They have reaction control and heat shielding on the craft as of present. The heat shielding was recently added.
Right.
This flight would be to check the airworthyness of the craft with all systems installed (but some not yet required to be operational for mission success).
If everything went well I'd expect the next flight to actually use the reaction attitude control in lieu of control surfaces (if they didn't check that this time around), or to go up high enough that they're actually needed for flight control (if they did check 'em out this time).
Because it doesn't reach orbital velocity, the shuttlecock system keeps the speeds down to a reasonable level and heat shielding is minimal.
Right. Falling into the atmosphere from just above it at a moderate speed is much less heating than hitting it sideways at nearly orbital velocity.
But while you're still doing atmospheric flight you only have to deal with the friction from the airspeed you need to get your lift - and you have an atmosphere around you to dump it into continuously.
Once you "pop out" you have the additional energy of your fall back from your peak altitude to flight altitude to deal with. That's a LOT. Any excess of that over the kinetic energy of your flight speed shows up as heat in your skin, mostly in the very short time near the end of the transition from "air might as well not be there" to "thick enough to fly in". This is in ADDITION to the continuous heating of the skin by flight friction - which didn't get much chance to cool by conduction in the near-vacuum of the hump flight.
If you weren't firing your engines while up in the near-vacuum it's close to a wash - you converted flight kinetic energy to altitude, then back. So it's similar to just the air friction from cruising at the high altitude and speed. If you fired your engines in the near vacuum, the portion of that energy that went into accellerating you comes back as extra heat.
So it's not as big a problem as with a shuttle (which dumps most of its orbital energy as a couple thousand mile streak of purple ionized ceramic vapor). But it's not trivial either. (Especially since you'll be flying pretty darned fast just before you leave the effective atmosphere if you want to get very far above it.) Thus the recently added heat shielding.
They have to get to 328,000 feet, seems like they are looking pretty good.
I bet this one only went a third of the way because that's about as far up as they can go while still controlling the craft's attitude with control surfaces.
Power for the rest of the altitude should be no problem, since their engine seems to be working just fine. But they'll need also need their attitude control and reentry heat shielding working to go extra-atmospheric - where they can't just glide down the whole way.
So first some tests where the limits of the aircraft mode are demonstrated and debugged, followed by tests where the additonal functions are also used.
It might be interesting to check for graphite fibers - such as those released by burning graphite reenforced plastic car parts. Such fibers are invisibly small and produce conductive paths between exposed wires on which they fall.
Unlike EM fields it wouldn't explain the claims of fires in unplugged devices or in line-powered devices after the power was cut. But a low level of such fibers could explain fires from overloaded wiring (even the lamp cords, if a couple fibers got into the fixture).
Graphite fibers shorting electric systems is the basis of one of the "soft weapons" used in Afghanistan to disable the power grid without destroying it. A high density of such fibers on the insulators of a power line load it down and cause the breakers to go. A lower density of fibers might cause fire-starting overloads without blowing breakers, as might a high density in an older power grid with inadequate automatic cutouts.
(This was discovered by accident, when the burning of carbon-fiber reenforced auto body parts in a dump upwind of an electrical substation took down a local power grid. Before that event it was assumed such open-air burning was safe because the fibers would burn up with the plastic, rather than being released relatively intact in the smoke to wreak havoc downwind, and that the spark would vaporize them if they fell across a high-line insulator.)
im confused by your post, netware is not and never has been an asset of sco
Oops. Sorry. *I*'m the one who was confused.
I meant whatever the SCO unix is - not Novell's netware.
My point was, though, that a major judgement against SCO could end up with the plantif - Red Hat, IBM, or whomever won it - holding all of SCO's remaining assets - which would include:
- whatever it was about Unix that SCO used as a basis for their suit, plus
- their code base for their current products.
So when SCO goes down, the winner can both
- free Linux AND Unix from further, similar threats.
- open the SCO code available (or support it themselves) so their remaining customers aren't left with an orphan product.
- SCO goes away.
- Linux is free.
- Unix is free.
- The old-SCO customers (who bought in good faith before all this hit the fan) aren't stuck.
- SCO execs are out of jobs and the people who bought into their scheme are out big buck$,
- Corporate execs who might think of mounting a similar attack on open-source have an object lesson: Be DAMED sure you're right - because if you're wrong your company dies. Take that risk into account when you make your decision.
People already DO "talk chimp" - and the other primate languages.
It's just that in some cases we're not that blatant about it and in others our dialect has diverged.
For instance: "Pout Face" (squeeze the lips together and extend them toward the reciever) is a nearly universal primate "I'm friendly toward you" getsture. In humans it has apparently evolved into the kiss (at least in western societies). So you're likely to be misunderstood if you address this gesture to another human other than your lover. Most other primates will accept it from a human and react as if it had been issued by a member of their own species - by notching their behavior away from fear toward relaxation and cooperation.
Back in the '60s my "psych of language acquisition" course teacher told a story of another researcher in the field who was a rotten driver but never got a ticket. When the cop pulled him over he'd go into the "submissive posture of the hamadryas baboon". He demonstrated it - round shoulders, neck forward looking up, facial expression I can't really describe. TOTALLY pittiful. This said to the cop what it does to baboons: "I'm totally beaten. You're the winner. Please stop beating me." The cops would react just as a baboon would - and let the guy go.
The FCC has been muttering about/threatening to regulate VoIP as telephony. This would allegedly have some "benefits" like 911 service working from VoIP and "reliability" [...]
