Intermodal freight, the wave of the future since the 50s. You're describing doublestacks which have been popular since the 80s, assuming you don't have low bridges and tunnels.
but neither case is going to work out if they have to use helium for buoyancy: there simply isn't enough of it trapped terrestrially to sustain a large number of airships, and it's far too valuable to waste on such frivolities.
Conveniently they have immense air resistance and need large amounts of power to move quickly. So, flooring the engines to speed up makes more heat, more heat means more lift, up you go, slowing down means less heat, down you go.
The problem is a "hot air dirigible" would collapse onto the ground were the heat source to go away. Use a reliable heat source, like a nuke.
what advantage does this technology hold over trains?
Tend to run people over somewhat less often, although partially canceled out by stuff falling on the people below.
In the frozen north, don't have to worry about plowing the rails, ice buildup making stopping difficult.
Derailments, although probably more catastrophic, would be pretty rare due to avalanches, flood washouts, earthquakes. You can hang the fiber optic cables above the derailments rather than below, so less outages.
In theory they could be nearly silent. In practice the tower bearings will be unmaintained and will squeak constantly. But at least in theory...
No ground traffic disruption.
The right-of-way issues are slightly simpler.
Easier to pick up and move elsewhere when the local property tax leaches feel they've found themselves a windfall at your expense.
Theoretically, if you're willing to build very tall towers, you can multitrack to your hearts content without increasing your (expensive) ground footprint.
How about working out the number of grams from one mol of Oxygen(?) atoms? If they all have an atomic mass of ~16 you know they're about 16 grams.:o
Not controllable enough. How you make sure that all atoms are of the "standard isotope" type and you have the correct number of atoms? What "environ conditions" (Buoyancy? gas adsorbtion?) How do know the number of atoms in your "definition" sample doesn't vary over time? Even if pushing to the extreme: what temperature should it have/what predominant electronic state? (higher inner energy, higher mass).
Easy, use a mononuclidic element at water's triple point. Or absolute zero if you'd prefer. Even more fun would be to define it as the freezing point of the material at STP (err, SP I mean) and use whatever thermal radiance you get to redefine the candella so you get to use the same heating rig for both standards.
Gold is a pretty good choice. Theres pretty much only Au-197 and the longest lived (rare) contaminant is Au-195 which has a half life of almost exactly half a year (easy to remember, don't even need to look it up, another way to remember is its half life in days is about its atomic mass).
Gold is not unusually rare or expensive (compared to the labor and equipment costs of the experiment) and is dense so the standards will be small and not have excessive weird buoyancy effects in the air.
To count the atoms you electroplate a controlled DC current at one electron per atom. Or X number of coulombs per kilo. Or Y number of amps for Z number seconds equals one kilo. Electrorefining is not exactly new tech for gold, measuring current and time is a no brainer at current (apologize for the pun) technology levels...
I agree with you that a watt balance is a better theoretical design, but your arguments against a lump of material aren't strong because they're so easy to work around.
The SI unit is officially defined as the weight of a 130-year-old platinum-iridium cylinder in France.
NO, it's not. It is defined as the mass of that cylinder. The weight is the force of attraction between Earth and the cylinder, it's not an intrinsic property of the body. I'd have hoped an article about mass would at least have that right.
To the best of my knowledge they only allow weight comparisons with secondary standards not inertial mass comparisons with that valuable little cylinder. So it is defined as the weight of that cylinder, because that is the only type of measurement you're allowed to make against that standard. If the weight and mass are constant (aside from gravitational field variations, etc) as they seem to be in other experiments, thats all very nice and as a secondary derived theoretical claim you can say that the mass is constant or it's a standard weight, that also happens to mass 1 kilo. They'll never let you test the inertial mass, so you'll never know.
Look at the difference between experiments that test gravitational weight vs inertial mass for an explanation.
Not everyone thinks that averaging the two amounts to sound research
Depends what the journalist means by "research". Averaging values is a perfectly valid experimental technique. It is definitely a very poor theoretical technique.
Everyone above so far is assuming they mean the latest vaporware from Cisco / Juniper / etc. You have to realize these are businessmen and journalists. They are probably talking about fully depreciated 100 megabit FDDI or 17 megaBYTE fiber escon when they say "today". In that case, with 10gig-E links I think I would be doing... exactly what I'm doing now?
