen are actually equivalently-featured (time will tell) all the linux (suffix "n") versions are $50-$100 lower price than the Windows equivalents:
[Desktop]
Windows XPS 410:$899 Ubuntu XPS 410n:$849 ($50 less)
And that is about as close to bi-partisan cooperation as Congress will ever get.
Which is fine by me. I don't ever want to see "bipartisan cooperation".
"Bipartisan" means major parties have the same position on the issue. And THAT means the voters didn't have an effective way to oppose this "consensus of oligarchs" at the polls.
Because the news media is SUPPOSED to EXPOSE such abuses of power - to give us warning. Then we can dodge, and mobilize opposition, etc.
Keeping silent about such abuses perpetuates them. Talking about them gives their opposition more intelligence (in the military sense) for organizing against them, and lets them know that action is needed.
The most powerful propaganda technique is to selectively not report. The media already does this with entirely too many things that they want put over on the population. (Ever notice how they don't tell you about a lot of tyrannical laws until they day they go into effect, rather than warning you when they're in the legislature (when you could do something about it), or up for executive signature (when you might have a slight chance to abort it)?)
For once we've got a petty tyrant who's knotting THEIR shorts, too. So let's not play into his hands by trying to get the media to shut up and let him perpetrate his evil unimpeded.
If I'm reading your article correctly, at least some of these work by intercepting the customer hitting a link on the advertiser's site or popping up a redirected-through-affiliate page as a result of browsing the advertiser's site, to give the customer the impression he's just continuing his existing session.
If this is the case, it seems to me the advertiser would be able to identify this fraud by auditing his own logs - looking for a non-affiliate hit followed, soon after, by an affiliate hit claiming commission for his signup.
Seems to me that he could take this to court. With your evidence of this sort of deliberate fraud to establish a pattern of deceptive behavior, the results of the log post-processing could establish the amount of the damages.
Am I correct on this?
Business model for the advertiser:
1) Read the expert's article. 2) Post-process the log. 3) Hire the expert as expert witness. 4) Sue the bastards. 5) Profit.
No missing steps. (Also, the expert could probably consult to help out on step 2).)
Good luck combining fermions with photons. Photons are very much a type of boson, which means they're very much _not_ fermions.
Photon: Integer spin: Boson.
Electron: Half-integer spin: Fermion.
Hole: Half-integer spin: Fermion.
Electron-hole pair: Sum of two half-integer spins = integer spin: Boson.
So an electron-hole PAIR and a photon of the excitation energy hanging around in a crystal full of electrons can be duals - "flipping back-and-forth" or forming a quantum-indeterminancy of which it "really is" - i.e. a "polariton".
And as a fine boson it doesn't give a hoot for the exclusion principle and actually prefers to be in step with its neighbors.
So successfully creating a suitable nanoscale structure to cause a bunch of them to form, then to combine into a bose-einstein condensate, seems like a reasonable accomplishment.
So when your license is suspended...your account is frozen. Brilliant!
Nope.
When your license is suspended it doesn't keep you from using it as ID. It just keeps you from driving legally.
All this system is doing is using your license as an ID to look up your account in the e-check processing service's database. This keeps on working until the service decides to stop accepting that particular license as ID. (Probably when it expires and/or is replaced with a new one.)
I refuse to use debit cards at all (as opposed to an ATM card or a credit card), because they draw directly from your account and they don't require an independent piece of verification (like a PIN) to use.
Now that depends on the debit card, doesn't it?
There's nothing to prevent this company, or one like it, from requiring a PIN to transact business when you identify via driver's license.
At least a debit card can be cancelled in the event it's stolen, even though by then it may be too late. How are you going to cancel your driver's license when the DMV is only open Monday through Friday 8-5?
By calling the "card stolen" hotline of N.P.C. and telling them to disconnect your license from your bank account.
Your driver's license is just being used as a key to a database. It's another way to go from a piece of plastic in your pocket to your name and account number - after that it's E-checks on your account with the E-check processing company.
The only real issue I see with this (besides people reading personal data off the plastic) is if the state doesn't make some distinction in the data on the license between a lost/stolen one and the replacement. Without that, once you've had ONE license lost or stolen you can't turn such a service back on for your new driver's license without re-enabling it for the missing one. (Of course you can change the PIN - presuming a PIN is required to use the service.)
If they get out of it (by getting out from under the pressure) by making hybrids like the current generation,... they'll keep doing just that, especially if we're still pleased in 2020 with a solution visionary in 2003, but inadequate in 2020.
I think we're on the same page on this - just focusing on different columns of type.
A non-plug-in hybrid does nothing for me. I need the plug-in type - both to run my 28-mile round trip commute with the engine off on $0.75/gallon-equivalent electric power and to achieve hybrid-type mileage (and as many electric-fueled miles as practical) cross-country and cross-mountain on my regular trips to/from Nevada.
You want to eliminate all car exhaust - or as much as you can convince people to eliminate - especially from the air of the crowded cities.
Plug-in hybrids give me what I want and you virtually all of what you want. Ordinary hybrids give you little (a partial reduction of city-driving exhaust) and me nothing (because a commute-only vehicle that won't handle the long trips or mountain roads is one I won't purchase).
That sort of trip cycle offers no advantage for a plug-in hybrid.
True for an ordinary hybrid, but NOT for a plug-in hybrid.
An ordinary hybrid has a very limited amount of power storage. It can save up the power from a couple stops from speed to get started again. But that's about it. Take it down a mountain slope and after a couple hundred feet of lost altitude its batteries are full and it has to start throwing away energy by braking, just like a non-hybrid.
