Experiment to measure efficiency of electrolysis
on
The End of the Oil Age
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Set up a simple electrolysis cell with a voltmeter and ammeter, and a thermometer. Fill with de-mineralised water and a drop of any available dilute acid or hydroxide. Plot temperature against time; between sample points, calculate how much power is going into apparatus, get some constantan wire and prepare a resistance that will dissipate the same amount of power at just 1 volt or thereabouts {not enough voltage to separate a H+ ion from an OH- ion; you can actually measure this voltage by turning down the PSU voltage till the ammeter drops sharply}. Remember, power in watts = volts * amps, resistance in ohms = volts / amps, and assume the resistance wire has constant resistance per unit length {it's deliberately made that way}. Do experiment again, but this time using your prepared resistance immersed in the electrolyte instead of carbon rods; adjust the PSU to get same the power dissipation, which will mean more current this time. Plot temperature against time on same sheet of graph paper.
Qualitative analysis: If the temperature rises much more with the resistance than with the electrolysis cell, then obviously most of the energy supplied is going into breaking up the water into hydrogen and oxygen. If the temperature rises by nearly the same amount, then most of the energy supplied is ending up as heat.
Quantitative analysis: Knowing the heat capacity of water is 4170 Watt-sec per kg per degree C, and neglecting the trace of whatever you used to make it conductive and the amount of water converted to H2 and O2, we can work out the expected rate of temperature rise from the energy supplied:
temp rise deg. C per sec = volts * amps / 4170 * kg.
This gives us an indication of the magnitude of heat loss to atmosphere. The initial slope of the time-temp. curve should follow this closely; because, at the beginning, everything is all at the same temperature so there is no heat loss. By drawing a tangent to the electrolysis time-temp. curve at t=0, we can determine how much energy went into heating. Then
power wasted as heat = temp. rise per deg. C * 4170 * kg.
and
efficiency {%} = 100 * [(volts * amps) - power wasted] / [volts * amps]
Further work: Investigate what happens if you try to use a higher voltage than strictly necessary.
Investigate what happens with different electrode spacings.
Investigate what happens when you set light to hydrogen.
If you can make enough oxygen to inflate a thin polythene bag, investigate what happens if a bag containing pure oxygen is touched with a smouldering cigarette end.
There has to be some force acting on the ink to get it to move at all. With a pen held upright, gravity and surface tension are acting in concert to get ink onto the ball. Invert the pen, and gravity is now opposing surface tension. At some critical value of g, the surface tension and gravity will be exactly equal and the ink will stay where it is. With stronger g, as on Earth, gravity will win over surface tension and the ink will be pulled away from the ball. With weaker g, surface tension will be stronger than gravity and the ink will flow normally.
Determining this critical value probably is the sort of thing likely to win you an Ig Nobel Prize
Yeah, but one assumes other countries would have corresponding legislation which protects people's inalienable rights over goods they have bought and own, and likely makes it a criminal offence to try to subvert such rights; and corresponding organisations for ensuring that those rights are upheld. Whatever the US equivalent of the Sale of Goods Act is called, invoke that; and whatever the US equivalent of Trading Standards is, call them. Or failing that, make an impassioned plea to the UN for liberation };->
Actually there are professional beggars operating in the UK. They turn up on a Saturday morning, park their BMWs on the outskirts and spend the day in the city pretending to be hungry and homeless. Then they drive home, count up the money and buy drugs.
There are real ones, too - genuinely homeless, friendless people who just got unlucky. And somewhere inbetween are people who could help themselves, if they made the effort, but just aren't. It doesn't help that many of the organisations that want to help the homeless are christian-based {christians tend to act like they have some sort of monopoly on being nice to people; I myself have direct experience of christians getting offended by a decidedly non-christian group's efforts in a good cause}. I know there are a lot of things I'd rather do than accept a penny from a christian, absit omen I should ever have to make that choice.
It also doesn't help that <KJV>that which taketh away a little of the pain associated with being homeless, bringeth indirectly other pain</KJV>.
Solution? Dismantle the mechanism which allows a dose of heroin costing pennies to manufacture to be sold for twenty pounds. And ban religious-affiliated groups from doing anything that would be considered "good deeds" by followers of any other religion in the name of their religion. You would still be allowed to attend a church / synagogue / mosque, but any Good Works not peculiar to that religion would have to be done through a separate, secular {if such works would be considered "good" by an atheist} or multidenominational {otherwise} organisation.
On one hand, they would want to protest the fact that Stots isn't letting them share.
I think you mean "..... protest against the fact....." rather than "..... protest the fact....." which would imply being in favour of the fact {cf. "The prisoner was led from the ock, still protesting his innocence"}.
On the other hand, these tools are used to promote the murdering and desecration of helpless, beautiful trees.
Trees are plants. Plants grow out of the ground {If you want to be pedantic, I suppose you should say they grow out of the air, since plants are made mostly from carbon which they get from CO2 in the atmosphere. The ground is mostly just there to separate the roots from the leaves. You can prove this by experiment. On the other hand, to avoid upsetting too many people, maybe it's best to stick with conventional wisdom while knowing that that isn't really what happens. Cf. conventional current flow vs. electron flow}. Now, nobody objects to carrots being pulled up. Same with trees, only bigger. You can be sure that whoever the land belongs to will want to make more money out of it year after year, so they keep planting trees at the same rate they use them up.
Why should this surprise anyone? But it's illegal anyway. You buy something, you own it and you have the right to use it, abuse it, enjoy it and destroy it. It is yours, the receipt says so, and the person who sold it to you has given up all their rights in respect of it. A licence like that will never stand up in court. It would be a total and utter violation of the Sale of Goods Act. Just report these people to the police and Trading Standards - having someone else prosecuted for a criminal offence is cheaper than defending a civil case which will likely get put on hold anyway once it comes to light that the plaintiff has committed a criminal offence.