Switching red lights to green for everybody on a busy intersection?
Historically those were wired with kill relays such that multiple greens would short out the power supply thus it goes black. This wiring is pretty trivial to accomplish and at least at one point was legally required.
Its also pretty easy to arrange the (solid state or mechanical) relays such that the reds and opposing greens/yellows are in series. So you can't light a green unless the opposing red has current flow. If you ever wondered why a light pole gets 240V power but uses 120V light bulbs, well, now you know.
The trivial upgrade is to replace only the timer unit with a PLC and the (possibly legally mandated) kill relays keep running.
Its possible modern ones don't bother with the whole kill relay thing. It would be trivial to install a second PLC, perhaps not even connected to the network, which has the sole purpose of shutting down the power when it sees something bad is commanded. I'm guessing they aren't tested very often.
The biggest problem is there is no standard and even terminology varies. Does anyone outside of the city I took a microcontroller class in 1993 use the "kill relay" terminology? One of our assignments was to design the "best" microcontroller based traffic light system we could, and then we were given the "correct" answer that being how our local community lights operated.
Breathing machines, heart regulators and whatever else you have planned won't stop functioning if the internet was shut off.
Actually, they will, yes.
Think of spare parts. When was the last time you called / faxed / MAILED an order into Digikey / Mouser / Jameco etc? In "a couple weeks" they could set up a non-VOIP call center to slowly and inaccurately take voice orders over the phone, but for days, commerce will simply shut down. If by some miracle you got an order to Digikey, would they even have a manual process to airmail a contract to China and get a shipping crate back?
The purpose of JIT inventory control is to "save money" by not keeping many spares. So, when the breathing machine needs a new air valve, the heart regulator needs a new weird lithium battery, or whatever else needs something.... it shuts off.
Also think of repair contractors, like the stereotypical Xerox repairman but for breathing machine / heart regulator repair maintenance and upgrades. The bottom level of support is the nurse whom flicks the power switch on and off when it doesn't work. Then its escalated upwards, someone gets an email... errr... a runner is dispatched... whatever. At some point in the escalation procedure it simply will not work without the internet. Think of how 20 years ago IBM folks got jobs on their PDAs, and its much worse now.
So, correct, a working device will keep working. Once it breaks or requires the slightest repair, not so good.
Salary means nothing without knowing what cost of living is wherever he will be living. Where I live (northeastern Wisconsin), I make $37,000, but that is a pretty good salary given the low cost of living.
Hi neighbor. I went to a Cisco router BGP class about a decade ago in Chicago. I live in suburban WI, lab partner lives in downtown Chicago. Compared salaries and he makes twice as much as I made. Later on, compared lifestyles and he was a small step above a homeless person and I lived like a king:
WI: $60K yr, wife and two kids in a medium size house on an acre of land in a very good area (low crime/great schools/great location), two brand new cars, no significant loans except the (small pre housing bubble) mortgage.
IL: $120K yr, tiny one bedroom apartment with wife and kid "want to get a two bedroom but can't afford it", he drove me around town in his princely 15 year old rusty pickup truck, commented about still having hefty student loans and maybe after they're paid off he could afford the rent on a two bdrm apt.
Now of course job opportunities being what they are, ten years later he's probably making $240K, and I'm still making, you guessed it, $60K, but...
People I don't want to be friends with want to friend me which leaves the terrible choice of accepting them, causing other people to wonder why exactly it is that you are friends with this person, or ignore them and give them the satisfaction of knowing you still dislike them.
Even funnier is when they start comparing whom you accept and reject... So the guy I sat next to in "diversity training" for four freaking hours is now annoyed at me for not accepting his friend, when he knows I friended his coworker who sent me exactly one work related email but I liked his sig line so he made the cut.
Even funnier when it spills over into work... I was not involved, but I heard of some pretty serious problems where some people would only friend coworkers or reject coworkers of certain racial ancestry, onsite in office behavior was professional but their facebook activities spilled over into work. (And I bet you're already assuming American White vs American Black but it was actually Indians vs Pakistanis, I am not involved but I understand they do not exactly get along)
it's even worse for people like me who were vegan activists but also were in the military. Come on.
"Don't ask Don't Tell?"
Then there's the ex-girlfriends issue, the MCSE studygroup vs Linux club issue, the "friend both my parole officer and my dealer" issue.