A plug in hybrid, on the other hand, has enough electric energy storage to go several tens of miles on the flat against freeway-speed wind resistance. That's also enough to go up a couple thousand feet of elevation. And that means it can recover the energy from going DOWN a couple thousand feet of elevation and use it to drive on the level for tens of miles, or go up the first couple thousand feet (less inefficiency) on the way to the next pass.
Going down and up hills has the same energy recovery issue as stopping and restarting - only bigger. Put in a big enough battery pack to handle it and a hybrid gets the same advantage in mountains as it does in stop-and-go on the level. "Plug-in hybrid" is another way to say "big battery pack".
So Toyota will sell no all-electric or other "zero emissions" cars in 2020?
If they make a "plug-in hybrid" (a hybrid with enlarged electric storage and a recharger connection) they can run engine-off on a daily commute, only firing up for long, out-of-city, trips.
That's zero emissions where it counts (on the bulk of the crowded city driving) without sacrificing range.
And at current gas prices it's better than a 4:1 cost savings on fuel, too.
The real win of hybrids isn't the drivetrain, it's rengenerative braking. Storing kinetic energy rather than dissipating it as heat is an obvious efficiency win, since you're presumably going to stop moving at some point.
Another big win - especially for a "plug-in hybrid" with batteries capable of holding a lot more than a couple stops worth of energy - is recovering the POTENTIAL energy of altitude when descending hills or mountains. That's a bloody lot of energy. (Ask anybody who tried to ride their brakes down a few miles of 6% grade and had them heat up, fade, and let his vehicle run away.)
You even get an advantage on the upslope - because mountains are lumpy, so it's not uphill all the way to the divide. There will be lots of miles where you're temporarily going down, letting a hybrid recover energy to get you up part of the next, higher, climb while the engine-only car burns it heating the brakes or the air and then has to make more kinetic energy out of more fuel.
The place where a hybrid is at a disadvantage is on a long, fast run down a level road. Then, once it's depleted its battery, it's burning fuel to fight friction just like a non-hybrid.
But even there it's not all bad for the hybrid. Yes the batteries and electric transmission means more weight to carry and more resulting friction. But that's partly offset by being able to have a smaller, lighter engine (because the electric system helps out on peak loads). And the smaller, lighter engine is working closer to its peak efficiency, which means that it burns less fuel than the non-hybrid's big, heavy, loafing engine to fight the same air resistance.
Why would someone design a car simply for that trip?
I'm not looking for a car DESIGNED for that particular 250 mile each-way trip. I'm looking for a car CAPABLE of that particular trip.
However, like the EPA emissions test cycles, this is a real usage pattern, with a mix of types of travel that puts a load on power train and charge control performance that must be met to have a practical vehicle.
It's also likely to be a common cycle: While my particular trip is Silicon Valley to Antelope Valley, its characteristics are virtually identical to trips from Silicon Valley to:
- Reno via Donner Pass,
- Carson City via Carson Pass and Echo Summit, or
- Minden/Gardnerville via Carson Pass, Echo Summit, and the Geiger Grade. Trips from Silicon Valley to the skiing areas around South Lake Tahoe and Stateline are a nearly complete subset of the Carson City / Minden / Gardnverville trips (cutting off only a few miles of downslope at the end.) Similarly with Reno vs. the (north) Lake Tahoe and Incline Village areas.
There are a LOT of people who make these trips quite regularly, with a load of recreation gear (or gambling money B-) ). (Try it during the winter skiing season, summer camping season, or any three-day holiday and count the cars.) Ordinary gasoline vehicles - SUVs, town cars, compacts, and pickup trucks - can all make them just fine, even in bad weather, on less than a tank of gas each way (and with a safety margin for traffic jams, chain-up lines, and getting stuck in snowstorms on a summit overnight). A plug-in hybrid should be able to do the same, with no penalties on performance, safety, travel time, comfort, or extra fuel stops. (And it should be able to do so with the sort of fuel efficiency improvements that hybrids are noted for, thanks to regeneration on the long downslopes.) If it can't manage this it isn't a viable replacement car for, not just one of the largest urban markets, but the one with the highest concentration of politically-correct tree-hugging early-adopters with massive disposable incomes.
If it CAN hack it, at a reasonable price, it can handle the driving cycles thoughout virtually all of the US. It should sell like hotcakes in the SF Bay Area, paying off the development costs quickly, then go on to take the rest of the country by storm.
So IMHO this trip would be an excellent target for automotive engineers to shoot for in their plug-in hybrid designs.
I want a plug-in hybrid that can do this cycle, with driver, passenger, and at least 500 lb of cargo:
- Start in the SF Bay area (elevation 10 ft) with a full charge and full tank.
- Take Altamont Pass (1007 ft)
- Cruise crosswise across the central valley
- Take highway 88 over Carson pass (8650 ft)
- Cut down 89 and cross Monitor pass (8314 ft)
- Descend to Antelope valley (5000 ft).
Then tank up, charge the battery from the windmill or power line over a couple nights, and go back.
The charge control should be smart:
Going east the car should use battery power at first, scavenge the power going down Altamot for the first part of the the trip across the central valley, arrive at Carson pass with the batteries near safe discharge (to avoid excessive gas consumption), scavenge power descending from Carson pass to use climbing through Monitor pass where it again arrives near safe discharge, and scavenge power on the short and steep descent to Antelope Valley for crusing there. With the scavenging and the mileage it should make the trip on a single tank with a margin of safety, despite the 5000 foot end-to-end climb and the 8650 ft bump near the end.
Going west it should be able to scavenge enough power coming down to the Sierras to get across the central valley with the engine off much of the way, arriving back in the Bay Area with non-trivial gas left in the tank, so if it misses getting a charge that night it can still do a 40-mile round-trip commute the next day without a pit stop.
All while maintaining the peppy performance needed to maintain freeway speeds and handle the traffic on the freeway legs of the trip and to quickly pass slow-moving traffic on the steep upgrades and short passing lanes of the Sierras.