The reason you need a licence to operate a television or radio set, for example, is that the "airwaves" do not belong to you - you need permission to receive or transmit a signal. Transmitting equipment usually requires you also to submit to inspection to ensure that it is not causing interference to other people. {If you can prove the equipment is not being used - strictly, if they can't prove that it is being used, but They Are Bigger Than You - you don't need the licence; the authorities might insist that you do something a bit more than unplug it, but any modification that can't be undone without the use of a tool should be fine.}
Whether or not the purpose of the jig is to clone itself is irrelevant. I'm guessing it's a slab of some MDF-like material that you clamp hard against another piece of MDF, and follow the groove using a router*, with a special cutter that has a ball-bearing on the end, the same diameter as the cutting width. This way it produces an exact copy. Chippies have been making things like this ever since routers were invented, so I seriously doubt that a router jig would even be patentable with all that prior art. If you want to cut out kitchen worktops for hobs, sinks &c., you just make a template for each fixture {they are mostly standardised nowadays anyway}. Likewise for stair sides, radiator covers and so forth {if you have to make several identical pieces for one job but you know you'll never need that exact pattern again, you just leave the original on site}.
* router: in this context, not a device for sending ethernet packets to the correct recipient {which would be pronounced "router" rather than "router" anyway}, but a power tool consisting of a powerful series-wound electric motor spinning a sharp-bladed cutter at up to 30000 rpm, and mainly used for creating large quantities of sawdust.
This is the time to ask for a shortening of copyright terms. Life is too long already. What use do dead people have for royalties? Also, the original intention of copyright was to encourage the creation of works which would eventually enter the public domain. This needs to be borne in mind in any discussion. Oft has it been said that "my ideas are my babies": well, babies have this tendency to grow up and develop an existence independent of their parents.
Here's what I would do if I was drafting a brand new copyright law:
Default term of copyright
Copyright should run for five years after the receipt of the first royalty payment, or five years after publication if no royalties are ever paid. If you can't make any money out of it in five years, then face it - you're probably never going to.
Extension to five year term
Extensions would be granted by court order and charged at five times the national median annual wage for the first six months, doubling the multiplying factor and recalculating the median wage for each additional six months thereafter. The onus would be upon the copyright holder to demonstrate why the work should not enter the public domain immediately.
Prevention of abuse of copy-prevention measures
If any technological measures are used to prevent unauthorised copying, then at least one unencumbered copy must be placed in escrow with the national library or a similar organisation in order that the work should be able to enter the public domain upon expiry of copyright. Failure to provide such an unencumbered copy would be grounds for termination of copyright. In such event, any penalty for attempting to circumvent copy-prevention would not be applicable in the case of such a work: it is in the public domain and the public has a statutory right to access it, using reasonable force if necessary. That the techniques used might be {illegally but successfully} applicable against other copy-prevented works should serve as a strong disincentive against "snake oil" merchants.
And finally, the bit I think is really the most important: Protection of works in the Public Domain.
Once a work has entered the public domain, whether by the expiration of copyright, by consent of the copyright holder or by court order, it would be legally protected against any attempt to re-copyright it. Exactly the same provision would be made for the fair use of PD material in copyright works as for the fair use of copyright material, except that nobody would be entitled to grant permission over and above what constitutes fair use.
It's harsh, but so was the Thirteenth Amendment. We moved out of the age of muscle power and into the age of engine power; thanks to James Watt, there was no longer any even remotely legitimate reason to allow people to be kept as slaves. Now we have moved out of the Age of Scarcity and into the Age of Plenty, and the law needs to change to recognise that -- not to create artificial scarcity.
Whether or not the space pen story was for real {and - asbestos underpants at the ready - an american web site would say it wasn't real, wouldn't they?}, it is still a damn fine thought experiment. I just couldn't think of a better one.
You are still missing the point. "[A] language that supported more advanced variable manipulations than the shell" - such as perl - still has to do the same stuff. It has to execute exactly the same instructions, and it has to do that whether or not it starts a new process. If starting a process has serious overheads, then that is a fundamental problem at the OS level - one would expect that the kernel would have the absolute best task-scheduling and resource-apportioning; and if some other application that needs to do these things managed to do so better than the kernel, then the kernel would get updated to reflect the state of the art.
Also, having a simple command-line interface to commonly-used utilities explicitly avoids the need for interpreters to have complex variable-handling. It's called keeping things simple - consider the extreme case of inventing a pressurised fountain pen for use in zero-g vs. using a chinagraph pencil. The more potential failure points you introduce, so the more likely failure becomes; and the more potential failure modes you introduce, so the harder it becomes to plan for what will happen when things go wrong.
You could design a "magic hammer" that has a camera and image recognition system, a range of screwdriving bits and a mechanism for converting impulsive downward motion into sustained rotary motion, so you can drive in any kind of screw just by hitting it like a nail. The advantage for users is that the interface is the same independent of the screw recess {posidriv, phillips, slothead, hex or torx} - you just pick up the magic hammer and hit the screw. The advantage for the vendor is that the instrument is bound to be incorrigibly fragile and need frequent repairs. You just have to hope that users have become too scared by horror stories about what happened to somebody whose hand slipped, to use separate screwdrivers anymore. 6000 years of monotheism have already instilled in people a feeling that they are somehow not good enough, so that fear is not hard to engender.
If it doesn't kill you, you're fine. Resale value shouln't be an issue. If you can't see yourself living in that house forever, then it obviously isn't the right house for you anyway..... if you know you'll want to move sooner or later, you would do better to rent, or even squat.
If it does kill you, you don't have to worry about the resale value anyway.
Remember the inverse-square law..... if light {and, by extension, all electromagnetic radiation..... "light" is just the name we give to the band to which our eyes respond} travels in straight lines, then it follows that the power density per unit surface area must vary inversely with the square of distance. So, at two metres away from the source, the field strength is 1/4 of whatever it was at 1 metre; at 10 metres, it's just a hundredth of the strength at one metre.
I am personally convinced that people want things to be bad for them. They just seem to be happier that way..... I don't know why and I've given up trying to explain, I just lump it all together under "perversity of human nature" and wait for someone else to come up with a better theory.
Point about hardware speeds grudgingly accepted:-) Nowadays, your word processor can be checking your spelling between keystrokes. But back in those halcyon days, there was nothing else like it.
