Okay, so we've already got -
- The Terminator
- Terminator 2: Judgement Day
- Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines
Followed by -
- Terminator 4: Inescapable Truth
- Terminator 5: ?????
- Terminator 6: Profit!*
* The working title for "Terminator 6: Profit!" is "Please, oh please, watch this movie." I can't wait for some asshat to start with the whole "social contract" crap and how we, the good little consumers, have an obligation to go to the theaters and finance whatever garbage they're shoveling this week. Think of the children of the executive producer!
Hmm, okay. I'd like to see you schlep something large... say a refrigerator... home on the back of your bike. Even with a trailer, that'd be nearly impossible. So you'll still need trucks for deliveries. Oh, and if you've got kids, you'll be justified in having a minivan, 'cuz small monkeys require a whole lotta infrastructure. Roads full of large trucks and commuters on bikes... that's a good, safe mix.
Banning personal transportation would be the equivalent of banning personal freedom (indeed, the car *is* freedom for many people.) If you had to rent truck-time for every delivery, suddenly you're at the mercy of the truck-owning cartels.
Bicycles work great in certain circumstances. I ride regularly, and I prefer to take the bike into town for simple errands - post office, drug store, local restaurants. However, when I have to take any significant quantity of stuff with me, I opt for the car.
Folks won't change unless they're motivated to do so. Wanna reduce fuel consumption? Make it expensive. $6/gallon gasoline will get *everyone's* attention. Tax the hell out of crappy fuels like gasoline. Place less tax on diesel because most diesels get much better mileage than gasoline engines, you want to promote biodiesel as a carbon-neutral fuel, diesel is less polluting than gasoline (particulate vs. gaseous emissions,) and it's primarily used by industrial transportation entities (and you're looking to alter the behavior of the lazy-assed commuters and not the truckers, right?) Public transportation doesn't pay the tax because it's a government function, and thus becomes substantially more attractive (as long as it can meet the convenience requirements.) If you make gasoline nasty expensive, you'll motivate people to change - move closer to work, upgrade to a new efficient diesel-hybrid, or ride the bike. People obey Newton's First Law - they'll continue doing what they're doing until an external influence motivates them to change. Some people need to be motivated with a stick.
I grew up in a small town in Northern Virgina (which is now a big town.) I don't know if it's still the case, but the local Chamber of Commerce had petitioned the local gub'ment to time the lights on Rte. 123 to cause maximum congestion during rush hour. Their small-minded thinking was that the congestion would motivate folks to pull off the non-moving road and go shopping - a direct benefit to the local business community! Stupid? You betcha. The place was a parking lot. Everyone knew to avoid the area during rush hour. I can't see how *anyone* benefitted from that brain-dead plan. with the possible exception of the police force (lots of opportunity to cite "agressive" drivers.)
"I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly served a subpoena to appear before a federal court regarding the alleged infringement of Plaintiff's (Sony BMG et al) copyrighted work "Cry Out in Terror" (c) 1952. I fear something terrible has happened."
Anybody else see the irony of a malformed HTML link href="http://www.foo.com/links/malformed.html"> in an article about the "worst in IT ?" Almost made my head implode.
Msft: Who leaked this onto a newsgroup? Lackey: The username on the account was "Richard." Msft: Richard who? Lackey: We don't know. The account name is just "Richard." Msft: Suspend all priveledges to anyone with a "Richard" in their name! Lackey: Sir, yes sir! Msft: Man, this Richard guy is a real dick. Lackey:*snickers* Msft: What?
Okay, I'm a glutton for punishment. I'll take a stab at this from another direction. New napkin... Ho-Hos have been... uhh... dealt with.
There are 300 million folks in the US. Average family of 4 -> 75 million households. Let's make this a compulsory public-service program, so city dwellers without roof space need to subcontract their citizen-obligation to a "sun farmer." Each household is responsible for (451 thousand MW / 75 million) = 0.006 MW = 6kW. Multiply that by 2 to account for the 50% illumination cycle, and divide by 0.707 to RMS the peak incident power = 17 kW.
