Digital photos also do not degrade with the passage of time.
That's the funny part about this discussion, all the non-photographers whom think color process pics will never degrade, as permanent as the Egyptian pyramids, blah blah.
True, PROPERLY PROCESSED black and white prints will last forever. Unfortunately the only way to tell if a B+W print was properly processed to remove all the unexposed silver and processing chemicals, and was really printed on genuinely acid-free paper, is to wait and see if it turns brown and/or stains and/or crumbles away. Pro processors are trustworthy (or.. are they?) where as quickie mart, probably not.
Color process prints and negatives degrade pretty fast under "real world" conditions... Unlikely to be viewable in a hundred years. Properly stored, maybe a bit longer. 2015, no problem. 2050, start worrying. 3000, forget about it.
At least digital has a chance of survival, if the owner recopies every year to new media, and new formats as necessary. Conveniently cost of storage implodes every year so this is no big deal. Wonder what will happen someday when that cost stops dropping.
There is a lot of places in here where people mentioning Tesla are getting modded into the dirt. Is there some Edison fanatic out there with mod points today or is there something I'm missing? Genuinely asking.
A tesla coil is a simple resonant circuit, which in his day was basically a spark-gap radio transmitter, coupled to a quarter-wave helical/vertical quarter wave antenna. So, you make the resonator out of low resistance wire to get high efficiency, and make the quarter wave antenna high resistance/impedance to get crazy high voltages for a given power level. Works purely on EM waves coupling to the quarter wave antenna, not magnetically. It's just an old fashioned radio transmitter connected to a radio receiver antenna that operates at power levels that make sparks come out of the receiver antenna.
The amazing never before seen device in the fine article, is a simple magnetic power transformer with non-coaxial windings cut in half, more or less, one half on the charging device, one half in the ipod/phone/laptop/car/whatever, with an air core instead of power transformer steel. That is why the cores are like foot on a side to charge an ipod... A close coupled steel lamination power transformer with "foot" dimensions will pass double digit kilowatts, this thing only passes "watts" at best.
The device is claimed to be a magnetic device, but the windings and "air core" will make a poor antenna, so it actually outputs plenty of EM interference. Regular transformers don't emit much interference because it's easy to add a copper shield around the windings to prevent EM radiation, the frequencies of operation are low enough (25, 50, or 60 Hz) that the windings are incomprehensibly bad antennas, and the core laminations are too thick (eddy currents) to work well at higher frequencies. This "magnetic" gadget has none of those inherent design features to prevent EM radiation, therefore it's a scam to say its magnetic.
So, they're either getting mod-ed down because the marketing claims it's magnetic and everyone knows teslas coil was a purely electromagnetic device, or, for slashvertisement purposes opinions critical of the false claim that its a magnetic non-EM radiator are being suppressed. Or they're being mod-ed down for the usual human stupidities on both sides. Hard to say if its overall good or bad.
(And 20% power loss from transmitter to receiver is pretty horrible efficiency.)
So... My gasoline car engine, is at best, 20% efficient, so it dumps 4 times the heat, and takes about 7 hours at highway speed to empty the tank. That requires a giant finned liquid cooled radiator with thermostatic control, coolant pump, running under pressure at 250 degrees, with electrical auxiliary fan, and it needs to be run outdoors in moving air or it will overheat.
Historically, even engines at 1/4 the power (1/4 the heat output) still required a similar coolant system, just maybe it ran unpressurized at 180 degrees, maybe no thermostat, maybe no electrically controlled aux fan.
An electric charger will still need to be outside, need actively pumped liquid coolant system the size of the entire front of the car with an electric fan running continuously. Probably not as elaborate of a cooling system as a modern gasoline car, but pretty complicated none the less.. It will not be able to dissipate that kind of power in an enclosed garage, other than maybe in the dead of winter. No idea how you'll keep animals and homeless away from the heat. Watching rain sizzle on the parked car will be weirdly cool. On the bright side you'll never need to scrape snow/ice off the windows, it'll be melted off.
You know that our brain and nerves work electromagnetically
Actually, no. Your eyes are quite sensitive to EM waves in the just sub 1um range, and as a secondary effect, EM waves in the vague range of a kilowatt per square meter heat your skin just as much as sunlight does. Vision, and bulk thermal heating effects. That's about it for EM radiation effects on the body.
Your neurons (assuming earth species) work on electrical potentials in the vaguely mV-ish range plus or minus an order of magnitude or two or so.
Now, moving a charge carrier thru an immense magnetic field makes an electric field, that is whats theorized to cause any effects of "magnetism on the body".
There is some pretty crackpotty stuff about certain organic chemicals and enzymes having a small dipole moment that may or may not react differently under extreme fields, but probably not even in a lab. If it were relevant, living things would probably evolve to be very sensitive to their magnetic alignment, which they seem not to be. If I got 0.005% better liver enzyme function if I slept aligned N-S, I probably would have evolved to sense that to get the free bonus, but thats not happened.
and many processes in our body do not expect a strong magnetic field on the outside.
The electrical signals in your brain make femto-tesla range fields, charges that move in a non-straight line, etc. So... uh... every brain thats ever existed has always floated in a femto tesla range field of its own making. So that certainly sets a low range of concern of about 1 fT below which our own brains create a field stronger than the external field of concern.
Then there's the.1 mT -ish range earth's magnetic field. Which occasionally drops to zero. And probably, occasionally goes over it's normal range due to magnetic storms and stuff. Anything from the earth is green and organic and therefore good, much like, say, hemlock, or poisonous mushrooms. So, good old mother nature sets low range of 1 mT or so. It seems most species can't evolve a useful sense organ for "mT" level fields, strong indication fields of that strength are not biologically active.