Cygwin isn't part of the default Windows installation. It's an ugly hack, and you may as well buy a dog as teach a cat to bark.
Tools like sort, uniq, sed, awk and so forth are not "things that almost nobody will use". That is a bit like saying "Who needs coal anyway now we've got electricity?" If you look in your rcscripts sometime, you probably will see plenty of references to these tools. You might never use them directly from the command line, but they're there, and all sorts of applications make heavy use of them. For instance, the spell() function in PHP makes use of spell - so the PHP developers didn't have to get distracted by working on a spelling checker, nor did the PHP source get bloated by the inclusion of a spelling checker. Not to mention that all applications that use spell as opposed to incorporating their own spelling checker will automatically share a common word list.
If you want to change one word for another in a whole lot of files, sed is, and always will be, the quickest way to do it. The fact is that some tasks are inherently unsuited to a point-and-drool interface. With any kind of user interface, you will have to type the word you want to change and the word you want to change it to. Using sed just adds a few extra keystrokes.
I could go on, but I suspect we aren't aiming at the same point. My point is that I think it's good to have many small programmes that each do one thing - and do it well - which can then be called from within other programmes. A mail client, for instance, just needs a call to sendmail - it doesn't have to handle the intricacies of SMTP. Thus leaving human-interface designers to get on with designing human interfaces.....
which just tells you how many individual words were misspelled.
Perhaps it's my experience with having used Protext on the Amiga, but I never saw the point of an interactive spelling checker. I want to type a document up, get the spelling checked while I'm away doing something else, then come back and correct the misspelt words. {I never cared too much about screen fonts matching printer fonts either. As long as I knew what the screen font looked like and what the printer font looked like, I would be happy.}
Windows must have equivalents for spell, sort, uniq and awk, right? 'Cause after all, everyone says it's so much better than other OSes..... so it must have the basics, even on the minimal installation..... surely?
Anybody who buys a built-up computer from me gets not one, but two - yes, count them, two - full office suites preinstalled: KOffice and OpenOffice.org.
Regenerative braking doesn't recover all the energy. I apologise for not making that more obvious. The wastage due to friction {an absolute, not a percentage} is directly proportional to mass -- so heavier vehicles are less efficient.
I think you are also being quite pessimistic about the efficiency of internal combustion engines. With proper engine management and continuously-variable transmission systems, engines are much more efficient today than they used to be. An ordinary car has only five gear ratios, so the engine speed has to vary greatly to cover a range of road speeds. An engine driving the wheels through a CVT keeps constant revs except during acceleration. As long as you press hard on the gas pedal, the engine speeds up; when you relax your foot, the engine starts slowing down and the transmission adjusts to make up the road speed. When you press the brake, the transmission adjusts to match the road speed to the still-slowing-down engine, so it will be ready to drive again when required. When maintaining any constant speed, the engine maintains the same constant revs. The transmission ratio is adjusted so gradually that a clutch is only needed when the vehicle is coming to rest. Modern electromagnetic clutches are better than centrifugal clutches, because they disengage more positively.
Better-refined fuels - which would almost certainly become the norm anyway with the adoption of biomass-derived replacements for petroleum - and leaner fuel-air ratios would eliminate the need for catalytic converters {themselves a bodge, sacrificing fuel efficiency for slightly cleaner emissions} as the products would consist of just carbon dioxide and water vapour, and no unburned fuel. The exhaust products would still carry away kinetic energy, but some of this could be recovered with a turbocharger. With the engine doing near-constant revs, the turbo could be active almost full time - achieving an efficiency close to the theoretical maximum.
I've no problem with the idea of electric vehicles per se {and modern electronic control systems have the same benefits as CVT}; I just don't think lugging a heavy battery around is the best way to do it. But for public transport systems powered by means of overhead wires, electricity certainly has advantages.
When I was a nipper, they said electric cars would be the transport of the future.
A quarter of a century on and they're still being touted as the transport of the future.
They probably always will be being touted as the transport of the future.
Nobody has ever made a battery-powered water heater, nobody ever will, and there's a very good reason for that. Energy density has pretty much maxed-out. Crucially, so has motor efficiency. You already can convert over 90% of the energy stored in a battery to kinetic energy. Regenerative braking is standard now - so the energy you expended while accelerating can be recovered when you slow down. There basically are no more efficiency gains to be made.
Electric cars are also at least as polluting as any other fuel, because the energy has to be generated somehow. The charging and discharging process is less than 100% efficient; so some more {anywhere from a little to as much again, depending on the battery tech used} energy is expended charging and discharging a battery than would be expended if whatever kind of engine had turned the generator had been used to turn the car's wheels.
The greater the mass of the battery, so the more energy is required to accelerate it to a given speed. {KE =.5 * m * v ** 2}. Assuming the energy stored varies linearly with mass {reasonable IMHO - amount of energy stored per mole of reagents would be a constant for a given chemical reaction}, it's not strictly a losing battle, but it's certainly a nil-nil draw. Every kilo you add to the battery is another kilo you ned to lug about. Unless you have a reaction product you can dump as you go.....
That's not to say that electric vehicles don't have a place: they do. And that place is anywhere where electrical power can be delivered to the vehicle without relying on a local battery to store it {at least, not a full journey's worth}.
I tell you what kind of flag I would like to see broadcast along with TV programmes, and that is a flag to indicate whether the content is "editorial" or advertising.
Imagine the possibilities..... you record the first, say, 10' or so of a show to HDD. Then you start watching the recorded programme. Obviously you would need some buffer memory for this to work reliably..... As soon as the VDR detects advertising, it skips forward to the next chunk of programme. That would be almost like fast-forwarding live television..... a surefire selling point. The new Record-o-mat AdBuster 3625 - lets you fast-forward live TV. Why, this could be the very last advert you ever watch! [shot of family, salesman in foreground, all with forced cheesy grins]
There are some stations -- particularly on satellite -- where you practically have to record the programmes, just so you can fast-forward through the advert breaks; otherwise, by the time the second half comes along, you have already forgotten what was going on in the first half.
In the event of any violation, both the broadcaster and the advertiser should be punished and damages paid to all viewers.
