300 miles of range? What about after 1 year of daily use? After 2 years?
How much does it cost to replace the worn out Li-Ion battery pack?
The Dell Laptops we have at work seem to consistently wear down to about 1 hour of capacity after one year of use... That is down from 5 hours capacity when the packs were new.
So I figure maybe the batteries need to be replaced every year on a commuting vehicle... Anyone care to provide a credible estimate of how that impacts cost of ownership for this vehicle?
I read somewhere recently that some scientists were concerned that lage-scale wind leeching could alter atmosopheric flows enough that potentially bad climate changes could result.
Afterall, sucking lots of energy out of anything could cause disruptions that are potentially bad for us.
Does anyone have any further details regarding this particular nuance?
Ok, maybe that the "anti-MS activist" thing is overly strong language. But the judge does seem confoundingly unreasonable to me... and I am by no means a pro-MS guy. It's just that I think that in this case there is strong injustice being done and while MS is wrongly a victim now, others could well become victims later. In the end if Eolas wins I believe the public will suffer and one greedy man and his lawyers will grossly profit by fraudulently claiming to have invented something that was an obvious AND public idea before he even filed his patent.
As I understand it, the judge disallowed nearly ALL Viola testimony because the copy of the Viola code that was available at the time would only work across the net with a beta version of the HTTP protocol. But there was no pre-1.0 HTTP server available at the time of the trial and Viola would break on a post 1.0 HTTP server. So the trial Viola demo was run by getting HTML through a file:// url (instead of an http:// url) simply to show that the old Viola could run external applications in an HTML page (that being the subject of the patent). But the judge then decided that since a file:// url was used in the demo, Viola was therefore not a "web browser" and so did not constitute prior art and so NO testimony about Viola was allowed AT ALL.
This in spite of the fact that Viola was well known by Tim Berners-Lee and other early web developers as being one of the first web browsers ever made! This in spite of the fact that even the Viola code at the trial was packed full of HTTP and HTML processing code, clearly indicating that it was intended, in part, as a web browser.
What the judge should have done is allowed Viola to be demonstrated as functioning on the script-in-a-page level and then relied on verbal assurance from Pei Wei that in the past Viola had been functioning as an HTTP-capable web browser as well. The web browser part would have to rely on Pei Wei's credibility as a witness while the application-in-a-page part could have been demonstrated by the code available at the trial. Throwing out ALL Viola testimony because the only remaining code available at the trial happened to be need an old HTTP server that was unavailable at the time IMO is unreasonble and seemingly disingenuous. The only reason in my mind that a judge could allow himself to exercise such an egregious lapse of judgement would be if he were motivated by some bias in the case. Granted, I am not a lawyer and I am not intimately versed in all the technicalities that are "necessary" in legal warfare, but it just seems to me that on a normal human-reasoning level an aweful injustice is being done here.
I understand that at the trial Michael Doyle had NO software and yet he was allowed to claim all kinds of capabilities for his old software using only charts and other paper. Pei Wei had a nearly completely functional copy of the old Viola code demonstrating the app-in-a-webpage functionality along with HTTP and HTML code (showing that Viola was intended as a fully functional web browser) but he had no old-style web server that was compatible with it. Yet Pei Wei's verbal testimony and visual aids about what the software used to be able to do was not permitted... In fact, NONE of his testimony about anything Viola was permitted in the case. Does that seem like a rational fair-minded judgement?
I think Pei Wei said that the judge didn't want to allow testimony about Viola because it would "bias the jury against Eolas". Well geez, the facts are _supposed_ to bias the jury! What if a judge decided to throw out testimony placing the defendant at the murder scene with a bloody knife in his hand because it might bias the jury??
This case is almost totally driven by Doyle and his lawyers, UC is not really pushing this matter.
As I understand it, the patent involves the plain obvious notion of running active elements inside web pages. But Viola, a number of other technologies, and even discussions of the old WWW mailing list of which Doyle was a part all established prior art efforts of developing this notion before Doyle ever filed his patent.
