I immagine that civilian uses would likely follow the same mantra with the added "Cost" factor that military uses don't care about.
The military cares a LOT about Cost:
- The cost of a defective piece of materiel to a solder's risk.
- The cost of a dead or wounded soldier to a battle.
- The cost of a lost battle to a war.
- The cost of a lost war to the country. "For want of a nail the horseshoe was lost..."
So the military defines a stiff set of standards and pays a stiff premium for getting good stuff (when they have the time to have it made to their specs). And they pay another stiff premium for having it made in places where the whole process is guarded against enemy sabotage and/or the factory is in a place they can defend it during a war so it's available to make more.
And when they do $100,000 worth of testing to be sure the screwdriver isn't going to break and put it in a toolkit that they make ten of, for an airplane they make five of, they get "a $10,000 screwdriver" and a bunch of flack.
And when that much money is flowing and there are only a few companies that can bid, they get gamed a lot, and there's opportunity for corruption.
But I'll take the military's idea of "Cost", thank you very much. They've cost me a lot of taxes. But they've kept most of the havoc on the other side of a couple of oceans for a century and a half.
It seems they are referring to Scrambling not Jamming. Scrambling as in, you can't intercept and hear the audio.
No, they're talking about jamming. Not just the audio, but the control signals.
The issue is that terrorists have used the ringer/vibrator on cellphones as an easy way to build a radio remote trigger for bombs. They can plant the bomb, key in the bomb's phone number, watch until the target is next to the bomb, and hit "send". BANG!
A jammer on a convoy creates a bubble around it within which the cell control signals won't ring the bomb's cellphone. The convoy rolls past the bomb, the bomber hits send, and he gets the recorded voice that says the bomb's cellphone is not available, so please leave a message.
(I bet some of the messages are a bit spicy. B-) )
I don't understand why optical scanning is any more trustworthy.
Because the human-marked and machine-scanned ballots go into a ballot box for potential counting later.
If the scanner is hooked up to a crooked counting algorithm, how will you know unless you actually count the paper?
If there is a question you actually DO count the ballots. And you count ballots in a few randomly-selected precincts even if there ISN'T a question, just to keep watch.
If you have to count the paper to ensure that the scanner is honest, why bother with the scanner at all?
To get a quick answer and to save money if nobody challenges the result.
Both the SCO lawsuit and the MS-Novell agreement are designed to cast (at least to most tech-unsavy MBA types) a huge legal cloud over Linux specifically, and FOSS in general, of which Microsoft would be the only benefactor.
And to make the reason for the timing explicit: With the SCO suit unraveling, it's time to get the next shoe ready to drop.
Not that he'll get called on the hypocrisy or anything.
What makes you think he's being hypocritical?
The previous article was written over three years ago. At the time WE may have known (or suspected) that SCO was talking through its hat, but The Suits, and the reporters that served them, had little such knowlege.
SCO talked a good line, while Open Source was a newcomer to business, of questionable utility, promoted by people who looked like "a bunch of socialist hippies" who didn't respect "intellectual property" and the related legal framework. Sure the OSS people SAID there was no proprietary Unix IP in Linux - deliberately or accidentally. But SCO (then repuatble) said otherwise.
Now we've had the SCO v. IBM trial (where it's clear that the issues are VERY important for business). That has given three plus years of education (so far) to those who are following it. (This is the JOB of news article authors such as Lions, who write these pieces to convey such information to executives, who need to get it RIGHT for their own multi-billion-dollar decision-making.) And so far SCO has shown itself to be blowing smoke, while IBM has shown Linux to be on solid IP ground.
So of COURSE the article NOW will be much different from the article THEN.
It would have been hypocracy if Lions had written the two articles back-to-back, with the same knowlege and mindset while writing both. But the Lions of today is a more educated man on this issue than the Lions of three plus years ago. So the contrast in the articles reflects his intelligence, integrity, and honesty - not hypocracy.
