Great in Seattle, by try it in Boulder Colorado...
on
Video Screen in Thin Air
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· Score: 3, Informative
This is a cool invention, but it will only work in a calm humid environment. In places like Boulder Colorado or Phoenix, the air is far too dry to sustain a fog. You might get to see whats on the edge of the display, but the fog would evaporate before it got to the other edge. And windy environments (Chicago, Boulder again, and displays near doorways or vents) would disrupt the fog sheet too.
On the otherhand, this display technology would make a nice swamp cooler for hot summer days.
As appealing as physical destruction of an HD is, it is not a wise course of action. As with most electonics, HDs contain lead, glass fibers in the circuitboard, and caustic chemicals in the electrolytic capacitors. And I have no idea of the potential toxicity of the materials coating the platters or used in the rare earth magnets in the actuators and motor.
Turning data into dust creates an environmental hazard. Therefore, it's better to send old electronics to an institution that has the tools and procedures for safely recycling/recovering/reprocessing the materials in the HD. Yet we obviously cannot and should not enrtust these companes with our sensitive data. That is why some form of encryption (either in hardware or software) is the solution to making the data unrecoverable.
There are valid reasons for checking out the contents of the HD -- if you think a machine might have been stolen, then finding the prior owner is the right course of action. I know of one dumspter diver who tried to reunite an old PC and its data with its former owner. The former owner was pleased by the honesty of the finder and upset that the HDs had not been wiped as promised by a PC recycling company.
The hardest case that I heard was a used computer buyer that ran across some very disturbed writings on a old machine. Violent written fantasies could have been just someone letting off steam, writing fiction, or a prelude to going postal. Finding potential evidence of a forthcoming crime places a severe ethical burden on the finder of the computer files.
Personally, I don't make a point of snooping and tend to just reformat the HDs of old computers that I buy. This also forestalls the licensing issues with old software on old computers -- that old copy of M$ Office may (or may not) be legal.
Seems like this event makes the case for encrypted HDs -- schemes that render data unretrievable without the proper passwords/biometric signatures/magic hardware dongles. The idea that all our personal records are stored in clear text on thousands of HDs and backup tapes at a myriad of institutions is not too pleasant.
As a purchaser/fixer/collector of old computers, I have seen many a file that some prior owner would probably have prefered I not. Although I, personally, have seen nothing of a criminal nature (or of a nature that would allow me to perpetrate a crime) I know others who have found strange files on old computers. Psychotic diary entries that advocated violence, financial records, proprietary engineering data, etc. all have an odd way of being left on HDs of obsolete machines. If a old machine stops working, few people make the effort to fix it in order to erase data. Systems that automatically make the data inaccessible in all but valid/authorized machine states would ensure the protection of the data.
Although any encryption system can be broken, by social engineering at the very least, it would be better if there were at least some barriers between sensitive data and potentially prying eyes.
Great Idea (for the lab or simulation)
on
Solar Window Panes
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· Score: 2, Insightful
This nice bit of technology (but bad engineering) will never make it in the real world. Pigeons, spiders, wind, snow, urban grime, clumsy cleaners, and assorted urban insults (taggers, vandals, inquistive slashdotters, etc.) will doom any of these solar window installations to the scrap heap inside of a year or two. Their structures look far too flexible and intricate to survive real world applications.
Don't get me wrong. I would love a cheap, reliable source of solar power. And I don't care about efficiency, because it is only tangentially relevant to the real measure of solar cell feasibility. I only care about long-term TCO and the effective ROI. Give me a coated, 5% efficient solar cell plastic film that costs 10 cents per lifetime kWh and I will coat every square inch that I have ownership of. Until then I will say "just what I need; another complex costly subsystem on my building."
NASA's risk averseness just about gaurantees that space exploration will go nowhere. And its a vicious cycle -- the more risks NASA tries to reduce, the more expensive things get, the more expensive things get, the more they want to reduce risk. NASA's strategy seems to be about creating an ever more expensive basket to keep its ever dwindling set of eggs in.