But the judge in the MS case did not permit effective testimonies to the jury about all this prior art, particularly Viola, based on ridiculous technicalities, essentially exposing himself as a nonrational anti-MS activist. The judge just seemed to be soley focused on sticking it to Microsoft.
But instead what he's done, I believe, is established a precedent where now one man and his team of lawyers get to rape and pillage anyone who has developed some kind of active web page element technology over the past 10 years. This may well include Sun, Macromedia, and Adobe, for example.
Doyle took an obvious idea and has succesfully manipulated the half-witted patent system into netting himself hundreds of millions of dollars of other people's hard work in good faith based on public technology concepts and he's not gonna stop there.
Yeah, when you watch all the Firefly DVD's close together without commercial interruption, you have time to immerse yourself into the depth of the writing and the sophistication of the characters.
If some of you guys are still skeptical, go to Netflix and open a free-trial account... then watch all 4 DVD's for free! I bet a bunch of you will be buying the set for keeps, bemoaning FOX's tragic cluelessness for having canceled the series prematurely, and eagerly awaiting the upcoming movie before this year is out:)
Ah yes, the mystical physics of dramatic license! And they thought String Theory would explain it all... not quite! Not even the mightiest theoretical infrastructure can begin to delve the murky depths of hollywoodism.
Regarding lubricants: most firearms lubricants these days use teflon suspension in a hydrocarbon medium. I suppose the hydrocarbons would freeze but the teflon should still prevent bonding for some time, shouldn't it?
Ah, yes... so friction between the moving parts would scrape off the oxidation layer and since no new oxidation would occur, the parts would meld together?
Heat clearly dissipates in space.. otherwise, things like the astronauts in Apollo 13 almost freezing with all the electronics off, wouldn't happen. In fact...
There are three primary mechanisms by which heat transports away from hot things: Radiation, Conduction, and Convection.
Convection is a fluid transport thing so it doesn't really happen in the case of solid materials.
Radiation is like the infra-red glow of a living animal, or the glow of red-hot toaster elements, or the light of white hot light bulb elements, etc... Hot things spit out lots of photons. These radiative photons carry away heat. If you've taken physics, this is "blackbody radiation".
Conduction comes from one hot molecule bumping into a cold molecule and transferring some of it's "heat" (kinetic energy). "Air cooled" guns are guns that cool down because the air carries the heat away by means of conduction.
Since space is near vacuum, hardly any conduction can occur. Note that space is neither hot nor cold... it is just vacuum. Only matter can have temperature (kinetic energy of it's molecules). So it turns out that vacuum is one of the best insulators there is. That's why thermoses have a vacuum chamber in them to minimise conductive heat flow. Anyway, it turns out that conductive cooling in Earth atmosphere is a lot more effective than radiative cooling at around 300K.
So a gun in space would lose access to it's most important cooling mechanism (conduction) and while it would eventually cool off via the radiative mechanism, you would run the risk of thermal jamming or cooking off rounds in the magazine if you fired more than a certain number of rounds (probably a dozen or two).
Spacecraft have to be very mindful of heat build-up because they cannot dump their heat via conduction. Eventually the heat bleeds away due to radiative flow (EX: Apollo 13), but this process is a lot slower than engineers are used to accounting for when making things that work in Earth's atmosphere.
Yeah, the silent space action had a real ethreal dramatic quality to it... sorta dreamlike. Fantastic!
(pointless nitpick: Incidentally guns can fire in vacuum and underwater and stuff because bullet propellant packs it's own oxygenation agent... Overheating would be a serious problem for conventional firearms in space though since there is no atmosphere to help carry the heat away.)
Anyway, one thing people should know about the DVD's: There are three episodes there that never aired on FOX. So if you saw everything on TV you haven't seen it all! Two of the unaired episodes were some of the best in the series (IMO).
