The DVD-burner graphene etching technique to produce supercaps is several years old -- but it looks like they're continuing to work on it. Good to see the technique hasn't been abandoned.
I'd never heard of it.
Using a DVD burner for constructing microcircuitry is a GREAT hack. Should be trivial to do resistors and wiring with it. If somebody can figure out how to do fast thin-film transistors it would put microcircuit fabrication within easy reach of hobbiests.
Sure the scale would be far larger than microchips. But for a lot of stuff that's just fine.
Sanders is the only one that I think would give them any pushback./i>
Then you haven't been paying attention. Rand Paul ALREADY gave them a BUNCH of pushback.
Just one example: He one-man filibustered the renewal of the Patriot Act for 10 1/2 hours, making it actually time out and creating a gap (to invalidate any claims to legality for information collected before the expiration and not destroyed after it.)
That's really amazing especially when considering that ENIAC, which is regarded as the first digital computer, wasn't introduced until after VE day.
The ENIAC has a claim to be (one of the) first stored-program ELECTRONIC computers.
But digital computing had been done for a very long time, using mechanical devices, electro-mechanical devices (including both motor-driven mechanical calculators and relay-based, often plugboard-programmed, card counters, sorters, collators, printers,...)
Hollerith invented the digital tabulation punched card and sorting/counting machinery for it for the 1900 census, after the 1890 census was taking nearly 10 years to process the data and the 1900 looked like it wouldn't be finished until after 1910. (Tab cards, AKA "IBM cards", were the size they were because, after the papermakers gave him an unreasonably high bid, he obtained the recently-retired bill making machinery from the US mint, which had redesigned the money shortly before. The cards are the same size as the previous generation of dollar bills.)
IBM did, however, manufacture M1 Carbine rifles for the US during WWII.
Sounds odd, though I suppose carbines could be considered to be a type of "international business machine".
A number of companies manufactured M1 carbiines for WW II. IBM, Saginaw Steering Gear division of GM, Rock-Ola (jukebox manufacturer), Underwood, National Postal Meter, etc.
"Out of ten primary contractors that manufactured.30 Caliber Carbines, Winchester was the only one with prior experience manufacturing weapons."
The main requirement for beating plowshare factories into sword factories was having the right equipment. Being able to drill a straight hole through a long steel rod to make a barrel was one way to get drafted into the effort. (Thus Saginaw Steering Gear, which had machines to drill a hole down the steering wheel shaft for the horn wire.) Another was having equipment able to accurately mill a high-accuracy complex machine part (for receivers and other parts with cam or shaft bushing surfaces) out of hard steel alloys that would survive thousands of beatings and keep working.
I am looking into a new position with my employer and have the opportunity to work with the development and QA team to further the creation of a Quality Assurance Framework that will be used into the long-term future.
You haven't taken the position yet? Don't!
Unlike other industries (such as the auto industry, where QA is often the highest ranking and most powerful professional short of plant manager, respected for their global understanding of both engineering and the math of probability and statistics, empowered to order things fixed and, if appropriate, stop the production until they are), the pointy-haired bosses of software development generally view QA people (even the write-the-tools types) as failed developers. "If you were good you'd be a developer." is a typical quote. A QA position on your resume is an albatros around your neck.
One of the better programming talents I know (and I know a lot of the big names), when starting out, took a QA position as a stop-loss. After that she couldn't get a developer position - even those where they CLAIMED to give her a developer position actually put her in the QA department.
QA is who they cut first, when things get tight. This is massively stupid - because it's who you need to get OUT of the jam. But understaffing QA shows up on the bottom line a couple years out, after the PHB has lined up his next positio, while understaffing development shows up quickly.
In it I pointed out that modern radios, in order to approach the Shannon limit, put out signals that are very close to random noise (and essentially indistinguishable from band-limited theral noise once distorted too much for clean reception).
And that this would make the window between no radio and radio that is indistinguishable at a distance from thermal noise very short - in our case, about 120 years from Tesla and Hertz to mostly OFDM, m-QAM, and the like.
What they discovered in the 1950's was that they couldn't use heat sensors for the missiles that were sensitive in the IR bands that CO2 absorbed. I don't imagine the missiles you worked on used IR sensors in those bands either.
Oh. THAT's what they're on about? Yeah, we knew about that. Also several bands absorbed by water, bands in the UV where oxygen is dissociated (some of it reforming as ozone), photochemical smog, and a host of other stuff.
The atmosphere is nearly opaque, with a scattering of transparent slots, through much of the spectrum, due to a host of things that absorb or scatter one color or another. A notable exception is the human visual spectrum - an entire octave of near-transparency, just below the upper-atmosphere UV cutoff.
Just because CO2 absorbs a particular line doesn't necessarily automatically turn into the CO2 density being the be-all and end-all driver of climate - or even a significant player compared to, say methane or water vapor (the latter being several times as effective as CO as a "greenhouse gas"), the ENORMOUS albedo effects from reflection by (incredibly and complexly variable) clouds and snow, absorption by ground, deep water, and all the tweaks to both from the colors of living things.
The meteorology survey course I took back then pretty much blamed water for everything - including the greenhouse effect - and was far more interested in soot and dirt seeding clouds than anything else with carbon in it.
The fact that the last serious scientific objection to AGW (as a theory) was overcome in the mid 20th century by improving spectrometers in heat seeking missile was a remarkable coincidence, NAS took full advantage of that opportunity.
Nobody mentioned it to me.