... the article was written to address the feasibility of Linux as a viable mass-market (read: installable by idiots) operating system,...
Not just idiots. Also by people who are very smart and skilled - in other things than system administration. (Non-idiots can be even more of a problem, since they can get into more complicated messes.)
These people have more important (to them, and maybe to us) things to do with their time than learn the ins-and-outs of system internals. A surgeon, for instance, needs a car that "just works" to get to the operating room in time. After decades of training he should not be wasting his time learning auto mechanics and working on his car, risking his fingers changing his own water pump or his life relining his own brakes.
If we want Lunux (and/or other FOSS) to replace the commercial systems, it must become accessible to such non-computer-guts-savvy people. They're the bulk of the users.
It's important to have accurate mileage ratings on cars, and it's hard to understand how the EPA could be so bad at it.
EPA testing was NEVER about estimating mileage. (That was something convenient that fell out of it for free.)
EPA testing was, and still is, about POLLUTION CONTROL: Establishing standardized emissions test procedures to affordably test engine/powertrain/aerodynamic performance and determining whether each of a manufacturer's products achieved the congress-mandated targets.
The test needed to be able to inform the engineers on how they were doing - giving them a comparison between performance with and without some modification, telling them whether they've met the year's targets, and letting them know how their products do compared to their competitors (so if a competitor does a bunch better they can work harder to match them, rather than claim it's undoable and petition congress for a relaxation of the standards).
To meet this purpose the test did NOT have to be an extremely accurate match to how cars, on the average, were used. It just had to be close enough that test-driven improvements in auto emissions mapped to a similar improvement in actual air quality, rather than having a big miss because the test didn't cover something important.
To do this they did some research on how cars were actually used, and created a test based on it. The test started with the engine cold, which means the car sat overnight. It only had ONE warmup cycle (with both "driving with engine cold" and "idling with engine cold"), so a car can be tested in a single day, in a single run, rather than having to "cold soak" overnight multiple times. And while it contained a mix of stop-and-go "city" driving and freeway speed "highway" driving, (along with other modes) it was biased toward having a large component of each mode, so engineers would have feedback on all of them, and regulatory approval would require adequate performance on all of them. This met its mix of "highway" vs. "city" wasn't typical of actual driving.
Back in the '70s (when I was writing software to capture and analyze the data from these tests), the story in the labs was that the EPA had developed the test by:
- Instrumenting a car to record its speed and distance moment-by-moment (along with "event" markers, like "started the engine").
- Covertly parking behind citizens in a "location near one of their field offices with a mix of city, suburb, and country roads" (Denver CO?) and following these people through actual start-drive-park cycles.
- Analyzing the results from a number of these runs,
- Picking one trip that contained a balanced mix of all the major cycles, each roughly typical of its type, and
- Making that particular captured trip the canonical test.
The tests ran on a dynamometer with drag and inertia-flywheels set to model the car's aerodynamics and mass, and included continuous measurements of mass-air-flow and levels of unburned hydrocarbons, CO2, CO, and NOx. A simple computation on all but NOx gives you the amount of carbon in the exhaust and thus the amount of gasoline into the engine. Ratioing that with the distance traveled gives you a good measure of gas mileage achieved - IN THE TEST'S DRIVING CYCLE.
As long as this mileage estimate was available "for free" from the analysis software, when the oil crunch hit a government bureau decided that it would be a good idea to require the manufacturers to print this "EPA estimate" of mileage on the stickers, so car buyers could compare gas mileage of different models when shopping. They knew it would be off for any individual driver, due to his actual driving style and a host of other factors. But because it was measured in a standard way it should still give a good comparison between cars. And it should be "in the ballpark" so the customer could estimate his gasoline costs while comparing prices.
Of course, once a LARGE number of people were driving their cars an
Not only has Microsoft ignored a significant shift in national intellectual property law (per recent Supreme court decisions)
Ignored a shift in IP law? By asserting their patents are infringed? I don't think the Supreme Court said you can't infringe a patent anymore.
As I understand it, the Supreme Court eliminated the Federal Circuit's bogus requirement that a prior art showing be a description of EXACTLY the claim to be rendered invalid.
As this percolates through the case law it should put teeth back into "obvious to a person having ordinary skill in the art". This implies both the end of the flood of bogus patents on all aspects of computing and the invalidation of the bulk of those currently in the "stack of barganing chips" portfolios of companies such as Microsoft, as soon as any attempt is made to actually ENFORCE them.
With the value of the asset about to vanish, acquiring more bogus patents about to become extremely hard, and the bulk of the patents ready to self-destruct if challenged, it make sense for Microsoft to stop sitting on them and use them in a FUD campaign while the count is at its peak.
Now where can I bone up on the info you mentioned?
Start here. It has links to a lot of useful stuff, mainly on US Government sites.
Google is your friend. Things like info on the Six Nations' declaration of war on the Germans are easy to find with searches like "Iroquois war Germany".
Speaking of whom: It was the Iroquios Confederacy that was the main inspiration - primarily through Franklin - for the structure of the federal government of the United States. Prior to the discovery of their working Republic and its long history (which has been described as "outdoing the Romans"), the history of democracy and republican forms in Europe - particularly certain episodes from Greece - were used as royalist propaganda. They were cautionary tales about why government of the people was doomed to failure and despotic rule by a member of an elite was allegedly necessary.
Quit a bit of this history has been unearthed in recent decades. A search for "Iroquois Franklin" will point you to quite a bit of it, such as full online text of Bruce Johansen's The Forgotten Founders
Is that why they all but wiped out many of those tribes you just mentioned ?