Oh, and incidentally, a Firefly movie is coming out this May. Hopefully from that, someone in TV will be smart enough to pick this up as a series again!
Seriously, if you haven't seen Firefly, rent all 4 disks from Netflix or something, you won't be disappointed. My favorite episode is the last on the disks: Objects In Space. All 9 main characters are interesting, complex, believable, and bounce off each in a manner consistent with their personalities. The action is great, plots are fairly unpredictable, and the writing is packed full of sharp humor.
For alternate opinions, check out the reviews of the Firefly DVD's on Amazon: 1200 reviews, average rating: 5 stars
B5 I'd say would be close behind on the rating scale overall... Mostly I think for it's ambition, and intricate tapestry of dramatic plotlines.
5) ability to read in direct sunlight. If I can't rely on being able to use my reading device when I'm stuck in the sun (agh, it BURNS!) then I can't trust it and it becomes only an occasional convenience.
If I'm going to carry a reading device around everywhere, I need to be able to trust that it is usable to me at all times.
I heard a couple years ago about display technology that IBM was devloping which could maintain superb contrast ratio even in direct sunlight. They initially planned on using it on camcorders and digital cameras (where sunlight often interferes in the usability of these gadgets). But they also intended to eventually move this technology into large scale full-sized computer displays. Part of the demo of this tech involved shining bright halogen lamps directly on the display so that users could see that they remained quite readable in intense light. Since that preview though I have heard nothing more... I wonder if they hit some kind of manufacturing costs snag or something?
Does anyone know any specifics about what I am referring to?
Display Tech is the key.
on
Upbeat on E-books
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
EBook tech really needs 4 things:
1) contrast ratio approaching paper
2) crisp resolution (anti-aliasing techniques makes fonts look blurry)
3) power to run such a display for at least 5 to 10 hours
4) light weight enough to be comfortable carrying around all day
Without these features, I don't think the public will widely accept ebooks.
Ebooks loose a certain intuitive spacial sense of location in the work that paper books provide. When you pick up a paper book, it's easy to find your place again and it's relatively easy to find former passages that one might like to refer back to from time to time. People don't like the disconnected homogeneous "loss of place" that one suffers with an ebook reader. Though I think people might be willing to adapt to a new interface if the above display and portability features were achieved though.
Display and battery tech are just nowhere near capable enough and they're coming along much too slowly I think for ebooks to become ubiquitously adopted by the general public at least before the next decade I bet.
shonagon53 writes
"The United States is known as being the world's most stable democracy. But since the Florida 2000 fiasco, things have changed.
Oh? The US is no longer a stable democracy eh? Hmm, I haven't noticed any coup attemts, riotous rebellions, or wonton car bombings in the last few days. Perhaps I should look out the window more often...?
As the BBC reports, for some Americans this comes as a humiliation; others see it as a necessity
Hmm, the BBC seems to have left out one other likely far more prevalent opinion... "while most everyone else sees it as a laughable ploy by pompous anti-American Europeans who are groping around for some (empty) reason to try to feel superior"
When H2 leaks in the open, it tends to rapidly disipate beyond explosive concentrations in the air (it rises and the wind spreads it out). Gasoline on the other hand sticks around on stuff and burns for a long time.
Can't cause harm because they are made of carbon? Heh!
I believe that asbestos is highly inert and yet it is a known carcinogen banned from public use. There are other chemically inert fibrous materials that are known to cause lung cancer as well.
Anyway, check out several of the articles above which already indicate that buckies are dangerous to cellular function... buckies are "just carbon" too and their structure is very similar to that of CNT's
The problem here is that they are microscopic in size, smaller than cells, and can interfere with cellular function since they have the potential to penetrate cell membranes.