Read about the history of exploration. In the 16th-18th centuries, did European governments halt all expeditions every time a ship sunk? No. Even though hundreds of lives could be lost on a single disaster, the governments and explorers kept on exploring. People back then went on far more dangerous ventures with far less support, planning, and likelihood of return.
I'm sure that there are people today that would gladly risk their lives to go into space and return humanity to a Golden Era of Exploration. It's too bad that our overly-regulated, overly-safe society of today won't let them.
I wonder if one could hack a CD-player to act like a microscope? The key would be to turn off any error correction/fault detection stuff and watch the raw bit pattern. When those bits are reconstructed into tracks, we would get a 1-bit image of the surface.
OK, there's a ton of tiny details that prevent this from working -- mostly due to the fact that modern CD players are unhackable blackboxes with all the magic inaccessibly embedded into a few inscrutable ASICs. It also does not help that the image plane (or is that play'n) is located on the metalized side of the disk. Cleaning a spot on the data-side, mounting a thin specimen well and reflective cover would be hard. Getting the disk to balance would be a challenge. Perhaps this hack would be a good use of all those ancient CD players, built from discrete components, that refuse to play RIAA-corrupted discs (I got a old CD player at a garage sale that actually had 6-daughter boards plugged into a backplane).
Done well, this system should be capable of resolutions of a couple of microns (the track-track x the pit-to-pit spacing). Oh, and for even higher resolution, hack a DVD player.
Most of the various current incarnations of 3-D displays contain an ugly, hard-to-resolve flaw. The display rendering routines must make assumptions about the location of each eyeball. Thus, they only create a proper 3-D picture when the person's head is front, center, level, the proper distance from the screen, and of normal eye spacing. Deviations in the position of the eyes from this sweet spot cause distortions in which the two views are inconsistent with the 3-D scene at best, and infusible at worst.
Worst of all are deviations in the angular orientation of the viewer's head WRT the screen. 3-D displays assume that the separation between the eyes is left-right. If the person tilts their head, the images do not fuse properly and cause eye strain or double vision. The only solution is a 4 or 5-axis head tracking system, although a head-mounted 3-D display does provide a first-order correction to the angular orientation problem (it causes other problems, though).
A secondary problem is that only one viewer can ever be in the "sweet" spot of the 3-D system. To create a proper 3-D view for the second person, the system needs to create a second pair of images that are different from those seen by the first person. Add another pair of eye and the need a second pair of images.
3-D has been around for a decades in 3-D movies, computer displays, and VR, but it has never caught on. Its not that it does not work well enough to interest some of the people some of the time, it just doesn't work well enough to interest most of the people, most of the time.
On the other hand, I could be wrong -- I never thought Window's would be popular either.
I disliked those Sun optical mice that required a metal "mouse pad" with a grid of lines. Rotating the pad caused the pointer to track diagonally when you moved the mouse up and down. On the other hand, it was fun to flip people's pads 90 degrees and watch their pointer move left-right when they moved the mouse up-down. The marketing material was especially amusing -- it touted the "free mouse pad" when that pad was absolutely indispensible to using the mouse.
This is another case of so much missing data that we can conclude nothing. Others have asked about the relative % deployment (i.e., is Linux attacked more often becuase it is more common). But this is only the first of 3 missing pieces of data.
1. The percentages of types of servers in deployment (the general market share of Linux vs. Windows)
2. The percentages of types of servers in the sample studied by the securty firm. (the degree that the security firm has a representative sample of Linux vs. Windows)
3. The cooperativeness/probability of server admins admitting break-ins to the security firm (are Linux vs. Window's admins more likely to verify a break-in?)
Without these three numbers, and a wee bit'o Bayes Theorum, we can conclude nothing from this statistic. And if you want to get really persnickety, you would want to understand the temporal variations in the system to rule out over-weighting by old dat
The system that London for charging cars that enter the inner city takes a picture of your car if you try to sneek into the city without have the requisite electronic pass (its not much different from photo-radar speed traps). I think Singapore uses a similar cheater-cam system. You will pay substantive fines for trying to bypass the system or use the highways without a functioning BBBB (Big Brother Black Box).