And I was working from the mid '60s through the early '70s in the "Infrared and Optics" lab that did the guidance systems for the BOMARK and Sidewinder, processed multispectral (including several infrared bands) aircraft and spacecraft data (from the ERTS - later renamed LandSat - and Skylab scanners), and much of the industrial-scale processing as well as the development of the equipment. The missile stuff was classified and before I joined, but the multispectral stuff was not, and was contemporary (as was the synthetic aperture radar in the other lab I worked for at the start of that period).
I did some of the software that processed that data, some of the running of the mainframes in question, maintained and augmented its OS and libraries on one of them, and, though a lowly undergrad techie at the time, talked with the researchers a lot. Some of them loved to tell me what they were up to and bounce ideas off me for my comments and opinions on them.
So I find it strange that, if they (or anybody in their field) had found a "strong" or "definitive" signal for AGW, using equipment derived from their work, they wouldn't, at least, have been talking about it a bunch, including with me, while celebrating and/or trying to get another grant out of it (and seeing if I could come up with a way to process the data to detect or falsify the signal).
As I recall, the dominant paradigm at the time was that the interglacial was ending and we were about to crash into the next ice age (or the next piece of the current one). But while that was discussed on campus it wasn't mentioned at this remote-sensing lab, either.
Their main issue is getting the government out of your pocketbook, currency manipulation, crony-capatalist bailouts (which attracts some lefties), world-wide economic power-plays (world bank, foreign aid,...), etc. This puts them a little right of center on the left-right axis, and way up toward the libertarian corner on the libertarian-authoritarian axis.
More accurately, because their main issue is an economic liberty, they attract people from a broad region spread out near the libertarian-right side of the Nolan chart, and the region is big enough to include some of the more libertarian of those left-of-center - mainly those who recognize property rights or oppose crony capitalists because they're perceived as looting the rest of the people (rather than because they think property rights shouldn't exist).
There are a couple issues the republicans have gone so far to the right that they actually accomplished a far Left policy goal.
Politics has more than one dimension - and you can't make substantial sense out of it without using at least two. Whenever you have a confusing "so far right it's left" (or vice-versa) analysis, you're really in an at-least-two-dimensions situation. The right-left analysis has broken as a result, and an off-in-another-direction group has been misidentified as being "off the end" of the left or right side that the left-right-only "dimension-blind" analysts usually associate them with.
If you're counting "tea party" as farther right than right, you've tried to squash 2-D into 1-D and gotten it wrong. (They'd be close to center on a left-right projection, and also contain {at least} two distinct groups)
The two axes you want (both here and usually as a minimum-to-make-sense) are "economic freedom vs. control" and "social freedom vs. control" - but you can rotate the square graph 45 degrees and get a diamond, with left/right along the now horizontal diagonal and libertarian/authoritarian along the now vertical one, yielding the "Nolan Chart" of the "World's Smallest Political Quiz".
The Tea Party ("Taxed Enough Already") started out as a libertarians-in-the-republican-party thing during the Ron Paul campaign, temporarily attracted (or was infiltrated by) neocons, (they had no controls to keep anybody from calling themselves "tea party"), attracted other anti-neocon republican faction members and lost most of the neocons (as the "tea party"-identified new congresscritters attacked the neocon-dominated party establishment) along with anti-tax people from the "left" side of the isle.
Their main issue is getting the government out of your pocketbook, currency manipulation, crony-capatalist bailouts (which attracts some lefties), world-wide economic power-plays (world bank, foreign aid,...), etc. This puts them a little right of center on the left-right axis, and way up toward the libertarian corner on the libertarian-authoritarian axis.
Here you go: http://www.pricestats.com/infl... . Again, this is measured directly by checking prices, no BLS or other government agencies are involved.
It also is useless, because:
- It's missing the explanation of what the brown and green lines represent.
- It only goes back to 2008
- It's the inflation rate, not the inflation. You need the integral of that.
(I note that the area between the lines and zero seems to be substantially larger in the section above the zero line than the section below. That would mean the inflation graph was climbing similarly to the gold price graph I referenced previously.)
So again feel free to post a reference to this project's data, in a form that can be actually used to compute the expansion or shrinkage of the bond market in terms of it, or similarly with some other value measure you're comfortable with.
I am perfectly willing to use any reasonable commodity basket to measure inflation. I just picked gold because it is usually a good indicator and generally recognized as such: It has little use except as a store of value (even when being used in jewelry) and its production costs don't vary much, so its pathologies when used as a reference for measuring value of a currency are minimal (and mainly related to short-term madness-of-crowds swings due to monetary system problems, rather than things like crop failures, wars, or inventions improving production of goods). For example, a high-end business suit has cost about an ounce of gold from colonial times to now. Gold will probably continue to be a good indicator until asteroid material mining drops its cost, decades from now.
It also can't be printed, so the gold price tends to expose governments that are trying to fake their currency's value by manipulations of markes and their legal system. This tends to make them want to discredit those who use it to point out their macinations. B-)
You seem to be projecting some personal mental image and reacting to it, rather than to what I'm actually saying. I'm sure you can do better if you back up and think a little. Meanwhile...
Ad hominem. I win.
No, you don't. You're terminally diseased and will die soon of brain explosion. It's been almost 10 years and there's still no hyperinflation in sight.
Ok. Let's look at the real inflation measured by directly checking the prices of a wide variety of services and goods: http://bpp.mit.edu/usa/
Unfortunately, that site's ouput is only provided as flash interactive something-or-other, which Firefox with noscript is unwilling to display for me today, even with everything unblocked. Their links to commercial distributors of the same information seems to require a subscription. Do you have a link to a less problematic way to view their results? Or can you quote their claims for the dates in question?