Also I strongly dislike the binary "friend" / "notfriend" situation. Can't they at least make it a small range of integers? I was meaning to delete my account for awhile, the thing that made me do it was this burnout dude from over two decades ago whom I hung out with in study hall a couple times wanted to friend me, and I'm thinking, so this dude and my wife are supposedly on the same level, according to facebook's way of thinking?
P.S. I use "whom" in every post to offend certain people. If this does not apply to you, please disregard the whom and this postscript.
Therefore, senior levels have an abundance of history majors.
The impression I get from reading a lot of old / ancient history books is its all about the battles. Gibbon Thucydides Herodotus JC (Julius Caesar) all "history books" nothing but battle stories. That might have an impact. Modern scholarship seems to cover more ground than military science, but the old stuff, nothing but the equivalent of "action movies".
There are a lot of not-so-smart people with degrees.
Claim: Statistically speaking, the difference in intelligence between those with and without college degrees is large. Do you deny this claim? Because if not, your statement quoted above seems meaningless.
Not meaningless, it means there are a whole heck of a lot of people with degrees (way more than necessary for job training, which is a whole nother topic) thus 10 percent of a very large population, remains a large number.
If we did, you would be born a commoner and spend the rest of your life there, never able to rise to the level of Bill Gates or Barak Obama or one of their assistant managers. Those jobs would be reserved for the nobles while you would be stuck in the factory/office as a laborer.
You are confusing "several orders of magnitude less likely than being struck by lightning" (seriously) with actual class mobility.
This kind of thing did happen in the past, read some historical literature. We only hear about the 1 in a billion now, because of the mass media.
It's one of the few careers that a history degree is good for(history is required so you can make sense of cultural/historical context in codes or conversations.)
Also excellent preparation for special forces, if you want to go military. So said my ex-coworker with that exact background.
You assume that the other people in the establishment took enough notice of you to recognize that you are not the one walking out with your laptop. All it takes is enough confidence to act as if everything is as it should be and almost nobody will question whether or not you own that thing you just picked up.
Want a free laptop? Walk up to someone elses laptop while they're in the can, drink a swig of their coffee, and walk out with the coffee and laptop. No one would drink someone elses coffee, right?
Admittedly I was thinking a lot more about a mostly empty coffee shop. One thats packed and loud is probably worse than cubicles at work, probably worse than an open plan at work.
However it can last a lifetime instead of 3 years the way the battery lasts on the electric hybrid.
Hybrid batteries only last 3 years? Please tell me more!
According to you, my wifes Prius should be on its third battery now.
Not that it really matters, since Toyota guarantees the hybrid powertrain to 10 years...
Talk about making hydraulics last a lifetime, my Government Motors Inc Saturn is only 12 years old and on its 4th set of hydraulic front brakes. Have faith that the engineers specializing in planned obsolescence will find a way to make a hydraulic hybrid only work for 3 years.
But at least the theoretical limit is full efficiency. With most hybrid-electric systems, the theoretical limit is under 100% simply due to resistance of various parts of the circuit and chemical behavior of the batteries.
There are some pretty darn good insulators out there. Think aerogel -- heck, that one even has scalable price vs. performance. You chose density that you can afford (lower: more expensive), trading off performance for better price.
If you demand aerogel for your insulator, I demand liquid helium cooled superconductors for my hybrid wiring and motor magnets.
If you demand theoretical 100% efficient compression (ha ha ha good luck), I demand the use of high-Q factor / low ESR supercapacitors in my hybrid design.
The problem with declaring a theoretical daydream of one design, superior to practical shipping product of a different design, is nothing stops the folks with the non-vaporware actual shipping product from also daydreaming...
It's fine and dandy on paper, but in practice you have to deal with it.
It's not a huge problem over a short period of time, they aren't planning on using the compressed gas to store energy for days or weeks like in an electric car.
The only reason for this system is to allow regenerative braking without the need for expensive batteries, that means the gas only needs to be compressed for minutes before it's release again.
The problem becomes, your compressed air tank now oscillates between -20 degrees and 700 degrees every couple minutes. How many cycles until failure?
industry? Why, I believe it has something to do with telemedicine and the soon to be heard cry from the PTB that American doctors are paid too much (nevermind the ridiculous cost of tuition, student loans, ect). Solution = outsource their asses. Set up a semi interactive TV & PTZ camera grid in front of an examination chair. Hire cheap trained labor to draw blood and perform other menial tasks. The Indian/Taiwanese doctor on the other end of the cameras will examine and collect data via clinic monkey.
