The Geo Metro WAS a 45mpg car, and it topped out around 80-90mph on the flat. The thing is that it doesn't pass modern safety standards.
Safety standards should scale with vehicle size, from few on lightweight cars, to many on heavy cars. This would effectively 'tax' heavy, less fuel efficient cars, while leaving economical cars economical. That might sound mean to the purchasers of eco cars, but frankly, the alternative is motorcycles if you want to go 100mpg.
If a manufacturer wants to have 'best safety in it's class, that's up to them, but we shouldn't put safety limitations on vehicles that destroy their cost and mileage when we're trying to get efficient cars out there.
Note that if there is a change in exchange rates that makes the British engines affordable in the US, Ford is certainly willing to sell the cars here. Just not if they're losing money or not making sales due to the price.
The article mentions sweet sorghum, which is a somewhat more favorable ethanol crop than corn.
There are other direct gas replacement options out there too, such as biobutanol.
They've obviously never been in a Cisco building. I was once in one of the Milpitas Cisco buildings and everything inside was pumpkin orange, the walls, ceiling, floor and cubicles. I was only there for a couple hours and just that was enough to make me feel a little cuckoo. At least gray cubicles don't burn one's retinas. Glad I wasn't interviewing or I may have faced a delima: are the stock options worth colorblindness and possible monochromatic psychosis?
I remember a lot of kids back in undergrad enjoyed playing with PIC boards because they provide a lot of capability. They were probably the most popular thing folks would tinker with.
Since the OP probably lacks an oscilloscope, he/she should probably get a copy of PSPICE (or some other SPICE), and the manual (available free online) so they can run transient simulations too.
Also harbor freight has multimeters for $3.99 on sale, perfect for home labs or (non-correlation) bench stuff at work without having to worry about disconnected meters walking off.
Hey, I know Jim! Not surprising that his drawing of an oscilloscope has a round screen in the design note.
I'm not sure if the guts of the 741 op-amp is the the right place to start someone out though. OP might adjust best using a standard PIC or FPGA board and expanding it's capabilities. That'd be directly applicable to building a simple robot as was mentioned in the OP.
Analog stuff gets pretty deep, pretty quickly. For what you want to do it sounds like you'd be best off learning the bare basics about LRCs and view transistors as digital devices, then cobble stuff together out of TTL components.
As a software guy, you'd probably get a blast out of using a PIC or FPGA board since you write firmware, but get to do some hardware stuff too.
Very simple mathamatical truths and relationships are discovered, but mathematical methodologies are invented. They're tools for solving a problem, just because they're abstract tools rather than physical ones doesn't make them less useful.
Microsoft gained their PC marketshare mainly through the gaming market. Even though apple indoctrinated everyone with their machines in schools during the 80's and 90's, when kids got computers they wanted a PC because it played far more games. If the Microsoft PC loses it's prominence as a gaming machine suddenly Apple and linux become more competitive against Microsoft. I suspect this is part of why Microsoft is in the console market, to keep console games compatible with PC architecture so they can be released to play on windows PCs and provide people with a motivation to buy windows PCs.
It's all fun and games until the FBI starts trolling through peoples google profiles. In a way it's worse than being able to see your library records, since google knows most everything you're interested in or have even been curious about.
Of course if one is worried about their privacy, it'd be easy to make a firefox plugin that does random google searches to foil the google-bot's attempts at profiling you.
At super low power/voltage it may be possible to rectify thermal noise in a warm semiconductor and use it to power circuitry. There are probably other ways to harness heat without a thermal gradient too, heat is just motion at an atomic scale so if you can harness that motion for power you don't need a gradient, just like a windmill doesn't need a wind gradient to work. It would convert heat to energy and thus cool itself, but the human body produces about 100W and a medical device would use a small fraction of a watt. I doubt someone would have trouble with having to produce 0.001% more heat - a haircut is much more drastic in the heat loss department.
Also if the government spends money domestically, it gets much of it back within a year in the form of taxes. All those rocket scientists, who's pay is the majority of NASA's expenditures, are in a pretty high tax bracket. Send the money overseas, and uncle sam doesn't see it again unless that country buys something from us to reciprocate.
The shuttle is a horrible launch vehicle anyway, it costs it $1bln to launch what could fly on a Delta IVH for $250M. Shuttle never lived up to (or even close) to it's expectations, and it took the Columbia disaster for NASA to be able to be able to press congress for the funding to retire and replace the shuttle.