If you want to know what happened to the American Indians you can ask them - or their mixed-race descendants. Like my wife. Or a significant number of my friends. (Unfortunately it's a couple years too late to ask the person who was perhaps my closest (just) friend for four decades...)
There was a lot of death due to European diseases. But contrary to popular myth, germ warfare was NOT used against them by the US. (One English general did do it before the Revolution.) When epidemics got started the Indians and non-Indian settlers worked together to try to mitigate them: Disease like smallpox were a threat to all.
Tribes were some of the first adopters of the smallpox vaccine. (The Sioux had a gold medal struck and sent to Jenner.)
The Indians are still here - in large numbers. (The Mohicans periodically issue press releases to point out that, contrary to the book title, they're still around. B-) ) There aren't a lot of fullbloods - but there aren't a lot of full-blooded English-Americans, or French-Americans, or Whatever-Americans, either. There was a lot of intermarriage. Many of those of Indian ancestry found it convenient not to mention it - sometimes even to their offspring.
"Redneck" isn't just about getting your neck sunburned if you work outdoors and have a short haircut. It's also about having a high likelyhood of some Indian bloodline. Many of the Indians - both fullblood and partbreed - have assimilated into the general population of the US. They're farmers and ranchers, civil engineers, high-iron workers, merchants, professors, computer scientists, nanotechnologists,...
... without tyrannical rulers and enforced, draconian, social homogenization.
Well how's that working out for ya ?
A lot better than you'd think if you're depending on the media - especially ours - to tell you. B-) And a WHOLE lot better, over virtually all of the last quarter-millenium, than the European alternatives.
BTW, if you can show me a link to a world map showing the locations of all those tribes you mentioned I'd appreciate it
Here you go. There are links to a full-sized PDF and an index. The ones outside the continental US can be found easily as well.
- but in the meantime, the subject was COUNTRIES.
These ARE countries. THAT was my POINT. Most of them just happen to be surrounded by various parts of the United States.
"Indian nation" is NOT a feel-good term used by the soppy-headed. It's a literal, legal, reality. These are independent, sovereign nations, with their own territories, borders, and so on. Most of them have treaty-based alliances with the US federal government. Some don't. They have automatic US citizenship - much like the citizens of Puerto Rico. They are exempt from some US taxes - which ones depend on treaty terms and whether they're living on the res or off it. Some tribes receive ongoing payments - think "rent" - as part of whatever settlement allowed non-tribal members to settle some of their lands.
They're countries in an alliance with the US. They have more independence than the "several states" (which subordinated all their foreign policy, interstate commerce regulation, and currency matters to the federation). They're also far more independent of the US than satellites of the USSR (such as Estonia) were of Russia - or than the member states of the European Union are likely to be of their own central government within a couple decades.
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I think you may have missed the point of combined heat and power. The idea is to generate electricity and heat simultaneously in the winter instead of just heat. ... Combined heat and power in a home can be MORE efficient overall than a power station even if it produces less electricity from the input because it can use a large amount of what would have been waste heat.
Another place it would be VERY useful is for travel trailers - for both recreation and construction.
Self-contained trailers normally carry water and propane. They can be self-contained for water and sewage for about a week, and on fuel for far longer. But electricity is a big problem: Batteries are heavy, so they typically only last for a day or two for lighting, ventilation, and the motor in the furnace. Beyond that (or if you want to run something more energy-intensive, like an air conditioner or a microwave oven) you need to run a generator.
But such a trailer will have several flames running all or much of the time: Burner for the ammonia-cycle refrigerator, pilot and main burner for the water heater, burner for the furnace. If those "burners" were actually these ceramic fuel cells you could get enough power to keep the batteries charged, run major appliances, and have plenty to spare.
All three use the heat of combustion at a far lower temperature than the flame is capable of. These cells give you all the heat of combustion in their output gas, getting their electrical power by producing that exhaust gas at a lower temperature. So (after the capital cost of the fancier "burner" is absorbed) the electricity is "free". You burn no more fuel than you would without the ceramic fuel cell being involved in the process - rather than consuming lots of extra propane in a noisy, high-maintenance generator.
First one to convert would be the propane refrigerator. Though its power level varies (to regulate the box temperature as the door is opened and warm food is added) it is "on" all the time, making up the heat loss through the refrigerator's insulation.
Propane/ammonia refrigerators that also generate enough "free" power for lighting and small appliances would also be useful in off-grid housing.
Actually you don't even need to gassify the fuel. All you need is to burn it in a way that sucks the oxygen out of the air and pipe the hot, oxygen-depleted air that results through (or around) the tubes.
The device is an oxygen-concentration cell. Oxygen dissolves into the ceramic on one side, donating two electrons per molecule to the electron there, migrates through the ceramic, and picks up two electrons from the electrode on the other side. (It has to be hot for the oxygen to migrate rapidly, but that heat is not a consumable.)
Of course it's easy to use with a fuel gas on the low-oxygen concentration side to consume the oxygen (and donate the electrons) in its stead. (The ceramic is hot enough to light the fresh fuel, and some of the energy of combustion goes to keep it hot.) But anything that gets it hot and with an oxygen-gradient will work fine.
These devices are also the "exhaust gas oxygen sensors" in your modern car's control system.
I read a similar rah-rah for these devices in an Analog magazine science-fact article back in the '60s or so, and have been wondering why we don't hear more about them or have them more widely deployed. (Fuel cells capture a lot more of the chemical energy of a fuel than heat engines do. In principle they can get it ALL - less a small delta to keep the second law of thermodynamics happy.) Perhaps the stuff in this article about solutions to fragility and ablation tells us why.
What are the advantages to converting the heat to sound first, rather than directly to electricity via thermoelectric processes?