Already being done with radiologists in non-rural areas. So, you get an xray after a car accident at 2am and the radiologist isn't there in person to evaluate. No problemo, you have the on call guy connect via his home cablemodem, download the immense file, look at it in the viewer, call the ER doc with the results. Why pay an American radiologist $150K/yr when the guy in Mexico does it for quite a bit less?
The part that mystifies me is "schools, energy grid and public safety networks". For schools, I'm not seeing the killer app that devours bandwidth other than filesharing in the residential dorms at university. For energy grid and pub safety, thats a complete WTF moment. I guess you need at least a T3 to post the local top 10 wanted criminals to a website annually. Or maybe in a natural disaster situation, if all 100K people in my suburban city called the cops simultaneously, and they somehow had 100K operators on duty to take the call, then I guess 13 kilobits/sec per call thats about 1 gig/sec, yeah that would be money well spent.
What I find amazing is not that Facebook isn't secure but people expect it to be. This is a place where you "publish" information on the internet. It is not now and never should have been considered a secure communication channel.
I deleted my facebook acct about a year ago, so excuse my terminology.
Imagine the scenario of a profile picture being changed to goatse.
You are correct that it is "published" to the internet and is not secret-secure.
Where you are wrong, is thinking that it is authorized-secure.
Much like this post was written by VLM. Or, was it? As if you'd know...
...cold fusion or any similar energy generating scheme: one day you'll notice that they'll offer to sell large companies electricity at half the market price.
That market is too highly regulated. Now if they start squirting out refined aluminum for less than what other companies pay for their electric bill... Also "free energy" means infinite ammonium based fertilizers, watch that market too.
Slashdot Mirror
Intermodal freight, the wave of the future since the 50s. You're describing doublestacks which have been popular since the 80s, assuming you don't have low bridges and tunnels.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intermodal_freight_transport
I'm surprised there are no model railroaders on /.
but neither case is going to work out if they have to use helium for buoyancy: there simply isn't enough of it trapped terrestrially to sustain a large number of airships, and it's far too valuable to waste on such frivolities.
Conveniently they have immense air resistance and need large amounts of power to move quickly. So, flooring the engines to speed up makes more heat, more heat means more lift, up you go, slowing down means less heat, down you go.
The problem is a "hot air dirigible" would collapse onto the ground were the heat source to go away. Use a reliable heat source, like a nuke.
what advantage does this technology hold over trains?
Tend to run people over somewhat less often, although partially canceled out by stuff falling on the people below.
In the frozen north, don't have to worry about plowing the rails, ice buildup making stopping difficult.
Derailments, although probably more catastrophic, would be pretty rare due to avalanches, flood washouts, earthquakes. You can hang the fiber optic cables above the derailments rather than below, so less outages.
In theory they could be nearly silent. In practice the tower bearings will be unmaintained and will squeak constantly. But at least in theory...
No ground traffic disruption.
The right-of-way issues are slightly simpler.
Easier to pick up and move elsewhere when the local property tax leaches feel they've found themselves a windfall at your expense.
Theoretically, if you're willing to build very tall towers, you can multitrack to your hearts content without increasing your (expensive) ground footprint.
How about working out the number of grams from one mol of Oxygen(?) atoms? If they all have an atomic mass of ~16 you know they're about 16 grams. :o
Not controllable enough.
How you make sure that all atoms are of the "standard isotope" type and you have the correct number of atoms? What "environ conditions" (Buoyancy? gas adsorbtion?) How do know the number of atoms in your "definition" sample doesn't vary over time? Even if pushing to the extreme: what temperature should it have/what predominant electronic state? (higher inner energy, higher mass).
Easy, use a mononuclidic element at water's triple point. Or absolute zero if you'd prefer. Even more fun would be to define it as the freezing point of the material at STP (err, SP I mean) and use whatever thermal radiance you get to redefine the candella so you get to use the same heating rig for both standards.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mononuclidic_element
Gold is a pretty good choice. Theres pretty much only Au-197 and the longest lived (rare) contaminant is Au-195 which has a half life of almost exactly half a year (easy to remember, don't even need to look it up, another way to remember is its half life in days is about its atomic mass).