The bigger nasty, if you use anything like GPS, is snow. A nice coating of snow or ice on the antenna means no GPS, means BBBB is not working, means you are in violation of the system. Their cute little test in Lisbon won't reveal this nasty defect in the system, but I'm sure drivers in Northern Europe will rue the day they bought into the idea.
WOW! Very very cool. But this hack is more ambitious than I had in mind. I'm talking about putting a flatbed scanner in the film plane of a large format camera, rather than extracting the CCD from a scanner.
Thank you very much for the link, I must have been offline when/. ran this one.
Image quality might suck because most scanners have lighting systems that are appreciably brighter than the image projected by a lens. So the image might be dark. Moreover, the coupling of the imaging lens' projected image into the scanner optics would be imperfect and so the center of the image would probably be far brighter than the edges. Finally, the hacked scanner-camera would only work on motionless objects -- any movement during the long scanning time would create interesting artifacts.
But it would be quite cool because you would have an umpteen megapixel camera. A 300 dpi flatbed would create an 8.4 megapixel image and a 600 dpi flatbed would provide a 33.6 megapixel image. A 4000 dpi slide scanner would lead to about a 21 megapixel camera.
Anybody ever attempt to hack their scanner into a camera? By disabling/removing the light source, placing a bit of frosted glass in the object plane and a lens in front, I would bet that one could make a linear-array camera. Image quality might suck, but it would be quite cool, nonetheless.
I see old flatbed scanners at garage sales. As soon as I find one for $5, I might try to make a large format linear camera from the thing. I already have some lenses (from old dismantled photocopiers) that will be perfect for projecting an image onto a 8.5 x 11 "film" plane of the scanner.
One common alternative energy scheme is a digester that converts waste into methane that is collected and burned for household energy needs. The tank employs methanogenic bacteria not unlike those found in ruminant mammals such as cows. Its a good, small-scale, low-tech method, but it does require a bit of stewardship to keep the bacteria warm and happy (issues like maintaining the proper carbon-nitrogen ratio can be hard).
A more recent, higher tech method is to use very high temperature, high pressure water (e.g., 700 C, 100 atmospheres) to completely breakdown and reform all the molecules in a waste stream. This converts just about any stream of organic waste into a mix of CO2, hydrocarbons, and salts. It's great in that it can chew up anything, including plastics and it detoxifies a wide range of nasties like medical waste, dioxin, and pesticides. It's not a small-scale technology, however.
As for using battery bacteria in such a system, I would have 3 concerns that could be dispatched with further study. First, many household garbage items might be toxic to the bacteria (e.g., detergents, soaps, solvents, and anti-bacterial cleansers). Second, highly digestive versions of the bacteria could lead to the infamous "gray goo" problem -- a cellulose-eating bateria might take a liking to our houses and trees. Third, slow release means a large holding tank -- a 1 acre processing tank would make battery-bacteria uneconomical or infeasible for most households.
Not that I want to know, but the goals and interests of the funding agency should be reflected in your proposal. For example, if the funding agency is interested in third-world health, then play up the low cost of the software for impoverished/disadvantaged clinics. If the donor is a big pharma company, then play up how they could "give this away" to potential customers or use it in clinical research. If the third party is more interested in academic research, then show how the system can support data collection, double-blind studies, etc. I'm not sure that the "open source" angle will have much traction unless you can show that the open source process multiplies the impact of the donor's money.
The more you know who the donor is, the better your proposal will sound to them.
RedWolves2 wrote: "Does that mean you are predicting that the Anahiem Mighty Ducks are going make a echoing return to the Stanley Cup this year?
LOL! On the one hand, if these ducks are "Mighty" enough, then a resounding echo should occur. On the other hand, Anaheim is flat place that lacks the geography needed for any form of echoing.
