Ethanol has the big advantage that it's energy source is free (as in beer) and will be for the next 5 billion years.
Except for the cost of using the land on which to collect that energy. B-)
Ethanol has another advantage: It's carbon neutral. The carbon in the carbone dioxide that is released when it burns is carbon that the plant extracted from atmospheric carbon dioxide in the first place. No greenhouse gas emission. Most of the other inputs to make it can also be produced and used without releasing fossil carbon, too.
(Actually a slight reduction, since a small amount of the plant material, on the average, ends up as stuff that gets buried for geologic time.)
Yes, batteries are the main loss. Also - their charging rate is the main limit on how much power you can recycle from braking.
There's a new lithium ion variant with a nanotube-array electrode that might be a good solution for that. Charges 85% of capacity in minutes, which implies enormous power densities and minimal precentage losses to heat.
(There's also a new lead-acid cell design using graphite rather than lead for the structural support of the plates that makes a similar sort of improvement in lead-acid technology, though it probably get near the same absolute performance as the LiIon version.)
"Intel is not going to redesign the Pentium tomorrow because of it," he said.
Why not?
For starters the automated design tools will need a rehack.
Current synchronous chips use a "clock tree" to try to get all the flops and latches to clock at once. Then the design tools assume that the outputs flip at the same time and try to route the signals so they all get through the logic to set up the flops in time for the next clock.
This scheme will produce waves of clocking that propagate across/around the chip. So different flops will be clocked at different times. This is good for signals going the same direction as the clocking wave (though not perfect, since the propagation time of a signal on a wire is NOT linear with length), because they get extra time to set up the next flop. It's rotten for signals going the other way.
But it's disaster for design software that doesn't understand the issue.
So new versions of the tools will be needed that can take the non-simultaneous clocking into account, both to compute the layout and wiring right and to take advantage of the effect to achieve improved performance by arranging for timing-tight data paths to "go with the flow" and slower stuff to go the other way.
Even if this hack works, getting those tool mods done, and getting them right, will hold up large projects using it.
(But something can be done meanwhile, with unaware tools, by doing some manual layout of blocks with respect to the clocking waves and telling the tools to treat each block as if it had a simultaneous clock internally, skewed with respect to other blocks and with less setup/hold time margin to take into account the internal skew.)
No, I'm not making a sarcastic comparison with the 2nd Amendment here. I'm deadly earnest. Cryptography and guns are both useful means for citizens to preserve their freedoms.
The government recognized that, too. Which is why the export of cryptographic software from the US was essentially banned for decades - crippling the US crypto software industry - by defining crypto to be "arms" and applying the same laws as were used to suppress the export of guns.
Would you care to provide a few concrete examples?
Preferably something at least as blatant as CBS's Killian Documents from the Rathergate episode of 60 minutes. Or the exploding GM gas tank from NBC's Dateline.
And please restrict yourself to their factual reporting. Fox News' promise is not to get everything right. It's to give the top two sides of major polical issues equal coverage (something that used to be an FCC requirement for broadcast media.) If one side is lying, keeping the lie off the air is NOT living up to that promise.
Part of the reason the Nazis were so efficient at rounding up the Jews and other 'undesirables' was because they had good information about where they were living/employed/etc, and the Public Service was quite happy to provide that information to the SS (or whoever it was who coordinated the death camps - my knowledge of history is a bit shady). Had they had a national ID card, this process would have been even more efficient.
It's also how they were so efficient at pacifying France: They just went to the local police stations, confiscated the gun registration records, and then went door to door confiscating the guns.
The resistance then had to depend on new armament smuggled in, the occasional one they missed, or stuff lifted from the invaders. Average lifetime after joining the resistance was measured in weeks - using only one digit. B-(
Get the Republicans to add a rider requiring the cards and their associated I.D. numbers be used to insure that only qualified voters (citizens, non-felons in jurisdictions where that matters) vote in federal elections and that no individual votes more than once in a given election.
The Democrats (the major beneficiaries of voting by illegals, felons, multiple voters, dead voters, and motor-voter + permanent absentee ballot virtual voters), will then be 100% against it. Even including a rider requiring audit trails on voting machine systems won't swing enough of them to matter.
