Reminds me of my laptop. The fan speed is software controlled. There's some sort of fail safe built in -- if the speed control software doesn't initialize or stops responding completely for around 10 seconds, the fan will spin up to maximum speed and stay there. Once I was having some software problems (a nasty rootkit broke a lot of stuff) and the fan speed control process was crashing every few hours. One time, the fail safe didn't kick in. Unfortunately the CPU load was light, so it sat there running at incredibly high temperatures for half an hour rather than shutting down. Luckily the laptop still works, but that probably took a chunk out of it's lifespan.:/
I can't cite any sources here, but I vaguely remember a story in the news about this. Someone was draining a fair amount of power from some long distance transmission lines near his house. The power company puzzled over the losses and spent a fair amount of effort tracking him down (I think he had large visible coils outside). They tried to prosecute, but could not. Instead they had to estimate his power use and send him a bill.
I've been a user in a setup like this. It's painful to sit at a shiny brand new (taxpayer bought) workstation and wait for it to load my profile from some old computer in a closet 10 miles away.
For me, by far the most useful application of technology in chem class has been an online forum where all the students can give and receive assistance on the homework. There's over 100 people in my course to participate in it, it may be less effective if you're not teaching a particularly large high school.
Rev matching techniques start becoming useful in normal traffic once the car is pushing 200,000 miles and is being driven by someone who doesn't want to or can't afford to rebuild half the drive train on his ancient beater.
I don't understand the aversion towards using a phone on a bus or train. You're already riding in an incredibly loud environment, a reasonably quiet conversation going on nearby doesn't make a difference at all.
Reminds me of the high school science fair project a few of my friends did. They wanted to test the effectiveness of a few types of model rocket engines that can be made at home, but the school authorities threw a fit about how rockets are dangerous. Instead, they were told it would be okay if they tested the effectiveness of their propellants using a homemade, constant volume calorimeter.
These things are called bomb calorimeters for a reason. Their set up - which the school considered to be safer than model rockets - was literally a pipe bomb with temperature and pressure sensors mounted in it. They tried to use a small enough quantity of propellant to avoid an explosion. They weren't entirely successful at that goal, but they didn't mention that to the science fair operators:D
To get their project approved, they had to write a safety report. Out of their several pages of BS, a single sentence in the middle described what they were actually doing. No one batted an eye.
I have the same model of EeePC; I've gotten 8 hours of usage with wifi on and moderately intensive web browsing (no movies though) and had at least 20% battery capacity to spare. I'd say it is conceivable to get close to the advertised 10.5 hours of battery life - at least when the battery is brand new. You'd have to be in a relatively dark room, the LED backlight has some pretty dim settings that save a lot of power.
Hmm, trying to spot potential new super volcanoes is quite a technological challenge. We only have really rough ideas of what's going on under the surface in even the most closely monitored volcanic situations. We're getting better and better at this as time goes on though.
The biggest issue is the time scale. A super volcano develops on a geologic time scale; Yellowstone has been active since before our species even existed in its current form. The entire time, it's being constantly fed with a massive amount of heat from the mantle plume/hotspot that's underneath it. What will eventually, on a geologic time scale, cause it to cool down and become dormant, is the movement of the continental plate above the hotspot. It will be cut off from its source of magma and slowly cool into rock. That's probably millions of years in the future though.
I can think of a single instance where humans were able to bleed off energy in an attempt to manipulate volcanic activity. There was an island near Iceland; an eruption destroyed their city and a lava flow was slowly blocking off their harbor, which would have made the island useless. They got every boat they could and kept a constant flow of sea water on the lava. The flow was already coming to a stop though, so no one really knows how much of an impact they had on the lava. Also consider that the amount of energy within a single lava flow is completely insignificant compared to what's resting in a magma chamber of any size, especially a super volcano.
If we want to spend resources on reducing the risks of a super eruption, we should work on developing better technology to monitor all the known dangerous areas, and have extensive plans as to how to react to such an eruption.
Even if you managed to drill directly into the magma chamber and create a path for magma to escape, it wouldn't be particularly successful at reducing the risk. According to our current understanding of supervolcanoes, the stuff making up the majority of the chamber is very viscous and with a high gas content - it WILL erupt explosively. If you're lucky, the drill would only produce a St. Helens sized eruption and then stop. That wouldn't take a very significant amount of energy out of the system though.
Trapped at the bottom of the chamber is very hot and less explosive felsic magma that is coming up from the hotspot below and feeding the whole system with energy. Again assuming the possibility of such a drill, you might be able to drain some of this off from systems outside of the actual caldera (so you don't have the rest of the explosive magma chamber in the way). Super volcanoes tend to do this on their own periodically; it creates massive plains of flood basalt - and as far as I know, still doesn't reduce the changes of a super eruption.