The larger problem here is that these kinds of molecules are not born of natural processes (at least in significant measure) and so our natural systems have not had time to adapt to any possible accutely adverse affects they might have. Their impact on the function of natural organisms is inherently unpredictable since we don't have anywhere near the kind of intellect or knowledge necessary to completely project all possible chemical and physical impacts of any given molecule in any natural system of practical complexity.
We need time to experiment and study each new type of nanoscopic structure we introduce into the world before we allow the crazy money-counting maniacs to spread these things ubiquitously throughout our environment.
I hope that most people considering the distribution of nanotechnology will exhibit a little more profound insight into the possible dangers than just "It's just carbon silly, so it can't possibly be dangerous!"
Electrons generally easily shift around to cancel out static charge in any molecule. If positive ions were embedded into the tubes, the tubes would immediately steal electrons from anything they came close to.
I'm guessing that since CNT's are electrically conductive, they apparently have an outer electron cloud that facilitates electron motion almost as if they were free electrons (like in metal or something).
Slashdot Mirror
300 miles of range? What about after 1 year of daily use? After 2 years?
How much does it cost to replace the worn out Li-Ion battery pack?
The Dell Laptops we have at work seem to consistently wear down to about 1 hour of capacity after one year of use... That is down from 5 hours capacity when the packs were new.
So I figure maybe the batteries need to be replaced every year on a commuting vehicle... Anyone care to provide a credible estimate of how that impacts cost of ownership for this vehicle?
I hope someone will post here when they plan to pull off this wacky caper so I can remember to bring my umbrella to work that day...
Argh! Spidey sense tingling! Sense danger somewhere...
Afterall, sucking lots of energy out of anything could cause disruptions that are potentially bad for us.
Does anyone have any further details regarding this particular nuance?
As I understand it, the judge disallowed nearly ALL Viola testimony because the copy of the Viola code that was available at the time would only work across the net with a beta version of the HTTP protocol. But there was no pre-1.0 HTTP server available at the time of the trial and Viola would break on a post 1.0 HTTP server. So the trial Viola demo was run by getting HTML through a file:// url (instead of an http:// url) simply to show that the old Viola could run external applications in an HTML page (that being the subject of the patent). But the judge then decided that since a file:// url was used in the demo, Viola was therefore not a "web browser" and so did not constitute prior art and so NO testimony about Viola was allowed AT ALL.
This in spite of the fact that Viola was well known by Tim Berners-Lee and other early web developers as being one of the first web browsers ever made! This in spite of the fact that even the Viola code at the trial was packed full of HTTP and HTML processing code, clearly indicating that it was intended, in part, as a web browser.
What the judge should have done is allowed Viola to be demonstrated as functioning on the script-in-a-page level and then relied on verbal assurance from Pei Wei that in the past Viola had been functioning as an HTTP-capable web browser as well. The web browser part would have to rely on Pei Wei's credibility as a witness while the application-in-a-page part could have been demonstrated by the code available at the trial. Throwing out ALL Viola testimony because the only remaining code available at the trial happened to be need an old HTTP server that was unavailable at the time IMO is unreasonble and seemingly disingenuous. The only reason in my mind that a judge could allow himself to exercise such an egregious lapse of judgement would be if he were motivated by some bias in the case. Granted, I am not a lawyer and I am not intimately versed in all the technicalities that are "necessary" in legal warfare, but it just seems to me that on a normal human-reasoning level an aweful injustice is being done here.
I understand that at the trial Michael Doyle had NO software and yet he was allowed to claim all kinds of capabilities for his old software using only charts and other paper. Pei Wei had a nearly completely functional copy of the old Viola code demonstrating the app-in-a-webpage functionality along with HTTP and HTML code (showing that Viola was intended as a fully functional web browser) but he had no old-style web server that was compatible with it. Yet Pei Wei's verbal testimony and visual aids about what the software used to be able to do was not permitted... In fact, NONE of his testimony about anything Viola was permitted in the case. Does that seem like a rational fair-minded judgement?