My impression was that the telephone companies were going to court and DEMANDING that the FCC regulate VoIP as telephony, and the FCC was doing its flat-out damdest to fight this, since the current FCC is hell-bent to keep the government's hands off the interenet (including especially hands in the other branches and levels of government.)
The last CD I ordered (nearly the only one I ever orderd online) never came.
(Interestingly, I had ordered it because the artist, who I'd never heard of before, made the full versions of three of the cuts available online, and there was a pointer to the cuts in a Yahoo ad. I liked 'em so much I ordered the album.)
Cadillac tried something like this with disastrous results in the 70s, and I read a while back that Chevy wanted to try something similar with the Corvette-dropping down to 4 cylinders when power isn't needed
But you are still pushing the pistons around - with much of the associated friction.
What I'm talking about it not having them at all. Instead you use the batteries when you need more power than the engine provides (which is mostly when accellerating or hill-climbing) and charge 'em up when you need less than you have, (or when descending or braking).
Not great for cross-country trips in mountains unless you have REALLY BIG batteries (or your engine is still somewhat oversized, or you add a little trailer with an extra engine (or extra batteries), as some electric cars already do for long trips). But great for fuel economy.
and most GM cars kind of do this if the coolant runs outs, using half as many cylinders with the others just pumping air.
Now that I DIDN'T know. Thanks.
(I wonder if they alternate the cylinders, too, to distribute the heat?)
If IBM didn't already win it in THEIR counter-suit: The remaining assets of SCO, including Netware and whatever remains of their claims to Unix.
Red Had could then, for instance, explicitly open-source it all - under multiple licenses. This would solve the "linux is a derived work of unix" issue from all time, and would also give anyone still stuck with a Netware deployment the opportunity to have it supported after SCO goes down.
So you're off by at least a factor 100 (if a car can hold that many batteries), now we're down to about 10 megawatts. Not beyond the realm of possibilities.
Let's try ballparking it another way:
- 300 mile range at 60 MPH. (300 minute run time - ignore initial start)
- 1 minute charge time
- 20 hp at cruising speed.
- 3/4 KW/hp. (within a couple percent)
300/1 * 20 * (.75 * 1000) = 4,500,000 W
Yep, I was off by a couple orders of magnitude.
(One of 'em was probably from assuming the engine was running at 200-300 hp rather than 20 during the cruise, which is silly since you don't flat-out the engine during cruise. But I don't know where the other one came from.)
OK, so you only need 5 megawatts per pump if you want to have a one-minute fill time, or 1 megawatt per pump for a five-minute fill. That's still a lot of power though. Rule of thumb is one house is a kilowatt average so it's the power feed of between one and five thousand houses PER "PUMP".
(Note also that a 50 minute fill is still 100 KW, or 100 times the typical prime-time power requirements of a single-family dwelling. An overnight (8ish hours) fill of one car is still ten times the house's typcial load. But if you have a short commute and thus only need to "fill" a family car once or twice a week - and leave them on charge overnights - you can probably get away with it without upgrading your neighborhood power grid.)
Fortunately the REAL solution is likely to be using the batteries for "peaking" in a hybrid car, with a small fuel-powered engine or a tens-of-KW fuel cell providing the basic generation.
Even a portable fuel cell should beat a fuel-powered steam generation plant in efficiency. So you don't need to upgrade the electric grid or change the basic liquid-fuel distribution system (though you might want to add tankage for a special formulation for the fuel cells). This makes for an easy, gradual changeover.
Finally, the car I've always wanted looks possible.
Where is the download for a Sun Solaris version?
on
Real Problems
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· Score: 2, Informative
While we're at it, where is the download for a free version for Sun Solaris?
The last one I was able to find was 6.0.4.216 (Beta), on their "community supported" subsection, which I installed in May of 1999.
Darned thing doesn't support most of the stream casting sites these days, and even the workarounds that used to work (digging the URL out of the file droppings in/tmp and reentering it from a menu) usually don't work anymore.
Yea, but I only hit the brakes a few times in my 16 mile commute from home to work. It's back country roads, and lots of farms. I'll stick with internal combustion for now. Unless one stop from 65mph to 0 will recarge them enough to get me back home, I'll let the 8 little pistions do their job nicely.
But you're burning a bunch of gasoline to push those eight pistons and all their associated bearings around when most of the time you could get away with two of 'em.
Suppose you could do your commute at 60 MPG instead of maybe 15 and still be able to accellerate from 0 to 65 spinning the tires the whole time whenever you needed to - and you or your spouse could also get 60 MPG while on a shopping trip or going into a city for entertainment. Would you want to switch then?
It seems to me that the limiting factor with recharging electric cars wasn't the batteries but the current supply.
Yep.
If you want to pull up at the pump and charge an electric car in about the same time as a gasoline car of similar range, you're talking about something like a thousand megawatts.
But the charging rate is a major breakthrough on another front: Regenerative braking! These new batteries can accept essentially all the power from stopping the car, to give it back for restarting it. That's MAJOR!
Electirc motors/generators can easily have inefficiencies in the small single-digit percentages. The rapid charging rate doesn't just mean the batteries can "drink the firehose" of energy from stopping a car, but that they can do it with VERY little loss (since the limit on charging rate is heating from losses).
With an electric transmission and a set of these batteries for "peaking" you could make a car that runs on anything but mountains with an under-20 horse engine and gets phenomonal MPGs.
Unless they have a 100% conversion of source electricity to storage these batteries are going to have very limited capacities.