The comparison of the space they take up is misleading too, sure a farm of 1000 (small) conventional windmills may take up 10k acres, but each windmills actual footprint is only about 100 square feet. Generally folks grow crops or (on hills) use the land for pasture as well. Perhaps 0.02% of said 10k acres is actually put out of use by the conventional windmills. For the vertical windmill however the land underneath cannot be re-used because it requires a more massive support structure.
From a more fundamental point a view, the main features we want in windmills is that they be cheap to make and install, and low in maintenance costs, both relative to the amount of electricity delivered. This does favor larger windmills since power goes up with the square of the radius, but it doesn't favor gee-whiz technologies like mag-lev - rather cheap off the shelf industrial bearings and components.
Perhaps this is true, but one must also consider the relative merit of various environments. Space resources and capabilities allows us to move some of our dirtiest practices away from the earth where the environment matters about six orders of magnitude more.
The universe doesn't care if we move rocks around or not - there are literally an infinite number of them, the only reason to protect the environment is for our own benefit and that of other species. On the moon this could include protecting scenery (perhaps not fill-in that amazing fissure), protecting resources (not using up all the water at the north/south poles inefficiently), preserving the view from earth (no pepsi logo lit up on the near face), and in the long run not whittling the moon down to the point where the earth/moon/sun gravitational status quo is altered.
I get carpal tunnel, and I use a computer a lot. However I don't think the mouse/keyboard is directly responsible - such activity usually doesn't cause problems. Rather I think my hands are under-worked by the light work I do and so when I go home and use a hammer for a few hours or go kayaking my wrists are unaccustomed to the abuse and flare up on me. The only problem I've ever had typing was with a keyboard that had a sticky shift key that needed a bit of extra oomph to push.
With cropland going for $1-$2000/acre in South Dakota there's absolutely no F'ing way some monstrosity in the middle of the city can compete on a cost basis, even with transportation factored in. The opportunity cost of putting your money elsewhere rather than into a $1bln skyscraper will vastly exceed the savings in transportation.
However, for those who have houses from before the standard lot included a 8' by 30' paved back yard one could supply a considerable quantity of the household's veggies from the yard - which is even closer to most than something in the city surrounded by offices.
The best place to grow food is adjacent to processing plants that make it into the items in in grocery store. Those happen to be in the countryside, by the farms. Or were they planning on handing New Yorkers whole live chickens?
No, it isn't contradictory at all because I specified that addressing either costs 'trillions of dollars'. The cost is the same and the result is the same - the cause shouldn't matter. The solution doesn't have to 'fix' the cause of the problem either, as in your sun example, there are many variables in the climate system that can be used as knobs to adjust it. CO2 is but one.
As it is people are paying to emit CO2 and raise the temperature, so addressing natural climate change need not always cost more than addressing the current warming trend - it's free if the natural trend is cooling.
There's a very simple way to weed out bias in this debate - ask:
"Do we need to take extensive action against anthropogenic climate change?"
and
"Do we need to take extensive action against natural climate change?"
If there is a difference between the two answers the person has an agenda beyond the climate. We should not expend trillions of dollars in averting anthropogenic climate effects only to see that investment wiped out by natural events - as is very likely within the multi-hundred year time frame needed for climate control measures to pay for themselves. Fighting only human-caused effects is simply misanthropic self-flagellation.
The stability of 2k and Vista are also erroding the market. I upgraded to 2k after 98 bombed and since I was re-installing (for like the 8th time) anyway I might as well upgrade. Now I'm about 4 years into the current 2k install. Why upgrade and spend a weekend chasing down drivers for all my peripherals again?
It's quite possible that my next upgrade will be preceeded by my hard drive failing, and that will be to XP.
Suborbital flights could be less carbon intensive since they leave the atmosphere and suffer no drag losses during the coast phase of the flight. Also hydrogen is the highest performing scramjet fuel, so it's theoretically possible to build them to be carbon nuetral - however these air/spacecraft push the limits of material science very hard and may never be feasible.
Slashdot Mirror
The Geo Metro WAS a 45mpg car, and it topped out around 80-90mph on the flat. The thing is that it doesn't pass modern safety standards.