17kW with 8% efficiency cells yields about 212 m^2 of cells, or a square that's 14.5m on a side. My current residence only has about 160 m^2 of roof space, so I'd probably need to opt for the 20% cells... Still, that's within the realm of reality. I wish the Iowa Thin Film flexible cells were more than 3-5% efficient. I very much like the idea of a long continuous roll of solar film. That'd eliminate much of the installation and handling headaches associated with the current rigid cells.
Damn, I gotta upgrade to better napkins. I see the fault. I lost the 1000 when converting from kW to MW. Beacuse that's an area term, the 1000 contributes twice.
Oh no, wait. There's some Ho-Ho smeared on the napkin. Huh, can't imagine where that came from. Musta obstructed the missing 1000 during my calculations. Yeah, that's the ticket. I am absolved of culpability! It's the Ho-Ho's fault!
Biff loved his Pro-E. We needed an enclosure for a manufacturing test fixture. He contracted a CNC machine shop to build a custom box about 8" x 10" x 10"... out of a solid billet of aluminum. The thing was pretty - had all sorts of recessed vent panels and integrated mounting bosses. But damn, this is a test fixture. The operator connects a cable to the UUT (Unit Under Test) and presses a key on the computer keyboard. We must've spent a couple thousand bucks on that one bucket. I'm not a big fan of Bud boxes, but they certainly have their place.
(background: At a staff meeting, Biff stood up to extole his credibility and the virtues of Pro-E. And I quote, "I may be big, I may be ignorant, I may be fat..." we didn't need to hear any more. Y'all can figure out what the second "f" stands for.)
Recently, I was having a conversation about the upper limit on solar power. I hadn't done the math then, but I just trotted out a fresh napkin to satisfy my curiosity. The earth is 12756 km in diameter. That presents a 127.8 million km^2 cross section to the sun. With the napkin-math estimate of 1kW/m^2 incident at the earth's surface, there's an upper limit of 127.8 million MW of power available from the sun. Okay, so that's an absolute ceiling for terrestrial solar collection - you can't collect more energy than is incident in the first place.
Okay, now for a more practical limit. Let's put the solar collection grid on land - that's a reduction to 30%. Let's also go with solar cells that are 20% efficient - that's not too shabby, but not bleeding-edge-expensive either. (127.8 * 0.3 * 0.2) = 7.67 million MW.
Finally, how much of the available global land mass are we willing to pave over with solar cells? If I use a residential rooftop model, a 1500 sq.ft. house on a 1/4 acre (~10000 sq.ft., sorry for the non-metric-unit shift) property would be about 15%. I think that's probably a bit high, considering that houses aren't aligned for optimal solar collection, but I'm looking for the practical upper limit of solar collection opportunity. Using 15%, the available harvestable power limit becomes 1.15 million MW.
Let's compare that to current consumption stats in the US (no pun intended.) If I read this chart correctly, December of 2006 had 335.6 million MWh of power generated across all industries. There were 744 hours in December, so that equates to 451 thousand MW average continuous power generation. So the maximum solar harvest potential is only about 3x our current consumption rate? Damn, that's sobering.
Re:Congratulations AMD!
on
AMD's New DRM
·
· Score: 1
Looks like they're expanding their leadership role in the "Foot-Firearm Interface" arena. I can imagine a recent BoD meeting that began like this... [Farnsworth]
"Good news, everyone... " [/Farnsworth]
You learn from your mistakes, and there's no substitute for "the real thing." You can crash the robot in a sim over and over, and it's no big deal. Real destruction with sparks and fire teaches you life-lessons... I had a summer job (many years ago) with a rather large gub'ment contractor. We were working on a robotic arm tasked with de-palletizing ammunition - ammunition of the 5-inch diameter variety. The second day at the site, the programming team had gotten the arm all twisted up after several hours of fussing with the control software. The design lead saw the "home" switch on the control panel, and decided that starting from a clean setup would streamline things.