I think Pei Wei said that the judge didn't want to allow testimony about Viola because it would "bias the jury against Eolas". Well geez, the facts are _supposed_ to bias the jury! What if a judge decided to throw out testimony placing the defendant at the murder scene with a bloody knife in his hand because it might bias the jury??
I believe that Eolas has one employee... Doyle, the owner.
As I understand it, the patent involves the plain obvious notion of running active elements inside web pages. But Viola, a number of other technologies, and even discussions of the old WWW mailing list of which Doyle was a part all established prior art efforts of developing this notion before Doyle ever filed his patent.
But the judge in the MS case did not permit effective testimonies to the jury about all this prior art, particularly Viola, based on ridiculous technicalities, essentially exposing himself as a nonrational anti-MS activist. The judge just seemed to be soley focused on sticking it to Microsoft.
But instead what he's done, I believe, is established a precedent where now one man and his team of lawyers get to rape and pillage anyone who has developed some kind of active web page element technology over the past 10 years. This may well include Sun, Macromedia, and Adobe, for example.
Doyle took an obvious idea and has succesfully manipulated the half-witted patent system into netting himself hundreds of millions of dollars of other people's hard work in good faith based on public technology concepts and he's not gonna stop there.
If some of you guys are still skeptical, go to Netflix and open a free-trial account... then watch all 4 DVD's for free! I bet a bunch of you will be buying the set for keeps, bemoaning FOX's tragic cluelessness for having canceled the series prematurely, and eagerly awaiting the upcoming movie before this year is out :)
Of the few episodes I saw of this, my favorite character was the Toaster. A pretty damned funny show, but more zany Brit comedy than Sci Fi.
You shouldn't let that turn you off... It's great writing!... Way above the TV par.
Ah yes, the mystical physics of dramatic license! And they thought String Theory would explain it all... not quite! Not even the mightiest theoretical infrastructure can begin to delve the murky depths of hollywoodism.
Regarding lubricants: most firearms lubricants these days use teflon suspension in a hydrocarbon medium. I suppose the hydrocarbons would freeze but the teflon should still prevent bonding for some time, shouldn't it?
Excellent point, thanks!
There are three primary mechanisms by which heat transports away from hot things: Radiation, Conduction, and Convection.
Convection is a fluid transport thing so it doesn't really happen in the case of solid materials.
Radiation is like the infra-red glow of a living animal, or the glow of red-hot toaster elements, or the light of white hot light bulb elements, etc... Hot things spit out lots of photons. These radiative photons carry away heat. If you've taken physics, this is "blackbody radiation".
Conduction comes from one hot molecule bumping into a cold molecule and transferring some of it's "heat" (kinetic energy). "Air cooled" guns are guns that cool down because the air carries the heat away by means of conduction.
Since space is near vacuum, hardly any conduction can occur. Note that space is neither hot nor cold... it is just vacuum. Only matter can have temperature (kinetic energy of it's molecules). So it turns out that vacuum is one of the best insulators there is. That's why thermoses have a vacuum chamber in them to minimise conductive heat flow. Anyway, it turns out that conductive cooling in Earth atmosphere is a lot more effective than radiative cooling at around 300K.
So a gun in space would lose access to it's most important cooling mechanism (conduction) and while it would eventually cool off via the radiative mechanism, you would run the risk of thermal jamming or cooking off rounds in the magazine if you fired more than a certain number of rounds (probably a dozen or two).
Spacecraft have to be very mindful of heat build-up because they cannot dump their heat via conduction. Eventually the heat bleeds away due to radiative flow (EX: Apollo 13), but this process is a lot slower than engineers are used to accounting for when making things that work in Earth's atmosphere.
(pointless nitpick: Incidentally guns can fire in vacuum and underwater and stuff because bullet propellant packs it's own oxygenation agent... Overheating would be a serious problem for conventional firearms in space though since there is no atmosphere to help carry the heat away.)