Oh, but I see. You're a goldbugger (i.e. you have a load of bug instead of brain).
Lemmesee... US bond market in 2007: 36 trillions, US bond market size in 2015: 41 trillions. Yeah, investors surely lost all hope in the US bond market.
I consider gold to be "stable money" for looking at REAL inflation (as opposed to things like the consumer price index, which has been politically hacked of late to make inflation look small and inflation-"corrected" entitlement payments lower.)
Gold price in 2007: Call it $650 (to err on the high side and bias it in favor of your position). Latest close from the same graph's heading: $1153.80. Denominated in gold, that 36 trillion would be worth about 64 trillion in today's dollars. That makes 41 trillion about a 36% loss, more than a third of the market, not a 14% gain.
In the _actual_ reality, bondholders were given a much sweeter deal than they could have hoped for without government intervention. A firesale of all assets would have resulted in them getting pretty much nothing at all.
No, a firesale of assets would have produced a lot of money, and the bondholders were in line after the workers getting back pay but ahead of the stockholders. For GM it would have worked something like this:
- The workers would have gotten some - but been out of a job unless/until somebody who bought the assets at the fire sale something new and rehired them - initially without a union. If any was left over...
- The bondholders - later investors (private-sector bailers-out) first - would have been next in line and gotten the bulk of the procedes. They might not have gotten full face value. But the late investors would have gotten more than the paltry sum they ended up with.
- Stockholders would have been last in line, and would have ended up with zilch unless there was more than enough to pay off the workers and all the bonds. So the meddling shafted the bond holders in favor of the unions - mainly the union organization rather than the workers themselves.
As for unions and workers getting their due before the bondholders - I fail to see issues there. Bondholders are paid interest because they are taking the risk, workers are paid because they actually do the work.
Which is approximately the way the law worked BEFORE the government meddled.
Ford's been repaying that loan at ~$465M per quarter and will have it payed off in 2022. They are paying US Treasury interest rates which are just below current market rates for large credit worthy companies.
And over an order of magnitude higher than the rates banks pay the Federal Reserve for money.
Meanwhile, the bailouts of GM and Chrysler were a payoff to the auto workers unions and raped the investors. The government massively violated the rules of how the assets of a bankruptcy-protected company are to be handled, giving the bondholders a small fraction of what they were owed (according to the laws in force when they invested their money into trying to turn the failing companies around). I think they ended up getting less than a third of what they were owed, after many months of having their money locked up.
One result of this is that, thanks to the government, the US bond market is no longer considered a good investment, because the government now has a track record of changing the rules, when trouble arises, to seize investors assets and bail out their corporate cronies. So loans from the government are practically the only option (and certainly the only affordable one) for a company in an industry perceived to be troubled. This was fresh in investors' minds when Ford had to go shopping for money.
IMHO Ford stayed away from government "assistance" to the extent it was possible to do so and stay in business, paid about what WOULD have been free-market rates (absent the government's retroactive meddling) for their working money loans, and protected their stockholders', bondholders', and employees' interests.
IPv4 addresses seem to be going for about $8 to $9 at the moment, in blocks of 256 or larger. That makes a class-C allocation worth less than $2,500. So I doubt there's a crisis just yet. Not even worth the trouble of pursuing it - and the hassle of retweaking your routers and ISP relations - if you happen to have some you could part with.
But it will be interesting to watch the prices now that the US registry has announced that it is "officially out" of address. That will tell us if/when reshuffling is insufficient to hold off a real crunch but IPv6 adoption is still inadequate to mitigate the need.
It will also be interesting to see if a new digital divide develops, with some people still without IPv6 connectivity and stuff they want only available via IPv6. (Again, I doubt it will be an issue.)
Does anyone know do flow batteries hold their charge well?
Depends on what the materials are. But unless the materials are inherently unstrable their separation into different storage tanks results in extremely low self-discharge. Very handy if you want to store utility-peaking levels of energy for months.
A more telling point is whether any leakage through the membrane to the other side degrades or poisons the reaction.
The latter is one reason Vanadium Redox flow batteries are so great. The simple compounds on each side of the membrane are the same (except for the oxidation state of the vanadium, and thus the number of its partners, such as oxygen atoms, it's associated with). As a result, any electrolyte that leaks into the wrong half-cell is quickly converted to that half-cell's electrolyte type. A little energy is lost "charging" it to the right oxidation state, but the battery is not poisoned. Unlike the one in the article.
Since we have very few antivirals, it isn't much of a problem.
If I understand it correctly: When you have a sequence you can CONSTRUCT a specific antiviral for it.
Better yet: You can also construct (or select off-the-shelf) antibodies to it, for antiseura treatment. That's very effective and blazingly fast for any infection that is accessible from the bloodstream.
Generally the justification for straight C or ASM is to remove runtime bloat, and you'd first have to give up using any frameworks to get there.
Another is if you have to security audit the result and protect it from attack, as in OSes. C++ can generate stuff that isn't obvious from the local source code - thanks to definitions, overridings, and the like. (Linus makes this point - it's why the Linux kernel is in C and will stay there for the foreseeable future.)
But that shouldn't be enough of an issue here to drop the helpful things the C++ compiler can do for you. (Especially when you're porting from an original in Java: C++ is a good match for a target language, C is not.)