*** CRASH ! ***
Nobody had programmed any obstructions within the cell, and some Genius had put the servo drive rack within the robots hemisphere of motion. The shortest path to the home location went directly through the servo drive rack. And when I say "directly through," I mean "ripped the rack in half." Literally. Big multi-ton mother, indeed.
So there's a bunch of down time while equipment is replaced, and we're back on-site after about 3 weeks. To my surprise, the servo control rack is still within the robot's operating envelope, but the obstructions have been properly programmed. There's even a short demo where they try to move the arm into the obstruction, but the machine refuses (rather politely, I might add.) Several days of progress are made before the Brain Trust is at it again. One of the programmers decides it will be "cool" if the robot commits suicide - he'd been reading an Asmiov book if I recall correctly. So they program the BMTM arm to reach over and press the main power switch on the servo control rack. It refuses. So they place a piece of 3/4" black pipe in the end effector to create the necessary tool offset. Attempt number two goes [click]...
*** CRASH ! ***
They had shut the main power breaker off, resulting in a rather ungraceful de-energizing event. Apparently the servo drives can "lurch" if power is abruptly removed. The arm stuffed the black pipe and the end effector halfway through the servo control rack... which was thankfully de-energized.
Not surprisingly, we were not invited back for a third attempt to program the arm.
At first glance, your observation seems to make sense. Let's take it one step further and do some napkin-math. There are two elements that conspire against you when you try to harvest energy from the sun - incident power and conversion efficiency.
As a general rule of thumb, when the sun is directly overhead and your solar panel is pointed directly at the sun (i.e. perpendicular to the incident light), the sun only provides 1000 watts per square meter of collection area. If you start to tip the solar array off-angle, you can reduce the effective incident power by the cosine of the angle. If you're tipped by 45 degrees, you get half the effective power. If you're pointed 90-degrees off-angle, you get nuthin'. So unless your roof mounted solar cells have a sun tracker, you won't get maximum power.
Second is conversion efficiency. The best solar cells manufactured today are about 40% efficient. They're pretty damned expensive too. At the other end of the spectrum (pardon the pun,) the "affordable" solar cells are 3-5% efficient. You'll want to run a peak power converter to collect maximum power from the cells - they look like a diode rather than a battery, so there's a "peak power" operating point that moves around with illumination. You'll want to track that, but that'll result in an output that moves (V=IR dictates that.) So you've collected maximum power from the cells, but the resultant output isn't well matched to your charging system, so there's another stage of DC-DC conversion with it's attendant losses. Typical designs run 85%, which is a good napkin-math number to use. If you can narrow the operating requirements and tolerate some additional cost, you can push that efficiency up to 93%. I wouldn't expect more than 95% best case ever.
The bottom line is that solar doesn't provide much power density to begin with, and everything you do to the collected power is lossy. The situation isn't impossible, but it's far from simple. If you put good solar cells on the roof of your car (about a square meter,) you'd probably net about 8% average over the course of the illuminated day. With 1kW incident, you get 80W to spend any way you want. By comparison, 1 hp is 750 watts. Your solar panel contributes 1/10 hp to your propulsion system. If you could get the system up to 40% efficiency, you only get 400W out the back - slightly more than 1/2 hp.
Thank you for using the word "customers" instead of "consumers." Consumers are force-fed; customers have a choice.
But therein lies the problem with this situation. The **AA cartels have purchased the necessary legislation to reinforce their monopolies. When they revoke a DRM key that effectively bricks your hardware player for future media releases, what are you going to do? They've cost-shifted the upgrade burden onto you, and since they own the entire distribution chain, you can't take your business elsewhere. I'm quite surprised that the media cartels haven't tried to mandate use of Scrip to purchase a lease for their items-that-shall-not-be-owned-by-the-customer. Long live the Company Store!
This is a perfect example of why monopolies are bad. This will resonate all the way down to Joe Sixpack in a form that he'll understand - "Damned 'new' movies don't play in my DVD player." He may not understand the ins and outs of DRM legislation, but he sure as hell knows what getting screwed by the establishment means.