IBM [] deserves a better reward [than the corpse of SCO] for fighting the good fight this time.
IBM certainly deserves a reward, big time. (Good work, guys!)
But their reward for fighting this fight (presuming they win it as it looks now) would be more than the corpse of SCO.
Much of their business model these days is based on Linux (and other Open Source code) being unencumbered by claims such as SCO's. A win against SCO will end risk for Linux from claims based on IP from the Unix codebase. But it will also serve as a precedent-setter for all Open Source authors and users, provide a lesson on how to defend against such claims, drive a spike into future IP FUD attacks on OSS, and (perhaps most effectively) provide a TERRIBLE object lesson for all who would seek to make such claims in the future.
IBM (and all of Open Source) will have the corpse of SCO to haul out an rattle whenever someone starts making noises about IP.
Now that won't STOP such claims - especially well funded ones. (I expect the next shoe to fall might be Microsoft directly bringing up patent infringement claims.) But a win here will go a long way toward consolidating the legal status of OSS.
After all, Arnold Schwatzenegger and Jesse Ventura both won state governorships primarily on name recognition.
Arnie also married into the Kennedy clan and had all their connections and advisors available. (R's noticed, during his first victory celebration, that virtually all the people on the stage were D's. B-) Notice his politics since... He's now the most extreme high-profile R.I.N.O. in the country.)
Jessie was a Seal (or UDT if you want to get picky). You may not be aware of it but these guys are generally off-the-chart geniuses, as well as being highly trained on rapidly organizing teams and using them in stress situations - with opposition to be defeated, attirition, and political ramifications.
Hah. Couple people I know (who were doing a repair service) bought one that had been in a fire. After they cleaned the smoke out of it they turned it on. It complained about a power-failure interrupt and went back to what it had been doing.
(Guess the magic smoke was still inside the cores. B-) )
What they are talking about here us just surrounding the hull with a thin layer of bubbles.....maybe the ship sits a couple inches (to pull a guess out of my rear) lower in the water....but there's not going to be any danger of sinking a ship...
Actually it floats HIGHER - by about the thickness of the air film. (It would float higher by EXACTLY the thickness of the air film except that the film is compressed slightly by the higher water pressure at the bottom of the boat.)
To understand it:
- The film displaces water, just like the hull.
- If the hull sinks marginally, the film stays about the same thickness and it's the water below that is displaced.
- So the film of air acts like part of the hull.
- The total amount of water displaced is the amount displaced by the hull PLUS the amount displaced by the air.
- But the air under the boat is about the same density as the air above the boat. So only the craft's weight (plus any surplus weight of air from its compression by the higher pressure below the hull) is supported by the displaced water.
- Thus, to displace its own weight the hull plus air system must have the hull higher than the hull-only system by about the thickness of the air barrier.
To sink lower, the ship would have to move [the bubbles] aside - which it is already doing - but are limited in their ability to move by the resistance of the surrounding water. Meanwhile they are continuously replaced from the air source.
To make it clearer: If the boat sinks further the layer of air goes with it and stays about the same thickness. What is displaced is water. So the craft remains bouyant, as if the layer of air were part of its own structure, rather than part of the supporting water.
In fact, because the layer of air is "part of its own structure" and displaces its own volume of water, the craft itself will float HIGHER by about the thickness of the layer of air. (The air will be somewhat compressed and thus denser than the atmosphere, so it will raise the ship by a smidgeon less than its own thickness.)
Putting bubbles around a ship will decrease its displacement, thus making it sink more to compensate for the loss of displacement, it will sink until it displaces exactly the same weight in water as the ships weight.
A thin layer of bubbles will not do that. They will be at the pressure of the surrounding water and provide the necessary force to support the ship. To sink lower, the ship would have to move them aside - which it is already doing - but are limited in their ability to move by the resistance of the surrounding water. Meanwhile they are continuously replaced from the air source.