But as a nerd, I must say "huh?" I have heard of Debian Linux cup ("Constructor of Useful Parsers") and CUPS for printing. Or perhaps the Ducks will repeat if they have "set echo on". Hmmm...does one drink for this Stanley Cup? Or do the Mighty Ducks covet the Cup for it's Grail-like shape?;)
The rest-of-the-world will get its last laugh. I'd bet the vast majority of money spent on "American" technology products never goes to American workers. Most of the hardware is fabricated in the Far East, Mexico, etc. Even the software and tech support is moving off-shore.
Won't long before the only America labor in a tech product is the lawyer's billables for the EULA.
"You could separate the sugar refill from the bacteria by a membrane that will let sugar molecules through but not complex organisms like viruses and other bacteria."
Good idea! An osmotic membrane of the proper design would let sugar in and bacterial metabolites out. I would wonder about the aggressiveness of mold hyphae, however. The membrane would need to be resistant to the enzymes used by molds to dissolve stuff.
As biological systems, these battery bacteria should be susceptible to a host of illnesses -- viruses (called bacteriophages), mold, other bacteria, etc.. Swiping a packet of sugar from the restaurant to fuel a laptop might get you some extra surfing time (about half an hour according to my back-of-the-envelope-calcs) or it may get you some nasty battery disease. Will we need public service announcements on practicing safe laptop recharging?
Sugar may be cheap, but sterilized sugar solution in a handy refill cartridge will cost a pretty penny. And, yes, it only means more sweet spam.
Exactly! Stealth= life for the Air Force. Moreover, the military does not care about fuel consumption -- its only an issue of ensuring a reasonable operating range with a reasonable payload of big cans of whoopass.
Civilian applications are much more fuel economy sensitive - if the airplane is not economical, no airline will buy it. Plus, the more fuel it consumes, the more pollution it dumps into the upper atmosphere, the less likely it will ever be permitted to get off the ground. Noise is not the only reason the SST never made it into production.
Slashdot Mirror
This is a cool invention, but it will only work in a calm humid environment. In places like Boulder Colorado or Phoenix, the air is far too dry to sustain a fog. You might get to see whats on the edge of the display, but the fog would evaporate before it got to the other edge. And windy environments (Chicago, Boulder again, and displays near doorways or vents) would disrupt the fog sheet too.
On the otherhand, this display technology would make a nice swamp cooler for hot summer days.
As appealing as physical destruction of an HD is, it is not a wise course of action. As with most electonics, HDs contain lead, glass fibers in the circuitboard, and caustic chemicals in the electrolytic capacitors. And I have no idea of the potential toxicity of the materials coating the platters or used in the rare earth magnets in the actuators and motor.
Turning data into dust creates an environmental hazard. Therefore, it's better to send old electronics to an institution that has the tools and procedures for safely recycling/recovering/reprocessing the materials in the HD. Yet we obviously cannot and should not enrtust these companes with our sensitive data. That is why some form of encryption (either in hardware or software) is the solution to making the data unrecoverable.
There are valid reasons for checking out the contents of the HD -- if you think a machine might have been stolen, then finding the prior owner is the right course of action. I know of one dumspter diver who tried to reunite an old PC and its data with its former owner. The former owner was pleased by the honesty of the finder and upset that the HDs had not been wiped as promised by a PC recycling company.
The hardest case that I heard was a used computer buyer that ran across some very disturbed writings on a old machine. Violent written fantasies could have been just someone letting off steam, writing fiction, or a prelude to going postal. Finding potential evidence of a forthcoming crime places a severe ethical burden on the finder of the computer files.
Personally, I don't make a point of snooping and tend to just reformat the HDs of old computers that I buy. This also forestalls the licensing issues with old software on old computers -- that old copy of M$ Office may (or may not) be legal.
Seems like this event makes the case for encrypted HDs -- schemes that render data unretrievable without the proper passwords/biometric signatures/magic hardware dongles. The idea that all our personal records are stored in clear text on thousands of HDs and backup tapes at a myriad of institutions is not too pleasant.