Current thermopiles are pretty inefficient. The main problem is that they unavoidably leak heat from the hot to the cold side. In peltier cells (the ones in those cheap "coolers" and CPU heatsinks) leak several times as much heat as they make use of when running as generators (and leak most of the heat they pump, so they have to pump it several times to get it dumped). There's a more efficient one in the labs, which doesn't have a lot of charge (and thus heat) carriers in the hot/cold bridge. But it's still far from perfect.
They also have to operate at temperatures that don't destroy their materials - typically semiconductors. That limits how hot the hot end can get, and thus how much energy you can get out of the heat (since they can't break the carnot cycle rules).
These devices are gas-working-fluid heat engines, with the gas (and the piezo power takeoff) as the only moving part(s). In principle the gas "prime mover" should be able to approach carnot cycle efficiency (which is as good as you CAN get) - and that's what this group is trying for. Being made of gas and metal, the "hot end" can get very hot, too, so you aren't as limited as with semiconductor heat converteres. Meanwhile, piezos are extremely efficient as well - and some (like quartz) can also handle very high temperatures.
As simple mechanical systems they should also be easier to fabricate than semiconductors, making them a garage-shop item that doesn't require your garage to be a clean-room in silicon valley with 100 megabux of specialized equipment.
The problem is that using DeCSS on a DVD is not going to be considered to be "in the ordinary course of its [the DVD's] operation".
IMHO (IANAL):
It might be if DeCSS software becomes widely enough used.
It might also be in the case of platforms that can ONLY play DVDs by using a player based on DeCSS because the "legitimate licensees" have not seen fit to make anything "legit" available, or if the DeCSS based software becomes more common than the "legit" products.
Oh, this COULD get interesting.
With the existing electoral system, only those in swing states matter. Most of the other votes are essentially discarded.
As opposed to direct election, where only the political machines in a handfull of heavily-populated states matter.
With popular election of a president, such political machines can manufacture enough votes to swing the popular total. (Faked counts can have a much larger margin than real ones, so a big state can override the actual will of tens of times as many people in the rest of the country.) With the electoral college they can only corrupt their own state's electroal votes.
You also have to recount the WHOLE COUNTRY if there's a close election.
Finally: The little states will NEVER be swing states in a popular election of president, and with small populations will have little effect. The candidates would become efficient by pandering to a few giant states and the "flyover country" would NEVER have any voice in the executive branch. With the Electoral College the presidential candidates have to pay attention to essentially ALL the states - certainly all the different SORTS of states - in order to accumulate enough electoral votes.
This was known by the founders, which was why the electoral college was set up in the first place. By giving one vote per senator or representative, with a minimum of one representative no matter how small the state was, it gives a slight extra weight to little states, to keep the giant states from riding rooughshod over them. This was done deliberately, to get the little states to join up and keep participating. Going back on the deal would be a destabilizing event - possibly kicking off a new secessioinist movement.
The electoral college tends to make presidents try to be president of ALL the regions of the country, not just of a few big states.
Dell updated the article TFA was based on to correct a pricing typo and someone posted a followup to summarize the corrected price differences.
If the compared boxen are actually equivalently-featured (time will tell) all the linux (suffix "n") versions are $50-$100 lower price than the Windows equivalents:
And that is about as close to bi-partisan cooperation as Congress will ever get.
Which is fine by me. I don't ever want to see "bipartisan cooperation".
"Bipartisan" means major parties have the same position on the issue. And THAT means the voters didn't have an effective way to oppose this "consensus of oligarchs" at the polls.
He's a lunatic that feeds off attention.
Why give him ammunition?
Because the news media is SUPPOSED to EXPOSE such abuses of power - to give us warning. Then we can dodge, and mobilize opposition, etc.
Keeping silent about such abuses perpetuates them. Talking about them gives their opposition more intelligence (in the military sense) for organizing against them, and lets them know that action is needed.
The most powerful propaganda technique is to selectively not report. The media already does this with entirely too many things that they want put over on the population. (Ever notice how they don't tell you about a lot of tyrannical laws until they day they go into effect, rather than warning you when they're in the legislature (when you could do something about it), or up for executive signature (when you might have a slight chance to abort it)?)
For once we've got a petty tyrant who's knotting THEIR shorts, too. So let's not play into his hands by trying to get the media to shut up and let him perpetrate his evil unimpeded.
If I'm reading your article correctly, at least some of these work by intercepting the customer hitting a link on the advertiser's site or popping up a redirected-through-affiliate page as a result of browsing the advertiser's site, to give the customer the impression he's just continuing his existing session.
If this is the case, it seems to me the advertiser would be able to identify this fraud by auditing his own logs - looking for a non-affiliate hit followed, soon after, by an affiliate hit claiming commission for his signup.
Seems to me that he could take this to court. With your evidence of this sort of deliberate fraud to establish a pattern of deceptive behavior, the results of the log post-processing could establish the amount of the damages.
Am I correct on this?
Business model for the advertiser:
1) Read the expert's article.
2) Post-process the log.
3) Hire the expert as expert witness.
4) Sue the bastards.
5) Profit.
No missing steps. (Also, the expert could probably consult to help out on step 2).)
Good luck combining fermions with photons. Photons are very much a type of boson, which means they're very much _not_ fermions.
Photon: Integer spin: Boson.
Electron: Half-integer spin: Fermion.
Hole: Half-integer spin: Fermion.
Electron-hole pair: Sum of two half-integer spins = integer spin: Boson.
So an electron-hole PAIR and a photon of the excitation energy hanging around in a crystal full of electrons can be duals - "flipping back-and-forth" or forming a quantum-indeterminancy of which it "really is" - i.e. a "polariton".
And as a fine boson it doesn't give a hoot for the exclusion principle and actually prefers to be in step with its neighbors.
So successfully creating a suitable nanoscale structure to cause a bunch of them to form, then to combine into a bose-einstein condensate, seems like a reasonable accomplishment.