Now if you have a DEEP foam of bubbles beneath and around the ship - allowing the air to move sideways rapidly - the ship would indeed drop as if it were in midair - or (if the foam is only partly air) attempting to "float" on something less dense than itself. But a layer of bubbles against the hull will not do that.
Even if there was SCO source code in Linux, SCO DISTRIBUTED THAT VERY SOURCE CODE UNDER THE GPL LICENSE.
If that argument prevais - or even achieves wide distribution - it would be VERY BAD for getting Open Source adopted by software vendors.
SCO claims that their IP had been included in open source products that they then adopted and distributed before noticing that their IP was included. After they discovered this (alleged) inclusion, they continued to distribute the code because:
- they were obligated to do so under the GPL
- the cat was out of the bag, so stopping their distribution wouldn't mitigate the (alleged) harm to them, but
- stopping distribution and support WOULD cause them FURTHER harm by driving customers away to other vendors of what was (allegedly) their own stolen IP.
So instead they attempted to recover damages from the people who (allegedly) stole and released their IP. If they proved their point they would be reimbursed by IBM and could chose between taking actions to get thieir IP removed from distributions (and replaced with other, potentially less effective, code) or accept IBM's payment as the sale price to release the IP.
IMHO If such an IP misuse ACTUALLY OCCURRED, that's EXACTLY what the wronged owner SHOULD be able to do.
If your argument were to stand, a company with software IP would be foolish to distribute or contribute to any open source distribution, for fear of compromising any of its own IP that it did NOT want to open. (At a minimum, it would have to reverse-engineer the entirety of every distribution it redistributed, and every update to it, to look for its own IP, BEFORE distributing. This would be a prohibitively large expense AND would delay its own releases.)
Unfortunately I cannot pull out the code (lost it a couple years ago), but it was part of an assignment...
Contact the university for a list of classmates and/or the prof. At least one of the classmates may have kept a copy his solution and the prof will have the class notes.
Also: If the files were kept on a server farm (or a mainframe) the computing center may still have a backup. Digging it out would cost - but if a legal team is engaged in breaking the patent and is going to court the cost would be trivial to them.
By the way: IMHO their statement about a 50% efficiency limit from impedence matching is bogus - just as it is in power generation and transmission. You can exceed that easily by abandoning attempts to pull as much power as possible from the cells and accepting a lower energy density in return for greater thermal efficiency. (There will be a limit further out, where the various forms of leakage eat more than you save by reducing internal resistive losses.)
On deeper reading of this I see that they've "solved the problem" of maintaining a vacuum by "replacing the vacuum with a properly selected semiconductor material". (The reporter seems to have hashed things up so it's hard to be sure what they're talking about - as usual. B-( )
That sounds like they're trying to build a semiconductor equivalent of the true-vacuum device I described above. Perhaps something like a field-effect transistor using bulk, undoped, semiconductor material for the "vacuum" and perhaps a schottky barrier junction (or a doped region) for the "thermionic emission cathode". A "P-I-P" diode perhaps, with the thermal agitation lifting the electrons from the potential well to launch them into the undoped region?
(I should stop guessing and look up their patents.)
Much of the heat conduction in solids is done by electron motion rather than mechanical vibration transfer. So a bar of undoped semiconductor should be a better insulator than the heavily-doped P and N type silicon that makes up the structure of a peltier cell, leading to higher efficiency in a "semconductor thermionic" device.
Darn. I thought these guys were working on true cold-cathode vacuum tubes at integrated circuit scales, and had solved the three big problems blocking them (cathode construction, ion erosion, and maintaining a clean vacuum).