Meanwhile some of the Republicans will oppose it because of the big-brother invasiveness.
Wouldn't it be easier to do the cooling on the chip and use something that conducts heat very good on the chip?
A conductor would have to be thick, which would take up a lot of space.
Moving s liquid with high heat capacity (such as water, which has ENORMOUS heat capacity) means you can move the heat out by transporting the liquid, rather than by conducting the heat THROUGH it. The liquid can then drop off the heat at the heat sink in a leisurely fashion on its way through. Heat only has to move by conduction across distances measured in molecular diameters rather than inches.
with an aperture roughly the size of a quarter pixel on the screen a fixed-focus lens would have extreme depth of field. So no focus adjustment should be necessary.
You WILL need to have the lenses on a very slightly larger spacing than the sensors, so the look-direction blooms outward as you go from the center of the screen toward the edge, if you want your field of view to be broader than a tunnel the size of the screen.
Unless they've also inserted thousands of tiny lenses the device is just a cute hack to create a no-moving-parts contact scanner. Put the thing you want scanned up to the screen and illuminate it with the screen's light. (You can get color by having the sensors sensitive to all the colors of the screen and flashing the screen in each color.)
With lenses they could make it an insect-style compound eye. But the focus would probably be pretty rotten due to diffraction limits from the small size of the lenses. (You might be able to post-process some of that out, though.)
When I started getting pain in my mouse-wrist I switched the mouse to the other side. (And made sure my keyboards are all level or DOWN at the back to keep the tendons straight in the carpal tunnel.)
Configuring the mouse so the buttons are reversed made learning it a matter of minutes, since it's mirror-motion from what I already knew.
That's bought me another decade - so far. At this point (a few years short of 60 in age) my knuckles, wrist bones, and one elbow tendon hurt just a tad (probably from the start of arthritis in the knuckles and from carrying a HEAVY breifcase in the case of the elbow tendon) but my wrist tendons and hand nerves seem to be in good shape.
But I lucked out: The big carpal tunnel flap started when I was JUST starting to feel trouble - so I made the switch at the first sign, rather than grinding through the pain and ruining the tendons. And I made it a point to take a break, change position of self, keyboard/mouse, do an exercise, etc. whenever I felt anything irritating. So I had a chance to heal.
It sounds [like the improvement is] to make it cheaper by only having to use ten percent the amount of PV cells in the same area of solar panel.
Yep.
a one square yard panel of naked PV cells shouldn't get any more energy than one square yard with holographic cells... right?
A square yard of naked cells (or cells imbedded in a classic panel), a square yard of focusing concentrator onto a smaller area of cells, and a square yard of holographic panel containing some smaller area of cells, would all potentially collect the same power (neglecting concentrator inefficiencies).
The point is that:
- doing a square yard of collection with a square yard of cells costs.
- A normal focusing concentrator focuses not just the useful light, but the non-useful far-infrared, so you need serious cooling of the cells to run at a high degree of contentration, and the concentrator is bulky, heavy, and may need to track the sun.
- This thing is WAY cheap to make, doesn't focus useless infrared below the cells' bandgap frequency, and doesn't need to track. It loses some of the light, so you may need a little extra area to make up for that. But you use only 10% of the cells compared to a classic panel for a given amount of power.
As I read the drawings this is basically a glass plate with solar cells glued to 10% or so of the back and the remainder covered with a holographic coating.
The holographic coating diffracts the desired frequencies so they become trapped between the faces of the glass plate by total internal reflection (as light is trapped in a fiber optic light pipe) and it bounces back and forth between the surfaces until it hits a place where a cell is glued to the back. At that point the glue's index of refraction is high enough that the light can escape into the cell. So you just need enough cells that most of the light encounters one before it gets to an edge or leaks out where a dirt speck sits on the glass. (I'm not clear how they keep the holographic coating from diffracting it back out toward the sun but I presume they've got that covered.)
Far infrared doesn't bend enough to get trapped so it escapes out the front or back of the panel.
This is VERY nice. With maybe 90% of the infrared passing through the panel or bouncing out the front of it you don't get the massive greenhouse effect of a classic panel.