So when your license is suspended...your account is frozen. Brilliant!
Nope.
When your license is suspended it doesn't keep you from using it as ID. It just keeps you from driving legally.
All this system is doing is using your license as an ID to look up your account in the e-check processing service's database. This keeps on working until the service decides to stop accepting that particular license as ID. (Probably when it expires and/or is replaced with a new one.)
I refuse to use debit cards at all (as opposed to an ATM card or a credit card), because they draw directly from your account and they don't require an independent piece of verification (like a PIN) to use.
Now that depends on the debit card, doesn't it?
There's nothing to prevent this company, or one like it, from requiring a PIN to transact business when you identify via driver's license.
At least a debit card can be cancelled in the event it's stolen, even though by then it may be too late. How are you going to cancel your driver's license when the DMV is only open Monday through Friday 8-5?
By calling the "card stolen" hotline of N.P.C. and telling them to disconnect your license from your bank account.
Your driver's license is just being used as a key to a database. It's another way to go from a piece of plastic in your pocket to your name and account number - after that it's E-checks on your account with the E-check processing company.
The only real issue I see with this (besides people reading personal data off the plastic) is if the state doesn't make some distinction in the data on the license between a lost/stolen one and the replacement. Without that, once you've had ONE license lost or stolen you can't turn such a service back on for your new driver's license without re-enabling it for the missing one. (Of course you can change the PIN - presuming a PIN is required to use the service.)
Looks like there's a lot of room for competition (or upgrade models).
If they get out of it (by getting out from under the pressure) by making hybrids like the current generation, ... they'll keep doing just that, especially if we're still pleased in 2020 with a solution visionary in 2003, but inadequate in 2020.
I think we're on the same page on this - just focusing on different columns of type.
A non-plug-in hybrid does nothing for me. I need the plug-in type - both to run my 28-mile round trip commute with the engine off on $0.75/gallon-equivalent electric power and to achieve hybrid-type mileage (and as many electric-fueled miles as practical) cross-country and cross-mountain on my regular trips to/from Nevada.
You want to eliminate all car exhaust - or as much as you can convince people to eliminate - especially from the air of the crowded cities.
Plug-in hybrids give me what I want and you virtually all of what you want. Ordinary hybrids give you little (a partial reduction of city-driving exhaust) and me nothing (because a commute-only vehicle that won't handle the long trips or mountain roads is one I won't purchase).
That sort of trip cycle offers no advantage for a plug-in hybrid.
True for an ordinary hybrid, but NOT for a plug-in hybrid.
An ordinary hybrid has a very limited amount of power storage. It can save up the power from a couple stops from speed to get started again. But that's about it. Take it down a mountain slope and after a couple hundred feet of lost altitude its batteries are full and it has to start throwing away energy by braking, just like a non-hybrid.
A plug in hybrid, on the other hand, has enough electric energy storage to go several tens of miles on the flat against freeway-speed wind resistance. That's also enough to go up a couple thousand feet of elevation. And that means it can recover the energy from going DOWN a couple thousand feet of elevation and use it to drive on the level for tens of miles, or go up the first couple thousand feet (less inefficiency) on the way to the next pass.
Going down and up hills has the same energy recovery issue as stopping and restarting - only bigger. Put in a big enough battery pack to handle it and a hybrid gets the same advantage in mountains as it does in stop-and-go on the level. "Plug-in hybrid" is another way to say "big battery pack".
So Toyota will sell no all-electric or other "zero emissions" cars in 2020?
If they make a "plug-in hybrid" (a hybrid with enlarged electric storage and a recharger connection) they can run engine-off on a daily commute, only firing up for long, out-of-city, trips.
That's zero emissions where it counts (on the bulk of the crowded city driving) without sacrificing range.
And at current gas prices it's better than a 4:1 cost savings on fuel, too.
The real win of hybrids isn't the drivetrain, it's rengenerative braking. Storing kinetic energy rather than dissipating it as heat is an obvious efficiency win, since you're presumably going to stop moving at some point.
Another big win - especially for a "plug-in hybrid" with batteries capable of holding a lot more than a couple stops worth of energy - is recovering the POTENTIAL energy of altitude when descending hills or mountains. That's a bloody lot of energy. (Ask anybody who tried to ride their brakes down a few miles of 6% grade and had them heat up, fade, and let his vehicle run away.)
You even get an advantage on the upslope - because mountains are lumpy, so it's not uphill all the way to the divide. There will be lots of miles where you're temporarily going down, letting a hybrid recover energy to get you up part of the next, higher, climb while the engine-only car burns it heating the brakes or the air and then has to make more kinetic energy out of more fuel.
The place where a hybrid is at a disadvantage is on a long, fast run down a level road. Then, once it's depleted its battery, it's burning fuel to fight friction just like a non-hybrid.
But even there it's not all bad for the hybrid. Yes the batteries and electric transmission means more weight to carry and more resulting friction. But that's partly offset by being able to have a smaller, lighter engine (because the electric system helps out on peak loads). And the smaller, lighter engine is working closer to its peak efficiency, which means that it burns less fuel than the non-hybrid's big, heavy, loafing engine to fight the same air resistance.
Why would someone design a car simply for that trip?
I'm not looking for a car DESIGNED for that particular 250 mile each-way trip. I'm looking for a car CAPABLE of that particular trip.
However, like the EPA emissions test cycles, this is a real usage pattern, with a mix of types of travel that puts a load on power train and charge control performance that must be met to have a practical vehicle.
It's also likely to be a common cycle: While my particular trip is Silicon Valley to Antelope Valley, its characteristics are virtually identical to trips from Silicon Valley to:
- Reno via Donner Pass,
- Carson City via Carson Pass and Echo Summit, or
- Minden/Gardnerville via Carson Pass, Echo Summit, and the Geiger Grade.