Gold is not unusually rare or expensive (compared to the labor and equipment costs of the experiment) and is dense so the standards will be small and not have excessive weird buoyancy effects in the air.
To count the atoms you electroplate a controlled DC current at one electron per atom. Or X number of coulombs per kilo. Or Y number of amps for Z number seconds equals one kilo. Electrorefining is not exactly new tech for gold, measuring current and time is a no brainer at current (apologize for the pun) technology levels...
I agree with you that a watt balance is a better theoretical design, but your arguments against a lump of material aren't strong because they're so easy to work around.
The SI unit is officially defined as the weight of a 130-year-old platinum-iridium cylinder in France.
NO, it's not. It is defined as the mass of that cylinder. The weight is the force of attraction between Earth and the cylinder, it's not an intrinsic property of the body. I'd have hoped an article about mass would at least have that right.
To the best of my knowledge they only allow weight comparisons with secondary standards not inertial mass comparisons with that valuable little cylinder. So it is defined as the weight of that cylinder, because that is the only type of measurement you're allowed to make against that standard. If the weight and mass are constant (aside from gravitational field variations, etc) as they seem to be in other experiments, thats all very nice and as a secondary derived theoretical claim you can say that the mass is constant or it's a standard weight, that also happens to mass 1 kilo. They'll never let you test the inertial mass, so you'll never know.
Look at the difference between experiments that test gravitational weight vs inertial mass for an explanation.
Not everyone thinks that averaging the two amounts to sound research
Depends what the journalist means by "research". Averaging values is a perfectly valid experimental technique. It is definitely a very poor theoretical technique.
What is "100 times faster than today."?
Everyone above so far is assuming they mean the latest vaporware from Cisco / Juniper / etc. You have to realize these are businessmen and journalists. They are probably talking about fully depreciated 100 megabit FDDI or 17 megaBYTE fiber escon when they say "today". In that case, with 10gig-E links I think I would be doing ... exactly what I'm doing now?
Switching red lights to green for everybody on a busy intersection?
Historically those were wired with kill relays such that multiple greens would short out the power supply thus it goes black. This wiring is pretty trivial to accomplish and at least at one point was legally required.
Its also pretty easy to arrange the (solid state or mechanical) relays such that the reds and opposing greens/yellows are in series. So you can't light a green unless the opposing red has current flow. If you ever wondered why a light pole gets 240V power but uses 120V light bulbs, well, now you know.
The trivial upgrade is to replace only the timer unit with a PLC and the (possibly legally mandated) kill relays keep running.
Its possible modern ones don't bother with the whole kill relay thing. It would be trivial to install a second PLC, perhaps not even connected to the network, which has the sole purpose of shutting down the power when it sees something bad is commanded. I'm guessing they aren't tested very often.
The biggest problem is there is no standard and even terminology varies. Does anyone outside of the city I took a microcontroller class in 1993 use the "kill relay" terminology? One of our assignments was to design the "best" microcontroller based traffic light system we could, and then we were given the "correct" answer that being how our local community lights operated.
Breathing machines, heart regulators and whatever else you have planned won't stop functioning if the internet was shut off.
Actually, they will, yes.
Think of spare parts. When was the last time you called / faxed / MAILED an order into Digikey / Mouser / Jameco etc? In "a couple weeks" they could set up a non-VOIP call center to slowly and inaccurately take voice orders over the phone, but for days, commerce will simply shut down. If by some miracle you got an order to Digikey, would they even have a manual process to airmail a contract to China and get a shipping crate back?
The purpose of JIT inventory control is to "save money" by not keeping many spares. So, when the breathing machine needs a new air valve, the heart regulator needs a new weird lithium battery, or whatever else needs something.... it shuts off.
Also think of repair contractors, like the stereotypical Xerox repairman but for breathing machine / heart regulator repair maintenance and upgrades. The bottom level of support is the nurse whom flicks the power switch on and off when it doesn't work. Then its escalated upwards, someone gets an email ... errr ... a runner is dispatched ... whatever. At some point in the escalation procedure it simply will not work without the internet. Think of how 20 years ago IBM folks got jobs on their PDAs, and its much worse now.
So, correct, a working device will keep working. Once it breaks or requires the slightest repair, not so good.