Heresy! How dare you question the RIAA's assessment that all the recording industry's woes are due to "pirates." There's absolutely no way the RIAA could be misinterpreting the situation. They're infallible. They said so themselves.
In today's age, your free time is under assault from hundreds of sources. Your free time is a resource that everyone wants access to. The youts [sic] of today have more choices than we did when we were kids. Listening to music used to be one of the mainstay activities. The music industry hasn't increased the "value" of listening to music, while other activities have increased their value to me. It's no surprise that the music industry is losing market share.
Lots of folks are knee-jerking with "what about electric vehicles?" Unfortunately, the Slashdot summary is misleading... again. The X-Prize folks are citing a "100 Mile Per Gallon Equivalent," or MPGe. They account for electric vehicles. You can use natural gas as a fuel, or biodeisel, or E85. For the "mainstream" vehicle, it has to have a radio, air conditioning, etc. It's in the linked doc above.
There are performance specs too. The vehicle must go at least 80 mph for the 2-seater; 100 mph for the 4-seater. Braking 60-0 must be less than 170 ft. They don't require crash testing, but expect you to demonstrate that you've built something to contrmporaty standards for front and side impacts. The standard compliment of mirrors, reflectors, indicators and gauges are required as well.
The end of the document describes their objectives and how they came up with their requirements. It's a pretty easy document to read, and it gives you some insight into what they're trying to do (hint: it involves eventual production of the vehicle.)
Time to hit the books again. There are two ways to couple power: static field coupling (i.e. like a transformer) and propagating-wave coupling (i.e. radio.)
A static field may be purely E or purely H, but it doesn't propagate. Transformers are the simplest example. There's a magnetic field generated by one inductor that's coupled to another inductor through a magnetic (H) field. There's no electric field to speak of. That field won't move... at all. The physics says it can't.
To get a propagating field, you have to have both E and H components. When you have both E and H, you can calculate the Poynting Vector to figure out which direction your wave will go. For the link-challenged, that'd be S = E x B where the "x" is the vector cross product. Yes, do the right-hand-rule thing now.
Your AM radio antenna is called a "ferrite bar antenna" and couples energy to/from the H-field component of the propagating wave. There is an alternating magnetic field component, but it's not alone. Don't believe me? Here's an example of a guy who replaced his ferrite bar antenna with other types, including a quarter-wave long-wire whip. Whip antennas are E-field devices, and require an E-field component of a radio wave to function. Give it a try.
We've got to be able to get some imagery on that area, old or new. Well how could they be changing them if they don't know we're coming?... Break off the attack, the images have been changed!
I only get cached images. Are you sure?
Pull up! All Congressional subcommittee members pull up!
The ISS is moving at 7.726 km/s (I checked this morning - I'm running Orbitron to track a different satellite.) 26.2 miles converts to 42.165 km, so she should traverse the course length in about 5.5 seconds.
How many steps does it take to complete a marathon from low earth orbit? A one... a two... a three. Three.
Pretexting is the practice of getting your personal information under false pretenses.
Then why isn't it called "pretensing?" That'd make more sense, but it doesn't sound as high-tech and scary as "pretexting," so the mainstream media outlets won't have anything to do with it.
Nobody says "information was gained under false pretexts," in spite of pretext and pretense having almost identical definitions.
Yeah, yeah... I live close enough to DC to experience that issue first hand. However, DC is not a state, and there's a serious potential conflict of interest were DC to be granted statehood - a state that would effectively be the federal government. That'd be bad in a completely different way.
The DC folks are *completely* without representation. The residents seem to have a thing for Marion Barry.
I'll be happy to pay your "out-of-state sales tax" if you'll provide me with the ability to vote in your elections. [Palpatine] Awlll of them. [/Palpatine]
Slashdot Mirror
Okay, so we've already got -
- The Terminator
- Terminator 2: Judgement Day
- Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines
Followed by -
- Terminator 4: Inescapable Truth
- Terminator 5: ?????