Trips from Silicon Valley to the skiing areas around South Lake Tahoe and Stateline are a nearly complete subset of the Carson City / Minden / Gardnverville trips (cutting off only a few miles of downslope at the end.) Similarly with Reno vs. the (north) Lake Tahoe and Incline Village areas.
There are a LOT of people who make these trips quite regularly, with a load of recreation gear (or gambling money B-) ). (Try it during the winter skiing season, summer camping season, or any three-day holiday and count the cars.) Ordinary gasoline vehicles - SUVs, town cars, compacts, and pickup trucks - can all make them just fine, even in bad weather, on less than a tank of gas each way (and with a safety margin for traffic jams, chain-up lines, and getting stuck in snowstorms on a summit overnight). A plug-in hybrid should be able to do the same, with no penalties on performance, safety, travel time, comfort, or extra fuel stops. (And it should be able to do so with the sort of fuel efficiency improvements that hybrids are noted for, thanks to regeneration on the long downslopes.) If it can't manage this it isn't a viable replacement car for, not just one of the largest urban markets, but the one with the highest concentration of politically-correct tree-hugging early-adopters with massive disposable incomes.
If it CAN hack it, at a reasonable price, it can handle the driving cycles thoughout virtually all of the US. It should sell like hotcakes in the SF Bay Area, paying off the development costs quickly, then go on to take the rest of the country by storm.
So IMHO this trip would be an excellent target for automotive engineers to shoot for in their plug-in hybrid designs.
I want a plug-in hybrid that can do this cycle, with driver, passenger, and at least 500 lb of cargo:
- Start in the SF Bay area (elevation 10 ft) with a full charge and full tank.
- Take Altamont Pass (1007 ft)
- Cruise crosswise across the central valley
- Take highway 88 over Carson pass (8650 ft)
- Cut down 89 and cross Monitor pass (8314 ft)
- Descend to Antelope valley (5000 ft).
Then tank up, charge the battery from the windmill or power line over a couple nights, and go back.
The charge control should be smart:
Going east the car should use battery power at first, scavenge the power going down Altamot for the first part of the the trip across the central valley, arrive at Carson pass with the batteries near safe discharge (to avoid excessive gas consumption), scavenge power descending from Carson pass to use climbing through Monitor pass where it again arrives near safe discharge, and scavenge power on the short and steep descent to Antelope Valley for crusing there. With the scavenging and the mileage it should make the trip on a single tank with a margin of safety, despite the 5000 foot end-to-end climb and the 8650 ft bump near the end.
Going west it should be able to scavenge enough power coming down to the Sierras to get across the central valley with the engine off much of the way, arriving back in the Bay Area with non-trivial gas left in the tank, so if it misses getting a charge that night it can still do a 40-mile round-trip commute the next day without a pit stop.
All while maintaining the peppy performance needed to maintain freeway speeds and handle the traffic on the freeway legs of the trip and to quickly pass slow-moving traffic on the steep upgrades and short passing lanes of the Sierras.
When can I buy THAT car?
Hmm, now I see why the blurb links to the slashdot story instead of the real FA; it doesn't exist.
The Internet Archive is your friend.
... the article was written to address the feasibility of Linux as a viable mass-market (read: installable by idiots) operating system, ...
Not just idiots. Also by people who are very smart and skilled - in other things than system administration. (Non-idiots can be even more of a problem, since they can get into more complicated messes.)
These people have more important (to them, and maybe to us) things to do with their time than learn the ins-and-outs of system internals. A surgeon, for instance, needs a car that "just works" to get to the operating room in time. After decades of training he should not be wasting his time learning auto mechanics and working on his car, risking his fingers changing his own water pump or his life relining his own brakes.
If we want Lunux (and/or other FOSS) to replace the commercial systems, it must become accessible to such non-computer-guts-savvy people. They're the bulk of the users.
It's important to have accurate mileage ratings on cars, and it's hard to understand how the EPA could be so bad at it.
EPA testing was NEVER about estimating mileage. (That was something convenient that fell out of it for free.)
EPA testing was, and still is, about POLLUTION CONTROL: Establishing standardized emissions test procedures to affordably test engine/powertrain/aerodynamic performance and determining whether each of a manufacturer's products achieved the congress-mandated targets.
The test needed to be able to inform the engineers on how they were doing - giving them a comparison between performance with and without some modification, telling them whether they've met the year's targets, and letting them know how their products do compared to their competitors (so if a competitor does a bunch better they can work harder to match them, rather than claim it's undoable and petition congress for a relaxation of the standards).
To meet this purpose the test did NOT have to be an extremely accurate match to how cars, on the average, were used. It just had to be close enough that test-driven improvements in auto emissions mapped to a similar improvement in actual air quality, rather than having a big miss because the test didn't cover something important.
To do this they did some research on how cars were actually used, and created a test based on it. The test started with the engine cold, which means the car sat overnight. It only had ONE warmup cycle (with both "driving with engine cold" and "idling with engine cold"), so a car can be tested in a single day, in a single run, rather than having to "cold soak" overnight multiple times. And while it contained a mix of stop-and-go "city" driving and freeway speed "highway" driving, (along with other modes) it was biased toward having a large component of each mode, so engineers would have feedback on all of them, and regulatory approval would require adequate performance on all of them. This met its mix of "highway" vs. "city" wasn't typical of actual driving.
Back in the '70s (when I was writing software to capture and analyze the data from these tests), the story in the labs was that the EPA had developed the test by:
- Instrumenting a car to record its speed and distance moment-by-moment (along with "event" markers, like "started the engine").
- Covertly parking behind citizens in a "location near one of their field offices with a mix of city, suburb, and country roads" (Denver CO?) and following these people through actual start-drive-park cycles.