A kids toy bar magnet runs around single digit mT range, so I'd worry more about the red lead paint on the "N" side of the magnet, than the actual field itself.
When you break out the liquid helium, then I'd worry about cryo accidents, suffocation / oxygen displacement accidents, and of course accidentally placing a body part between the "T" range magnet and something made of iron. Way down on the list of concerns, maybe there would be worries about the biological effect of the field.
How strong is still OK
Here's an interesting link from some green group, which may or may not be flaky, but seems remarkably reasonable to an engineer like me, and suggests fields stronger than current model MRI range are getting troublesome to humans.
Well, greenie luddites are probably as technophobic, and ignorant of what they fear, as a group can get, and they seem only mildly concerned about the highest field levels from the most powerful magnets being built in today's laboratories, everything else you'll ever experience is probably a factor of ten thousand to ten million lower field and probably a factor of more than thousands to millions safer, since risk is not strictly linear since we live in a planetary field and our own nerv
Chances are the EM waves for this device couldn't leave a room
Ham radio is just not popular here on slashdot, oddly enough. Used to be a very popular hobby amongst the technologically advanced, now even the most obvious basics seem forgotten...
FYI a couple watts in the 40 meter band (where this device operates) will easily communicate/interfere around the world... google for various combinations of "ham radio" QRP "40 meters" 40M ARRL "five 5 watts". The idea that "watt level" 7 mhz signals won't leave a room, is very incorrect.
it ought to just work. Instead you're all bashing it and claiming it's a bad/stupid idea and implying they ought to just scrap the whole project.
It sets off all the scam detectors for anyone that knows anything about power transmission, magnetic induction, medical diathermy machines, power transformer design, air core RF chokes/transmission lines, pretty much everyone in the field but gullible journalists.
No explanation of how it works. No reason I've seen that explains why this would not have rolled out, say, 60 years ago to recharge WWII era army walkie-talkies. Nothing new in the magnetic world other than improvements in permanent magnet material science, mu-metal shielding is "cheaper", and superconductors, all of which have nothing to do with this product. Well, there are some advances in higher permeability materials, but the whole point of this product is to use an air core inductor. So, what are they doing with 1890-ish era technology that hasn't been done until now?
How great it would be, if only it were true, is more appropriate for religious recruitment than electrical engineering. Of course it's possible to make jokes about optimistic electronic device data sheets, but this is carrying it a bit far.
The overall effect is very similar to handing slick marketing brochure for a perpetual motion machine to a P.E. or thermodynamics engineer. Just gonna get laughed at.
at least you wouldn't have to worry about your kid putting a fork in a wall socket.
Adding up all my wireless devices, a hundred watts delivered might be a power level that would be useful to me. Less than that, don't bother, more than that... read on for why that would be bad.
So, at 20% efficient, my 100 watts delivered, dissipates 400 watts into heat. I'm guessing a surface area of a square foot or so. It'll be a nice space heater on 24 hours a day. Not so bad in northern climates in the winter. Not so good in the summer. A couple hundred watts with no ventilation, lay some papers on it, maybe not hot enough to ignite the paper, but easily hot enough to melt xerox/laserprinter toner.
I would worry a lot more about my wedding ring acting as a single turn transformer secondary. Lets figure it would adsorb the full power level. The effect on my finger would be roughly like, touch skin w/ 100 watt soldering gun and pull trigger. In other words, if I move my hand quickly to place and remove my recharging devices, in less than a second, it will be uncomfortable but no damage due to thermal mass if starting from body temperature. But, hold my finger there for ten seconds, serious burn damage, hold my hand there a minute and its definitely emergency room time/burn clean off. Also for a good time toss my round key ring on the table next to my phone, I estimate red hot in about 20 seconds if I guessed an appropriate wire gauge equivalent for my keyring's ring...
Only trouble tough are the HIGH prices and crappy movies.
Best one line summary of the whole "HD" problem.
Like the vast majority of the population, I don't go to theaters or buy DVDs. My reasons:
1) The price is too high for what I get. I can get a great zillion hour video game for the cost of a B-R disk or a theater visit. Or fine dining at the restaurant w/ my wife. Parts for my PC. A loud and exciting power tool from Home Depot. Hand me the cash for a B-R disk, and about the last thing I'd consider spending the cash on, is a B-R disk.
2) Most movies are crappy. After wasting an hour or two of my extremely limited free time watching a crappy formulaic rehashed predictable Hollywood sequel movie, I want my free time back! I always feel remorse that I wasted my evening watching a movie.
Despite my ability to download pretty much any movie out there for free, you literally could not pay me to watch 99.9% of whats out there, and the last 0.1% is not worth very much money to me, certainly not as much as the movie-industrial complex wants me to pay.
Movie industrial complex answer to my concerns: Um, OK, I'm sure you'll buy it if its in higher resolution. WTF?
A 7 foot dia balloon lifts about a dozen pounds and takes about two hundred cu feet to fill. At about a quarter a cubic foot, it's going to cost about fifty bucks for the helium.
Helium is NOT cheap... Looking at more than $2 per hour per balloon just for the helium. And helium is not a renewable resource.
I don't understand why the author calls the foundational elements of game design atoms.
I think it's a requirement of buzzword-labels that they either make no sense or dilute the meaning of the original word, or both.