- Terminator 6: Profit!*
* The working title for "Terminator 6: Profit!" is "Please, oh please, watch this movie." I can't wait for some asshat to start with the whole "social contract" crap and how we, the good little consumers, have an obligation to go to the theaters and finance whatever garbage they're shoveling this week. Think of the children of the executive producer!
Hmm, okay. I'd like to see you schlep something large ... say a refrigerator ... home on the back of your bike. Even with a trailer, that'd be nearly impossible. So you'll still need trucks for deliveries. Oh, and if you've got kids, you'll be justified in having a minivan, 'cuz small monkeys require a whole lotta infrastructure. Roads full of large trucks and commuters on bikes ... that's a good, safe mix.
Banning personal transportation would be the equivalent of banning personal freedom (indeed, the car *is* freedom for many people.) If you had to rent truck-time for every delivery, suddenly you're at the mercy of the truck-owning cartels.
Bicycles work great in certain circumstances. I ride regularly, and I prefer to take the bike into town for simple errands - post office, drug store, local restaurants. However, when I have to take any significant quantity of stuff with me, I opt for the car.
Folks won't change unless they're motivated to do so. Wanna reduce fuel consumption? Make it expensive. $6/gallon gasoline will get *everyone's* attention. Tax the hell out of crappy fuels like gasoline. Place less tax on diesel because most diesels get much better mileage than gasoline engines, you want to promote biodiesel as a carbon-neutral fuel, diesel is less polluting than gasoline (particulate vs. gaseous emissions,) and it's primarily used by industrial transportation entities (and you're looking to alter the behavior of the lazy-assed commuters and not the truckers, right?) Public transportation doesn't pay the tax because it's a government function, and thus becomes substantially more attractive (as long as it can meet the convenience requirements.) If you make gasoline nasty expensive, you'll motivate people to change - move closer to work, upgrade to a new efficient diesel-hybrid, or ride the bike. People obey Newton's First Law - they'll continue doing what they're doing until an external influence motivates them to change. Some people need to be motivated with a stick.
I grew up in a small town in Northern Virgina (which is now a big town.) I don't know if it's still the case, but the local Chamber of Commerce had petitioned the local gub'ment to time the lights on Rte. 123 to cause maximum congestion during rush hour. Their small-minded thinking was that the congestion would motivate folks to pull off the non-moving road and go shopping - a direct benefit to the local business community! Stupid? You betcha. The place was a parking lot. Everyone knew to avoid the area during rush hour. I can't see how *anyone* benefitted from that brain-dead plan. with the possible exception of the police force (lots of opportunity to cite "agressive" drivers.)
Y'all got no sense of humor. Didja miss the "of Ulm" at the end?
University corporate-relations spokesperson, Johann Gambolputty- de- von- Ausfern- schplenden- schlitter- crass- cren- bon- fried- digger- dingle- dangle- dongle- dungle- burstein- von- knacker- thrasher- apple- banger- horowitz- ticolensic- grander- knotty- spelltinkle- grandlich- grumblemeyer- spelter- wasser- kurstlich- himble- eisenbahnwagen- gutenabend- bitte- einen- nürnburger- bratwürstel- gespurten- mitz- weimache- luber- hundsfut- gumeraber- schönendanker- kalbsfleisch- mittleraucher- von- Hautkopft of Ulm , had the following comment:
"You yourg whippersnappers, get the hell off my lawn!"
"I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly served a subpoena to appear before a federal court regarding the alleged infringement of Plaintiff's (Sony BMG et al) copyrighted work "Cry Out in Terror" (c) 1952. I fear something terrible has happened."
Anybody else see the irony of a malformed HTML link href="http://www.foo.com/links/malformed.html"> in an article about the "worst in IT ?" Almost made my head implode.
That was my first reaction.
Msft: Who leaked this onto a newsgroup?
Lackey: The username on the account was "Richard."
Msft: Richard who?
Lackey: We don't know. The account name is just "Richard."
Msft: Suspend all priveledges to anyone with a "Richard" in their name!