- Analyzing the results from a number of these runs,
- Picking one trip that contained a balanced mix of all the major cycles, each roughly typical of its type, and
- Making that particular captured trip the canonical test.
The tests ran on a dynamometer with drag and inertia-flywheels set to model the car's aerodynamics and mass, and included continuous measurements of mass-air-flow and levels of unburned hydrocarbons, CO2, CO, and NOx. A simple computation on all but NOx gives you the amount of carbon in the exhaust and thus the amount of gasoline into the engine. Ratioing that with the distance traveled gives you a good measure of gas mileage achieved - IN THE TEST'S DRIVING CYCLE.
As long as this mileage estimate was available "for free" from the analysis software, when the oil crunch hit a government bureau decided that it would be a good idea to require the manufacturers to print this "EPA estimate" of mileage on the stickers, so car buyers could compare gas mileage of different models when shopping. They knew it would be off for any individual driver, due to his actual driving style and a host of other factors. But because it was measured in a standard way it should still give a good comparison between cars. And it should be "in the ballpark" so the customer could estimate his gasoline costs while comparing prices.
Of course, once a LARGE number of people were driving their cars an
Not only has Microsoft ignored a significant shift in national intellectual property law (per recent Supreme court decisions)
Ignored a shift in IP law? By asserting their patents are infringed? I don't think the Supreme Court said you can't infringe a patent anymore.
As I understand it, the Supreme Court eliminated the Federal Circuit's bogus requirement that a prior art showing be a description of EXACTLY the claim to be rendered invalid.
As this percolates through the case law it should put teeth back into "obvious to a person having ordinary skill in the art". This implies both the end of the flood of bogus patents on all aspects of computing and the invalidation of the bulk of those currently in the "stack of barganing chips" portfolios of companies such as Microsoft, as soon as any attempt is made to actually ENFORCE them.
With the value of the asset about to vanish, acquiring more bogus patents about to become extremely hard, and the bulk of the patents ready to self-destruct if challenged, it make sense for Microsoft to stop sitting on them and use them in a FUD campaign while the count is at its peak.
Now where can I bone up on the info you mentioned?
Start here. It has links to a lot of useful stuff, mainly on US Government sites.
Google is your friend. Things like info on the Six Nations' declaration of war on the Germans are easy to find with searches like "Iroquois war Germany".
Speaking of whom: It was the Iroquios Confederacy that was the main inspiration - primarily through Franklin - for the structure of the federal government of the United States. Prior to the discovery of their working Republic and its long history (which has been described as "outdoing the Romans"), the history of democracy and republican forms in Europe - particularly certain episodes from Greece - were used as royalist propaganda. They were cautionary tales about why government of the people was doomed to failure and despotic rule by a member of an elite was allegedly necessary.
Quit a bit of this history has been unearthed in recent decades. A search for "Iroquois Franklin" will point you to quite a bit of it, such as full online text of Bruce Johansen's The Forgotten Founders
Is that why they all but wiped out many of those tribes you just mentioned ?
...
... without tyrannical rulers and enforced, draconian, social homogenization.
If you want to know what happened to the American Indians you can ask them - or their mixed-race descendants. Like my wife. Or a significant number of my friends. (Unfortunately it's a couple years too late to ask the person who was perhaps my closest (just) friend for four decades...)
There was a lot of death due to European diseases. But contrary to popular myth, germ warfare was NOT used against them by the US. (One English general did do it before the Revolution.) When epidemics got started the Indians and non-Indian settlers worked together to try to mitigate them: Disease like smallpox were a threat to all.
Tribes were some of the first adopters of the smallpox vaccine. (The Sioux had a gold medal struck and sent to Jenner.)
The Indians are still here - in large numbers. (The Mohicans periodically issue press releases to point out that, contrary to the book title, they're still around. B-) ) There aren't a lot of fullbloods - but there aren't a lot of full-blooded English-Americans, or French-Americans, or Whatever-Americans, either. There was a lot of intermarriage. Many of those of Indian ancestry found it convenient not to mention it - sometimes even to their offspring.
"Redneck" isn't just about getting your neck sunburned if you work outdoors and have a short haircut. It's also about having a high likelyhood of some Indian bloodline. Many of the Indians - both fullblood and partbreed - have assimilated into the general population of the US. They're farmers and ranchers, civil engineers, high-iron workers, merchants, professors, computer scientists, nanotechnologists,
Well how's that working out for ya ?
A lot better than you'd think if you're depending on the media - especially ours - to tell you. B-) And a WHOLE lot better, over virtually all of the last quarter-millenium, than the European alternatives.
BTW, if you can show me a link to a world map showing the locations of all those tribes you mentioned I'd appreciate it
Here you go. There are links to a full-sized PDF and an index. The ones outside the continental US can be found easily as well.
- but in the meantime, the subject was COUNTRIES.
These ARE countries. THAT was my POINT. Most of them just happen to be surrounded by various parts of the United States.
"Indian nation" is NOT a feel-good term used by the soppy-headed. It's a literal, legal, reality. These are independent, sovereign nations, with their own territories, borders, and so on. Most of them have treaty-based alliances with the US federal government. Some don't. They have automatic US citizenship - much like the citizens of Puerto Rico. They are exempt from some US taxes - which ones depend on treaty terms and whether they're living on the res or off it. Some tribes receive ongoing payments - think "rent" - as part of whatever settlement allowed non-tribal members to settle some of their lands.
They're countries in an alliance with the US. They have more independence than the "several states" (which subordinated all their foreign policy, interstate commerce regulation, and currency matters to the federation). They're also far more independent of the US than satellites of the USSR (such as Estonia) were of Russia - or than the member states of the European Union are likely to be of their own central government within a couple decades.