Book author is hot for Lua. Lua's data structures innards are kind of lisp list-ish and one funny part of the wikipedia article explains that in small part, they invented Lua because lisp's syntax is "too hard". Lisp lists are made of atoms. So, to summarize, author likes Lua, Lua's list innards are lispish, lisp lists are made of atoms.
The author probably couldn't help himself but to call the individual foundational elements of game design, atoms.
The IP address was hers, with no WiFi, no NAT, and a password-protected Windows box
So far, not compelling at all. All they really have is they picked an ip address out of the air. Success is about as likely as picking a random ten digit number and filing a suit against whomever has it.
The username chosen was the one she's used online traditionally for 16 years.
Ah, that one item, combined with the rest, she's screwed. There's a lesson here about selecting usernames when doing something questionable.
What he and his employees engage in is tax avoidance, which is perfectly legal. Tax avoidance is simply following the letter of the law and avoiding the incurring tax liability......... If I ever make the kind of money where it makes sense to do so, you bet your ass I would hire a tax lawyer and take advantage of the law to the my benefit.
It's not that complicated, or expensive, dude. For example, you pay a higher cap gains tax rate on assets owned more than a year (long term rate vs short term rate). So, given the choice of selling stock after owning it 364 days or after 367 days, I'd wait the three days.
Another way is to offset cap gains with realized cap losses. Lets say you're retired and some investments made money, some lost. Well, when you cash in the winners, make sure to cash in the correct ratio of losers, so as to have a net cap gain of zero, thus no tax need be paid. Worst case would be to sell all the winners and pay a nice high tax, and next year sell all the losers and have an immense capital loss that exceeds your ability to apply to your taxes.
If you can itemize, you don't have to pay income tax on money paid to the bank as mortgage interest (paying down principle has no effect, beyond obviously paying less interest next year). So, if you own a home and itemize (Schedule A) you are pretty much by definition a "tax avoider" since you could pay taxes on your mortgage interest merely by not itemizing Schedule A.
Also any time you decline to participate in commerce because the taxes would eliminate the profit, you are a "tax avoider". So, if you have the option to buy property, and its all profitable until you add in the high property taxes, so you don't buy the property, you are a "tax avoider". Same with not smoking, not drinking, not buying much gasoline.
When you sell them for more than the face value, you get taxed on what you sold them for. Which is what the people in this article did.
This is pretty clearly tax evasion.
Your two quotes are logically inconsistent. I say either you pay the correct tax and its all good, or you evade the tax and possibly pay the consequences. Your quotes say you do both at the same time because gold was involved?
Imagine if North Korea's missile launch hadn't been a failure; that's why we don't want this kind of information getting out.
Why bother?
Its senseless to claim that NK will never figure it out without help. They will, and much faster and cheaper than USA private industry ever could, due to staggering disparity in labor costs and coercion (fellow korean komrades, you will make this work or your kids don't eat this month, especially since we assigned ten of you for each US scientist, etc etc). Not even a fair race, more like an absolute rout of the US private industry.
If space-X can do it in a couple years, NK will do it in a couple months, tops.
If NK launches on July 3rd instead of July 4th, is that a heroic victory for the US government? No. Pushing out the problem deadline a very short amount of time does not by any means make it go away, plus it adds the problem of destroying your own industry to your plate of problems. Since NK with missiles is a big problem, why not let your own industry succeed, so you don't have to worry about that problem in addition to the MK missile problem at the same time?
Sort of like, you can "only" take a.45 cal to the head, or you can help someone else out and take a.50 cal to the head. Which shot is better?
Surely then, should they choose to sell these they'll pay income tax on any profit they make.
Not necessarily. For example, there is no law that I can't buy a laptop "worth" $1000 from someone for $10 (assuming they're not fencing stolen goods, etc, etc)
That kind of stupidity happens all the time at yard sales, where "ugly old painting" is bought for $10 by someone whom recognizes it as an original Van Gogh or whatever. Somebody buys a worthless old postcard from paris for 50 cents because they have special knowledge that the cancelled rare stamp is worth 50 bucks but the seller has no idea. That is no tax dodge.
The tax dodge is when somebody far enough down the line eventually trades the "$10 coin" for $1000 of federal reserve notes and doesn't pay the capital gains tax.
The US constitution specifically states that gold an silver are legal tender.
[citation needed]
Article one, section ten, clause one (aka the contracts clause) "No State shall enter into" (long list of naughtyness) "make any Thing but gold and silver Coin a Tender in Payment of Debts;"
American workers are taxed on the dollar value of their earnings - this is typically payment in cash, but if you receive non-monetary compensation as part of your employment, you're still responsible for paying taxes on the dollar value of that compensation.
Which was the subject of not one, but two recent slashdot stories where the IRS would enjoy taxing individuals for their portion of company provided cell phone service used for personal use, non-monetary compensation.
Also there is ample tax case law about unusually low valued "gifts" to avoid gift and inheritance taxes. The dude is either liable for violating minimum wage laws, or not paying gift taxes, or is falsifying his financial documents. How he accounts for buying 1 oz gold coins for $1000 and paying his employees at "$20" is going to be pretty weird on ye ole income statement, unless he declares a profit of $980 and pays the appropriate tax on that profit...
summarizes the current situation. Pretty much, nothing but a lot of wouldn't it be cool. Its the chemistry version of astronomy students pondering how cool it would be to have a warp drive, or poli-sci students dreaming of true communism.
It is a geometrical-numerological approach to chemistry, encouraged by occasional past success. "If it looks cool to a human being, it must be chemically useful".