I had a math teacher try something like this for a single chapter. The instruction was still textbook and lecture based, but there were daily assignments that were computer generated and would not let you move on until you had "mastered" the prescribed skillsets. Every assignment corresponded to specific pages of the textbook, so it was basically like what you described. I finished weeks late and very nearly failed that chapter. It was absolutely terrible and if entire classes had been designed like that, I would have not have even tried to finish high school.
I normally hit the brake first and worry about the clutch later, when I actually have to let it idle or downshift and engine brake. When I had to emergency brake in the rain once, the tires were locked up and the engine was stalled long before I even thought about the clutch.
The 83% figure was just used to roughly sort through the VOCs that they tested for in a lab. It will probably have very little impact on the accuracy of the final device.
True that. I went to a high school where there were a lot of kids who were given really nice cars by their family, but I know that some of the nicest cars there were bought through hours of work at low wage jobs and very careful money management.
56K? Your kids are spoiled rotten. I bet you give them a computer that has a heatsink and cooling fan on the processor too. Give them 28.8 if they go to their room without any protest, 14.4 otherwise.
We're not allowed to do anything that even resembles a business transaction. Forget encryption and especially anonymity. You couldn't even log in to your email without giving the world your access credentials. You cannot connect to most parts of the Internet because you might accidentally download a bad word and get in trouble. Sure, hams are capable of creating such a network (it would be slow though) but if it were very useful it would be shut down pretty fast.
I'm pretty sure they do that sort of stuff all the time. Earlier this year there was a small scandal regarding a teacher at a local school. The school resource officer involved apparently would not give comments that the news stations wanted, so they got a recording of a *different* police officer and played it while displaying a candid telephoto shot of the first guy. The newspapers also quoted the wrong officer and suggested that they were quoting the correct person.
In some states with medical marijuana laws, those that are allowed to posses pot are also allowed to grow a very limited number of pot plants. Similar laws combined with decriminalization or legalization of small amounts of pot might be a lot more effective at removing money from the illegal drug trade.
Slashdot Mirror
Reminds me of my laptop. The fan speed is software controlled. There's some sort of fail safe built in -- if the speed control software doesn't initialize or stops responding completely for around 10 seconds, the fan will spin up to maximum speed and stay there. Once I was having some software problems (a nasty rootkit broke a lot of stuff) and the fan speed control process was crashing every few hours. One time, the fail safe didn't kick in. Unfortunately the CPU load was light, so it sat there running at incredibly high temperatures for half an hour rather than shutting down. Luckily the laptop still works, but that probably took a chunk out of it's lifespan. :/
I can't cite any sources here, but I vaguely remember a story in the news about this. Someone was draining a fair amount of power from some long distance transmission lines near his house. The power company puzzled over the losses and spent a fair amount of effort tracking him down (I think he had large visible coils outside). They tried to prosecute, but could not. Instead they had to estimate his power use and send him a bill.
My new phone came with a tripped sensor on the battery. Another one millimeters away on the inside of the phone is not tripped. Weird.
Plus there are those of us who use a HDTV that doesn't support HDMI. . .
I've been a user in a setup like this. It's painful to sit at a shiny brand new (taxpayer bought) workstation and wait for it to load my profile from some old computer in a closet 10 miles away.
For me, by far the most useful application of technology in chem class has been an online forum where all the students can give and receive assistance on the homework. There's over 100 people in my course to participate in it, it may be less effective if you're not teaching a particularly large high school.
Rev matching techniques start becoming useful in normal traffic once the car is pushing 200,000 miles and is being driven by someone who doesn't want to or can't afford to rebuild half the drive train on his ancient beater.
I don't understand the aversion towards using a phone on a bus or train. You're already riding in an incredibly loud environment, a reasonably quiet conversation going on nearby doesn't make a difference at all.
Probably because the phone itself cost $10 and the rest of the parts can generally be found lying on the floor of your average slashdotter's house.
Reminds me of the high school science fair project a few of my friends did. They wanted to test the effectiveness of a few types of model rocket engines that can be made at home, but the school authorities threw a fit about how rockets are dangerous. Instead, they were told it would be okay if they tested the effectiveness of their propellants using a homemade, constant volume calorimeter.
:D
These things are called bomb calorimeters for a reason. Their set up - which the school considered to be safer than model rockets - was literally a pipe bomb with temperature and pressure sensors mounted in it. They tried to use a small enough quantity of propellant to avoid an explosion. They weren't entirely successful at that goal, but they didn't mention that to the science fair operators
To get their project approved, they had to write a safety report. Out of their several pages of BS, a single sentence in the middle described what they were actually doing. No one batted an eye.