As a purchaser/fixer/collector of old computers, I have seen many a file that some prior owner would probably have prefered I not. Although I, personally, have seen nothing of a criminal nature (or of a nature that would allow me to perpetrate a crime) I know others who have found strange files on old computers. Psychotic diary entries that advocated violence, financial records, proprietary engineering data, etc. all have an odd way of being left on HDs of obsolete machines. If a old machine stops working, few people make the effort to fix it in order to erase data. Systems that automatically make the data inaccessible in all but valid/authorized machine states would ensure the protection of the data.
Although any encryption system can be broken, by social engineering at the very least, it would be better if there were at least some barriers between sensitive data and potentially prying eyes.
This nice bit of technology (but bad engineering) will never make it in the real world. Pigeons, spiders, wind, snow, urban grime, clumsy cleaners, and assorted urban insults (taggers, vandals, inquistive slashdotters, etc.) will doom any of these solar window installations to the scrap heap inside of a year or two. Their structures look far too flexible and intricate to survive real world applications.
Don't get me wrong. I would love a cheap, reliable source of solar power. And I don't care about efficiency, because it is only tangentially relevant to the real measure of solar cell feasibility. I only care about long-term TCO and the effective ROI. Give me a coated, 5% efficient solar cell plastic film that costs 10 cents per lifetime kWh and I will coat every square inch that I have ownership of. Until then I will say "just what I need; another complex costly subsystem on my building."
NASA's risk averseness just about gaurantees that space exploration will go nowhere. And its a vicious cycle -- the more risks NASA tries to reduce, the more expensive things get, the more expensive things get, the more they want to reduce risk. NASA's strategy seems to be about creating an ever more expensive basket to keep its ever dwindling set of eggs in.
Read about the history of exploration. In the 16th-18th centuries, did European governments halt all expeditions every time a ship sunk? No. Even though hundreds of lives could be lost on a single disaster, the governments and explorers kept on exploring. People back then went on far more dangerous ventures with far less support, planning, and likelihood of return.
I'm sure that there are people today that would gladly risk their lives to go into space and return humanity to a Golden Era of Exploration. It's too bad that our overly-regulated, overly-safe society of today won't let them.
I wonder if one could hack a CD-player to act like a microscope? The key would be to turn off any error correction/fault detection stuff and watch the raw bit pattern. When those bits are reconstructed into tracks, we would get a 1-bit image of the surface.
OK, there's a ton of tiny details that prevent this from working -- mostly due to the fact that modern CD players are unhackable blackboxes with all the magic inaccessibly embedded into a few inscrutable ASICs. It also does not help that the image plane (or is that play'n) is located on the metalized side of the disk. Cleaning a spot on the data-side, mounting a thin specimen well and reflective cover would be hard. Getting the disk to balance would be a challenge. Perhaps this hack would be a good use of all those ancient CD players, built from discrete components, that refuse to play RIAA-corrupted discs (I got a old CD player at a garage sale that actually had 6-daughter boards plugged into a backplane).
Done well, this system should be capable of resolutions of a couple of microns (the track-track x the pit-to-pit spacing). Oh, and for even higher resolution, hack a DVD player.
Most of the various current incarnations of 3-D displays contain an ugly, hard-to-resolve flaw. The display rendering routines must make assumptions about the location of each eyeball. Thus, they only create a proper 3-D picture when the person's head is front, center, level, the proper distance from the screen, and of normal eye spacing. Deviations in the position of the eyes from this sweet spot cause distortions in which the two views are inconsistent with the 3-D scene at best, and infusible at worst.
Worst of all are deviations in the angular orientation of the viewer's head WRT the screen. 3-D displays assume that the separation between the eyes is left-right. If the person tilts their head, the images do not fuse properly and cause eye strain or double vision. The only solution is a 4 or 5-axis head tracking system, although a head-mounted 3-D display does provide a first-order correction to the angular orientation problem (it causes other problems, though).
A secondary problem is that only one viewer can ever be in the "sweet" spot of the 3-D system. To create a proper 3-D view for the second person, the system needs to create a second pair of images that are different from those seen by the first person. Add another pair of eye and the need a second pair of images.