We can bring a LOT more of the population up to new-world power-available-for-living standards if the only "pollution" from energy use is the waste heat after it's used and another 20% or so from rectenna and other transport losses, rather than also dealing with the dumped heat of the carnot cycle; the CO2 emissions, ash, sulfur, radon, etc. of coal and oil; the nuclear waste of fission, etc. Only aneutronic fusion (such as protium-boron11) with direct conversion by alpha-particle deceleration comes close.
How about heavy manufacturing?
For starters there's lots of nickel-iron there for the hauling, alloyed with a number of valuable "impurities" (like gold and platinum) that, on Earth, mostly sank into the core. Just heat it up and cast or machine it into what you want to build. Why should things like steel mills be on the planet emitting all sorts of pollution when you can do the work in space and let the solar wind blow away anything too cheap to be worth capturing?
Lots of other stuff you can build up there, too, for cheap (once the infrastructure is in place), and delivery is nearly free. Turn the planet into parks and high-end residences - for far more of the population than now.
The hard part of space travel is getting out of the Earth's gravity well despite atmospheric friction (which totally wrecks several easy ways to launch). Near-Earth orbit is halfway to EVERYwhere else in the Universe, energetically, and one out of the (bulk of the) atmosphere you can apply thrust gradually and efficiently.
Getting finished goods or refined ores down from orbit is trivial and cheap - as is getting it off an asteroid. Getting it up from the moon requires some infrastructure, but a magnetic catapult, once constructed, is cheap to operate.
You want to build any large structures "up there" using materials from "up there", because getting ANYTHING from "down here" to "up there" is HORRIBLY difficult and expensive. For any ongoing large construction program it is likely to be far cheaper to launch bootstrapping technology to build the mines and factories to build the materials for the projects. Once you've done that you ALSO have the infrastructure to build more stuff, and once you've got stuff up there, moving some down here is nearly free.
The main idea of mining the moon or asteroids is to use the product up there.
It is HORRENDOUSLY expensive to lift mass out of the Earth's gravity well. If you're going to build any substantial structures up there, it may (if it's a lot, it WILL) be far less expensive to launch bootstrapping manufacturing technology and mine the resources on the high frontier, rather than burn resources to kick the finished products up there.
Once it's in orbit, if it can be packed to take some rough handling, getting it down is dirt cheap. Getting big stuff off the moon is also cheap, partly because the gravity well is so much smaller, but mostly because the atmosphere is almost nonexistent, so a solar-powered electromagnetic catapult can do nearly all of the job. So things mined and manufactured "up there", if that can be done cheaply enough, can be easily shipped "down here". (The main cost would be packaging and the disposable guidance system - which could be as cheap as a solar/laser sail or laser-ablated reaction mass coating, and/or the capital cost of busying out a reusable orbit-changer or time on the laser.)
Refining a lot of stuff does NOT necessarily take a lot of water. If you do use water in the process you can typically get it back to re-use. Also: Water is one of the things you'll be "mining" - assuming that's cheaper than trapping hydrogen from the solar wind and combining it with "industrial waste" oxygen from refining metals out of handy rocks
I have never seen an example of the Indian state successfully enforcing anything....
Selective enforcement is worse than no enforcement.
Intermittent enforcement can give India all the downsides of the law without most of the (for them) benefits. The threat of occasional sporadic success, for instance, can cripple or kill outsourcing of anything with sensitive information to India, while the general failure of enforcement can still cause it to fail in its stated purpose of detecting planned attacks on the government and the like.
As someone whose employment prospects and pay levels are severely impacted by outsourcing of technology work to India, it's tempting to cheer them on in re-wording and re-promulgating the regulation, and spiking the outsourcing. But that would probably just push the work to an even riskier to secrets country like China, rather than bring it to the US.
Yes I know it's not a zero-sum game. But with the current US laws it's a massively sloped playing field, too.
- Terrible keyboards: Fat flat chicklets that don't work well and resul in lots of typos. The lettering is coming off the Toshiba's keys and the backlight doesn't work with Ubuntu. On the Lenovo I was able to get the backlight to work but the keys were painted clear plastic and after a few months not just the letters, but the black paint surrounding them, chipped away letting the light shine through horribly.
- Terrible touchpads: Very sensitive and positioned perfectly (and identically) wrong, so my thumbs hit them all the time and trigger the mouse to jump around and randomly click things. I can disable them (but they re-enable after the laptop is closed and repoened). I can't find any way to reduce their sensitivity.
Battery life is half what the battery tools says it should be (about 1 3/4 hours, tool claims 4 and doesn't learn it correctly.)
Built-in radios were not supported by latest Ubuntu LTS when I got them, though an update fixed that after about a year.
Other than that they DO work. They're just a pain unless you carry a mouse and decent keyboard around with you.
Why have [key size and algorithm limitations] When they have enforced key escrow and mandated plaintext retention of said encrypted data?
1) So they can eavesdrop without warning the target. 2) So they can (try to) crack the saved info when somebody says the dog ate his retained data. 3) So they can have evidence to bust people who don't provide "retained data" that matches what was sent. 4) The two sets of requirements are belt-and-suspenders. The retention/delivery requirements help cover for times the wiretap decryption fails or the data is lost through some mishandling, equipment failure, or failure to get the wiretap started in time to capture what was of interest to law enforcement.
Slashdot Mirror
The DVD-burner graphene etching technique to produce supercaps is several years old -- but it looks like they're continuing to work on it. Good to see the technique hasn't been abandoned.