Vacuum tubes and their close relatives, gas-discharge (plasma) tubes, have great properties (like radiation and EMP resistance) and can do a lot of amazing stuff - some of which semiconductors still can't do, or do well. It was mainly the need to heat the cathode that let semiconductors displace them - and the strucutral shrinkage and continued breakthroughs that let them hold their lead. While the size of the electron wave function means nano-scale vacuum ICs will probably hit a density wall at a slightly larger feature size than semiconductors, vacuum ICs still have a lot of potential. If somebody had solved those three problems I mentioned I can imagine a partial revival, with vacuum ICs leveraging the semiconductor manufacturing processes and displacing semiconductors in at least some applications where their properties give significant advantages.
Peltiers are just thermocouples/thermopiles made of semiconductors. They are inefficient mainly because the material they're made of is a good enough heat conductor that it conducts most of the heat they've pumped back across the temperature gradient. Absent that they should be able to reach carnot cycle efficiency. Meanwhile, if you are willing to feed 'em the extra power (or accept that they generate
You can get cooling down to cryogenic temperatures just by building a pyramid of peltier cells (with progressively fewer couples in each layer), all interconnected electrically. This was done 'way back when they were first invented.
This device is a more efficient vacuum-tube version, using nanostructure field-emission needles for the cathodes and built in a microscopic form-factor using integrated-circuit manufacturing techniques. It does the same thing, but using electrons in vacuum. (The heat kicks them off the emitter with a momentum high enough for them to pass through a field to a more-negative collector plate.) A vacuum is a GREAT insulator, so the efficiency is much better. (Or pump heat by applying a voltage to encourrage the electrons to jump off the needles at thermal vibration peaks, cooling them, and smack into the collectors, heating them.)
Also: Since it is apparently built of metals and ceramics rather than semiconductors you can run it very hot - like at the focus of a solar concentrator. That can beat photovoltaics by a bunch.
I've seen reports of this device before. I presume this one means either they need more funding or they've just solved a manufacturing problem, bringing them a step closer to commercial rollout.
Misjudged a curve due to a lack of depth perception while his left eye was sleeping.
Depth perception at open-road driving distances is not done by paralax. (The eyes are too close together for that to work.) It is done by comparing a time-series of images as the body moves through space.
It's especially effective if you're moving up-and-down - like the overall up-and-down motion when you're walking, or going over humps in a car. (Try closing one eye while walking some time.) But changing position sideways - in a land on a straightaway, or by going around curves - works, too.
The scary thing here is the following question: If you add power generated by 'clean' sources to the grid, will people stop using 'dirty' power, or just use more power?
That's EASY:
- IF the price of power comes down people will use more power. - IF it's cheaper than burning carbon compounds, it will displace burning them and less carbon compounds will be burned.
The displacement is a LITTLE complicated: The price of carbon compunds will come down and some will continue to be burned - as long as it's cheaper to run the older fossil-fuel plants than shut them down and tear them out, or they serve special purposes (such as fast start-up peaking generators if the fusion plants don't respond to load variations quickly). But the burning will decline as they're retired and their replacements are the cheaper fusion plants.
Other side of the IF: Just as with nuclear FISSION plants, if the cost ends up higher than fossil fuels (whether due to inherent costs or regulatory/legal costs) they'll never catch on and the carbon will still be burned.
So if the environmentalists are serious about mitigating greenhouse effect, it's time for them to shut up and sit down (or keep the engineers honest by looking for problems).
If they don't, it's clear they're really after shutting down tech so we can "return to nature" (and suffer a die-off that makes the Black Plague look like a bad cold until we're down to the no-tech farming carrying capacity of the planet.) Then, if they get their way, the survivors can freeze in the dark through the next ice age while waiting for an extinction event to finish us off - or our displacement by some species that's a bit more reasonable.
Slashdot Mirror
I immagine that civilian uses would likely follow the same mantra with the added "Cost" factor that military uses don't care about.
The military cares a LOT about Cost:
- The cost of a defective piece of materiel to a solder's risk.
- The cost of a dead or wounded soldier to a battle.
- The cost of a lost battle to a war.
- The cost of a lost war to the country.
"For want of a nail the horseshoe was lost..."