3-D has been around for a decades in 3-D movies, computer displays, and VR, but it has never caught on. Its not that it does not work well enough to interest some of the people some of the time, it just doesn't work well enough to interest most of the people, most of the time.
On the other hand, I could be wrong -- I never thought Window's would be popular either.
I disliked those Sun optical mice that required a metal "mouse pad" with a grid of lines. Rotating the pad caused the pointer to track diagonally when you moved the mouse up and down. On the other hand, it was fun to flip people's pads 90 degrees and watch their pointer move left-right when they moved the mouse up-down. The marketing material was especially amusing -- it touted the "free mouse pad" when that pad was absolutely indispensible to using the mouse.
This is another case of so much missing data that we can conclude nothing. Others have asked about the relative % deployment (i.e., is Linux attacked more often becuase it is more common). But this is only the first of 3 missing pieces of data.
1. The percentages of types of servers in deployment (the general market share of Linux vs. Windows)
2. The percentages of types of servers in the sample studied by the securty firm. (the degree that the security firm has a representative sample of Linux vs. Windows)
3. The cooperativeness/probability of server admins admitting break-ins to the security firm (are Linux vs. Window's admins more likely to verify a break-in?)
Without these three numbers, and a wee bit'o Bayes Theorum, we can conclude nothing from this statistic. And if you want to get really persnickety, you would want to understand the temporal variations in the system to rule out over-weighting by old dat
The system that London for charging cars that enter the inner city takes a picture of your car if you try to sneek into the city without have the requisite electronic pass (its not much different from photo-radar speed traps). I think Singapore uses a similar cheater-cam system. You will pay substantive fines for trying to bypass the system or use the highways without a functioning BBBB (Big Brother Black Box).
The bigger nasty, if you use anything like GPS, is snow. A nice coating of snow or ice on the antenna means no GPS, means BBBB is not working, means you are in violation of the system. Their cute little test in Lisbon won't reveal this nasty defect in the system, but I'm sure drivers in Northern Europe will rue the day they bought into the idea.
So now we will know if that mosquito has a fever or not.... It does! Well, then pass the quinine.
exhilaration wrote:"Building a Digicam from Scanner Elements links to this page"
/. ran this one.
WOW! Very very cool. But this hack is more ambitious than I had in mind. I'm talking about putting a flatbed scanner in the film plane of a large format camera, rather than extracting the CCD from a scanner.
Thank you very much for the link, I must have been offline when
Image quality might suck because most scanners have lighting systems that are appreciably brighter than the image projected by a lens. So the image might be dark. Moreover, the coupling of the imaging lens' projected image into the scanner optics would be imperfect and so the center of the image would probably be far brighter than the edges. Finally, the hacked scanner-camera would only work on motionless objects -- any movement during the long scanning time would create interesting artifacts.
But it would be quite cool because you would have an umpteen megapixel camera. A 300 dpi flatbed would create an 8.4 megapixel image and a 600 dpi flatbed would provide a 33.6 megapixel image. A 4000 dpi slide scanner would lead to about a 21 megapixel camera.
Anybody ever attempt to hack their scanner into a camera? By disabling/removing the light source, placing a bit of frosted glass in the object plane and a lens in front, I would bet that one could make a linear-array camera. Image quality might suck, but it would be quite cool, nonetheless.
I see old flatbed scanners at garage sales. As soon as I find one for $5, I might try to make a large format linear camera from the thing. I already have some lenses (from old dismantled photocopiers) that will be perfect for projecting an image onto a 8.5 x 11 "film" plane of the scanner.
Any other scanner/camera hackers out there???
Energy from garbage is a good (and old) idea.
One common alternative energy scheme is a digester that converts waste into methane that is collected and burned for household energy needs. The tank employs methanogenic bacteria not unlike those found in ruminant mammals such as cows. Its a good, small-scale, low-tech method, but it does require a bit of stewardship to keep the bacteria warm and happy (issues like maintaining the proper carbon-nitrogen ratio can be hard).