Safety standards should scale with vehicle size, from few on lightweight cars, to many on heavy cars. This would effectively 'tax' heavy, less fuel efficient cars, while leaving economical cars economical. That might sound mean to the purchasers of eco cars, but frankly, the alternative is motorcycles if you want to go 100mpg.
If a manufacturer wants to have 'best safety in it's class, that's up to them, but we shouldn't put safety limitations on vehicles that destroy their cost and mileage when we're trying to get efficient cars out there.
Note that if there is a change in exchange rates that makes the British engines affordable in the US, Ford is certainly willing to sell the cars here. Just not if they're losing money or not making sales due to the price.
The article mentions sweet sorghum, which is a somewhat more favorable ethanol crop than corn. There are other direct gas replacement options out there too, such as biobutanol.
They've obviously never been in a Cisco building. I was once in one of the Milpitas Cisco buildings and everything inside was pumpkin orange, the walls, ceiling, floor and cubicles. I was only there for a couple hours and just that was enough to make me feel a little cuckoo. At least gray cubicles don't burn one's retinas. Glad I wasn't interviewing or I may have faced a delima: are the stock options worth colorblindness and possible monochromatic psychosis?
I remember a lot of kids back in undergrad enjoyed playing with PIC boards because they provide a lot of capability. They were probably the most popular thing folks would tinker with. Since the OP probably lacks an oscilloscope, he/she should probably get a copy of PSPICE (or some other SPICE), and the manual (available free online) so they can run transient simulations too. Also harbor freight has multimeters for $3.99 on sale, perfect for home labs or (non-correlation) bench stuff at work without having to worry about disconnected meters walking off.
Hey, I know Jim! Not surprising that his drawing of an oscilloscope has a round screen in the design note. I'm not sure if the guts of the 741 op-amp is the the right place to start someone out though. OP might adjust best using a standard PIC or FPGA board and expanding it's capabilities. That'd be directly applicable to building a simple robot as was mentioned in the OP.
Analog stuff gets pretty deep, pretty quickly. For what you want to do it sounds like you'd be best off learning the bare basics about LRCs and view transistors as digital devices, then cobble stuff together out of TTL components. As a software guy, you'd probably get a blast out of using a PIC or FPGA board since you write firmware, but get to do some hardware stuff too.
Very simple mathamatical truths and relationships are discovered, but mathematical methodologies are invented. They're tools for solving a problem, just because they're abstract tools rather than physical ones doesn't make them less useful.
One could drill a hole and pour salt-water in it to make the drive absolutely unrecoverable. That's easier than grinding the thing.
Microsoft gained their PC marketshare mainly through the gaming market. Even though apple indoctrinated everyone with their machines in schools during the 80's and 90's, when kids got computers they wanted a PC because it played far more games. If the Microsoft PC loses it's prominence as a gaming machine suddenly Apple and linux become more competitive against Microsoft. I suspect this is part of why Microsoft is in the console market, to keep console games compatible with PC architecture so they can be released to play on windows PCs and provide people with a motivation to buy windows PCs.
In related news marijuana futures for 2010 have dropped 5%...
It's all fun and games until the FBI starts trolling through peoples google profiles. In a way it's worse than being able to see your library records, since google knows most everything you're interested in or have even been curious about. Of course if one is worried about their privacy, it'd be easy to make a firefox plugin that does random google searches to foil the google-bot's attempts at profiling you.
At super low power/voltage it may be possible to rectify thermal noise in a warm semiconductor and use it to power circuitry. There are probably other ways to harness heat without a thermal gradient too, heat is just motion at an atomic scale so if you can harness that motion for power you don't need a gradient, just like a windmill doesn't need a wind gradient to work. It would convert heat to energy and thus cool itself, but the human body produces about 100W and a medical device would use a small fraction of a watt. I doubt someone would have trouble with having to produce 0.001% more heat - a haircut is much more drastic in the heat loss department.
And he matters because?
Also if the government spends money domestically, it gets much of it back within a year in the form of taxes. All those rocket scientists, who's pay is the majority of NASA's expenditures, are in a pretty high tax bracket. Send the money overseas, and uncle sam doesn't see it again unless that country buys something from us to reciprocate.