So the military defines a stiff set of standards and pays a stiff premium for getting good stuff (when they have the time to have it made to their specs). And they pay another stiff premium for having it made in places where the whole process is guarded against enemy sabotage and/or the factory is in a place they can defend it during a war so it's available to make more.
And when they do $100,000 worth of testing to be sure the screwdriver isn't going to break and put it in a toolkit that they make ten of, for an airplane they make five of, they get "a $10,000 screwdriver" and a bunch of flack.
And when that much money is flowing and there are only a few companies that can bid, they get gamed a lot, and there's opportunity for corruption.
But I'll take the military's idea of "Cost", thank you very much. They've cost me a lot of taxes. But they've kept most of the havoc on the other side of a couple of oceans for a century and a half.
It seems they are referring to Scrambling not Jamming. Scrambling as in, you can't intercept and hear the audio.
No, they're talking about jamming. Not just the audio, but the control signals.
The issue is that terrorists have used the ringer/vibrator on cellphones as an easy way to build a radio remote trigger for bombs. They can plant the bomb, key in the bomb's phone number, watch until the target is next to the bomb, and hit "send". BANG!
A jammer on a convoy creates a bubble around it within which the cell control signals won't ring the bomb's cellphone. The convoy rolls past the bomb, the bomber hits send, and he gets the recorded voice that says the bomb's cellphone is not available, so please leave a message.
(I bet some of the messages are a bit spicy. B-) )
I don't understand why optical scanning is any more trustworthy.
Because the human-marked and machine-scanned ballots go into a ballot box for potential counting later.
If the scanner is hooked up to a crooked counting algorithm, how will you know unless you actually count the paper?
If there is a question you actually DO count the ballots. And you count ballots in a few randomly-selected precincts even if there ISN'T a question, just to keep watch.
If you have to count the paper to ensure that the scanner is honest, why bother with the scanner at all?
To get a quick answer and to save money if nobody challenges the result.
... the potential for corruption is identical for paper ballots and electronic ones.
I call bull puckey.
The potential for corruption is massively greater when THERE IS NO WAY TO CHECK FOR IT.
When it can be detected (and is routinely watched for), trying to rig an election stops being a path to power and becomes a path to jail.
The article you referenced is based on an internetnews.com PREDICTION that the NIST would issue a release saying something like this.
THIS article is based on the actual release, and what the release actually says.
Both the SCO lawsuit and the MS-Novell agreement are designed to cast (at least to most tech-unsavy MBA types) a huge legal cloud over Linux specifically, and FOSS in general, of which Microsoft would be the only benefactor.
And to make the reason for the timing explicit: With the SCO suit unraveling, it's time to get the next shoe ready to drop.
The Wheels of Justice ... Grind slowly, but they grind exceedingly fine.
Well I, for one, am willing to wait a bit if it is because they are taking that time to be sure they get it RIGHT. B-)
Not that he'll get called on the hypocrisy or anything.
What makes you think he's being hypocritical?
The previous article was written over three years ago. At the time WE may have known (or suspected) that SCO was talking through its hat, but The Suits, and the reporters that served them, had little such knowlege.
SCO talked a good line, while Open Source was a newcomer to business, of questionable utility, promoted by people who looked like "a bunch of socialist hippies" who didn't respect "intellectual property" and the related legal framework. Sure the OSS people SAID there was no proprietary Unix IP in Linux - deliberately or accidentally. But SCO (then repuatble) said otherwise.
Now we've had the SCO v. IBM trial (where it's clear that the issues are VERY important for business). That has given three plus years of education (so far) to those who are following it. (This is the JOB of news article authors such as Lions, who write these pieces to convey such information to executives, who need to get it RIGHT for their own multi-billion-dollar decision-making.) And so far SCO has shown itself to be blowing smoke, while IBM has shown Linux to be on solid IP ground.
So of COURSE the article NOW will be much different from the article THEN.