This is troubling you because you are letting Facebook influence the way that you're thinking.
Well, yeah, thats kind of the point of "playing". If you don't want to play, you very well should take your ball and go home, as I did.
It is not some official list for keeping track of what your relationships are with the people that you know.
Thats open for debate. I think the majority hold the opposite opinion.
Salary means nothing without knowing what cost of living is wherever he will be living. Where I live (northeastern Wisconsin), I make $37,000, but that is a pretty good salary given the low cost of living.
Hi neighbor. I went to a Cisco router BGP class about a decade ago in Chicago. I live in suburban WI, lab partner lives in downtown Chicago. Compared salaries and he makes twice as much as I made. Later on, compared lifestyles and he was a small step above a homeless person and I lived like a king:
WI: $60K yr, wife and two kids in a medium size house on an acre of land in a very good area (low crime/great schools/great location), two brand new cars, no significant loans except the (small pre housing bubble) mortgage.
IL: $120K yr, tiny one bedroom apartment with wife and kid "want to get a two bedroom but can't afford it", he drove me around town in his princely 15 year old rusty pickup truck, commented about still having hefty student loans and maybe after they're paid off he could afford the rent on a two bdrm apt.
Now of course job opportunities being what they are, ten years later he's probably making $240K, and I'm still making, you guessed it, $60K, but...
People I don't want to be friends with want to friend me which leaves the terrible choice of accepting them, causing other people to wonder why exactly it is that you are friends with this person, or ignore them and give them the satisfaction of knowing you still dislike them.
Even funnier is when they start comparing whom you accept and reject ... So the guy I sat next to in "diversity training" for four freaking hours is now annoyed at me for not accepting his friend, when he knows I friended his coworker who sent me exactly one work related email but I liked his sig line so he made the cut.
Even funnier when it spills over into work... I was not involved, but I heard of some pretty serious problems where some people would only friend coworkers or reject coworkers of certain racial ancestry, onsite in office behavior was professional but their facebook activities spilled over into work. (And I bet you're already assuming American White vs American Black but it was actually Indians vs Pakistanis, I am not involved but I understand they do not exactly get along)
it's even worse for people like me who were vegan activists but also were in the military. Come on.
"Don't ask Don't Tell?"
Then there's the ex-girlfriends issue, the MCSE studygroup vs Linux club issue, the "friend both my parole officer and my dealer" issue.
Also I strongly dislike the binary "friend" / "notfriend" situation. Can't they at least make it a small range of integers? I was meaning to delete my account for awhile, the thing that made me do it was this burnout dude from over two decades ago whom I hung out with in study hall a couple times wanted to friend me, and I'm thinking, so this dude and my wife are supposedly on the same level, according to facebook's way of thinking?
P.S. I use "whom" in every post to offend certain people. If this does not apply to you, please disregard the whom and this postscript.
You would think someone this pretentious would at least make an effort to know the difference between who and whom.
No, I intentionally do it to piss people off. Works pretty well!
Therefore, senior levels have an abundance of history majors.
The impression I get from reading a lot of old / ancient history books is its all about the battles. Gibbon Thucydides Herodotus JC (Julius Caesar) all "history books" nothing but battle stories. That might have an impact. Modern scholarship seems to cover more ground than military science, but the old stuff, nothing but the equivalent of "action movies".
There are a lot of not-so-smart people with degrees.
Claim: Statistically speaking, the difference in intelligence between those with and without college degrees is large. Do you deny this claim? Because if not, your statement quoted above seems meaningless.
Not meaningless, it means there are a whole heck of a lot of people with degrees (way more than necessary for job training, which is a whole nother topic) thus 10 percent of a very large population, remains a large number.
We don't have a class (aka caste) system.
If we did, you would be born a commoner and spend the rest of your life there, never able to rise to the level of Bill Gates or Barak Obama or one of their assistant managers. Those jobs would be reserved for the nobles while you would be stuck in the factory/office as a laborer.
You are confusing "several orders of magnitude less likely than being struck by lightning" (seriously) with actual class mobility.
This kind of thing did happen in the past, read some historical literature. We only hear about the 1 in a billion now, because of the mass media.
It's one of the few careers that a history degree is good for(history is required so you can make sense of cultural/historical context in codes or conversations.)
Also excellent preparation for special forces, if you want to go military. So said my ex-coworker with that exact background.