Or, we could go back to how it used to be, ban all advertising on TV and make viewers pay for what they watch. The cost of watching TV would go up, for sure, and maybe 24 hour broadcasting would come to an end; but the quality would improve beyond measure, and isn't that the main thing?
We already used to have a radio listener's licence in this country, when the BBC was all there was. The licence money was paid to the BBC and this was what paid for programmes - there was no advertising, except those safety announcements -- you know the ones.....
I would like to propose a formal amendment to Godwin's law. Namely, that the list of "automatic argument-losing" words be extended to include "communist", "terrorist" and "11 September 2001".
Who do I need to see to get this put through the official channels? Presumably the actual words can be decided upon as part of the debate {after the initial draft motion is published, amendments would be invited, composited together and adopted or rejected with the motion}.
The easiest way to assist the uptake of these things would be a carefully-worked out system of taxation and subsidy. If they want to live by the bankbook, let them die by the bankbook.
Tax mineral extraction where there are recycled or biological alternatives available.
Force waste handlers to pay a rebate on all recyclable goods whether or not they are actually recycled.
Introduce these measures gradually but firmly. Announce a schedule and stick to it. Borrow against taxes on polluting practices to subsidise green alternatives.
Now, there will be predictable opposition to the use of taxation to achieve any ends, but IMHO it is justified in this case. The main point is that The mineral resources in our Mother Earth belong to future generations, not just us. These people haven't been born yet, much less reached voting age, so we have to make some assumptions on their behalf, one of which is that they would rather we didn't force them to live in a shithole.
The first idea makes virgin materials more expensive and therefore forces manufacturers to seek alternatives. Ideally, the rate of taxation should be such that it is substantially cheaper to use recycled materials, even all the way to the point where companies are prepared to buy back end-of-life goods from consumers.
The second idea doesn't directly stop anyone from putting recyclable waste in landfill, it just makes the proposal less economically attractive. It means that as a waste handler, you can't charge someone money for collecting recyclable goods {which, after all, are worth money, so it's only fair}. The only way you can cover the cost of landfilling recyclable goods for which you have paid is to charge more to landfill non-recyclable goods. Any other waste handler who is actually recycling recyclables will be getting paid for them, so will have lower overheads and can pass this saving on to customers. Similarly with incineration: if you do something sensible with the heat you liberate, you have something saleable {probably electricity, though home heating or compressed air would be alternatives; alternatively the heat could be used directly in some industrial process}. If your energy recovery rate is poor or you aren't even trying, just warming the atmosphere directly, you might as well be burning pound notes.
The GNOME foot is bare. Bare feet do not smell. Well..... perhaps briefly, after recently being removed from shoes and socks, they may smell for a bit. The smell is caused by bacterial and chemical action between perspiration {which cannot evaporate and so builds up} and shoe / sock interior surface {socks get holes because your perspiration eats through them}, and soon wears off your feet {though it stays in your shoes much longer!} See the Society for Barefoot Living for more details. In cultures where shoes are not worn, foot odour is unknown.
It would be more correct to refer to foot odour as shoe odour. But lots of things are known by inappropriate names. Pencil lead..... adjusting the tappets..... pulling the chain..... almost every telephone-related colloquialism {OK, they used to make sense}..... drug-related crime..... just one of those little quirks of language you have to get used to I suppose.
I think I've seen something like this before somewhere..... probably.....
Anyway, at my last place of work we instituted the annual Pegg Award for Excellent Incompetence in the Constructiuon of a New PC. The first recipient won for the sheer brilliance of omitting to fit any insulating pillars between the motherboard and the chassis, electing instead to bolt the motherboard directly to the chassis.
He was our top PCB designer. He also once routed a 0V supply to a microamp-current flame sense amplifier circuit through a section of track {ignition transformer primary circuit} that would carry pulses of tens of amperes.
The second recipient won it for failing to format a hard disk he'd just FDISK'ed, and wondering why attempts to SYS it were failing.
Nothing, really. The way virtual hosting works, anything you use before the at sign will work. A simple regex match in a procmail recipe will weed out anything that doesn't conform to the style, of course, but that would break the main purpose of VH. The purpose of SpamJavelin 1.2 is to make harvested e-mail addresses useless.
Conceivably, a spammer could delete the trace digits or change them. But they aren't going to know what is a virtually-hosted address without looking {and I could always register a domain name so it would have fewer levels in it and so not even look obviously virtually-hosted}, and they don't look at the addresses they harvest..... they just burn them onto CDs and sell them to other spammers.
Another idea would be actually to get a number of domain names, just for the purpose of being spam sinks..... and point them at a machine which accepts SMTP, but does nothing with it {maybe always relay one message back to the sender just so it'll look like an open relay}. Or..... maybe I could have a script that responds to every single piece of spam, and gives them bogus credit card numbers {begin with a 4 [for Visa / Delta] or a 5 [for MC / Switch / Maestro], put any 14 random digits, calculate the 16th digit using a widely-known algorithm, and it will pass any rudimentary plausibility check} and addresses. Then the spammers will be too busy sorting out bogus enquiries from genuine ones..... Talk about a dose of one's own medicine!
Oh, come on. Next minute you'll be telling me you can disable the right mouse button so people can't steal your photos. (*cough*) alt-print screen (*cough*)
Unmunging addresses that have been munged like that is a trivial matter, but nonetheless is left as an exercise for the reader. You don't even need a full JS interpreter. Just parse anything that looks like a bunch of escapes on the basis that someone probably did that because they don't want you to see it, and that assumption will be valid more often than not.
If you're really paranoid about displaying an e-mail address, use a P(erl|hp|ython) script to turn form contents into mail messages. Just don't allow the recipient address to be determined from the form variables, otherwise you could be aiding and abetting spammers {tho' you could put decoy hidden fields in your form to make it look like an insecure formmail; that'd be highly amusing}. Also, only allow one submission per IP address per five minutes. Otherwise you'll get enough multiple submissions from dim-witted users who don't realise you only need to single-click a button on a web page, or that the back and forward buttons break on dynamic pages, not to need any spam.