A more recent, higher tech method is to use very high temperature, high pressure water (e.g., 700 C, 100 atmospheres) to completely breakdown and reform all the molecules in a waste stream. This converts just about any stream of organic waste into a mix of CO2, hydrocarbons, and salts. It's great in that it can chew up anything, including plastics and it detoxifies a wide range of nasties like medical waste, dioxin, and pesticides. It's not a small-scale technology, however.
As for using battery bacteria in such a system, I would have 3 concerns that could be dispatched with further study. First, many household garbage items might be toxic to the bacteria (e.g., detergents, soaps, solvents, and anti-bacterial cleansers). Second, highly digestive versions of the bacteria could lead to the infamous "gray goo" problem -- a cellulose-eating bateria might take a liking to our houses and trees. Third, slow release means a large holding tank -- a 1 acre processing tank would make battery-bacteria uneconomical or infeasible for most households.
Not that I want to know, but the goals and interests of the funding agency should be reflected in your proposal. For example, if the funding agency is interested in third-world health, then play up the low cost of the software for impoverished/disadvantaged clinics. If the donor is a big pharma company, then play up how they could "give this away" to potential customers or use it in clinical research. If the third party is more interested in academic research, then show how the system can support data collection, double-blind studies, etc. I'm not sure that the "open source" angle will have much traction unless you can show that the open source process multiplies the impact of the donor's money.
The more you know who the donor is, the better your proposal will sound to them.
RedWolves2 wrote: "Does that mean you are predicting that the Anahiem Mighty Ducks are going make a echoing return to the Stanley Cup this year?
;)
LOL! On the one hand, if these ducks are "Mighty" enough, then a resounding echo should occur. On the other hand, Anaheim is flat place that lacks the geography needed for any form of echoing.
But as a nerd, I must say "huh?" I have heard of Debian Linux cup ("Constructor of Useful Parsers") and CUPS for printing. Or perhaps the Ducks will repeat if they have "set echo on". Hmmm...does one drink for this Stanley Cup? Or do the Mighty Ducks covet the Cup for it's Grail-like shape?
Suing children!?!?! This one will really make everyone so much more likely to buy new CDs, won't it.
The rest-of-the-world will get its last laugh. I'd bet the vast majority of money spent on "American" technology products never goes to American workers. Most of the hardware is fabricated in the Far East, Mexico, etc. Even the software and tech support is moving off-shore.
Won't long before the only America labor in a tech product is the lawyer's billables for the EULA.
RedWolves2 wrote: "This story "broke" in late July. I had a discussion about it here."
I guess everything involving ducks will echo.
"You could separate the sugar refill from the bacteria by a membrane that will let sugar molecules through but not complex organisms like viruses and other bacteria."
Good idea! An osmotic membrane of the proper design would let sugar in and bacterial metabolites out. I would wonder about the aggressiveness of mold hyphae, however. The membrane would need to be resistant to the enzymes used by molds to dissolve stuff.
"Nah - I sterilize my glucose solutions in lab with a 0.22 micron filter that costs about 25 pretty pennies. I wouldn't worry about cost."
A 0.22 micron filter is 8X too coarse. Bacteriophages are as small 0.027 microns.
As biological systems, these battery bacteria should be susceptible to a host of illnesses -- viruses (called bacteriophages), mold, other bacteria, etc.. Swiping a packet of sugar from the restaurant to fuel a laptop might get you some extra surfing time (about half an hour according to my back-of-the-envelope-calcs) or it may get you some nasty battery disease. Will we need public service announcements on practicing safe laptop recharging?
Sugar may be cheap, but sterilized sugar solution in a handy refill cartridge will cost a pretty penny. And, yes, it only means more sweet spam.
Exactly! Stealth= life for the Air Force. Moreover, the military does not care about fuel consumption -- its only an issue of ensuring a reasonable operating range with a reasonable payload of big cans of whoopass.
Civilian applications are much more fuel economy sensitive - if the airplane is not economical, no airline will buy it. Plus, the more fuel it consumes, the more pollution it dumps into the upper atmosphere, the less likely it will ever be permitted to get off the ground. Noise is not the only reason the SST never made it into production.