Benzene is attractively symmetric and cool looking and is also pretty vital. On a really large scale DNA is pretty cool looking and does come in handy, mostly because its self replicating (with a little help). Little lego building blocks of NaCl are pretty and industrially important. A pretty matrix of silicon is very handy. Similarily, a pretty handful of silicone is way off the chemistry topic here but also enjoyable (is this like the worst slashdot joke ever?)
On the other hand, there are plenty of examples, such as anthracene, with structures that look really super duper cool, but are more or less useless. Add fullerenes to that list of cool looking, mostly useless structures.
linux installed fine, but without working sound. You killed your linux installation through attempting to update video drivers. windows installed fine, but without working LAN drivers. I am assuming you corrected this and installed proper ATI drivers without crashing your system.
Objectively, how is your Linux experience any better than Windows?
Objectively, for linux, don't update the video drivers. You know the old routine, "doc it hurts when I move my arm like this" doc says "well, then don't move your arm like this". Other than gamers, does anyone really need 3D drivers, etc?
Objectively, for windows, you type "apt-get install madwifi-module" and 10 seconds later you're all done. No, just kidding ha ha ha, windows doesn't work like that, you get the LAN drivers working by going to the company website (assuming it's still online), selecting the english language version and/or cut and pasting all the text into the babelfish, registering your email for spam reception to get an account, watch a dozen stupid flash animations (and ads), clicking around approximately one million times, downloading the LAN drivers in some weird compressed format, installing winrar to uncompress the distribution file, run some goofy GUI program that requires a.NET install just to load a freaking LAN driver that incidentally changes your web browser homepage to some.ru bride site, adds an icon to your screen for AOL dialup, and reroutes citbank.com to some.info site, then rebooting a couple times. Err, um, wait, how am I gonna download the LAN drivers without working LAN drivers. Like layers of an onion, deeper and deeper.
Sounds like overall, the windows experience will be much worse, stay with linux.
It would seem much easier to vacuum distill benzene out of the buckywire product than iron, because of the difference in boiling points. If 80 degrees C is still too hot for buckywires, then vacuum distillation will work at a lower temperature. So the technology to separate the good from the bad is much easier with the benzene process so it'll probably be done better.
Benzene traps are simple cheap and easy to use (well, relatively anyway), whereas nanoparticle "traps" are basically expensive filters that may or may not work and or be maintained, so just blowing filtered N2 thru the product and cleaning the contaminated N2 stream would probably work pretty well. Recycling benzene is simple, but I think all you can do with nanoparticles is bury them or maybe dissolve the whole filter in a super strong acid. So, trapping / recycling bad stuff using the benzene process is much simpler and easier to do, so it'll probably be done better.
Finally monitoring benzene levels (to verify your containment is working, detect when it fails) is pretty trivial, but monitoring nanoparticle contamination levels is pretty much a mystery or at least not standardized. And when you have a spill, the fire department and EPA know exactly what to do with spilled benzene but would be mystified by nanoparticles. So, when the bad stuff inevitably gets released into the environment, "we" know exactly how to handle the benzene process, but not the nanoparticle process.
Making eco-judgements about a chemistry topic, when all you can base it on is sloganeering like benzene is bad, is not going to result in useful judgments.
Benzene and many derivatives, are just as toxic (if not more so) than a lot of metals.
That's about as vague of a "statement" as can be made, but if you really believe it is true, we can set up a little wager and I'll wash my hands in a bucket of pure benzene if you'll agree to wash your hands or any other appendage with a mercury organometallic and we'll see who ends up healthier. Or if you don't like mercury organometallics, I'll let you chose any soluble lead compound. Or, how about a tasty ionic Uranium compound?
I'm sure something like this exists but I haven't looked too hard for it. The main problem with a concept like this is that it's hard to make it globally playable, keep privacy concerns in mind, and enjoyable as a game.
How hard can it be to port the GTA series to the iphone? Take out the car chases (seriously, how could that possibly work?) and add some sort of GTA:CTW dealing minigame that you can trade with other real world players that are reasonably physically near? Place minigames and missions around town that are triggered by approaching their location? If you are in the top X% of "points" you get to place those minigames / missions / treasures / dealers / virtual (?) weapons in your local area, subject to meta moderation by others to verify you're following various rules? This does not seem terribly difficult, and seems blindingly obvious, at least to me.
Other themes would probably work like some kind of spy-vs-spy thing, or some kind of comic book hero theme, or maybe a vampire theme that can only be played after dark.
The problem with the game really though was you were expected to say travel 5 miles to progress the adventure in the game.
Some call that exercise, not a "problem". I'm just saying your happiness is based on your preconceived expectations... I have a semi-long distance runner friend whom gets bored on long runs... Your "problem" would be his "solution".
Slashdot Mirror
Digital photos also do not degrade with the passage of time.
That's the funny part about this discussion, all the non-photographers whom think color process pics will never degrade, as permanent as the Egyptian pyramids, blah blah.
True, PROPERLY PROCESSED black and white prints will last forever. Unfortunately the only way to tell if a B+W print was properly processed to remove all the unexposed silver and processing chemicals, and was really printed on genuinely acid-free paper, is to wait and see if it turns brown and/or stains and/or crumbles away. Pro processors are trustworthy (or .. are they?) where as quickie mart, probably not.
Color process prints and negatives degrade pretty fast under "real world" conditions... Unlikely to be viewable in a hundred years. Properly stored, maybe a bit longer. 2015, no problem. 2050, start worrying. 3000, forget about it.