I've set something similar up. I have an email account using virtual hosting, so I wrote a little PHP script that generates unique e-mail addresses based on the date, time and remote IP address. If a spam-merchant harvests one of these addresses, I can simply put in a procmail recipe that will catch it and erase it. It means I get one spam per harvesting, but it stops anybody from selling them on. And if anyone claims I opted-in to a list, then this will show they are lying through their arsehole.
I'm planning on adding some really nasty {from the spammer's point of view} enhancements for v2.0. Basically adding some mailto links that a spam-harvester will see but a human reader won't.....
Slashdot Mirror
Set up a simple electrolysis cell with a voltmeter and ammeter, and a thermometer. Fill with de-mineralised water and a drop of any available dilute acid or hydroxide. Plot temperature against time; between sample points, calculate how much power is going into apparatus, get some constantan wire and prepare a resistance that will dissipate the same amount of power at just 1 volt or thereabouts {not enough voltage to separate a H+ ion from an OH- ion; you can actually measure this voltage by turning down the PSU voltage till the ammeter drops sharply}. Remember, power in watts = volts * amps, resistance in ohms = volts / amps, and assume the resistance wire has constant resistance per unit length {it's deliberately made that way}. Do experiment again, but this time using your prepared resistance immersed in the electrolyte instead of carbon rods; adjust the PSU to get same the power dissipation, which will mean more current this time. Plot temperature against time on same sheet of graph paper.
Qualitative analysis: If the temperature rises much more with the resistance than with the electrolysis cell, then obviously most of the energy supplied is going into breaking up the water into hydrogen and oxygen. If the temperature rises by nearly the same amount, then most of the energy supplied is ending up as heat.
Quantitative analysis: Knowing the heat capacity of water is 4170 Watt-sec per kg per degree C, and neglecting the trace of whatever you used to make it conductive and the amount of water converted to H2 and O2, we can work out the expected rate of temperature rise from the energy supplied:
temp rise deg. C per sec = volts * amps / 4170 * kg.
This gives us an indication of the magnitude of heat loss to atmosphere. The initial slope of the time-temp. curve should follow this closely; because, at the beginning, everything is all at the same temperature so there is no heat loss. By drawing a tangent to the electrolysis time-temp. curve at t=0, we can determine how much energy went into heating. Then
power wasted as heat = temp. rise per deg. C * 4170 * kg.
and
efficiency {%} = 100 * [(volts * amps) - power wasted] / [volts * amps]
Further work: Investigate what happens if you try to use a higher voltage than strictly necessary.
Investigate what happens with different electrode spacings.
Investigate what happens when you set light to hydrogen.
If you can make enough oxygen to inflate a thin polythene bag, investigate what happens if a bag containing pure oxygen is touched with a smouldering cigarette end.
There has to be some force acting on the ink to get it to move at all. With a pen held upright, gravity and surface tension are acting in concert to get ink onto the ball. Invert the pen, and gravity is now opposing surface tension. At some critical value of g, the surface tension and gravity will be exactly equal and the ink will stay where it is. With stronger g, as on Earth, gravity will win over surface tension and the ink will be pulled away from the ball. With weaker g, surface tension will be stronger than gravity and the ink will flow normally.
Determining this critical value probably is the sort of thing likely to win you an Ig Nobel Prize
Yeah, but one assumes other countries would have corresponding legislation which protects people's inalienable rights over goods they have bought and own, and likely makes it a criminal offence to try to subvert such rights; and corresponding organisations for ensuring that those rights are upheld. Whatever the US equivalent of the Sale of Goods Act is called, invoke that; and whatever the US equivalent of Trading Standards is, call them. Or failing that, make an impassioned plea to the UN for liberation };->
Actually there are professional beggars operating in the UK. They turn up on a Saturday morning, park their BMWs on the outskirts and spend the day in the city pretending to be hungry and homeless. Then they drive home, count up the money and buy drugs.
There are real ones, too - genuinely homeless, friendless people who just got unlucky. And somewhere inbetween are people who could help themselves, if they made the effort, but just aren't. It doesn't help that many of the organisations that want to help the homeless are christian-based {christians tend to act like they have some sort of monopoly on being nice to people; I myself have direct experience of christians getting offended by a decidedly non-christian group's efforts in a good cause}. I know there are a lot of things I'd rather do than accept a penny from a christian, absit omen I should ever have to make that choice.
It also doesn't help that <KJV>that which taketh away a little of the pain associated with being homeless, bringeth indirectly other pain</KJV>.
Solution? Dismantle the mechanism which allows a dose of heroin costing pennies to manufacture to be sold for twenty pounds. And ban religious-affiliated groups from doing anything that would be considered "good deeds" by followers of any other religion in the name of their religion. You would still be allowed to attend a church / synagogue / mosque, but any Good Works not peculiar to that religion would have to be done through a separate, secular {if such works would be considered "good" by an atheist} or multidenominational {otherwise} organisation.
Why should this surprise anyone? But it's illegal anyway. You buy something, you own it and you have the right to use it, abuse it, enjoy it and destroy it. It is yours, the receipt says so, and the person who sold it to you has given up all their rights in respect of it. A licence like that will never stand up in court. It would be a total and utter violation of the Sale of Goods Act. Just report these people to the police and Trading Standards - having someone else prosecuted for a criminal offence is cheaper than defending a civil case which will likely get put on hold anyway once it comes to light that the plaintiff has committed a criminal offence.
The reason you need a licence to operate a television or radio set, for example, is that the "airwaves" do not belong to you - you need permission to receive or transmit a signal. Transmitting equipment usually requires you also to submit to inspection to ensure that it is not causing interference to other people. {If you can prove the equipment is not being used - strictly, if they can't prove that it is being used, but They Are Bigger Than You - you don't need the licence; the authorities might insist that you do something a bit more than unplug it, but any modification that can't be undone without the use of a tool should be fine.}
Whether or not the purpose of the jig is to clone itself is irrelevant. I'm guessing it's a slab of some MDF-like material that you clamp hard against another piece of MDF, and follow the groove using a router*, with a special cutter that has a ball-bearing on the end, the same diameter as the cutting width. This way it produces an exact copy. Chippies have been making things like this ever since routers were invented, so I seriously doubt that a router jig would even be patentable with all that prior art. If you want to cut out kitchen worktops for hobs, sinks &c., you just make a template for each fixture {they are mostly standardised nowadays anyway}. Likewise for stair sides, radiator covers and so forth {if you have to make several identical pieces for one job but you know you'll never need that exact pattern again, you just leave the original on site}.