This may have applied prior to 1978, when the Copyright Act of 1976 took effect, but too many provisions of 17 USC chapter 1 have the phrase "Notwithstanding any provision of the antitrust laws".
That smells like the tracks of a legislative hack to repeal the portion of the antitrust laws that penalize misuse of copyright without appearing to repeal them.
The investigation will result in a few token gesture penalities and business will continue as usual.
It's called a settlement. Something the cartels do all the time. "Without admitting any wrongdoing". And then we, the customers, tell them, "Very well then. Carry on." And continue to buy their crap.
The penalty for this type of wrongdoing is to elminate the copyright on the works used in the scheme.
IMHO (IANAL), should the original parties settle, this might give anyone claiming to be attempting to start a download service standing to bring suit themselves, to attempt to obtain a judgement that they can distribute the works freely and without paying any royalty or facing any other penalty.
(Would anybody from the EFF, or with more knowlege of the law in question, care to comment on that?)
... In which case the RIAA member companies who participated in this action should find their properties (copyrighted music) to be forfeited in the similar manner that a drug smuggling operation would loose properties.
So then the arguement could go that any music that was covered by these RIAA companies copryrights at the time of these attempted criminal efforts becomes null or is handed over to the DoJ for auction.
As I understand it (IANAL) this predates RICO and is part of antitrust. Basic take is that if you use copyright as a tool to violate antitrust, the copyright on the material in question vanishes and it becomes public domain.
If that happens in this case it will be a double blow to the RIAA. The artists / industry created/used-the-services-of the RIAA to enforce their copyrights and collect their royalties. If doing so makes the copyright go away because the RIAA screwed up, they'll be seriously burned. Their "properties" gone.
They'll certainly think twice befor letting the current RIAA and/or its current administration handle any more of their works, or when setting up a replacement for it or a strategy for doing their own enforcement.
Short of invalidating quantum mechanics you can't have a MITM UNLESS he intercepts and rewrites ALL your communications - including the initial setup of your link.
The MITM must have inserted himself in ALL your communications, so he can fool you and your partner by looking like you to your partner, your partner to you. Side-channel a polarization schedule that he can't rewrite and you detect him.
In particular, without having the key schedule in advance he can't cut the fiber and retransmit while making a copy to save in the hope that he can work out your key schedule later. He needs the key bits when he receives each photon to avoid having a 50% chance of randomizing each on reception and thus not being able to resend its information.
you needed a direct fiber optic link to wherever you wanted to send the bits to.
You can also switch with an optic switch (which forwards the actual photons using moving mirrors, switch index-of-refraction light piping, or the like). You can't let the signal go to a box that converts it to electronic signals, routes the packets, and retconverts them to photons.
Photons travel in optic fibers just fine - polarization state and all. Around corners, bent by index of refraction gradients and bouncing off index of refraction continuities, etc.
Might as well be using line-of-sight and telescopes, as some (but not all) of the experiments did.
If you use quantum encryption to transmit the one time pads, you can detect wether one has been intercepted or not. If it has, discard it,...
It isn't just that you can detect it. It's that the very act of intercepting it corrupts it for the intended receiver. If the interceptor has it, the intneded receiver has noise, not the intended message.
The other half of quantum encryption systems is that you can send info in such a way that you have to have ANOTHER key stream (using some ordinary cryptosystem) to even recieve it. Get a bit wrong in your reception process keying and the corresponding bit of what you're trying to intercept turns into a coin flip. The information is noise for both the intended recipient AND the intercepter.
Slashdot Mirror
Ethanol has the big advantage that it's energy source is free (as in beer) and will be for the next 5 billion years.
Except for the cost of using the land on which to collect that energy. B-)
Ethanol has another advantage: It's carbon neutral. The carbon in the carbone dioxide that is released when it burns is carbon that the plant extracted from atmospheric carbon dioxide in the first place. No greenhouse gas emission. Most of the other inputs to make it can also be produced and used without releasing fossil carbon, too.
(Actually a slight reduction, since a small amount of the plant material, on the average, ends up as stuff that gets buried for geologic time.)