At least digital has a chance of survival, if the owner recopies every year to new media, and new formats as necessary. Conveniently cost of storage implodes every year so this is no big deal. Wonder what will happen someday when that cost stops dropping.
There is a lot of places in here where people mentioning Tesla are getting modded into the dirt. Is there some Edison fanatic out there with mod points today or is there something I'm missing? Genuinely asking.
A tesla coil is a simple resonant circuit, which in his day was basically a spark-gap radio transmitter, coupled to a quarter-wave helical/vertical quarter wave antenna. So, you make the resonator out of low resistance wire to get high efficiency, and make the quarter wave antenna high resistance/impedance to get crazy high voltages for a given power level. Works purely on EM waves coupling to the quarter wave antenna, not magnetically. It's just an old fashioned radio transmitter connected to a radio receiver antenna that operates at power levels that make sparks come out of the receiver antenna.
The amazing never before seen device in the fine article, is a simple magnetic power transformer with non-coaxial windings cut in half, more or less, one half on the charging device, one half in the ipod/phone/laptop/car/whatever, with an air core instead of power transformer steel. That is why the cores are like foot on a side to charge an ipod... A close coupled steel lamination power transformer with "foot" dimensions will pass double digit kilowatts, this thing only passes "watts" at best.
The device is claimed to be a magnetic device, but the windings and "air core" will make a poor antenna, so it actually outputs plenty of EM interference. Regular transformers don't emit much interference because it's easy to add a copper shield around the windings to prevent EM radiation, the frequencies of operation are low enough (25, 50, or 60 Hz) that the windings are incomprehensibly bad antennas, and the core laminations are too thick (eddy currents) to work well at higher frequencies. This "magnetic" gadget has none of those inherent design features to prevent EM radiation, therefore it's a scam to say its magnetic.
So, they're either getting mod-ed down because the marketing claims it's magnetic and everyone knows teslas coil was a purely electromagnetic device, or, for slashvertisement purposes opinions critical of the false claim that its a magnetic non-EM radiator are being suppressed. Or they're being mod-ed down for the usual human stupidities on both sides. Hard to say if its overall good or bad.
(And 20% power loss from transmitter to receiver is pretty horrible efficiency.)
So... My gasoline car engine, is at best, 20% efficient, so it dumps 4 times the heat, and takes about 7 hours at highway speed to empty the tank. That requires a giant finned liquid cooled radiator with thermostatic control, coolant pump, running under pressure at 250 degrees, with electrical auxiliary fan, and it needs to be run outdoors in moving air or it will overheat.
Historically, even engines at 1/4 the power (1/4 the heat output) still required a similar coolant system, just maybe it ran unpressurized at 180 degrees, maybe no thermostat, maybe no electrically controlled aux fan.
An electric charger will still need to be outside, need actively pumped liquid coolant system the size of the entire front of the car with an electric fan running continuously. Probably not as elaborate of a cooling system as a modern gasoline car, but pretty complicated none the less.. It will not be able to dissipate that kind of power in an enclosed garage, other than maybe in the dead of winter. No idea how you'll keep animals and homeless away from the heat. Watching rain sizzle on the parked car will be weirdly cool. On the bright side you'll never need to scrape snow/ice off the windows, it'll be melted off.
You know that our brain and nerves work electromagnetically
Actually, no. Your eyes are quite sensitive to EM waves in the just sub 1um range, and as a secondary effect, EM waves in the vague range of a kilowatt per square meter heat your skin just as much as sunlight does. Vision, and bulk thermal heating effects. That's about it for EM radiation effects on the body.
Your neurons (assuming earth species) work on electrical potentials in the vaguely mV-ish range plus or minus an order of magnitude or two or so.
Now, moving a charge carrier thru an immense magnetic field makes an electric field, that is whats theorized to cause any effects of "magnetism on the body".
There is some pretty crackpotty stuff about certain organic chemicals and enzymes having a small dipole moment that may or may not react differently under extreme fields, but probably not even in a lab. If it were relevant, living things would probably evolve to be very sensitive to their magnetic alignment, which they seem not to be. If I got 0.005% better liver enzyme function if I slept aligned N-S, I probably would have evolved to sense that to get the free bonus, but thats not happened.
and many processes in our body do not expect a strong magnetic field on the outside.
The electrical signals in your brain make femto-tesla range fields, charges that move in a non-straight line, etc. So... uh... every brain thats ever existed has always floated in a femto tesla range field of its own making. So that certainly sets a low range of concern of about 1 fT below which our own brains create a field stronger than the external field of concern.
Then there's the .1 mT -ish range earth's magnetic field. Which occasionally drops to zero. And probably, occasionally goes over it's normal range due to magnetic storms and stuff. Anything from the earth is green and organic and therefore good, much like, say, hemlock, or poisonous mushrooms. So, good old mother nature sets low range of 1 mT or so. It seems most species can't evolve a useful sense organ for "mT" level fields, strong indication fields of that strength are not biologically active.
A kids toy bar magnet runs around single digit mT range, so I'd worry more about the red lead paint on the "N" side of the magnet, than the actual field itself.
When you break out the liquid helium, then I'd worry about cryo accidents, suffocation / oxygen displacement accidents, and of course accidentally placing a body part between the "T" range magnet and something made of iron. Way down on the list of concerns, maybe there would be worries about the biological effect of the field.