* router: in this context, not a device for sending ethernet packets to the correct recipient {which would be pronounced "router" rather than "router" anyway}, but a power tool consisting of a powerful series-wound electric motor spinning a sharp-bladed cutter at up to 30000 rpm, and mainly used for creating large quantities of sawdust.
This is the time to ask for a shortening of copyright terms. Life is too long already. What use do dead people have for royalties? Also, the original intention of copyright was to encourage the creation of works which would eventually enter the public domain. This needs to be borne in mind in any discussion. Oft has it been said that "my ideas are my babies": well, babies have this tendency to grow up and develop an existence independent of their parents.
Here's what I would do if I was drafting a brand new copyright law:
Default term of copyright
Copyright should run for five years after the receipt of the first royalty payment, or five years after publication if no royalties are ever paid. If you can't make any money out of it in five years, then face it - you're probably never going to.
Extension to five year term
Extensions would be granted by court order and charged at five times the national median annual wage for the first six months, doubling the multiplying factor and recalculating the median wage for each additional six months thereafter. The onus would be upon the copyright holder to demonstrate why the work should not enter the public domain immediately.
Prevention of abuse of copy-prevention measures
If any technological measures are used to prevent unauthorised copying, then at least one unencumbered copy must be placed in escrow with the national library or a similar organisation in order that the work should be able to enter the public domain upon expiry of copyright. Failure to provide such an unencumbered copy would be grounds for termination of copyright. In such event, any penalty for attempting to circumvent copy-prevention would not be applicable in the case of such a work: it is in the public domain and the public has a statutory right to access it, using reasonable force if necessary. That the techniques used might be {illegally but successfully} applicable against other copy-prevented works should serve as a strong disincentive against "snake oil" merchants.
And finally, the bit I think is really the most important: Protection of works in the Public Domain.
Once a work has entered the public domain, whether by the expiration of copyright, by consent of the copyright holder or by court order, it would be legally protected against any attempt to re-copyright it. Exactly the same provision would be made for the fair use of PD material in copyright works as for the fair use of copyright material, except that nobody would be entitled to grant permission over and above what constitutes fair use.
It's harsh, but so was the Thirteenth Amendment. We moved out of the age of muscle power and into the age of engine power; thanks to James Watt, there was no longer any even remotely legitimate reason to allow people to be kept as slaves. Now we have moved out of the Age of Scarcity and into the Age of Plenty, and the law needs to change to recognise that -- not to create artificial scarcity.
Whether or not the space pen story was for real {and - asbestos underpants at the ready - an american web site would say it wasn't real, wouldn't they?}, it is still a damn fine thought experiment. I just couldn't think of a better one.
You are still missing the point. "[A] language that supported more advanced variable manipulations than the shell" - such as perl - still has to do the same stuff. It has to execute exactly the same instructions, and it has to do that whether or not it starts a new process. If starting a process has serious overheads, then that is a fundamental problem at the OS level - one would expect that the kernel would have the absolute best task-scheduling and resource-apportioning; and if some other application that needs to do these things managed to do so better than the kernel, then the kernel would get updated to reflect the state of the art.
Also, having a simple command-line interface to commonly-used utilities explicitly avoids the need for interpreters to have complex variable-handling. It's called keeping things simple - consider the extreme case of inventing a pressurised fountain pen for use in zero-g vs. using a chinagraph pencil. The more potential failure points you introduce, so the more likely failure becomes; and the more potential failure modes you introduce, so the harder it becomes to plan for what will happen when things go wrong.
You could design a "magic hammer" that has a camera and image recognition system, a range of screwdriving bits and a mechanism for converting impulsive downward motion into sustained rotary motion, so you can drive in any kind of screw just by hitting it like a nail. The advantage for users is that the interface is the same independent of the screw recess {posidriv, phillips, slothead, hex or torx} - you just pick up the magic hammer and hit the screw. The advantage for the vendor is that the instrument is bound to be incorrigibly fragile and need frequent repairs. You just have to hope that users have become too scared by horror stories about what happened to somebody whose hand slipped, to use separate screwdrivers anymore. 6000 years of monotheism have already instilled in people a feeling that they are somehow not good enough, so that fear is not hard to engender.
Either it will kill you, or it won't.
..... if you know you'll want to move sooner or later, you would do better to rent, or even squat.
..... if light {and, by extension, all electromagnetic radiation ..... "light" is just the name we give to the band to which our eyes respond} travels in straight lines, then it follows that the power density per unit surface area must vary inversely with the square of distance. So, at two metres away from the source, the field strength is 1/4 of whatever it was at 1 metre; at 10 metres, it's just a hundredth of the strength at one metre.
..... I don't know why and I've given up trying to explain, I just lump it all together under "perversity of human nature" and wait for someone else to come up with a better theory.
If it doesn't kill you, you're fine. Resale value shouln't be an issue. If you can't see yourself living in that house forever, then it obviously isn't the right house for you anyway
If it does kill you, you don't have to worry about the resale value anyway.
Remember the inverse-square law
I am personally convinced that people want things to be bad for them. They just seem to be happier that way
Point about hardware speeds grudgingly accepted :-) Nowadays, your word processor can be checking your spelling between keystrokes. But back in those halcyon days, there was nothing else like it.
.....
Cygwin isn't part of the default Windows installation. It's an ugly hack, and you may as well buy a dog as teach a cat to bark.