It would have been hypocracy if Lions had written the two articles back-to-back, with the same knowlege and mindset while writing both. But the Lions of today is a more educated man on this issue than the Lions of three plus years ago. So the contrast in the articles reflects his intelligence, integrity, and honesty - not hypocracy.
IBM [] deserves a better reward [than the corpse of SCO] for fighting the good fight this time.
IBM certainly deserves a reward, big time. (Good work, guys!)
But their reward for fighting this fight (presuming they win it as it looks now) would be more than the corpse of SCO.
Much of their business model these days is based on Linux (and other Open Source code) being unencumbered by claims such as SCO's. A win against SCO will end risk for Linux from claims based on IP from the Unix codebase. But it will also serve as a precedent-setter for all Open Source authors and users, provide a lesson on how to defend against such claims, drive a spike into future IP FUD attacks on OSS, and (perhaps most effectively) provide a TERRIBLE object lesson for all who would seek to make such claims in the future.
IBM (and all of Open Source) will have the corpse of SCO to haul out an rattle whenever someone starts making noises about IP.
Now that won't STOP such claims - especially well funded ones. (I expect the next shoe to fall might be Microsoft directly bringing up patent infringement claims.) But a win here will go a long way toward consolidating the legal status of OSS.
Just to balance the ticket. B-)
After all, Arnold Schwatzenegger and Jesse Ventura both won state governorships primarily on name recognition.
Arnie also married into the Kennedy clan and had all their connections and advisors available. (R's noticed, during his first victory celebration, that virtually all the people on the stage were D's. B-) Notice his politics since... He's now the most extreme high-profile R.I.N.O. in the country.)
Jessie was a Seal (or UDT if you want to get picky). You may not be aware of it but these guys are generally off-the-chart geniuses, as well as being highly trained on rapidly organizing teams and using them in stress situations - with opposition to be defeated, attirition, and political ramifications.
A spider is an insect, not a aminal.
Actually it's an arachnid, not an insect.
(But I'd really like to know what an aminal is.)
Hah. Couple people I know (who were doing a repair service) bought one that had been in a fire. After they cleaned the smoke out of it they turned it on. It complained about a power-failure interrupt and went back to what it had been doing.
(Guess the magic smoke was still inside the cores. B-) )
What they are talking about here us just surrounding the hull with a thin layer of bubbles.....maybe the ship sits a couple inches (to pull a guess out of my rear) lower in the water....but there's not going to be any danger of sinking a ship...
Actually it floats HIGHER - by about the thickness of the air film. (It would float higher by EXACTLY the thickness of the air film except that the film is compressed slightly by the higher water pressure at the bottom of the boat.)
To understand it:
- The film displaces water, just like the hull.
- If the hull sinks marginally, the film stays about the same thickness and it's the water below that is displaced.
- So the film of air acts like part of the hull.
- The total amount of water displaced is the amount displaced by the hull PLUS the amount displaced by the air.
- But the air under the boat is about the same density as the air above the boat. So only the craft's weight (plus any surplus weight of air from its compression by the higher pressure below the hull) is supported by the displaced water.
- Thus, to displace its own weight the hull plus air system must have the hull higher than the hull-only system by about the thickness of the air barrier.
To sink lower, the ship would have to move [the bubbles] aside - which it is already doing - but are limited in their ability to move by the resistance of the surrounding water. Meanwhile they are continuously replaced from the air source.
To make it clearer: If the boat sinks further the layer of air goes with it and stays about the same thickness. What is displaced is water. So the craft remains bouyant, as if the layer of air were part of its own structure, rather than part of the supporting water.
In fact, because the layer of air is "part of its own structure" and displaces its own volume of water, the craft itself will float HIGHER by about the thickness of the layer of air. (The air will be somewhat compressed and thus denser than the atmosphere, so it will raise the ship by a smidgeon less than its own thickness.)
Putting bubbles around a ship will decrease its displacement, thus making it sink more to compensate for the loss of displacement, it will sink until it displaces exactly the same weight in water as the ships weight.