Since the primary limit on charging rate is heating, and these devices apparently include an organic component and probably a water-based electrolyte, I suspect that they have VERY little loss during the charging cycle. B-)
Pretty much anyone using rechargeables has at least one extra set so that there's always a fresh pair to swap to when the ones you're using runs out. In that scenario even halfing the recharge time doesn't matter a bit.
Actually it's vs 1 HOUR so it's a factor of 120 reduction (as others have pointed out).
The real point, though, is that they've got the charging time down to less than the time it takes to swap in a fresh set of batteries. So no need to swap any more. Just do a "pit stop" with the fat electric cord in place of the fat pump hose. B-)
(Unfortunately that won't work for a REAL car, which will take a bit longer to charge even if the batteries are capable of better. You're looking at something like a thousand megawatts to charge one of those in a minute. Even if you included a small nuke plant at each filling station, the mag fields around the charging cables might bend the sheet metal. B-) )
Will this be plagued by the Mysterious Memory Effect of Rechargeable Batteries?
It's hard to tell from the article, but the chemistry sounds more like that of Nickel Metal Hydride than Nickel Cadmium. So I suspect memory effect will be absent or very small.
I saw no mention of the level of heat generated when charging a battery this fast. I haven't worked out any equations, but I was under the impression that there was a certain amount of heat generated per unit of time when charging / discharging batteries.
That depends on the efficiency of the charging process in the battery.
The heat generated is the main limit on charging rate, so I suspect that these puppies have VERY little internal loss when being charged.
The result will be that even when packaged you won't have a lot of problems with charging heat. If they don't get hot enough to damage the "organic resin" in their own guts, your nearby circuitry should be safe.
This also implies low losses for the total cycle. That will be very good for the automotive application. As will the lack of anything rarer than Nickel in their construction.
Nickel-cadmium would have been much better than lead-acid for automotive starter batteries - but that never took over for that service. That's because, if you wanted to put a NiCad starter battery into every car in service even back in the '60s there just wasn't enough readily-minable cadmium reserves known to do the job. It only appears in nature as an impurity in zinc. (So don't even think of making enough NiCad batteries to replace the engines).
So they pollute more than one out of twenty of the cars I see on the road and less than the rest. Horrible!
Actually that's out of date - from back when I was actually working on emission testing in the auto industry. I believe that these days a single-passenger car pollutes LESS than a passenger's share of, say, a bus trip.
The emission regs on cars are VERY strict, fleet fuel economy standards ditto, and a lot of effort has gone into improving car exhaust and fuel consumption. Meanwhile bus engines have had much less done on them - and that is mostly fallout from their dual-use with trucks. You see, they're mostly run by governments - who have no interest in increasing their own costs.
I have never seen urban sprawl be considered a problem; suburban sprawl is a current plight across the country.
You're talking about the same thing.
If the suburbanites would simply move to urban areas and if people would build up instead of out, sprawl itself would be in very small trickles if not completely eliminated.
And if my mother had wheels she'd be a wagon.
People build out because they don't WANT to live in cities. They'd be diffuse enough to be a much lighter load on the environment if it weren't for government regulations and land-grabs bottling them up. (Meanwhile, those who WANT to live near work can't, again because of government regulations - zoning in this case.)
Some places, like Portland (IIRC), actually have set a hard limit on restricting construction outside of city limits, thus leading to much more efficient use of land while Portland still manages to be a beautiful city.
The state it's in (Oregon) is actually what passed the limits on sprawl. This created an incentive to redevelop "brownfields" rather than let them rot and move on, which is the main source of the improvement of the cities.
Of course the once-functioning mass transit system has since been gutted by clueless politicians pushing social programs. For instance, they decided to cut services to areas with low car ownership to provide it to areas with high car ownership, to try to get people in those richer neighborhoods out of their cars. Net result was that the poorer people who once used mass transit had to go out and buy cars to get to work - typically high-pollution older model used cars. Of course the more well-to-do people in the suburbs could care less about bus service and stayed in their cars.
Mass transit also has a safety issue. Defending it and its patrons raises the cost enormously. You've see extreme examples recently - in France, and in the US on 9/11. But there are less pressworthy but more pervasive risks.
Like gang activity.
In California the mass transit systems are nearly unusable long-term by ordinary citizens due to criminal activity. (In San Francisco they literally threw in the towel and hired the gangsters to "guard" the bus lines they'd taken over. ) ) Oregon could get away with it because its citizens can still carry guns to provide their own protection.
But to be usable a mass transit system also has to be pervasive and continuous - so people don't have to worry about "missing the last train" and not getting home until after the weekend, and can go anywhere they want to in reasonable time.
Here in California the schedules have either always been sparse or have been cut back to only rush-hour service. And Oregon made a similar cutback not long ago - helping to gut their system by making it unreliable.
For instance:
- Last time I tried to use CalTrans I got stuck in Gilroy on Friday and had to call for a ride to get back to the peninsula before midday Monday. Neither busses nor trains were available.
- My wife looked into commuting to a high-tec firm in Emmoryville from Palo Alto. Would have taken 4 1/2 hours EACH WAY!
Never mind using it to go see a play, a
"Beginning"? It's been militarized from day one.
on
Weapons in Space
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· Score: 1
[...] this story about the U.S. military beginning the militarization of space.
What do you MEAN "beginning"? It's been military since day one.
The whole POINT of the satellite program was that a rocket capable of orbiting a satellite can launch a bomb to hit anywhere in the world - and that an orbital base could watch AND hit anything it wanted to.
Early satellite launch attempts and rocketry development were done (and still are done) by the military. (That's what Vandenberg Air Force Base is about.) In fact they were the whole show before what became NASA had its mission expanded from researching aircraft issues.