I'd never heard of it.
Using a DVD burner for constructing microcircuitry is a GREAT hack. Should be trivial to do resistors and wiring with it. If somebody can figure out how to do fast thin-film transistors it would put microcircuit fabrication within easy reach of hobbiests.
Sure the scale would be far larger than microchips. But for a lot of stuff that's just fine.
Sanders is the only one that I think would give them any pushback./i>
Then you haven't been paying attention. Rand Paul ALREADY gave them a BUNCH of pushback.
Just one example: He one-man filibustered the renewal of the Patriot Act for 10 1/2 hours, making it actually time out and creating a gap (to invalidate any claims to legality for information collected before the expiration and not destroyed after it.)
That's really amazing especially when considering that ENIAC, which is regarded as the first digital computer, wasn't introduced until after VE day.
The ENIAC has a claim to be (one of the) first stored-program ELECTRONIC computers.
But digital computing had been done for a very long time, using mechanical devices, electro-mechanical devices (including both motor-driven mechanical calculators and relay-based, often plugboard-programmed, card counters, sorters, collators, printers, ...)
Hollerith invented the digital tabulation punched card and sorting/counting machinery for it for the 1900 census, after the 1890 census was taking nearly 10 years to process the data and the 1900 looked like it wouldn't be finished until after 1910. (Tab cards, AKA "IBM cards", were the size they were because, after the papermakers gave him an unreasonably high bid, he obtained the recently-retired bill making machinery from the US mint, which had redesigned the money shortly before. The cards are the same size as the previous generation of dollar bills.)
A number of companies manufactured M1 carbiines for WW II. IBM, Saginaw Steering Gear division of GM, Rock-Ola (jukebox manufacturer), Underwood, National Postal Meter, etc.
"Out of ten primary contractors that manufactured .30 Caliber Carbines, Winchester was the only one with prior experience manufacturing weapons."
The main requirement for beating plowshare factories into sword factories was having the right equipment. Being able to drill a straight hole through a long steel rod to make a barrel was one way to get drafted into the effort. (Thus Saginaw Steering Gear, which had machines to drill a hole down the steering wheel shaft for the horn wire.) Another was having equipment able to accurately mill a high-accuracy complex machine part (for receivers and other parts with cam or shaft bushing surfaces) out of hard steel alloys that would survive thousands of beatings and keep working.
I am looking into a new position with my employer and have the opportunity to work with the development and QA team to further the creation of a Quality Assurance Framework that will be used into the long-term future.
You haven't taken the position yet? Don't!
Unlike other industries (such as the auto industry, where QA is often the highest ranking and most powerful professional short of plant manager, respected for their global understanding of both engineering and the math of probability and statistics, empowered to order things fixed and, if appropriate, stop the production until they are), the pointy-haired bosses of software development generally view QA people (even the write-the-tools types) as failed developers. "If you were good you'd be a developer." is a typical quote. A QA position on your resume is an albatros around your neck.
One of the better programming talents I know (and I know a lot of the big names), when starting out, took a QA position as a stop-loss. After that she couldn't get a developer position - even those where they CLAIMED to give her a developer position actually put her in the QA department.
QA is who they cut first, when things get tight. This is massively stupid - because it's who you need to get OUT of the jam. But understaffing QA shows up on the bottom line a couple years out, after the PHB has lined up his next positio, while understaffing development shows up quickly.
I wonder if he read my November 24 2014 post.
In it I pointed out that modern radios, in order to approach the Shannon limit, put out signals that are very close to random noise (and essentially indistinguishable from band-limited theral noise once distorted too much for clean reception).
And that this would make the window between no radio and radio that is indistinguishable at a distance from thermal noise very short - in our case, about 120 years from Tesla and Hertz to mostly OFDM, m-QAM, and the like.
I wonder if he read My
What they discovered in the 1950's was that they couldn't use heat sensors for the missiles that were sensitive in the IR bands that CO2 absorbed. I don't imagine the missiles you worked on used IR sensors in those bands either.
Oh. THAT's what they're on about? Yeah, we knew about that. Also several bands absorbed by water, bands in the UV where oxygen is dissociated (some of it reforming as ozone), photochemical smog, and a host of other stuff.
The atmosphere is nearly opaque, with a scattering of transparent slots, through much of the spectrum, due to a host of things that absorb or scatter one color or another. A notable exception is the human visual spectrum - an entire octave of near-transparency, just below the upper-atmosphere UV cutoff.
Just because CO2 absorbs a particular line doesn't necessarily automatically turn into the CO2 density being the be-all and end-all driver of climate - or even a significant player compared to, say methane or water vapor (the latter being several times as effective as CO as a "greenhouse gas"), the ENORMOUS albedo effects from reflection by (incredibly and complexly variable) clouds and snow, absorption by ground, deep water, and all the tweaks to both from the colors of living things.
The meteorology survey course I took back then pretty much blamed water for everything - including the greenhouse effect - and was far more interested in soot and dirt seeding clouds than anything else with carbon in it.
The fact that the last serious scientific objection to AGW (as a theory) was overcome in the mid 20th century by improving spectrometers in heat seeking missile was a remarkable coincidence, NAS took full advantage of that opportunity.
Nobody mentioned it to me.
And I was working from the mid '60s through the early '70s in the "Infrared and Optics" lab that did the guidance systems for the BOMARK and Sidewinder, processed multispectral (including several infrared bands) aircraft and spacecraft data (from the ERTS - later renamed LandSat - and Skylab scanners), and much of the industrial-scale processing as well as the development of the equipment. The missile stuff was classified and before I joined, but the multispectral stuff was not, and was contemporary (as was the synthetic aperture radar in the other lab I worked for at the start of that period).