Lackey: Sir, yes sir!
Msft: Man, this Richard guy is a real dick.
Lackey: *snickers*
Msft: What?
Okay, I'm a glutton for punishment. I'll take a stab at this from another direction. New napkin ... Ho-Hos have been ... uhh ... dealt with.
... Still, that's within the realm of reality. I wish the Iowa Thin Film flexible cells were more than 3-5% efficient. I very much like the idea of a long continuous roll of solar film. That'd eliminate much of the installation and handling headaches associated with the current rigid cells.
There are 300 million folks in the US. Average family of 4 -> 75 million households. Let's make this a compulsory public-service program, so city dwellers without roof space need to subcontract their citizen-obligation to a "sun farmer." Each household is responsible for (451 thousand MW / 75 million) = 0.006 MW = 6kW. Multiply that by 2 to account for the 50% illumination cycle, and divide by 0.707 to RMS the peak incident power = 17 kW.
17kW with 8% efficiency cells yields about 212 m^2 of cells, or a square that's 14.5m on a side. My current residence only has about 160 m^2 of roof space, so I'd probably need to opt for the 20% cells
Damn, I gotta upgrade to better napkins. I see the fault. I lost the 1000 when converting from kW to MW. Beacuse that's an area term, the 1000 contributes twice.
Oh no, wait. There's some Ho-Ho smeared on the napkin. Huh, can't imagine where that came from. Musta obstructed the missing 1000 during my calculations. Yeah, that's the ticket. I am absolved of culpability! It's the Ho-Ho's fault!
Hey! You worked with Biff too?
... out of a solid billet of aluminum. The thing was pretty - had all sorts of recessed vent panels and integrated mounting bosses. But damn, this is a test fixture. The operator connects a cable to the UUT (Unit Under Test) and presses a key on the computer keyboard. We must've spent a couple thousand bucks on that one bucket. I'm not a big fan of Bud boxes, but they certainly have their place.
..." we didn't need to hear any more. Y'all can figure out what the second "f" stands for.)
Biff loved his Pro-E. We needed an enclosure for a manufacturing test fixture. He contracted a CNC machine shop to build a custom box about 8" x 10" x 10"
(background: At a staff meeting, Biff stood up to extole his credibility and the virtues of Pro-E. And I quote, "I may be big, I may be ignorant, I may be fat
Recently, I was having a conversation about the upper limit on solar power. I hadn't done the math then, but I just trotted out a fresh napkin to satisfy my curiosity. The earth is 12756 km in diameter. That presents a 127.8 million km^2 cross section to the sun. With the napkin-math estimate of 1kW/m^2 incident at the earth's surface, there's an upper limit of 127.8 million MW of power available from the sun. Okay, so that's an absolute ceiling for terrestrial solar collection - you can't collect more energy than is incident in the first place.
Okay, now for a more practical limit. Let's put the solar collection grid on land - that's a reduction to 30%. Let's also go with solar cells that are 20% efficient - that's not too shabby, but not bleeding-edge-expensive either. (127.8 * 0.3 * 0.2) = 7.67 million MW.
Finally, how much of the available global land mass are we willing to pave over with solar cells? If I use a residential rooftop model, a 1500 sq.ft. house on a 1/4 acre (~10000 sq.ft., sorry for the non-metric-unit shift) property would be about 15%. I think that's probably a bit high, considering that houses aren't aligned for optimal solar collection, but I'm looking for the practical upper limit of solar collection opportunity. Using 15%, the available harvestable power limit becomes 1.15 million MW.
Let's compare that to current consumption stats in the US (no pun intended.) If I read this chart correctly, December of 2006 had 335.6 million MWh of power generated across all industries. There were 744 hours in December, so that equates to 451 thousand MW average continuous power generation. So the maximum solar harvest potential is only about 3x our current consumption rate? Damn, that's sobering.