Tools like sort, uniq, sed, awk and so forth are not "things that almost nobody will use". That is a bit like saying "Who needs coal anyway now we've got electricity?" If you look in your rcscripts sometime, you probably will see plenty of references to these tools. You might never use them directly from the command line, but they're there, and all sorts of applications make heavy use of them. For instance, the spell() function in PHP makes use of spell - so the PHP developers didn't have to get distracted by working on a spelling checker, nor did the PHP source get bloated by the inclusion of a spelling checker. Not to mention that all applications that use spell as opposed to incorporating their own spelling checker will automatically share a common word list.
If you want to change one word for another in a whole lot of files, sed is, and always will be, the quickest way to do it. The fact is that some tasks are inherently unsuited to a point-and-drool interface. With any kind of user interface, you will have to type the word you want to change and the word you want to change it to. Using sed just adds a few extra keystrokes.
I could go on, but I suspect we aren't aiming at the same point. My point is that I think it's good to have many small programmes that each do one thing - and do it well - which can then be called from within other programmes. A mail client, for instance, just needs a call to sendmail - it doesn't have to handle the intricacies of SMTP. Thus leaving human-interface designers to get on with designing human interfaces
Perhaps it's my experience with having used Protext on the Amiga, but I never saw the point of an interactive spelling checker. I want to type a document up, get the spelling checked while I'm away doing something else, then come back and correct the misspelt words. {I never cared too much about screen fonts matching printer fonts either. As long as I knew what the screen font looked like and what the printer font looked like, I would be happy.}
Windows must have equivalents for spell, sort, uniq and awk, right? 'Cause after all, everyone says it's so much better than other OSes
AJS318 computers use mostly genuine Slackware or Debian GNU/Linux.
http://www.microsoft.com/piracy/whogivesatoss/
Regenerative braking doesn't recover all the energy. I apologise for not making that more obvious. The wastage due to friction {an absolute, not a percentage} is directly proportional to mass -- so heavier vehicles are less efficient.
I think you are also being quite pessimistic about the efficiency of internal combustion engines. With proper engine management and continuously-variable transmission systems, engines are much more efficient today than they used to be. An ordinary car has only five gear ratios, so the engine speed has to vary greatly to cover a range of road speeds. An engine driving the wheels through a CVT keeps constant revs except during acceleration. As long as you press hard on the gas pedal, the engine speeds up; when you relax your foot, the engine starts slowing down and the transmission adjusts to make up the road speed. When you press the brake, the transmission adjusts to match the road speed to the still-slowing-down engine, so it will be ready to drive again when required. When maintaining any constant speed, the engine maintains the same constant revs. The transmission ratio is adjusted so gradually that a clutch is only needed when the vehicle is coming to rest. Modern electromagnetic clutches are better than centrifugal clutches, because they disengage more positively.
Better-refined fuels - which would almost certainly become the norm anyway with the adoption of biomass-derived replacements for petroleum - and leaner fuel-air ratios would eliminate the need for catalytic converters {themselves a bodge, sacrificing fuel efficiency for slightly cleaner emissions} as the products would consist of just carbon dioxide and water vapour, and no unburned fuel. The exhaust products would still carry away kinetic energy, but some of this could be recovered with a turbocharger. With the engine doing near-constant revs, the turbo could be active almost full time - achieving an efficiency close to the theoretical maximum.
I've no problem with the idea of electric vehicles per se {and modern electronic control systems have the same benefits as CVT}; I just don't think lugging a heavy battery around is the best way to do it. But for public transport systems powered by means of overhead wires, electricity certainly has advantages.
When I was a nipper, they said electric cars would be the transport of the future.
.5 * m * v ** 2}. Assuming the energy stored varies linearly with mass {reasonable IMHO - amount of energy stored per mole of reagents would be a constant for a given chemical reaction}, it's not strictly a losing battle, but it's certainly a nil-nil draw. Every kilo you add to the battery is another kilo you ned to lug about. Unless you have a reaction product you can dump as you go .....
A quarter of a century on and they're still being touted as the transport of the future.
They probably always will be being touted as the transport of the future.
Nobody has ever made a battery-powered water heater, nobody ever will, and there's a very good reason for that. Energy density has pretty much maxed-out. Crucially, so has motor efficiency. You already can convert over 90% of the energy stored in a battery to kinetic energy. Regenerative braking is standard now - so the energy you expended while accelerating can be recovered when you slow down. There basically are no more efficiency gains to be made.
Electric cars are also at least as polluting as any other fuel, because the energy has to be generated somehow. The charging and discharging process is less than 100% efficient; so some more {anywhere from a little to as much again, depending on the battery tech used} energy is expended charging and discharging a battery than would be expended if whatever kind of engine had turned the generator had been used to turn the car's wheels.
The greater the mass of the battery, so the more energy is required to accelerate it to a given speed. {KE =
That's not to say that electric vehicles don't have a place: they do. And that place is anywhere where electrical power can be delivered to the vehicle without relying on a local battery to store it {at least, not a full journey's worth}.
I tell you what kind of flag I would like to see broadcast along with TV programmes, and that is a flag to indicate whether the content is "editorial" or advertising.
..... you record the first, say, 10' or so of a show to HDD. Then you start watching the recorded programme. Obviously you would need some buffer memory for this to work reliably ..... As soon as the VDR detects advertising, it skips forward to the next chunk of programme. That would be almost like fast-forwarding live television ..... a surefire selling point. The new Record-o-mat AdBuster 3625 - lets you fast-forward live TV. Why, this could be the very last advert you ever watch! [shot of family, salesman in foreground, all with forced cheesy grins]
Imagine the possibilities
There are some stations -- particularly on satellite -- where you practically have to record the programmes, just so you can fast-forward through the advert breaks; otherwise, by the time the second half comes along, you have already forgotten what was going on in the first half.
In the event of any violation, both the broadcaster and the advertiser should be punished and damages paid to all viewers.
Or, we could go back to how it used to be, ban all advertising on TV and make viewers pay for what they watch. The cost of watching TV would go up, for sure, and maybe 24 hour broadcasting would come to an end; but the quality would improve beyond measure, and isn't that the main thing?
We already used to have a radio listener's licence in this country, when the BBC was all there was. The licence money was paid to the BBC and this was what paid for programmes - there was no advertising, except those safety announcements -- you know the ones .....