I did some of the software that processed that data, some of the running of the mainframes in question, maintained and augmented its OS and libraries on one of them, and, though a lowly undergrad techie at the time, talked with the researchers a lot. Some of them loved to tell me what they were up to and bounce ideas off me for my comments and opinions on them.
So I find it strange that, if they (or anybody in their field) had found a "strong" or "definitive" signal for AGW, using equipment derived from their work, they wouldn't, at least, have been talking about it a bunch, including with me, while celebrating and/or trying to get another grant out of it (and seeing if I could come up with a way to process the data to detect or falsify the signal).
As I recall, the dominant paradigm at the time was that the interglacial was ending and we were about to crash into the next ice age (or the next piece of the current one). But while that was discussed on campus it wasn't mentioned at this remote-sensing lab, either.
Their main issue is getting the government out of your pocketbook, currency manipulation, crony-capatalist bailouts (which attracts some lefties), world-wide economic power-plays (world bank, foreign aid, ...), etc. This puts them a little right of center on the left-right axis, and way up toward the libertarian corner on the libertarian-authoritarian axis.
More accurately, because their main issue is an economic liberty, they attract people from a broad region spread out near the libertarian-right side of the Nolan chart, and the region is big enough to include some of the more libertarian of those left-of-center - mainly those who recognize property rights or oppose crony capitalists because they're perceived as looting the rest of the people (rather than because they think property rights shouldn't exist).
There are a couple issues the republicans have gone so far to the right that they actually accomplished a far Left policy goal.
Politics has more than one dimension - and you can't make substantial sense out of it without using at least two. Whenever you have a confusing "so far right it's left" (or vice-versa) analysis, you're really in an at-least-two-dimensions situation. The right-left analysis has broken as a result, and an off-in-another-direction group has been misidentified as being "off the end" of the left or right side that the left-right-only "dimension-blind" analysts usually associate them with.
If you're counting "tea party" as farther right than right, you've tried to squash 2-D into 1-D and gotten it wrong. (They'd be close to center on a left-right projection, and also contain {at least} two distinct groups)
The two axes you want (both here and usually as a minimum-to-make-sense) are "economic freedom vs. control" and "social freedom vs. control" - but you can rotate the square graph 45 degrees and get a diamond, with left/right along the now horizontal diagonal and libertarian/authoritarian along the now vertical one, yielding the "Nolan Chart" of the "World's Smallest Political Quiz".
The Tea Party ("Taxed Enough Already") started out as a libertarians-in-the-republican-party thing during the Ron Paul campaign, temporarily attracted (or was infiltrated by) neocons, (they had no controls to keep anybody from calling themselves "tea party"), attracted other anti-neocon republican faction members and lost most of the neocons (as the "tea party"-identified new congresscritters attacked the neocon-dominated party establishment) along with anti-tax people from the "left" side of the isle.
Their main issue is getting the government out of your pocketbook, currency manipulation, crony-capatalist bailouts (which attracts some lefties), world-wide economic power-plays (world bank, foreign aid, ...), etc. This puts them a little right of center on the left-right axis, and way up toward the libertarian corner on the libertarian-authoritarian axis.
Here you go: http://www.pricestats.com/infl... . Again, this is measured directly by checking prices, no BLS or other government agencies are involved.
It also is useless, because:
- It's missing the explanation of what the brown and green lines represent.
- It only goes back to 2008
- It's the inflation rate, not the inflation. You need the integral of that.
(I note that the area between the lines and zero seems to be substantially larger in the section above the zero line than the section below. That would mean the inflation graph was climbing similarly to the gold price graph I referenced previously.)
So again feel free to post a reference to this project's data, in a form that can be actually used to compute the expansion or shrinkage of the bond market in terms of it, or similarly with some other value measure you're comfortable with.
I am perfectly willing to use any reasonable commodity basket to measure inflation. I just picked gold because it is usually a good indicator and generally recognized as such: It has little use except as a store of value (even when being used in jewelry) and its production costs don't vary much, so its pathologies when used as a reference for measuring value of a currency are minimal (and mainly related to short-term madness-of-crowds swings due to monetary system problems, rather than things like crop failures, wars, or inventions improving production of goods). For example, a high-end business suit has cost about an ounce of gold from colonial times to now. Gold will probably continue to be a good indicator until asteroid material mining drops its cost, decades from now.
It also can't be printed, so the gold price tends to expose governments that are trying to fake their currency's value by manipulations of markes and their legal system. This tends to make them want to discredit those who use it to point out their macinations. B-)
You seem to be projecting some personal mental image and reacting to it, rather than to what I'm actually saying. I'm sure you can do better if you back up and think a little. Meanwhile...
Ad hominem. I win.
No, you don't. You're terminally diseased and will die soon of brain explosion. It's been almost 10 years and there's still no hyperinflation in sight.
Bigger ad hominem. I win again. B-)
Ok. Let's look at the real inflation measured by directly checking the prices of a wide variety of services and goods: http://bpp.mit.edu/usa/
Unfortunately, that site's ouput is only provided as flash interactive something-or-other, which Firefox with noscript is unwilling to display for me today, even with everything unblocked. Their links to commercial distributors of the same information seems to require a subscription. Do you have a link to a less problematic way to view their results? Or can you quote their claims for the dates in question?