You assume that the other people in the establishment took enough notice of you to recognize that you are not the one walking out with your laptop. All it takes is enough confidence to act as if everything is as it should be and almost nobody will question whether or not you own that thing you just picked up.
Want a free laptop? Walk up to someone elses laptop while they're in the can, drink a swig of their coffee, and walk out with the coffee and laptop. No one would drink someone elses coffee, right?
Admittedly I was thinking a lot more about a mostly empty coffee shop. One thats packed and loud is probably worse than cubicles at work, probably worse than an open plan at work.
However it can last a lifetime instead of 3 years the way the battery lasts on the electric hybrid.
Hybrid batteries only last 3 years? Please tell me more!
According to you, my wifes Prius should be on its third battery now.
Not that it really matters, since Toyota guarantees the hybrid powertrain to 10 years...
Talk about making hydraulics last a lifetime, my Government Motors Inc Saturn is only 12 years old and on its 4th set of hydraulic front brakes. Have faith that the engineers specializing in planned obsolescence will find a way to make a hydraulic hybrid only work for 3 years.
But at least the theoretical limit is full efficiency. With most hybrid-electric systems, the theoretical limit is under 100% simply due to resistance of various parts of the circuit and chemical behavior of the batteries.
There are some pretty darn good insulators out there. Think aerogel -- heck, that one even has scalable price vs. performance. You chose density that you can afford (lower: more expensive), trading off performance for better price.
If you demand aerogel for your insulator, I demand liquid helium cooled superconductors for my hybrid wiring and motor magnets.
If you demand theoretical 100% efficient compression (ha ha ha good luck), I demand the use of high-Q factor / low ESR supercapacitors in my hybrid design.
The problem with declaring a theoretical daydream of one design, superior to practical shipping product of a different design, is nothing stops the folks with the non-vaporware actual shipping product from also daydreaming...
It's not a huge problem over a short period of time, they aren't planning on using the compressed gas to store energy for days or weeks like in an electric car.
The only reason for this system is to allow regenerative braking without the need for expensive batteries, that means the gas only needs to be compressed for minutes before it's release again.
The problem becomes, your compressed air tank now oscillates between -20 degrees and 700 degrees every couple minutes. How many cycles until failure?
industry? Why, I believe it has something to do with telemedicine and the soon to be heard cry from the PTB that American doctors are paid too much (nevermind the ridiculous cost of tuition, student loans, ect). Solution = outsource their asses. Set up a semi interactive TV & PTZ camera grid in front of an examination chair. Hire cheap trained labor to draw blood and perform other menial tasks. The Indian/Taiwanese doctor on the other end of the cameras will examine and collect data via clinic monkey.
Already being done with radiologists in non-rural areas. So, you get an xray after a car accident at 2am and the radiologist isn't there in person to evaluate. No problemo, you have the on call guy connect via his home cablemodem, download the immense file, look at it in the viewer, call the ER doc with the results. Why pay an American radiologist $150K/yr when the guy in Mexico does it for quite a bit less?
The part that mystifies me is "schools, energy grid and public safety networks". For schools, I'm not seeing the killer app that devours bandwidth other than filesharing in the residential dorms at university. For energy grid and pub safety, thats a complete WTF moment. I guess you need at least a T3 to post the local top 10 wanted criminals to a website annually. Or maybe in a natural disaster situation, if all 100K people in my suburban city called the cops simultaneously, and they somehow had 100K operators on duty to take the call, then I guess 13 kilobits/sec per call thats about 1 gig/sec, yeah that would be money well spent.
What I find amazing is not that Facebook isn't secure but people expect it to be. This is a place where you "publish" information on the internet. It is not now and never should have been considered a secure communication channel.
I deleted my facebook acct about a year ago, so excuse my terminology.
Imagine the scenario of a profile picture being changed to goatse.
You are correct that it is "published" to the internet and is not secret-secure.
Where you are wrong, is thinking that it is authorized-secure.
Much like this post was written by VLM. Or, was it? As if you'd know...
...cold fusion or any similar energy generating scheme: one day you'll notice that they'll offer to sell large companies electricity at half the market price.
That market is too highly regulated. Now if they start squirting out refined aluminum for less than what other companies pay for their electric bill... Also "free energy" means infinite ammonium based fertilizers, watch that market too.