One of the first uses of satellite technology was spy satellites, to replace high-altitude aircraft such as the U2 (which was no longer invulnerable to interception).
The space shuttle design is extremely inefficient (heavy LARGE wings - with their weight coming straight out of payload) because it was co-developed for handling civilian and military missions. The wings are oversize so the shuttle can do a "pop-up" single polar orbit mission, and have enough cross-range ability to manouver eastward by the amount the earth has rotated while it was up, landing where it took off. A strictly military mission - to do a quick-look or take a shot. (And it mostly hasn't happened because going polar with such heavy wings reduces payload to just a few hundred pounds above crew and consumables.)
Shuttle missions have been used to test several "Star Wars" systems.
Various space-based military systems beyond pure observation have been under development for a while.
So what's new? Just that they're thinking about actually deploying one of these other systems.
Whoop-tee-doo.
And electrons ditto. Need ION beams to be subatom
on
Pioneer Electron Beam DVD
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· Score: 1, Informative
The beam of the laser is much larger than atoms. Photon don't exist without their associated wavelength, hence their duality.
Electrons also have the wave-particle duality. And being light they're big.
If you want a beam to do etching on an atomic scale you need ions, not electons. (Even then, though the individual particles (and their wave functions) are subatomic in size, the beam is still likely to be significantly larger than an atom.)
Know what else the country didn't have in 1913? National highways to maintain,
Which are supposed to be maintained out of the gas taxes. But the bureaucrats keep ripping it off to fund other stuff, such as:
huge publicly funded transit systems,
Which cost FAR more per ride than cars. And pollute more than a car with two passengers. And are one of the big forces promoting ghettoization and urban sprawl. (For mass transit to work AT ALL you need a mass of people at one place who need to commute to work at another.)
If mass transit systems can't be run at a profit it means one or both of two things: there's no real demand for them or the people running them are not competent (in which case they're useless even if they COULD have been useful).
security agencies like the NSA and CIA to keep you safe,
By tapping our phones and internet, "dirty tricking" opposition politicians, testing virus delivery systems on US urban populations (and nuclear istotpe exposure on "marginal" rural populations (such as indians and people living with them), assasinating foreign leaders, destabilizing social institutions in countries that aren't friendly to US industries (even if they are friendly to US interests otherwise) - then "retiring" to form organizations to destabilize social institutions here at home, overestimating the threat from the Soviet Union, missing the threat from certain middle-eastern terrorists, and I could go on for hours (since THEY went on for decades).
social security,
The worlds largest ponzi scheme. It won't be here when I'm retired. All that money I could have been investing (or using to buy a home and raise the children I'll now never have) has been spent on the previous generation and the only way they'll have anything to pay for us boomers is to totally enslave generations X and Y.
medicare,
Even more so. (And the people it serves are, on the average, better off than the people who are taxed to pay for it.)
the largest military in the universe
Which was supposed to be f***ing DISBANDED after WWII. The US is not SUPPOSED to have a standing army.
But with the income tax they were able to keep it going, and become cops of the world. And with private armament development crippled by the first of the federal gun bans they could argue that they needed it.
Hogwash.
Want to ditch income tax? Fine - lay off about half the people paid directly or indirectly by the military ( oh, 2 million give or take ),
Sounds good to me.
Let's put the military back into its proper form.
get rid of old age security and let your parents die of starvation as they grow old and can't afford food because of their perscriptions ( oh, because medicare is also gone ).
Your man's straw is showing. "Oh, horrors! Without these government programs people will starve and die." Well guess what: First, they aren't falling off the cliff you drew, and second the government (as usual) is ripping off the bulk of the money that's SUPPOSED to go to "help" them for other purposes, while bleeding the NEXT batch white.
shit costs money, and people like you are too greedy to fork it over for the general good by choice
NOW it's out in the open. "You're too greedy to give and too stupid to save. So we eitists who know better will just have to steal it from you to do the things that SHOULD be done with it, while calling you names the whole while."
Grow up yourself, commisar.
The people are MUCH smarter than you give them credit for. And are perfectly capable of taking care of themselves - and each other - voluntarily - when you and your minions aren't stealing their savings and spending $2.60 on yourselves for every $1.00 you spend giving them some "benefit" - usually not the one they need.
When I first read the article and noticed that the technique involved submersion in water, I thought to myself: "How about vacuums, or zero-gravity? How will these things effect creation processes?"
This trick is to use the high index of refraciton of the liquid to slow the light. Slower light, shorter wavelength for a given frequency, smaller features before it dies.
Vacuum and zero gravity may have other useful effects but unless they enable something new they seem unlikely to affect feature size by themselves.
This wasn't "try everything". It was "what can make the features smaller?"
Re:Continuing Criminal Enterprise? Does it take a new trial for a judge to say "You're in contempt of court" for not following the orders resulting from a trial?
Nope.
Can't that result in a small amount of jail time immediately?
Yep.
But the RICO and Continuing Criminal Enterprise statutes can result in rapid seizure of the company's assets. (These are assumed to be ill-gotten gains once it has been shown that the company is engaged in an ongoing pattern of lawbreaking for profit.)
And they don't require the government to do the prosecuting. Individuals who were harmed can drive the process (and reap the benefits.) B-)
The kicker is that if Linux is a "nonliteral" derivative of SysV, then SCO's Linux Kernel Personality must be "nonliterally" infringing on Linux and the GPL.
Not necessarily.
SCO claims that they own Unix, and that Linux is Unix. By that argument they own the code they're adapting to, and the application of GPL to such code is void.