The shuttle is a horrible launch vehicle anyway, it costs it $1bln to launch what could fly on a Delta IVH for $250M. Shuttle never lived up to (or even close) to it's expectations, and it took the Columbia disaster for NASA to be able to be able to press congress for the funding to retire and replace the shuttle.
The comparison of the space they take up is misleading too, sure a farm of 1000 (small) conventional windmills may take up 10k acres, but each windmills actual footprint is only about 100 square feet. Generally folks grow crops or (on hills) use the land for pasture as well. Perhaps 0.02% of said 10k acres is actually put out of use by the conventional windmills. For the vertical windmill however the land underneath cannot be re-used because it requires a more massive support structure. From a more fundamental point a view, the main features we want in windmills is that they be cheap to make and install, and low in maintenance costs, both relative to the amount of electricity delivered. This does favor larger windmills since power goes up with the square of the radius, but it doesn't favor gee-whiz technologies like mag-lev - rather cheap off the shelf industrial bearings and components.
Perhaps this is true, but one must also consider the relative merit of various environments. Space resources and capabilities allows us to move some of our dirtiest practices away from the earth where the environment matters about six orders of magnitude more. The universe doesn't care if we move rocks around or not - there are literally an infinite number of them, the only reason to protect the environment is for our own benefit and that of other species. On the moon this could include protecting scenery (perhaps not fill-in that amazing fissure), protecting resources (not using up all the water at the north/south poles inefficiently), preserving the view from earth (no pepsi logo lit up on the near face), and in the long run not whittling the moon down to the point where the earth/moon/sun gravitational status quo is altered.
I get carpal tunnel, and I use a computer a lot. However I don't think the mouse/keyboard is directly responsible - such activity usually doesn't cause problems. Rather I think my hands are under-worked by the light work I do and so when I go home and use a hammer for a few hours or go kayaking my wrists are unaccustomed to the abuse and flare up on me. The only problem I've ever had typing was with a keyboard that had a sticky shift key that needed a bit of extra oomph to push.
With cropland going for $1-$2000/acre in South Dakota there's absolutely no F'ing way some monstrosity in the middle of the city can compete on a cost basis, even with transportation factored in. The opportunity cost of putting your money elsewhere rather than into a $1bln skyscraper will vastly exceed the savings in transportation. However, for those who have houses from before the standard lot included a 8' by 30' paved back yard one could supply a considerable quantity of the household's veggies from the yard - which is even closer to most than something in the city surrounded by offices. The best place to grow food is adjacent to processing plants that make it into the items in in grocery store. Those happen to be in the countryside, by the farms. Or were they planning on handing New Yorkers whole live chickens?
Indeed, that's like saying you'll help your neighbor if he gets hit by a car, but if a tree falls on him you'll let him die.
No, it isn't contradictory at all because I specified that addressing either costs 'trillions of dollars'. The cost is the same and the result is the same - the cause shouldn't matter. The solution doesn't have to 'fix' the cause of the problem either, as in your sun example, there are many variables in the climate system that can be used as knobs to adjust it. CO2 is but one.
As it is people are paying to emit CO2 and raise the temperature, so addressing natural climate change need not always cost more than addressing the current warming trend - it's free if the natural trend is cooling.
There's a very simple way to weed out bias in this debate - ask: "Do we need to take extensive action against anthropogenic climate change?" and "Do we need to take extensive action against natural climate change?" If there is a difference between the two answers the person has an agenda beyond the climate. We should not expend trillions of dollars in averting anthropogenic climate effects only to see that investment wiped out by natural events - as is very likely within the multi-hundred year time frame needed for climate control measures to pay for themselves. Fighting only human-caused effects is simply misanthropic self-flagellation.
And Native americans wonder why they're among the most unpopular minorities around...
The stability of 2k and Vista are also erroding the market. I upgraded to 2k after 98 bombed and since I was re-installing (for like the 8th time) anyway I might as well upgrade. Now I'm about 4 years into the current 2k install. Why upgrade and spend a weekend chasing down drivers for all my peripherals again?
It's quite possible that my next upgrade will be preceeded by my hard drive failing, and that will be to XP.
Suborbital flights could be less carbon intensive since they leave the atmosphere and suffer no drag losses during the coast phase of the flight. Also hydrogen is the highest performing scramjet fuel, so it's theoretically possible to build them to be carbon nuetral - however these air/spacecraft push the limits of material science very hard and may never be feasible.