How strong is still OK
Here's an interesting link from some green group, which may or may not be flaky, but seems remarkably reasonable to an engineer like me, and suggests fields stronger than current model MRI range are getting troublesome to humans.
http://www.greenfacts.org/en/static-fields/l-3/4-interactions-body.htm
Here's the world health organization's opinion. A gross generalization of their 30+ page report is don't worry be happy.
http://www.who.int/entity/peh-emf/about/en/Static%20and%20ELF%20Fields.pdf
and is the one who defines this trustworthy?
Well, greenie luddites are probably as technophobic, and ignorant of what they fear, as a group can get, and they seem only mildly concerned about the highest field levels from the most powerful magnets being built in today's laboratories, everything else you'll ever experience is probably a factor of ten thousand to ten million lower field and probably a factor of more than thousands to millions safer, since risk is not strictly linear since we live in a planetary field and our own nerv
This operates at the Watt level
Chances are the EM waves for this device couldn't leave a room
Ham radio is just not popular here on slashdot, oddly enough. Used to be a very popular hobby amongst the technologically advanced, now even the most obvious basics seem forgotten...
FYI a couple watts in the 40 meter band (where this device operates) will easily communicate/interfere around the world... google for various combinations of "ham radio" QRP "40 meters" 40M ARRL "five 5 watts". The idea that "watt level" 7 mhz signals won't leave a room, is very incorrect.
73 de n9nfb
it ought to just work. Instead you're all bashing it and claiming it's a bad/stupid idea and implying they ought to just scrap the whole project.
It sets off all the scam detectors for anyone that knows anything about power transmission, magnetic induction, medical diathermy machines, power transformer design, air core RF chokes/transmission lines, pretty much everyone in the field but gullible journalists.
No explanation of how it works. No reason I've seen that explains why this would not have rolled out, say, 60 years ago to recharge WWII era army walkie-talkies. Nothing new in the magnetic world other than improvements in permanent magnet material science, mu-metal shielding is "cheaper", and superconductors, all of which have nothing to do with this product. Well, there are some advances in higher permeability materials, but the whole point of this product is to use an air core inductor. So, what are they doing with 1890-ish era technology that hasn't been done until now?
How great it would be, if only it were true, is more appropriate for religious recruitment than electrical engineering. Of course it's possible to make jokes about optimistic electronic device data sheets, but this is carrying it a bit far.
The overall effect is very similar to handing slick marketing brochure for a perpetual motion machine to a P.E. or thermodynamics engineer. Just gonna get laughed at.
at least you wouldn't have to worry about your kid putting a fork in a wall socket.
Adding up all my wireless devices, a hundred watts delivered might be a power level that would be useful to me. Less than that, don't bother, more than that... read on for why that would be bad.
So, at 20% efficient, my 100 watts delivered, dissipates 400 watts into heat. I'm guessing a surface area of a square foot or so. It'll be a nice space heater on 24 hours a day. Not so bad in northern climates in the winter. Not so good in the summer. A couple hundred watts with no ventilation, lay some papers on it, maybe not hot enough to ignite the paper, but easily hot enough to melt xerox/laserprinter toner.
I would worry a lot more about my wedding ring acting as a single turn transformer secondary. Lets figure it would adsorb the full power level. The effect on my finger would be roughly like, touch skin w/ 100 watt soldering gun and pull trigger. In other words, if I move my hand quickly to place and remove my recharging devices, in less than a second, it will be uncomfortable but no damage due to thermal mass if starting from body temperature. But, hold my finger there for ten seconds, serious burn damage, hold my hand there a minute and its definitely emergency room time/burn clean off. Also for a good time toss my round key ring on the table next to my phone, I estimate red hot in about 20 seconds if I guessed an appropriate wire gauge equivalent for my keyring's ring...
Only trouble tough are the HIGH prices and crappy movies.
Best one line summary of the whole "HD" problem.
Like the vast majority of the population, I don't go to theaters or buy DVDs. My reasons:
1) The price is too high for what I get. I can get a great zillion hour video game for the cost of a B-R disk or a theater visit. Or fine dining at the restaurant w/ my wife. Parts for my PC. A loud and exciting power tool from Home Depot. Hand me the cash for a B-R disk, and about the last thing I'd consider spending the cash on, is a B-R disk.
2) Most movies are crappy. After wasting an hour or two of my extremely limited free time watching a crappy formulaic rehashed predictable Hollywood sequel movie, I want my free time back! I always feel remorse that I wasted my evening watching a movie.
Despite my ability to download pretty much any movie out there for free, you literally could not pay me to watch 99.9% of whats out there, and the last 0.1% is not worth very much money to me, certainly not as much as the movie-industrial complex wants me to pay.
Movie industrial complex answer to my concerns: Um, OK, I'm sure you'll buy it if its in higher resolution. WTF?
They probably open a valve to let the helium out and try to reuse both the balloon and the electronics pack.
From http://www.chem.hawaii.edu/uham/lift.html
A 7 foot dia balloon lifts about a dozen pounds and takes about two hundred cu feet to fill. At about a quarter a cubic foot, it's going to cost about fifty bucks for the helium.
Helium is NOT cheap... Looking at more than $2 per hour per balloon just for the helium. And helium is not a renewable resource.
I don't understand why the author calls the foundational elements of game design atoms.
I think it's a requirement of buzzword-labels that they either make no sense or dilute the meaning of the original word, or both.
Book author is hot for Lua. Lua's data structures innards are kind of lisp list-ish and one funny part of the wikipedia article explains that in small part, they invented Lua because lisp's syntax is "too hard". Lisp lists are made of atoms. So, to summarize, author likes Lua, Lua's list innards are lispish, lisp lists are made of atoms.
The author probably couldn't help himself but to call the individual foundational elements of game design, atoms.