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They have reaction control and heat shielding on the craft as of present. The heat shielding was recently added.
Right.
This flight would be to check the airworthyness of the craft with all systems installed (but some not yet required to be operational for mission success).
If everything went well I'd expect the next flight to actually use the reaction attitude control in lieu of control surfaces (if they didn't check that this time around), or to go up high enough that they're actually needed for flight control (if they did check 'em out this time).
Because it doesn't reach orbital velocity, the shuttlecock system keeps the speeds down to a reasonable level and heat shielding is minimal.
Right. Falling into the atmosphere from just above it at a moderate speed is much less heating than hitting it sideways at nearly orbital velocity.
But while you're still doing atmospheric flight you only have to deal with the friction from the airspeed you need to get your lift - and you have an atmosphere around you to dump it into continuously.
Once you "pop out" you have the additional energy of your fall back from your peak altitude to flight altitude to deal with. That's a LOT. Any excess of that over the kinetic energy of your flight speed shows up as heat in your skin, mostly in the very short time near the end of the transition from "air might as well not be there" to "thick enough to fly in". This is in ADDITION to the continuous heating of the skin by flight friction - which didn't get much chance to cool by conduction in the near-vacuum of the hump flight.
If you weren't firing your engines while up in the near-vacuum it's close to a wash - you converted flight kinetic energy to altitude, then back. So it's similar to just the air friction from cruising at the high altitude and speed. If you fired your engines in the near vacuum, the portion of that energy that went into accellerating you comes back as extra heat.
So it's not as big a problem as with a shuttle (which dumps most of its orbital energy as a couple thousand mile streak of purple ionized ceramic vapor). But it's not trivial either. (Especially since you'll be flying pretty darned fast just before you leave the effective atmosphere if you want to get very far above it.) Thus the recently added heat shielding.
They have to get to 328,000 feet, seems like they are looking pretty good.
I bet this one only went a third of the way because that's about as far up as they can go while still controlling the craft's attitude with control surfaces.
Power for the rest of the altitude should be no problem, since their engine seems to be working just fine. But they'll need also need their attitude control and reentry heat shielding working to go extra-atmospheric - where they can't just glide down the whole way.
So first some tests where the limits of the aircraft mode are demonstrated and debugged, followed by tests where the additonal functions are also used.
One step at a time wins the race. B-)
It might be interesting to check for graphite fibers - such as those released by burning graphite reenforced plastic car parts. Such fibers are invisibly small and produce conductive paths between exposed wires on which they fall.
Unlike EM fields it wouldn't explain the claims of fires in unplugged devices or in line-powered devices after the power was cut. But a low level of such fibers could explain fires from overloaded wiring (even the lamp cords, if a couple fibers got into the fixture).
Graphite fibers shorting electric systems is the basis of one of the "soft weapons" used in Afghanistan to disable the power grid without destroying it. A high density of such fibers on the insulators of a power line load it down and cause the breakers to go. A lower density of fibers might cause fire-starting overloads without blowing breakers, as might a high density in an older power grid with inadequate automatic cutouts.
(This was discovered by accident, when the burning of carbon-fiber reenforced auto body parts in a dump upwind of an electrical substation took down a local power grid. Before that event it was assumed such open-air burning was safe because the fibers would burn up with the plastic, rather than being released relatively intact in the smoke to wreak havoc downwind, and that the spark would vaporize them if they fell across a high-line insulator.)
im confused by your post, netware is not and never has been an asset of sco
Oops. Sorry. *I*'m the one who was confused.
I meant whatever the SCO unix is - not Novell's netware.
My point was, though, that a major judgement against SCO could end up with the plantif - Red Hat, IBM, or whomever won it - holding all of SCO's remaining assets - which would include:
- whatever it was about Unix that SCO used as a basis for their suit, plus
- their code base for their current products.
So when SCO goes down, the winner can both
- free Linux AND Unix from further, similar threats.
- open the SCO code available (or support it themselves) so their remaining customers aren't left with an orphan product.
- SCO goes away.
- Linux is free.
- Unix is free.
- The old-SCO customers (who bought in good faith before all this hit the fan) aren't stuck.
- SCO execs are out of jobs and the people who bought into their scheme are out big buck$,
- Corporate execs who might think of mounting a similar attack on open-source have an object lesson: Be DAMED sure you're right - because if you're wrong your company dies. Take that risk into account when you make your decision.
People already DO "talk chimp" - and the other primate languages.
It's just that in some cases we're not that blatant about it and in others our dialect has diverged.
For instance: "Pout Face" (squeeze the lips together and extend them toward the reciever) is a nearly universal primate "I'm friendly toward you" getsture. In humans it has apparently evolved into the kiss (at least in western societies). So you're likely to be misunderstood if you address this gesture to another human other than your lover. Most other primates will accept it from a human and react as if it had been issued by a member of their own species - by notching their behavior away from fear toward relaxation and cooperation.
Back in the '60s my "psych of language acquisition" course teacher told a story of another researcher in the field who was a rotten driver but never got a ticket. When the cop pulled him over he'd go into the "submissive posture of the hamadryas baboon". He demonstrated it - round shoulders, neck forward looking up, facial expression I can't really describe. TOTALLY pittiful. This said to the cop what it does to baboons: "I'm totally beaten. You're the winner. Please stop beating me." The cops would react just as a baboon would - and let the guy go.
The FCC has been muttering about/threatening to regulate VoIP as telephony. This would allegedly have some "benefits" like 911 service working from VoIP and "reliability" [...]