Look at it this way;
I would like to propose a formal amendment to Godwin's law. Namely, that the list of "automatic argument-losing" words be extended to include "communist", "terrorist" and "11 September 2001".
Who do I need to see to get this put through the official channels? Presumably the actual words can be decided upon as part of the debate {after the initial draft motion is published, amendments would be invited, composited together and adopted or rejected with the motion}.
- Tax mineral extraction where there are recycled or biological alternatives available.
- Force waste handlers to pay a rebate on all recyclable goods whether or not they are actually recycled.
- Introduce these measures gradually but firmly. Announce a schedule and stick to it. Borrow against taxes on polluting practices to subsidise green alternatives.
Now, there will be predictable opposition to the use of taxation to achieve any ends, but IMHO it is justified in this case. The main point is that The mineral resources in our Mother Earth belong to future generations, not just us. These people haven't been born yet, much less reached voting age, so we have to make some assumptions on their behalf, one of which is that they would rather we didn't force them to live in a shithole.The first idea makes virgin materials more expensive and therefore forces manufacturers to seek alternatives. Ideally, the rate of taxation should be such that it is substantially cheaper to use recycled materials, even all the way to the point where companies are prepared to buy back end-of-life goods from consumers.
The second idea doesn't directly stop anyone from putting recyclable waste in landfill, it just makes the proposal less economically attractive. It means that as a waste handler, you can't charge someone money for collecting recyclable goods {which, after all, are worth money, so it's only fair}. The only way you can cover the cost of landfilling recyclable goods for which you have paid is to charge more to landfill non-recyclable goods. Any other waste handler who is actually recycling recyclables will be getting paid for them, so will have lower overheads and can pass this saving on to customers. Similarly with incineration: if you do something sensible with the heat you liberate, you have something saleable {probably electricity, though home heating or compressed air would be alternatives; alternatively the heat could be used directly in some industrial process}. If your energy recovery rate is poor or you aren't even trying, just warming the atmosphere directly, you might as well be burning pound notes.
The GNOME foot is bare. Bare feet do not smell. Well ..... perhaps briefly, after recently being removed from shoes and socks, they may smell for a bit. The smell is caused by bacterial and chemical action between perspiration {which cannot evaporate and so builds up} and shoe / sock interior surface {socks get holes because your perspiration eats through them}, and soon wears off your feet {though it stays in your shoes much longer!} See the Society for Barefoot Living for more details. In cultures where shoes are not worn, foot odour is unknown.
..... adjusting the tappets ..... pulling the chain ..... almost every telephone-related colloquialism {OK, they used to make sense} ..... drug-related crime ..... just one of those little quirks of language you have to get used to I suppose.
It would be more correct to refer to foot odour as shoe odour. But lots of things are known by inappropriate names. Pencil lead
I think I've seen something like this before somewhere ..... probably .....
Anyway, at my last place of work we instituted the annual Pegg Award for Excellent Incompetence in the Constructiuon of a New PC. The first recipient won for the sheer brilliance of omitting to fit any insulating pillars between the motherboard and the chassis, electing instead to bolt the motherboard directly to the chassis.
He was our top PCB designer. He also once routed a 0V supply to a microamp-current flame sense amplifier circuit through a section of track {ignition transformer primary circuit} that would carry pulses of tens of amperes.
The second recipient won it for failing to format a hard disk he'd just FDISK'ed, and wondering why attempts to SYS it were failing.
Nothing, really. The way virtual hosting works, anything you use before the at sign will work. A simple regex match in a procmail recipe will weed out anything that doesn't conform to the style, of course, but that would break the main purpose of VH. The purpose of SpamJavelin 1.2 is to make harvested e-mail addresses useless.
..... they just burn them onto CDs and sell them to other spammers.
..... and point them at a machine which accepts SMTP, but does nothing with it {maybe always relay one message back to the sender just so it'll look like an open relay}. Or ..... maybe I could have a script that responds to every single piece of spam, and gives them bogus credit card numbers {begin with a 4 [for Visa / Delta] or a 5 [for MC / Switch / Maestro], put any 14 random digits, calculate the 16th digit using a widely-known algorithm, and it will pass any rudimentary plausibility check} and addresses. Then the spammers will be too busy sorting out bogus enquiries from genuine ones ..... Talk about a dose of one's own medicine!
Conceivably, a spammer could delete the trace digits or change them. But they aren't going to know what is a virtually-hosted address without looking {and I could always register a domain name so it would have fewer levels in it and so not even look obviously virtually-hosted}, and they don't look at the addresses they harvest
Another idea would be actually to get a number of domain names, just for the purpose of being spam sinks
Oh, come on. Next minute you'll be telling me you can disable the right mouse button so people can't steal your photos. (*cough*) alt-print screen (*cough*)
Unmunging addresses that have been munged like that is a trivial matter, but nonetheless is left as an exercise for the reader. You don't even need a full JS interpreter. Just parse anything that looks like a bunch of escapes on the basis that someone probably did that because they don't want you to see it, and that assumption will be valid more often than not.
If you're really paranoid about displaying an e-mail address, use a P(erl|hp|ython) script to turn form contents into mail messages. Just don't allow the recipient address to be determined from the form variables, otherwise you could be aiding and abetting spammers {tho' you could put decoy hidden fields in your form to make it look like an insecure formmail; that'd be highly amusing}. Also, only allow one submission per IP address per five minutes. Otherwise you'll get enough multiple submissions from dim-witted users who don't realise you only need to single-click a button on a web page, or that the back and forward buttons break on dynamic pages, not to need any spam.
I've set something similar up. I have an email account using virtual hosting, so I wrote a little PHP script that generates unique e-mail addresses based on the date, time and remote IP address. If a spam-merchant harvests one of these addresses, I can simply put in a procmail recipe that will catch it and erase it. It means I get one spam per harvesting, but it stops anybody from selling them on. And if anyone claims I opted-in to a list, then this will show they are lying through their arsehole.
.....
I'm planning on adding some really nasty {from the spammer's point of view} enhancements for v2.0. Basically adding some mailto links that a spam-harvester will see but a human reader won't