Yes, batteries are the main loss. Also - their charging rate is the main limit on how much power you can recycle from braking.
There's a new lithium ion variant with a nanotube-array electrode that might be a good solution for that. Charges 85% of capacity in minutes, which implies enormous power densities and minimal precentage losses to heat.
(There's also a new lead-acid cell design using graphite rather than lead for the structural support of the plates that makes a similar sort of improvement in lead-acid technology, though it probably get near the same absolute performance as the LiIon version.)
"Intel is not going to redesign the Pentium tomorrow because of it," he said.
Why not?
For starters the automated design tools will need a rehack.
Current synchronous chips use a "clock tree" to try to get all the flops and latches to clock at once. Then the design tools assume that the outputs flip at the same time and try to route the signals so they all get through the logic to set up the flops in time for the next clock.
This scheme will produce waves of clocking that propagate across/around the chip. So different flops will be clocked at different times. This is good for signals going the same direction as the clocking wave (though not perfect, since the propagation time of a signal on a wire is NOT linear with length), because they get extra time to set up the next flop. It's rotten for signals going the other way.
But it's disaster for design software that doesn't understand the issue.
So new versions of the tools will be needed that can take the non-simultaneous clocking into account, both to compute the layout and wiring right and to take advantage of the effect to achieve improved performance by arranging for timing-tight data paths to "go with the flow" and slower stuff to go the other way.
Even if this hack works, getting those tool mods done, and getting them right, will hold up large projects using it.
(But something can be done meanwhile, with unaware tools, by doing some manual layout of blocks with respect to the clocking waves and telling the tools to treat each block as if it had a simultaneous clock internally, skewed with respect to other blocks and with less setup/hold time margin to take into account the internal skew.)
No, I'm not making a sarcastic comparison with the 2nd Amendment here. I'm deadly earnest. Cryptography and guns are both useful means for citizens to preserve their freedoms.
The government recognized that, too. Which is why the export of cryptographic software from the US was essentially banned for decades - crippling the US crypto software industry - by defining crypto to be "arms" and applying the same laws as were used to suppress the export of guns.
... Who Framed Roger Rabbit with the Yosemite Sam speech uncensored.
They [Fox News] are wrong in fact repeatedly.
Would you care to provide a few concrete examples?
Preferably something at least as blatant as CBS's Killian Documents from the Rathergate episode of 60 minutes. Or the exploding GM gas tank from NBC's Dateline.
And please restrict yourself to their factual reporting. Fox News' promise is not to get everything right. It's to give the top two sides of major polical issues equal coverage (something that used to be an FCC requirement for broadcast media.) If one side is lying, keeping the lie off the air is NOT living up to that promise.
The first (at least) Harry Potter movie DVD was released with the Macrovision flag tuned off.
I didn't notice anything about the sales being poor.
(They did save a nickle a disk in Macrovision licensing, though.)
Without an independent audit of their claims, is there any reason at all that anybody should be taking these numbers seriously?
Of course not.
They pull these numbers from their a**holes.
So now they hired some bigger a**holes and were able to pull out bigger numbers.
Part of the reason the Nazis were so efficient at rounding up the Jews and other 'undesirables' was because they had good information about where they were living/employed/etc, and the Public Service was quite happy to provide that information to the SS (or whoever it was who coordinated the death camps - my knowledge of history is a bit shady). Had they had a national ID card, this process would have been even more efficient.
It's also how they were so efficient at pacifying France: They just went to the local police stations, confiscated the gun registration records, and then went door to door confiscating the guns.
The resistance then had to depend on new armament smuggled in, the occasional one they missed, or stuff lifted from the invaders. Average lifetime after joining the resistance was measured in weeks - using only one digit. B-(
You're obviously too young to remember World War II or the horror stories that were uncovered during the cleanup after it.
You don't disappear to avoid taxes. You disappear when a government gone bad decides you're an annoyance to be handled with "extreme prejudice".
... let's get id checks to vote.
Here's how to block national ID cards:
Get the Republicans to add a rider requiring the cards and their associated I.D. numbers be used to insure that only qualified voters (citizens, non-felons in jurisdictions where that matters) vote in federal elections and that no individual votes more than once in a given election.