My impression was that the telephone companies were going to court and DEMANDING that the FCC regulate VoIP as telephony, and the FCC was doing its flat-out damdest to fight this, since the current FCC is hell-bent to keep the government's hands off the interenet (including especially hands in the other branches and levels of government.)
The last CD I ordered (nearly the only one I ever orderd online) never came.
(Interestingly, I had ordered it because the artist, who I'd never heard of before, made the full versions of three of the cuts available online, and there was a pointer to the cuts in a Yahoo ad. I liked 'em so much I ordered the album.)
Cadillac tried something like this with disastrous results in the 70s, and I read a while back that Chevy wanted to try something similar with the Corvette-dropping down to 4 cylinders when power isn't needed
But you are still pushing the pistons around - with much of the associated friction.
What I'm talking about it not having them at all. Instead you use the batteries when you need more power than the engine provides (which is mostly when accellerating or hill-climbing) and charge 'em up when you need less than you have, (or when descending or braking).
Not great for cross-country trips in mountains unless you have REALLY BIG batteries (or your engine is still somewhat oversized, or you add a little trailer with an extra engine (or extra batteries), as some electric cars already do for long trips). But great for fuel economy.
and most GM cars kind of do this if the coolant runs outs, using half as many cylinders with the others just pumping air.
Now that I DIDN'T know. Thanks.
(I wonder if they alternate the cylinders, too, to distribute the heat?)
Anything left to kick around?
Yes:
If IBM didn't already win it in THEIR counter-suit: The remaining assets of SCO, including Netware and whatever remains of their claims to Unix.
Red Had could then, for instance, explicitly open-source it all - under multiple licenses. This would solve the "linux is a derived work of unix" issue from all time, and would also give anyone still stuck with a Netware deployment the opportunity to have it supported after SCO goes down.
Something doesn't compute.
So you're off by at least a factor 100 (if a car can hold that many batteries), now we're down to about 10 megawatts. Not beyond the realm of possibilities.
Let's try ballparking it another way:
- 300 mile range at 60 MPH. (300 minute run time - ignore initial start)
- 1 minute charge time
- 20 hp at cruising speed.
- 3/4 KW/hp. (within a couple percent)
300/1 * 20 * (.75 * 1000) = 4,500,000 W
Yep, I was off by a couple orders of magnitude.
(One of 'em was probably from assuming the engine was running at 200-300 hp rather than 20 during the cruise, which is silly since you don't flat-out the engine during cruise. But I don't know where the other one came from.)
OK, so you only need 5 megawatts per pump if you want to have a one-minute fill time, or 1 megawatt per pump for a five-minute fill. That's still a lot of power though. Rule of thumb is one house is a kilowatt average so it's the power feed of between one and five thousand houses PER "PUMP".
(Note also that a 50 minute fill is still 100 KW, or 100 times the typical prime-time power requirements of a single-family dwelling. An overnight (8ish hours) fill of one car is still ten times the house's typcial load. But if you have a short commute and thus only need to "fill" a family car once or twice a week - and leave them on charge overnights - you can probably get away with it without upgrading your neighborhood power grid.)
Fortunately the REAL solution is likely to be using the batteries for "peaking" in a hybrid car, with a small fuel-powered engine or a tens-of-KW fuel cell providing the basic generation.
Even a portable fuel cell should beat a fuel-powered steam generation plant in efficiency. So you don't need to upgrade the electric grid or change the basic liquid-fuel distribution system (though you might want to add tankage for a special formulation for the fuel cells). This makes for an easy, gradual changeover.
Finally, the car I've always wanted looks possible.
While we're at it, where is the download for a free version for Sun Solaris?
/tmp and reentering it from a menu) usually don't work anymore.
The last one I was able to find was 6.0.4.216 (Beta), on their "community supported" subsection, which I installed in May of 1999.
Darned thing doesn't support most of the stream casting sites these days, and even the workarounds that used to work (digging the URL out of the file droppings in
Yea, but I only hit the brakes a few times in my 16 mile commute from home to work. It's back country roads, and lots of farms. I'll stick with internal combustion for now. Unless one stop from 65mph to 0 will recarge them enough to get me back home, I'll let the 8 little pistions do their job nicely.
But you're burning a bunch of gasoline to push those eight pistons and all their associated bearings around when most of the time you could get away with two of 'em.
Suppose you could do your commute at 60 MPG instead of maybe 15 and still be able to accellerate from 0 to 65 spinning the tires the whole time whenever you needed to - and you or your spouse could also get 60 MPG while on a shopping trip or going into a city for entertainment. Would you want to switch then?
It seems to me that the limiting factor with recharging electric cars wasn't the batteries but the current supply.
Yep.
If you want to pull up at the pump and charge an electric car in about the same time as a gasoline car of similar range, you're talking about something like a thousand megawatts.
But the charging rate is a major breakthrough on another front: Regenerative braking! These new batteries can accept essentially all the power from stopping the car, to give it back for restarting it. That's MAJOR!
Electirc motors/generators can easily have inefficiencies in the small single-digit percentages. The rapid charging rate doesn't just mean the batteries can "drink the firehose" of energy from stopping a car, but that they can do it with VERY little loss (since the limit on charging rate is heating from losses).
With an electric transmission and a set of these batteries for "peaking" you could make a car that runs on anything but mountains with an under-20 horse engine and gets phenomonal MPGs.
Unless they have a 100% conversion of source electricity to storage these batteries are going to have very limited capacities.