Looks like they're expanding their leadership role in the "Foot-Firearm Interface" arena. I can imagine a recent BoD meeting that began like this ... ... "
[Farnsworth]
"Good news, everyone
[/Farnsworth]
You learn from your mistakes, and there's no substitute for "the real thing." You can crash the robot in a sim over and over, and it's no big deal. Real destruction with sparks and fire teaches you life-lessons ... I had a summer job (many years ago) with a rather large gub'ment contractor. We were working on a robotic arm tasked with de-palletizing ammunition - ammunition of the 5-inch diameter variety. The second day at the site, the programming team had gotten the arm all twisted up after several hours of fussing with the control software. The design lead saw the "home" switch on the control panel, and decided that starting from a clean setup would streamline things.
...
... which was thankfully de-energized.
*** CRASH ! ***
Nobody had programmed any obstructions within the cell, and some Genius had put the servo drive rack within the robots hemisphere of motion. The shortest path to the home location went directly through the servo drive rack. And when I say "directly through," I mean "ripped the rack in half." Literally. Big multi-ton mother, indeed.
So there's a bunch of down time while equipment is replaced, and we're back on-site after about 3 weeks. To my surprise, the servo control rack is still within the robot's operating envelope, but the obstructions have been properly programmed. There's even a short demo where they try to move the arm into the obstruction, but the machine refuses (rather politely, I might add.) Several days of progress are made before the Brain Trust is at it again. One of the programmers decides it will be "cool" if the robot commits suicide - he'd been reading an Asmiov book if I recall correctly. So they program the BMTM arm to reach over and press the main power switch on the servo control rack. It refuses. So they place a piece of 3/4" black pipe in the end effector to create the necessary tool offset. Attempt number two goes [click]
*** CRASH ! ***
They had shut the main power breaker off, resulting in a rather ungraceful de-energizing event. Apparently the servo drives can "lurch" if power is abruptly removed. The arm stuffed the black pipe and the end effector halfway through the servo control rack
Not surprisingly, we were not invited back for a third attempt to program the arm.
At first glance, your observation seems to make sense. Let's take it one step further and do some napkin-math. There are two elements that conspire against you when you try to harvest energy from the sun - incident power and conversion efficiency.
As a general rule of thumb, when the sun is directly overhead and your solar panel is pointed directly at the sun (i.e. perpendicular to the incident light), the sun only provides 1000 watts per square meter of collection area. If you start to tip the solar array off-angle, you can reduce the effective incident power by the cosine of the angle. If you're tipped by 45 degrees, you get half the effective power. If you're pointed 90-degrees off-angle, you get nuthin'. So unless your roof mounted solar cells have a sun tracker, you won't get maximum power.
Second is conversion efficiency. The best solar cells manufactured today are about 40% efficient. They're pretty damned expensive too. At the other end of the spectrum (pardon the pun,) the "affordable" solar cells are 3-5% efficient. You'll want to run a peak power converter to collect maximum power from the cells - they look like a diode rather than a battery, so there's a "peak power" operating point that moves around with illumination. You'll want to track that, but that'll result in an output that moves (V=IR dictates that.) So you've collected maximum power from the cells, but the resultant output isn't well matched to your charging system, so there's another stage of DC-DC conversion with it's attendant losses. Typical designs run 85%, which is a good napkin-math number to use. If you can narrow the operating requirements and tolerate some additional cost, you can push that efficiency up to 93%. I wouldn't expect more than 95% best case ever.
The bottom line is that solar doesn't provide much power density to begin with, and everything you do to the collected power is lossy. The situation isn't impossible, but it's far from simple. If you put good solar cells on the roof of your car (about a square meter,) you'd probably net about 8% average over the course of the illuminated day. With 1kW incident, you get 80W to spend any way you want. By comparison, 1 hp is 750 watts. Your solar panel contributes 1/10 hp to your propulsion system. If you could get the system up to 40% efficiency, you only get 400W out the back - slightly more than 1/2 hp.
Thank you for using the word "customers" instead of "consumers." Consumers are force-fed; customers have a choice.