I have the same model of EeePC; I've gotten 8 hours of usage with wifi on and moderately intensive web browsing (no movies though) and had at least 20% battery capacity to spare. I'd say it is conceivable to get close to the advertised 10.5 hours of battery life - at least when the battery is brand new. You'd have to be in a relatively dark room, the LED backlight has some pretty dim settings that save a lot of power.
No, not really...
:D
Hmm, trying to spot potential new super volcanoes is quite a technological challenge. We only have really rough ideas of what's going on under the surface in even the most closely monitored volcanic situations. We're getting better and better at this as time goes on though.
The biggest issue is the time scale. A super volcano develops on a geologic time scale; Yellowstone has been active since before our species even existed in its current form. The entire time, it's being constantly fed with a massive amount of heat from the mantle plume/hotspot that's underneath it. What will eventually, on a geologic time scale, cause it to cool down and become dormant, is the movement of the continental plate above the hotspot. It will be cut off from its source of magma and slowly cool into rock. That's probably millions of years in the future though.
I can think of a single instance where humans were able to bleed off energy in an attempt to manipulate volcanic activity. There was an island near Iceland; an eruption destroyed their city and a lava flow was slowly blocking off their harbor, which would have made the island useless. They got every boat they could and kept a constant flow of sea water on the lava. The flow was already coming to a stop though, so no one really knows how much of an impact they had on the lava. Also consider that the amount of energy within a single lava flow is completely insignificant compared to what's resting in a magma chamber of any size, especially a super volcano.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heimaey
If we want to spend resources on reducing the risks of a super eruption, we should work on developing better technology to monitor all the known dangerous areas, and have extensive plans as to how to react to such an eruption.
Even if you managed to drill directly into the magma chamber and create a path for magma to escape, it wouldn't be particularly successful at reducing the risk. According to our current understanding of supervolcanoes, the stuff making up the majority of the chamber is very viscous and with a high gas content - it WILL erupt explosively. If you're lucky, the drill would only produce a St. Helens sized eruption and then stop. That wouldn't take a very significant amount of energy out of the system though.
Trapped at the bottom of the chamber is very hot and less explosive felsic magma that is coming up from the hotspot below and feeding the whole system with energy. Again assuming the possibility of such a drill, you might be able to drain some of this off from systems outside of the actual caldera (so you don't have the rest of the explosive magma chamber in the way). Super volcanoes tend to do this on their own periodically; it creates massive plains of flood basalt - and as far as I know, still doesn't reduce the changes of a super eruption.
I had a math teacher try something like this for a single chapter. The instruction was still textbook and lecture based, but there were daily assignments that were computer generated and would not let you move on until you had "mastered" the prescribed skillsets. Every assignment corresponded to specific pages of the textbook, so it was basically like what you described. I finished weeks late and very nearly failed that chapter. It was absolutely terrible and if entire classes had been designed like that, I would have not have even tried to finish high school.
I normally hit the brake first and worry about the clutch later, when I actually have to let it idle or downshift and engine brake. When I had to emergency brake in the rain once, the tires were locked up and the engine was stalled long before I even thought about the clutch.
You found someone kind enough to share their internet connection, so you wasted their ink and paper. Nice.
There should be third option [ignore] just to make sure the user doesn't know what the machine will actually do if they press it.
The 83% figure was just used to roughly sort through the VOCs that they tested for in a lab. It will probably have very little impact on the accuracy of the final device.
True that. I went to a high school where there were a lot of kids who were given really nice cars by their family, but I know that some of the nicest cars there were bought through hours of work at low wage jobs and very careful money management.
56K? Your kids are spoiled rotten. I bet you give them a computer that has a heatsink and cooling fan on the processor too. Give them 28.8 if they go to their room without any protest, 14.4 otherwise.
We're not allowed to do anything that even resembles a business transaction. Forget encryption and especially anonymity. You couldn't even log in to your email without giving the world your access credentials. You cannot connect to most parts of the Internet because you might accidentally download a bad word and get in trouble. Sure, hams are capable of creating such a network (it would be slow though) but if it were very useful it would be shut down pretty fast.
So does asphalt, yet it still doesn't seem to resist snow very well.
I'm pretty sure they do that sort of stuff all the time. Earlier this year there was a small scandal regarding a teacher at a local school. The school resource officer involved apparently would not give comments that the news stations wanted, so they got a recording of a *different* police officer and played it while displaying a candid telephoto shot of the first guy. The newspapers also quoted the wrong officer and suggested that they were quoting the correct person.
In some states with medical marijuana laws, those that are allowed to posses pot are also allowed to grow a very limited number of pot plants. Similar laws combined with decriminalization or legalization of small amounts of pot might be a lot more effective at removing money from the illegal drug trade.