Oh, but I see. You're a goldbugger (i.e. you have a load of bug instead of brain).
Ad hominem. I win.
Lemmesee... US bond market in 2007: 36 trillions, US bond market size in 2015: 41 trillions. Yeah, investors surely lost all hope in the US bond market.
I consider gold to be "stable money" for looking at REAL inflation (as opposed to things like the consumer price index, which has been politically hacked of late to make inflation look small and inflation-"corrected" entitlement payments lower.)
Using approximate values off a graph: 10 Year gold price in USD/oz, for a quick reply:
Gold price in 2007: Call it $650 (to err on the high side and bias it in favor of your position). Latest close from the same graph's heading: $1153.80. Denominated in gold, that 36 trillion would be worth about 64 trillion in today's dollars. That makes 41 trillion about a 36% loss, more than a third of the market, not a 14% gain.
In the _actual_ reality, bondholders were given a much sweeter deal than they could have hoped for without government intervention. A firesale of all assets would have resulted in them getting pretty much nothing at all.
No, a firesale of assets would have produced a lot of money, and the bondholders were in line after the workers getting back pay but ahead of the stockholders. For GM it would have worked something like this:
- The workers would have gotten some - but been out of a job unless/until somebody who bought the assets at the fire sale something new and rehired them - initially without a union. If any was left over...
- The bondholders - later investors (private-sector bailers-out) first - would have been next in line and gotten the bulk of the procedes. They might not have gotten full face value. But the late investors would have gotten more than the paltry sum they ended up with.
- Stockholders would have been last in line, and would have ended up with zilch unless there was more than enough to pay off the workers and all the bonds.
So the meddling shafted the bond holders in favor of the unions - mainly the union organization rather than the workers themselves.
As for unions and workers getting their due before the bondholders - I fail to see issues there. Bondholders are paid interest because they are taking the risk, workers are paid because they actually do the work.
Which is approximately the way the law worked BEFORE the government meddled.
Ford's been repaying that loan at ~$465M per quarter and will have it payed off in 2022. They are paying US Treasury interest rates which are just below current market rates for large credit worthy companies.
And over an order of magnitude higher than the rates banks pay the Federal Reserve for money.
Meanwhile, the bailouts of GM and Chrysler were a payoff to the auto workers unions and raped the investors. The government massively violated the rules of how the assets of a bankruptcy-protected company are to be handled, giving the bondholders a small fraction of what they were owed (according to the laws in force when they invested their money into trying to turn the failing companies around). I think they ended up getting less than a third of what they were owed, after many months of having their money locked up.
One result of this is that, thanks to the government, the US bond market is no longer considered a good investment, because the government now has a track record of changing the rules, when trouble arises, to seize investors assets and bail out their corporate cronies. So loans from the government are practically the only option (and certainly the only affordable one) for a company in an industry perceived to be troubled. This was fresh in investors' minds when Ford had to go shopping for money.
IMHO Ford stayed away from government "assistance" to the extent it was possible to do so and stay in business, paid about what WOULD have been free-market rates (absent the government's retroactive meddling) for their working money loans, and protected their stockholders', bondholders', and employees' interests.
And they did it beautifully.
This is a huge opportunity for IP address brokerage.
You mean like ? They already exist, and have for a long time.
IPv4 addresses seem to be going for about $8 to $9 at the moment, in blocks of 256 or larger. That makes a class-C allocation worth less than $2,500. So I doubt there's a crisis just yet. Not even worth the trouble of pursuing it - and the hassle of retweaking your routers and ISP relations - if you happen to have some you could part with.
But it will be interesting to watch the prices now that the US registry has announced that it is "officially out" of address. That will tell us if/when reshuffling is insufficient to hold off a real crunch but IPv6 adoption is still inadequate to mitigate the need.
It will also be interesting to see if a new digital divide develops, with some people still without IPv6 connectivity and stuff they want only available via IPv6. (Again, I doubt it will be an issue.)
Does anyone know do flow batteries hold their charge well?
Depends on what the materials are. But unless the materials are inherently unstrable their separation into different storage tanks results in extremely low self-discharge. Very handy if you want to store utility-peaking levels of energy for months.
A more telling point is whether any leakage through the membrane to the other side degrades or poisons the reaction.
The latter is one reason Vanadium Redox flow batteries are so great. The simple compounds on each side of the membrane are the same (except for the oxidation state of the vanadium, and thus the number of its partners, such as oxygen atoms, it's associated with). As a result, any electrolyte that leaks into the wrong half-cell is quickly converted to that half-cell's electrolyte type. A little energy is lost "charging" it to the right oxidation state, but the battery is not poisoned. Unlike the one in the article.
Since we have very few antivirals, it isn't much of a problem.
If I understand it correctly: When you have a sequence you can CONSTRUCT a specific antiviral for it.
Better yet: You can also construct (or select off-the-shelf) antibodies to it, for antiseura treatment. That's very effective and blazingly fast for any infection that is accessible from the bloodstream.
Generally the justification for straight C or ASM is to remove runtime bloat, and you'd first have to give up using any frameworks to get there.
Another is if you have to security audit the result and protect it from attack, as in OSes. C++ can generate stuff that isn't obvious from the local source code - thanks to definitions, overridings, and the like. (Linus makes this point - it's why the Linux kernel is in C and will stay there for the foreseeable future.)
But that shouldn't be enough of an issue here to drop the helpful things the C++ compiler can do for you. (Especially when you're porting from an original in Java: C++ is a good match for a target language, C is not.)