Since the primary limit on charging rate is heating, and these devices apparently include an organic component and probably a water-based electrolyte, I suspect that they have VERY little loss during the charging cycle. B-)
Pretty much anyone using rechargeables has at least one extra set so that there's always a fresh pair to swap to when the ones you're using runs out. In that scenario even halfing the recharge time doesn't matter a bit.
Actually it's vs 1 HOUR so it's a factor of 120 reduction (as others have pointed out).
The real point, though, is that they've got the charging time down to less than the time it takes to swap in a fresh set of batteries. So no need to swap any more. Just do a "pit stop" with the fat electric cord in place of the fat pump hose. B-)
(Unfortunately that won't work for a REAL car, which will take a bit longer to charge even if the batteries are capable of better. You're looking at something like a thousand megawatts to charge one of those in a minute. Even if you included a small nuke plant at each filling station, the mag fields around the charging cables might bend the sheet metal. B-) )
Will this be plagued by the Mysterious Memory Effect of Rechargeable Batteries?
It's hard to tell from the article, but the chemistry sounds more like that of Nickel Metal Hydride than Nickel Cadmium. So I suspect memory effect will be absent or very small.
I saw no mention of the level of heat generated when charging a battery this fast. I haven't worked out any equations, but I was under the impression that there was a certain amount of heat generated per unit of time when charging / discharging batteries.
That depends on the efficiency of the charging process in the battery.
The heat generated is the main limit on charging rate, so I suspect that these puppies have VERY little internal loss when being charged.
The result will be that even when packaged you won't have a lot of problems with charging heat. If they don't get hot enough to damage the "organic resin" in their own guts, your nearby circuitry should be safe.
This also implies low losses for the total cycle. That will be very good for the automotive application. As will the lack of anything rarer than Nickel in their construction.
Nickel-cadmium would have been much better than lead-acid for automotive starter batteries - but that never took over for that service. That's because, if you wanted to put a NiCad starter battery into every car in service even back in the '60s there just wasn't enough readily-minable cadmium reserves known to do the job. It only appears in nature as an impurity in zinc. (So don't even think of making enough NiCad batteries to replace the engines).
and pollute more than a car with two passengers.
So they pollute more than one out of twenty of the cars I see on the road and less than the rest. Horrible!
Actually that's out of date - from back when I was actually working on emission testing in the auto industry. I believe that these days a single-passenger car pollutes LESS than a passenger's share of, say, a bus trip.
The emission regs on cars are VERY strict, fleet fuel economy standards ditto, and a lot of effort has gone into improving car exhaust and fuel consumption. Meanwhile bus engines have had much less done on them - and that is mostly fallout from their dual-use with trucks. You see, they're mostly run by governments - who have no interest in increasing their own costs.
I have never seen urban sprawl be considered a problem; suburban sprawl is a current plight across the country.
You're talking about the same thing.
If the suburbanites would simply move to urban areas and if people would build up instead of out, sprawl itself would be in very small trickles if not completely eliminated.
And if my mother had wheels she'd be a wagon.
People build out because they don't WANT to live in cities. They'd be diffuse enough to be a much lighter load on the environment if it weren't for government regulations and land-grabs bottling them up. (Meanwhile, those who WANT to live near work can't, again because of government regulations - zoning in this case.)
Some places, like Portland (IIRC), actually have set a hard limit on restricting construction outside of city limits, thus leading to much more efficient use of land while Portland still manages to be a beautiful city.
The state it's in (Oregon) is actually what passed the limits on sprawl. This created an incentive to redevelop "brownfields" rather than let them rot and move on, which is the main source of the improvement of the cities.
Of course the once-functioning mass transit system has since been gutted by clueless politicians pushing social programs. For instance, they decided to cut services to areas with low car ownership to provide it to areas with high car ownership, to try to get people in those richer neighborhoods out of their cars. Net result was that the poorer people who once used mass transit had to go out and buy cars to get to work - typically high-pollution older model used cars. Of course the more well-to-do people in the suburbs could care less about bus service and stayed in their cars.
Mass transit also has a safety issue. Defending it and its patrons raises the cost enormously. You've see extreme examples recently - in France, and in the US on 9/11. But there are less pressworthy but more pervasive risks.
Like gang activity.
In California the mass transit systems are nearly unusable long-term by ordinary citizens due to criminal activity. (In San Francisco they literally threw in the towel and hired the gangsters to "guard" the bus lines they'd taken over. ) ) Oregon could get away with it because its citizens can still carry guns to provide their own protection.
But to be usable a mass transit system also has to be pervasive and continuous - so people don't have to worry about "missing the last train" and not getting home until after the weekend, and can go anywhere they want to in reasonable time.
Here in California the schedules have either always been sparse or have been cut back to only rush-hour service. And Oregon made a similar cutback not long ago - helping to gut their system by making it unreliable.
For instance:
- Last time I tried to use CalTrans I got stuck in Gilroy on Friday and had to call for a ride to get back to the peninsula before midday Monday. Neither busses nor trains were available.
- My wife looked into commuting to a high-tec firm in Emmoryville from Palo Alto. Would have taken 4 1/2 hours EACH WAY!
Never mind using it to go see a play, a
[...] this story about the U.S. military beginning the militarization of space.
What do you MEAN "beginning"? It's been military since day one.
The whole POINT of the satellite program was that a rocket capable of orbiting a satellite can launch a bomb to hit anywhere in the world - and that an orbital base could watch AND hit anything it wanted to.
Early satellite launch attempts and rocketry development were done (and still are done) by the military. (That's what Vandenberg Air Force Base is about.) In fact they were the whole show before what became NASA had its mission expanded from researching aircraft issues.