Maybe I'm being way to literal, but how do the brakes know the difference between cement and water that feels like cement at hundreds of MPH?
Grats, you just passed the test of "programmers have a responsibility to .... mention anything that did not make sense"
The RIAA's evidence is compelling.
The IP address was hers, with no WiFi, no NAT, and a password-protected Windows box
So far, not compelling at all. All they really have is they picked an ip address out of the air. Success is about as likely as picking a random ten digit number and filing a suit against whomever has it.
The username chosen was the one she's used online traditionally for 16 years.
Ah, that one item, combined with the rest, she's screwed. There's a lesson here about selecting usernames when doing something questionable.
What he and his employees engage in is tax avoidance, which is perfectly legal. Tax avoidance is simply following the letter of the law and avoiding the incurring tax liability. ........ If I ever make the kind of money where it makes sense to do so, you bet your ass I would hire a tax lawyer and take advantage of the law to the my benefit.
It's not that complicated, or expensive, dude. For example, you pay a higher cap gains tax rate on assets owned more than a year (long term rate vs short term rate). So, given the choice of selling stock after owning it 364 days or after 367 days, I'd wait the three days.
Another way is to offset cap gains with realized cap losses. Lets say you're retired and some investments made money, some lost. Well, when you cash in the winners, make sure to cash in the correct ratio of losers, so as to have a net cap gain of zero, thus no tax need be paid. Worst case would be to sell all the winners and pay a nice high tax, and next year sell all the losers and have an immense capital loss that exceeds your ability to apply to your taxes.
If you can itemize, you don't have to pay income tax on money paid to the bank as mortgage interest (paying down principle has no effect, beyond obviously paying less interest next year). So, if you own a home and itemize (Schedule A) you are pretty much by definition a "tax avoider" since you could pay taxes on your mortgage interest merely by not itemizing Schedule A.
Also any time you decline to participate in commerce because the taxes would eliminate the profit, you are a "tax avoider". So, if you have the option to buy property, and its all profitable until you add in the high property taxes, so you don't buy the property, you are a "tax avoider". Same with not smoking, not drinking, not buying much gasoline.
When you sell them for more than the face value, you get taxed on what you sold them for. Which is what the people in this article did.
This is pretty clearly tax evasion.
Your two quotes are logically inconsistent. I say either you pay the correct tax and its all good, or you evade the tax and possibly pay the consequences. Your quotes say you do both at the same time because gold was involved?
Imagine if North Korea's missile launch hadn't been a failure; that's why we don't want this kind of information getting out.
Why bother?
Its senseless to claim that NK will never figure it out without help. They will, and much faster and cheaper than USA private industry ever could, due to staggering disparity in labor costs and coercion (fellow korean komrades, you will make this work or your kids don't eat this month, especially since we assigned ten of you for each US scientist, etc etc). Not even a fair race, more like an absolute rout of the US private industry.
If space-X can do it in a couple years, NK will do it in a couple months, tops.
If NK launches on July 3rd instead of July 4th, is that a heroic victory for the US government? No. Pushing out the problem deadline a very short amount of time does not by any means make it go away, plus it adds the problem of destroying your own industry to your plate of problems. Since NK with missiles is a big problem, why not let your own industry succeed, so you don't have to worry about that problem in addition to the MK missile problem at the same time?
Sort of like, you can "only" take a .45 cal to the head, or you can help someone else out and take a .50 cal to the head. Which shot is better?
Surely then, should they choose to sell these they'll pay income tax on any profit they make.
Not necessarily. For example, there is no law that I can't buy a laptop "worth" $1000 from someone for $10 (assuming they're not fencing stolen goods, etc, etc)
That kind of stupidity happens all the time at yard sales, where "ugly old painting" is bought for $10 by someone whom recognizes it as an original Van Gogh or whatever. Somebody buys a worthless old postcard from paris for 50 cents because they have special knowledge that the cancelled rare stamp is worth 50 bucks but the seller has no idea. That is no tax dodge.
The tax dodge is when somebody far enough down the line eventually trades the "$10 coin" for $1000 of federal reserve notes and doesn't pay the capital gains tax.
The US constitution specifically states that gold an silver are legal tender.
[citation needed]
Article one, section ten, clause one (aka the contracts clause) "No State shall enter into" (long list of naughtyness) "make any Thing but gold and silver Coin a Tender in Payment of Debts;"
American workers are taxed on the dollar value of their earnings - this is typically payment in cash, but if you receive non-monetary compensation as part of your employment, you're still responsible for paying taxes on the dollar value of that compensation.
Which was the subject of not one, but two recent slashdot stories where the IRS would enjoy taxing individuals for their portion of company provided cell phone service used for personal use, non-monetary compensation.
Also there is ample tax case law about unusually low valued "gifts" to avoid gift and inheritance taxes. The dude is either liable for violating minimum wage laws, or not paying gift taxes, or is falsifying his financial documents. How he accounts for buying 1 oz gold coins for $1000 and paying his employees at "$20" is going to be pretty weird on ye ole income statement, unless he declares a profit of $980 and pays the appropriate tax on that profit...
Quarters, unlike gold coins, are legal tender.
Blatantly, outright, not even close, missed by a mile, false. 10 seconds on wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Gold_Eagle
Refers you to the US mint government webpage:
http://www.usmint.gov/downloads/mint_programs/am_eagles/AmerEagleGold.pdf
Here's a direct quote from the first page of this US MINT government issued document:
"They're also legal tender"
I can't recall a single substantial application. What are they?