But therein lies the problem with this situation. The **AA cartels have purchased the necessary legislation to reinforce their monopolies. When they revoke a DRM key that effectively bricks your hardware player for future media releases, what are you going to do? They've cost-shifted the upgrade burden onto you, and since they own the entire distribution chain, you can't take your business elsewhere. I'm quite surprised that the media cartels haven't tried to mandate use of Scrip to purchase a lease for their items-that-shall-not-be-owned-by-the-customer. Long live the Company Store!
This is a perfect example of why monopolies are bad. This will resonate all the way down to Joe Sixpack in a form that he'll understand - "Damned 'new' movies don't play in my DVD player." He may not understand the ins and outs of DRM legislation, but he sure as hell knows what getting screwed by the establishment means.
Heresy! How dare you question the RIAA's assessment that all the recording industry's woes are due to "pirates." There's absolutely no way the RIAA could be misinterpreting the situation. They're infallible. They said so themselves.
In today's age, your free time is under assault from hundreds of sources. Your free time is a resource that everyone wants access to. The youts [sic] of today have more choices than we did when we were kids. Listening to music used to be one of the mainstay activities. The music industry hasn't increased the "value" of listening to music, while other activities have increased their value to me. It's no surprise that the music industry is losing market share.
They've published the Draft Competition Guidelines.
Lots of folks are knee-jerking with "what about electric vehicles?" Unfortunately, the Slashdot summary is misleading
There are performance specs too. The vehicle must go at least 80 mph for the 2-seater; 100 mph for the 4-seater. Braking 60-0 must be less than 170 ft. They don't require crash testing, but expect you to demonstrate that you've built something to contrmporaty standards for front and side impacts. The standard compliment of mirrors, reflectors, indicators and gauges are required as well.
The end of the document describes their objectives and how they came up with their requirements. It's a pretty easy document to read, and it gives you some insight into what they're trying to do (hint: it involves eventual production of the vehicle.)
But Admiral Ackbar wasn't in that scene. [waves hand] I forgot nothing
Time to hit the books again. There are two ways to couple power: static field coupling (i.e. like a transformer) and propagating-wave coupling (i.e. radio.)
... at all. The physics says it can't.
A static field may be purely E or purely H, but it doesn't propagate. Transformers are the simplest example. There's a magnetic field generated by one inductor that's coupled to another inductor through a magnetic (H) field. There's no electric field to speak of. That field won't move
To get a propagating field, you have to have both E and H components. When you have both E and H, you can calculate the Poynting Vector to figure out which direction your wave will go. For the link-challenged, that'd be S = E x B where the "x" is the vector cross product. Yes, do the right-hand-rule thing now.
Your AM radio antenna is called a "ferrite bar antenna" and couples energy to/from the H-field component of the propagating wave. There is an alternating magnetic field component, but it's not alone. Don't believe me? Here's an example of a guy who replaced his ferrite bar antenna with other types, including a quarter-wave long-wire whip. Whip antennas are E-field devices, and require an E-field component of a radio wave to function. Give it a try.
We've got to be able to get some imagery on that area, old or new. Well how could they be changing them if they don't know we're coming?
I only get cached images. Are you sure?
Pull up! All Congressional subcommittee members pull up!
The ISS is moving at 7.726 km/s (I checked this morning - I'm running Orbitron to track a different satellite.) 26.2 miles converts to 42.165 km, so she should traverse the course length in about 5.5 seconds.
... a two ... a three. Three.
How many steps does it take to complete a marathon from low earth orbit? A one
Nobody says "information was gained under false pretexts," in spite of pretext and pretense having almost identical definitions.
Yeah, yeah ... I live close enough to DC to experience that issue first hand. However, DC is not a state, and there's a serious potential conflict of interest were DC to be granted statehood - a state that would effectively be the federal government. That'd be bad in a completely different way.
The DC folks are *completely* without representation. The residents seem to have a thing for Marion Barry.
I'll be happy to pay your "out-of-state sales tax" if you'll provide me with the ability to vote in your elections. [Palpatine] Awlll of them. [/Palpatine]
I expect representation for the taxation.