A thin layer of bubbles will not do that. They will be at the pressure of the surrounding water and provide the necessary force to support the ship. To sink lower, the ship would have to move them aside - which it is already doing - but are limited in their ability to move by the resistance of the surrounding water. Meanwhile they are continuously replaced from the air source.
Now if you have a DEEP foam of bubbles beneath and around the ship - allowing the air to move sideways rapidly - the ship would indeed drop as if it were in midair - or (if the foam is only partly air) attempting to "float" on something less dense than itself. But a layer of bubbles against the hull will not do that.
Subject says it all.
Even if there was SCO source code in Linux, SCO DISTRIBUTED THAT VERY SOURCE CODE UNDER THE GPL LICENSE.
If that argument prevais - or even achieves wide distribution - it would be VERY BAD for getting Open Source adopted by software vendors.
SCO claims that their IP had been included in open source products that they then adopted and distributed before noticing that their IP was included. After they discovered this (alleged) inclusion, they continued to distribute the code because:
- they were obligated to do so under the GPL
- the cat was out of the bag, so stopping their distribution wouldn't mitigate the (alleged) harm to them, but
- stopping distribution and support WOULD cause them FURTHER harm by driving customers away to other vendors of what was (allegedly) their own stolen IP.
So instead they attempted to recover damages from the people who (allegedly) stole and released their IP. If they proved their point they would be reimbursed by IBM and could chose between taking actions to get thieir IP removed from distributions (and replaced with other, potentially less effective, code) or accept IBM's payment as the sale price to release the IP.
IMHO If such an IP misuse ACTUALLY OCCURRED, that's EXACTLY what the wronged owner SHOULD be able to do.
If your argument were to stand, a company with software IP would be foolish to distribute or contribute to any open source distribution, for fear of compromising any of its own IP that it did NOT want to open. (At a minimum, it would have to reverse-engineer the entirety of every distribution it redistributed, and every update to it, to look for its own IP, BEFORE distributing. This would be a prohibitively large expense AND would delay its own releases.)
Unfortunately I cannot pull out the code (lost it a couple years ago), but it was part of an assignment ...
Contact the university for a list of classmates and/or the prof. At least one of the classmates may have kept a copy his solution and the prof will have the class notes.
Also: If the files were kept on a server farm (or a mainframe) the computing center may still have a backup. Digging it out would cost - but if a legal team is engaged in breaking the patent and is going to court the cost would be trivial to them.
By the way: IMHO their statement about a 50% efficiency limit from impedence matching is bogus - just as it is in power generation and transmission. You can exceed that easily by abandoning attempts to pull as much power as possible from the cells and accepting a lower energy density in return for greater thermal efficiency. (There will be a limit further out, where the various forms of leakage eat more than you save by reducing internal resistive losses.)
HAH! Found it on their web site!
On deeper reading of this I see that they've "solved the problem" of maintaining a vacuum by "replacing the vacuum with a properly selected semiconductor material". (The reporter seems to have hashed things up so it's hard to be sure what they're talking about - as usual. B-( )
That sounds like they're trying to build a semiconductor equivalent of the true-vacuum device I described above. Perhaps something like a field-effect transistor using bulk, undoped, semiconductor material for the "vacuum" and perhaps a schottky barrier junction (or a doped region) for the "thermionic emission cathode". A "P-I-P" diode perhaps, with the thermal agitation lifting the electrons from the potential well to launch them into the undoped region?
(I should stop guessing and look up their patents.)
Much of the heat conduction in solids is done by electron motion rather than mechanical vibration transfer. So a bar of undoped semiconductor should be a better insulator than the heavily-doped P and N type silicon that makes up the structure of a peltier cell, leading to higher efficiency in a "semconductor thermionic" device.
Darn. I thought these guys were working on true cold-cathode vacuum tubes at integrated circuit scales, and had solved the three big problems blocking them (cathode construction, ion erosion, and maintaining a clean vacuum).