The Democrats (the major beneficiaries of voting by illegals, felons, multiple voters, dead voters, and motor-voter + permanent absentee ballot virtual voters), will then be 100% against it. Even including a rider requiring audit trails on voting machine systems won't swing enough of them to matter.
Meanwhile some of the Republicans will oppose it because of the big-brother invasiveness.
And that's the necessary majority to kill it.
... would small as bad.
Wouldn't it be easier to do the cooling on the chip and use something that conducts heat very good on the chip?
A conductor would have to be thick, which would take up a lot of space.
Moving s liquid with high heat capacity (such as water, which has ENORMOUS heat capacity) means you can move the heat out by transporting the liquid, rather than by conducting the heat THROUGH it. The liquid can then drop off the heat at the heat sink in a leisurely fashion on its way through. Heat only has to move by conduction across distances measured in molecular diameters rather than inches.
with an aperture roughly the size of a quarter pixel on the screen a fixed-focus lens would have extreme depth of field. So no focus adjustment should be necessary.
You WILL need to have the lenses on a very slightly larger spacing than the sensors, so the look-direction blooms outward as you go from the center of the screen toward the edge, if you want your field of view to be broader than a tunnel the size of the screen.
Unless they've also inserted thousands of tiny lenses the device is just a cute hack to create a no-moving-parts contact scanner. Put the thing you want scanned up to the screen and illuminate it with the screen's light. (You can get color by having the sensors sensitive to all the colors of the screen and flashing the screen in each color.)
With lenses they could make it an insect-style compound eye. But the focus would probably be pretty rotten due to diffraction limits from the small size of the lenses. (You might be able to post-process some of that out, though.)
When I started getting pain in my mouse-wrist I switched the mouse to the other side. (And made sure my keyboards are all level or DOWN at the back to keep the tendons straight in the carpal tunnel.)
Configuring the mouse so the buttons are reversed made learning it a matter of minutes, since it's mirror-motion from what I already knew.
That's bought me another decade - so far. At this point (a few years short of 60 in age) my knuckles, wrist bones, and one elbow tendon hurt just a tad (probably from the start of arthritis in the knuckles and from carrying a HEAVY breifcase in the case of the elbow tendon) but my wrist tendons and hand nerves seem to be in good shape.
But I lucked out: The big carpal tunnel flap started when I was JUST starting to feel trouble - so I made the switch at the first sign, rather than grinding through the pain and ruining the tendons. And I made it a point to take a break, change position of self, keyboard/mouse, do an exercise, etc. whenever I felt anything irritating. So I had a chance to heal.
It sounds [like the improvement is] to make it cheaper by only having to use ten percent the amount of PV cells in the same area of solar panel.
Yep.
a one square yard panel of naked PV cells shouldn't get any more energy than one square yard with holographic cells... right?
A square yard of naked cells (or cells imbedded in a classic panel), a square yard of focusing concentrator onto a smaller area of cells, and a square yard of holographic panel containing some smaller area of cells, would all potentially collect the same power (neglecting concentrator inefficiencies).
The point is that:
- doing a square yard of collection with a square yard of cells costs.
- A normal focusing concentrator focuses not just the useful light, but the non-useful far-infrared, so you need serious cooling of the cells to run at a high degree of contentration, and the concentrator is bulky, heavy, and may need to track the sun.
- This thing is WAY cheap to make, doesn't focus useless infrared below the cells' bandgap frequency, and doesn't need to track. It loses some of the light, so you may need a little extra area to make up for that. But you use only 10% of the cells compared to a classic panel for a given amount of power.
As I read the drawings this is basically a glass plate with solar cells glued to 10% or so of the back and the remainder covered with a holographic coating.
The holographic coating diffracts the desired frequencies so they become trapped between the faces of the glass plate by total internal reflection (as light is trapped in a fiber optic light pipe) and it bounces back and forth between the surfaces until it hits a place where a cell is glued to the back. At that point the glue's index of refraction is high enough that the light can escape into the cell. So you just need enough cells that most of the light encounters one before it gets to an edge or leaks out where a dirt speck sits on the glass. (I'm not clear how they keep the holographic coating from diffracting it back out toward the sun but I presume they've got that covered.)