One of the first uses of satellite technology was spy satellites, to replace high-altitude aircraft such as the U2 (which was no longer invulnerable to interception).
The space shuttle design is extremely inefficient (heavy LARGE wings - with their weight coming straight out of payload) because it was co-developed for handling civilian and military missions. The wings are oversize so the shuttle can do a "pop-up" single polar orbit mission, and have enough cross-range ability to manouver eastward by the amount the earth has rotated while it was up, landing where it took off. A strictly military mission - to do a quick-look or take a shot. (And it mostly hasn't happened because going polar with such heavy wings reduces payload to just a few hundred pounds above crew and consumables.)
Shuttle missions have been used to test several "Star Wars" systems.
Various space-based military systems beyond pure observation have been under development for a while.
So what's new? Just that they're thinking about actually deploying one of these other systems.
Whoop-tee-doo.
The beam of the laser is much larger than atoms. Photon don't exist without their associated wavelength, hence their duality.
Electrons also have the wave-particle duality. And being light they're big.
If you want a beam to do etching on an atomic scale you need ions, not electons. (Even then, though the individual particles (and their wave functions) are subatomic in size, the beam is still likely to be significantly larger than an atom.)
Know what else the country didn't have in 1913? National highways to maintain,
Which are supposed to be maintained out of the gas taxes. But the bureaucrats keep ripping it off to fund other stuff, such as:
huge publicly funded transit systems,
Which cost FAR more per ride than cars. And pollute more than a car with two passengers. And are one of the big forces promoting ghettoization and urban sprawl. (For mass transit to work AT ALL you need a mass of people at one place who need to commute to work at another.)
If mass transit systems can't be run at a profit it means one or both of two things: there's no real demand for them or the people running them are not competent (in which case they're useless even if they COULD have been useful).
security agencies like the NSA and CIA to keep you safe,
By tapping our phones and internet, "dirty tricking" opposition politicians, testing virus delivery systems on US urban populations (and nuclear istotpe exposure on "marginal" rural populations (such as indians and people living with them), assasinating foreign leaders, destabilizing social institutions in countries that aren't friendly to US industries (even if they are friendly to US interests otherwise) - then "retiring" to form organizations to destabilize social institutions here at home, overestimating the threat from the Soviet Union, missing the threat from certain middle-eastern terrorists, and I could go on for hours (since THEY went on for decades).
social security,
The worlds largest ponzi scheme. It won't be here when I'm retired. All that money I could have been investing (or using to buy a home and raise the children I'll now never have) has been spent on the previous generation and the only way they'll have anything to pay for us boomers is to totally enslave generations X and Y.
medicare,
Even more so. (And the people it serves are, on the average, better off than the people who are taxed to pay for it.)
the largest military in the universe
Which was supposed to be f***ing DISBANDED after WWII. The US is not SUPPOSED to have a standing army.
But with the income tax they were able to keep it going, and become cops of the world. And with private armament development crippled by the first of the federal gun bans they could argue that they needed it.
Hogwash.
Want to ditch income tax? Fine - lay off about half the people paid directly or indirectly by the military ( oh, 2 million give or take ),
Sounds good to me.
Let's put the military back into its proper form.
get rid of old age security and let your parents die of starvation as they grow old and can't afford food because of their perscriptions ( oh, because medicare is also gone ).
Your man's straw is showing. "Oh, horrors! Without these government programs people will starve and die." Well guess what: First, they aren't falling off the cliff you drew, and second the government (as usual) is ripping off the bulk of the money that's SUPPOSED to go to "help" them for other purposes, while bleeding the NEXT batch white.
shit costs money, and people like you are too greedy to fork it over for the general good by choice
NOW it's out in the open. "You're too greedy to give and too stupid to save. So we eitists who know better will just have to steal it from you to do the things that SHOULD be done with it, while calling you names the whole while."
Grow up yourself, commisar.
The people are MUCH smarter than you give them credit for. And are perfectly capable of taking care of themselves - and each other - voluntarily - when you and your minions aren't stealing their savings and spending $2.60 on yourselves for every $1.00 you spend giving them some "benefit" - usually not the one they need.
Socialism is theft.
When I first read the article and noticed that the technique involved submersion in water, I thought to myself: "How about vacuums, or zero-gravity? How will these things effect creation processes?"
This trick is to use the high index of refraciton of the liquid to slow the light. Slower light, shorter wavelength for a given frequency, smaller features before it dies.
Vacuum and zero gravity may have other useful effects but unless they enable something new they seem unlikely to affect feature size by themselves.
This wasn't "try everything". It was "what can make the features smaller?"
Re:Continuing Criminal Enterprise?
Does it take a new trial for a judge to say "You're in contempt of court" for not following the orders resulting from a trial?
Nope.
Can't that result in a small amount of jail time immediately?
Yep.
But the RICO and Continuing Criminal Enterprise statutes can result in rapid seizure of the company's assets. (These are assumed to be ill-gotten gains once it has been shown that the company is engaged in an ongoing pattern of lawbreaking for profit.)
And they don't require the government to do the prosecuting. Individuals who were harmed can drive the process (and reap the benefits.) B-)
The kicker is that if Linux is a "nonliteral" derivative of SysV, then SCO's Linux Kernel Personality must be "nonliterally" infringing on Linux and the GPL.
Not necessarily.
SCO claims that they own Unix, and that Linux is Unix. By that argument they own the code they're adapting to, and the application of GPL to such code is void.
(Interesting world they live in, eh?)