Vacuum tubes and their close relatives, gas-discharge (plasma) tubes, have great properties (like radiation and EMP resistance) and can do a lot of amazing stuff - some of which semiconductors still can't do, or do well. It was mainly the need to heat the cathode that let semiconductors displace them - and the strucutral shrinkage and continued breakthroughs that let them hold their lead. While the size of the electron wave function means nano-scale vacuum ICs will probably hit a density wall at a slightly larger feature size than semiconductors, vacuum ICs still have a lot of potential. If somebody had solved those three problems I mentioned I can imagine a partial revival, with vacuum ICs leveraging the semiconductor manufacturing processes and displacing semiconductors in at least some applications where their properties give significant advantages.
Peltiers are just thermocouples/thermopiles made of semiconductors. They are inefficient mainly because the material they're made of is a good enough heat conductor that it conducts most of the heat they've pumped back across the temperature gradient. Absent that they should be able to reach carnot cycle efficiency. Meanwhile, if you are willing to feed 'em the extra power (or accept that they generate
You can get cooling down to cryogenic temperatures just by building a pyramid of peltier cells (with progressively fewer couples in each layer), all interconnected electrically. This was done 'way back when they were first invented.
This device is a more efficient vacuum-tube version, using nanostructure field-emission needles for the cathodes and built in a microscopic form-factor using integrated-circuit manufacturing techniques. It does the same thing, but using electrons in vacuum. (The heat kicks them off the emitter with a momentum high enough for them to pass through a field to a more-negative collector plate.) A vacuum is a GREAT insulator, so the efficiency is much better. (Or pump heat by applying a voltage to encourrage the electrons to jump off the needles at thermal vibration peaks, cooling them, and smack into the collectors, heating them.)
Also: Since it is apparently built of metals and ceramics rather than semiconductors you can run it very hot - like at the focus of a solar concentrator. That can beat photovoltaics by a bunch.
I've seen reports of this device before. I presume this one means either they need more funding or they've just solved a manufacturing problem, bringing them a step closer to commercial rollout.
Misjudged a curve due to a lack of depth perception while his left eye was sleeping.
Depth perception at open-road driving distances is not done by paralax. (The eyes are too close together for that to work.) It is done by comparing a time-series of images as the body moves through space.
It's especially effective if you're moving up-and-down - like the overall up-and-down motion when you're walking, or going over humps in a car. (Try closing one eye while walking some time.) But changing position sideways - in a land on a straightaway, or by going around curves - works, too.
The scary thing here is the following question: If you add power generated by 'clean' sources to the grid, will people stop using 'dirty' power, or just use more power?
That's EASY:
- IF the price of power comes down people will use more power.
- IF it's cheaper than burning carbon compounds, it will displace burning them and less carbon compounds will be burned.
The displacement is a LITTLE complicated: The price of carbon compunds will come down and some will continue to be burned - as long as it's cheaper to run the older fossil-fuel plants than shut them down and tear them out, or they serve special purposes (such as fast start-up peaking generators if the fusion plants don't respond to load variations quickly). But the burning will decline as they're retired and their replacements are the cheaper fusion plants.
Other side of the IF: Just as with nuclear FISSION plants, if the cost ends up higher than fossil fuels (whether due to inherent costs or regulatory/legal costs) they'll never catch on and the carbon will still be burned.
So if the environmentalists are serious about mitigating greenhouse effect, it's time for them to shut up and sit down (or keep the engineers honest by looking for problems).
If they don't, it's clear they're really after shutting down tech so we can "return to nature" (and suffer a die-off that makes the Black Plague look like a bad cold until we're down to the no-tech farming carrying capacity of the planet.) Then, if they get their way, the survivors can freeze in the dark through the next ice age while waiting for an extinction event to finish us off - or our displacement by some species that's a bit more reasonable.