How about space solar power systems?
We can bring a LOT more of the population up to new-world power-available-for-living standards if the only "pollution" from energy use is the waste heat after it's used and another 20% or so from rectenna and other transport losses, rather than also dealing with the dumped heat of the carnot cycle; the CO2 emissions, ash, sulfur, radon, etc. of coal and oil; the nuclear waste of fission, etc. Only aneutronic fusion (such as protium-boron11) with direct conversion by alpha-particle deceleration comes close.
How about heavy manufacturing?
For starters there's lots of nickel-iron there for the hauling, alloyed with a number of valuable "impurities" (like gold and platinum) that, on Earth, mostly sank into the core. Just heat it up and cast or machine it into what you want to build. Why should things like steel mills be on the planet emitting all sorts of pollution when you can do the work in space and let the solar wind blow away anything too cheap to be worth capturing?
Lots of other stuff you can build up there, too, for cheap (once the infrastructure is in place), and delivery is nearly free. Turn the planet into parks and high-end residences - for far more of the population than now.
The hard part of space travel is getting out of the Earth's gravity well despite atmospheric friction (which totally wrecks several easy ways to launch). Near-Earth orbit is halfway to EVERYwhere else in the Universe, energetically, and one out of the (bulk of the) atmosphere you can apply thrust gradually and efficiently.
Getting finished goods or refined ores down from orbit is trivial and cheap - as is getting it off an asteroid. Getting it up from the moon requires some infrastructure, but a magnetic catapult, once constructed, is cheap to operate.
You want to build any large structures "up there" using materials from "up there", because getting ANYTHING from "down here" to "up there" is HORRIBLY difficult and expensive. For any ongoing large construction program it is likely to be far cheaper to launch bootstrapping technology to build the mines and factories to build the materials for the projects. Once you've done that you ALSO have the infrastructure to build more stuff, and once you've got stuff up there, moving some down here is nearly free.
The main idea of mining the moon or asteroids is to use the product up there.
It is HORRENDOUSLY expensive to lift mass out of the Earth's gravity well. If you're going to build any substantial structures up there, it may (if it's a lot, it WILL) be far less expensive to launch bootstrapping manufacturing technology and mine the resources on the high frontier, rather than burn resources to kick the finished products up there.
Once it's in orbit, if it can be packed to take some rough handling, getting it down is dirt cheap. Getting big stuff off the moon is also cheap, partly because the gravity well is so much smaller, but mostly because the atmosphere is almost nonexistent, so a solar-powered electromagnetic catapult can do nearly all of the job. So things mined and manufactured "up there", if that can be done cheaply enough, can be easily shipped "down here". (The main cost would be packaging and the disposable guidance system - which could be as cheap as a solar/laser sail or laser-ablated reaction mass coating, and/or the capital cost of busying out a reusable orbit-changer or time on the laser.)
Refining a lot of stuff does NOT necessarily take a lot of water. If you do use water in the process you can typically get it back to re-use. Also: Water is one of the things you'll be "mining" - assuming that's cheaper than trapping hydrogen from the solar wind and combining it with "industrial waste" oxygen from refining metals out of handy rocks
I have never seen an example of the Indian state successfully enforcing anything....
Selective enforcement is worse than no enforcement.
Intermittent enforcement can give India all the downsides of the law without most of the (for them) benefits. The threat of occasional sporadic success, for instance, can cripple or kill outsourcing of anything with sensitive information to India, while the general failure of enforcement can still cause it to fail in its stated purpose of detecting planned attacks on the government and the like.
As someone whose employment prospects and pay levels are severely impacted by outsourcing of technology work to India, it's tempting to cheer them on in re-wording and re-promulgating the regulation, and spiking the outsourcing. But that would probably just push the work to an even riskier to secrets country like China, rather than bring it to the US.
Yes I know it's not a zero-sum game. But with the current US laws it's a massively sloped playing field, too.
Using Ubuntu 15.04 LTS:
Both the Toshiba s75 and Lenovo z710 have:
- Terrible keyboards: Fat flat chicklets that don't work well and resul in lots of typos. The lettering is coming off the Toshiba's keys and the backlight doesn't work with Ubuntu. On the Lenovo I was able to get the backlight to work but the keys were painted clear plastic and after a few months not just the letters, but the black paint surrounding them, chipped away letting the light shine through horribly.
- Terrible touchpads: Very sensitive and positioned perfectly (and identically) wrong, so my thumbs hit them all the time and trigger the mouse to jump around and randomly click things. I can disable them (but they re-enable after the laptop is closed and repoened). I can't find any way to reduce their sensitivity.
Battery life is half what the battery tools says it should be (about 1 3/4 hours, tool claims 4 and doesn't learn it correctly.)
Built-in radios were not supported by latest Ubuntu LTS when I got them, though an update fixed that after about a year.
Other than that they DO work. They're just a pain unless you carry a mouse and decent keyboard around with you.
Why have [key size and algorithm limitations] When they have enforced key escrow and mandated plaintext retention of said encrypted data?
1) So they can eavesdrop without warning the target.
2) So they can (try to) crack the saved info when somebody says the dog ate his retained data.
3) So they can have evidence to bust people who don't provide "retained data" that matches what was sent.
4) The two sets of requirements are belt-and-suspenders. The retention/delivery requirements help cover for times the wiretap decryption fails or the data is lost through some mishandling, equipment failure, or failure to get the wiretap started in time to capture what was of interest to law enforcement.