Far infrared doesn't bend enough to get trapped so it escapes out the front or back of the panel.
This is VERY nice. With maybe 90% of the infrared passing through the panel or bouncing out the front of it you don't get the massive greenhouse effect of a classic panel.
This may have applied prior to 1978, when the Copyright Act of 1976 took effect, but too many provisions of 17 USC chapter 1 have the phrase "Notwithstanding any provision of the antitrust laws".
That smells like the tracks of a legislative hack to repeal the portion of the antitrust laws that penalize misuse of copyright without appearing to repeal them.
We all know how MusicNet and Pressplay went on to dominate digital music market...
Making the attempt is enough to violate the law - and damage other parties. Success is not required.
It's like murder that way. "But, your Honor! When I swung the axe at him I missed! I should go scott-free!"
The investigation will result in a few token gesture penalities and business will continue as usual.
It's called a settlement. Something the cartels do all the time. "Without admitting any wrongdoing". And then we, the customers, tell them, "Very well then. Carry on." And continue to buy their crap.
The penalty for this type of wrongdoing is to elminate the copyright on the works used in the scheme.
IMHO (IANAL), should the original parties settle, this might give anyone claiming to be attempting to start a download service standing to bring suit themselves, to attempt to obtain a judgement that they can distribute the works freely and without paying any royalty or facing any other penalty.
(Would anybody from the EFF, or with more knowlege of the law in question, care to comment on that?)
... In which case the RIAA member companies who participated in this action should find their properties (copyrighted music) to be forfeited in the similar manner that a drug smuggling operation would loose properties.
So then the arguement could go that any music that was covered by these RIAA companies copryrights at the time of these attempted criminal efforts becomes null or is handed over to the DoJ for auction.
As I understand it (IANAL) this predates RICO and is part of antitrust. Basic take is that if you use copyright as a tool to violate antitrust, the copyright on the material in question vanishes and it becomes public domain.
If that happens in this case it will be a double blow to the RIAA. The artists / industry created/used-the-services-of the RIAA to enforce their copyrights and collect their royalties. If doing so makes the copyright go away because the RIAA screwed up, they'll be seriously burned. Their "properties" gone.
They'll certainly think twice befor letting the current RIAA and/or its current administration handle any more of their works, or when setting up a replacement for it or a strategy for doing their own enforcement.
Short of invalidating quantum mechanics you can't have a MITM UNLESS he intercepts and rewrites ALL your communications - including the initial setup of your link.
The MITM must have inserted himself in ALL your communications, so he can fool you and your partner by looking like you to your partner, your partner to you. Side-channel a polarization schedule that he can't rewrite and you detect him.
In particular, without having the key schedule in advance he can't cut the fiber and retransmit while making a copy to save in the hope that he can work out your key schedule later. He needs the key bits when he receives each photon to avoid having a 50% chance of randomizing each on reception and thus not being able to resend its information.
you needed a direct fiber optic link to wherever you wanted to send the bits to.
You can also switch with an optic switch (which forwards the actual photons using moving mirrors, switch index-of-refraction light piping, or the like). You can't let the signal go to a box that converts it to electronic signals, routes the packets, and retconverts them to photons.
Photons travel in optic fibers just fine - polarization state and all. Around corners, bent by index of refraction gradients and bouncing off index of refraction continuities, etc.
Might as well be using line-of-sight and telescopes, as some (but not all) of the experiments did.
If you use quantum encryption to transmit the one time pads, you can detect wether one has been intercepted or not. If it has, discard it, ...
It isn't just that you can detect it. It's that the very act of intercepting it corrupts it for the intended receiver. If the interceptor has it, the intneded receiver has noise, not the intended message.
The other half of quantum encryption systems is that you can send info in such a way that you have to have ANOTHER key stream (using some ordinary cryptosystem) to even recieve it. Get a bit wrong in your reception process keying and the corresponding bit of what you're trying to intercept turns into a coin flip. The information is noise for both the intended recipient AND the intercepter.