So far, most applications involve applications for grant money.
Kim Allen's fullerene page is a pretty good reference in general.
This sub page:
http://kimallen.sheepdogdesign.net/Fuller/apps.html
summarizes the current situation. Pretty much, nothing but a lot of wouldn't it be cool. Its the chemistry version of astronomy students pondering how cool it would be to have a warp drive, or poli-sci students dreaming of true communism.
It is a geometrical-numerological approach to chemistry, encouraged by occasional past success. "If it looks cool to a human being, it must be chemically useful".
Benzene is attractively symmetric and cool looking and is also pretty vital. On a really large scale DNA is pretty cool looking and does come in handy, mostly because its self replicating (with a little help). Little lego building blocks of NaCl are pretty and industrially important. A pretty matrix of silicon is very handy. Similarily, a pretty handful of silicone is way off the chemistry topic here but also enjoyable (is this like the worst slashdot joke ever?)
On the other hand, there are plenty of examples, such as anthracene, with structures that look really super duper cool, but are more or less useless. Add fullerenes to that list of cool looking, mostly useless structures.
I'll bet 100 mod points that Windows XP will be available at least a year after Windows 7 release.
Do .torrent files count? Seriously, the best windows "distributions" I've ever seen were not from Microsoft.
linux installed fine, but without working sound. You killed your linux installation through attempting to update video drivers.
windows installed fine, but without working LAN drivers. I am assuming you corrected this and installed proper ATI drivers without crashing your system.
Objectively, how is your Linux experience any better than Windows?
Objectively, for linux, don't update the video drivers. You know the old routine, "doc it hurts when I move my arm like this" doc says "well, then don't move your arm like this". Other than gamers, does anyone really need 3D drivers, etc?
Objectively, for windows, you type "apt-get install madwifi-module" and 10 seconds later you're all done. No, just kidding ha ha ha, windows doesn't work like that, you get the LAN drivers working by going to the company website (assuming it's still online), selecting the english language version and/or cut and pasting all the text into the babelfish, registering your email for spam reception to get an account, watch a dozen stupid flash animations (and ads), clicking around approximately one million times, downloading the LAN drivers in some weird compressed format, installing winrar to uncompress the distribution file, run some goofy GUI program that requires a .NET install just to load a freaking LAN driver that incidentally changes your web browser homepage to some .ru bride site, adds an icon to your screen for AOL dialup, and reroutes citbank.com to some .info site, then rebooting a couple times. Err, um, wait, how am I gonna download the LAN drivers without working LAN drivers. Like layers of an onion, deeper and deeper.
Sounds like overall, the windows experience will be much worse, stay with linux.
Benzene boiling point 80 degrees C at STP
Iron boiling point 2860 degrees C at STP
It would seem much easier to vacuum distill benzene out of the buckywire product than iron, because of the difference in boiling points. If 80 degrees C is still too hot for buckywires, then vacuum distillation will work at a lower temperature. So the technology to separate the good from the bad is much easier with the benzene process so it'll probably be done better.
Benzene traps are simple cheap and easy to use (well, relatively anyway), whereas nanoparticle "traps" are basically expensive filters that may or may not work and or be maintained, so just blowing filtered N2 thru the product and cleaning the contaminated N2 stream would probably work pretty well. Recycling benzene is simple, but I think all you can do with nanoparticles is bury them or maybe dissolve the whole filter in a super strong acid. So, trapping / recycling bad stuff using the benzene process is much simpler and easier to do, so it'll probably be done better.
Finally monitoring benzene levels (to verify your containment is working, detect when it fails) is pretty trivial, but monitoring nanoparticle contamination levels is pretty much a mystery or at least not standardized. And when you have a spill, the fire department and EPA know exactly what to do with spilled benzene but would be mystified by nanoparticles. So, when the bad stuff inevitably gets released into the environment, "we" know exactly how to handle the benzene process, but not the nanoparticle process.
Making eco-judgements about a chemistry topic, when all you can base it on is sloganeering like benzene is bad, is not going to result in useful judgments.
Benzene and many derivatives, are just as toxic (if not more so) than a lot of metals.
That's about as vague of a "statement" as can be made, but if you really believe it is true, we can set up a little wager and I'll wash my hands in a bucket of pure benzene if you'll agree to wash your hands or any other appendage with a mercury organometallic and we'll see who ends up healthier. Or if you don't like mercury organometallics, I'll let you chose any soluble lead compound. Or, how about a tasty ionic Uranium compound?
I'm sure something like this exists but I haven't looked too hard for it. The main problem with a concept like this is that it's hard to make it globally playable, keep privacy concerns in mind, and enjoyable as a game.
How hard can it be to port the GTA series to the iphone? Take out the car chases (seriously, how could that possibly work?) and add some sort of GTA:CTW dealing minigame that you can trade with other real world players that are reasonably physically near? Place minigames and missions around town that are triggered by approaching their location? If you are in the top X% of "points" you get to place those minigames / missions / treasures / dealers / virtual (?) weapons in your local area, subject to meta moderation by others to verify you're following various rules? This does not seem terribly difficult, and seems blindingly obvious, at least to me.
Other themes would probably work like some kind of spy-vs-spy thing, or some kind of comic book hero theme, or maybe a vampire theme that can only be played after dark.
The problem with the game really though was you were expected to say travel 5 miles to progress the adventure in the game.
Some call that exercise, not a "problem". I'm just saying your happiness is based on your preconceived expectations... I have a semi-long distance runner friend whom gets bored on long runs... Your "problem" would be his "solution".