Anyway, one thing people should know about the DVD's: There are three episodes there that never aired on FOX. So if you saw everything on TV you haven't seen it all! Two of the unaired episodes were some of the best in the series (IMO).
Oh, and incidentally, a Firefly movie is coming out this May. Hopefully from that, someone in TV will be smart enough to pick this up as a series again!
Not quite.
Clearly the best Sci Fi series ever is: Firefly :)
Seriously, if you haven't seen Firefly, rent all 4 disks from Netflix or something, you won't be disappointed. My favorite episode is the last on the disks: Objects In Space. All 9 main characters are interesting, complex, believable, and bounce off each in a manner consistent with their personalities. The action is great, plots are fairly unpredictable, and the writing is packed full of sharp humor.
For alternate opinions, check out the reviews of the Firefly DVD's on Amazon: 1200 reviews, average rating: 5 stars
B5 I'd say would be close behind on the rating scale overall... Mostly I think for it's ambition, and intricate tapestry of dramatic plotlines.
5) ability to read in direct sunlight. If I can't rely on being able to use my reading device when I'm stuck in the sun (agh, it BURNS!) then I can't trust it and it becomes only an occasional convenience.
If I'm going to carry a reading device around everywhere, I need to be able to trust that it is usable to me at all times.
I heard a couple years ago about display technology that IBM was devloping which could maintain superb contrast ratio even in direct sunlight. They initially planned on using it on camcorders and digital cameras (where sunlight often interferes in the usability of these gadgets). But they also intended to eventually move this technology into large scale full-sized computer displays. Part of the demo of this tech involved shining bright halogen lamps directly on the display so that users could see that they remained quite readable in intense light. Since that preview though I have heard nothing more... I wonder if they hit some kind of manufacturing costs snag or something?
Does anyone know any specifics about what I am referring to?
EBook tech really needs 4 things: 1) contrast ratio approaching paper 2) crisp resolution (anti-aliasing techniques makes fonts look blurry) 3) power to run such a display for at least 5 to 10 hours 4) light weight enough to be comfortable carrying around all day Without these features, I don't think the public will widely accept ebooks. Ebooks loose a certain intuitive spacial sense of location in the work that paper books provide. When you pick up a paper book, it's easy to find your place again and it's relatively easy to find former passages that one might like to refer back to from time to time. People don't like the disconnected homogeneous "loss of place" that one suffers with an ebook reader. Though I think people might be willing to adapt to a new interface if the above display and portability features were achieved though. Display and battery tech are just nowhere near capable enough and they're coming along much too slowly I think for ebooks to become ubiquitously adopted by the general public at least before the next decade I bet.
Oh? The US is no longer a stable democracy eh? Hmm, I haven't noticed any coup attemts, riotous rebellions, or wonton car bombings in the last few days. Perhaps I should look out the window more often...?
Hmm, the BBC seems to have left out one other likely far more prevalent opinion... "while most everyone else sees it as a laughable ploy by pompous anti-American Europeans who are groping around for some (empty) reason to try to feel superior"
When H2 leaks in the open, it tends to rapidly disipate beyond explosive concentrations in the air (it rises and the wind spreads it out). Gasoline on the other hand sticks around on stuff and burns for a long time.
I believe that asbestos is highly inert and yet it is a known carcinogen banned from public use. There are other chemically inert fibrous materials that are known to cause lung cancer as well.
Anyway, check out several of the articles above which already indicate that buckies are dangerous to cellular function... buckies are "just carbon" too and their structure is very similar to that of CNT's
The problem here is that they are microscopic in size, smaller than cells, and can interfere with cellular function since they have the potential to penetrate cell membranes.
The larger problem here is that these kinds of molecules are not born of natural processes (at least in significant measure) and so our natural systems have not had time to adapt to any possible accutely adverse affects they might have. Their impact on the function of natural organisms is inherently unpredictable since we don't have anywhere near the kind of intellect or knowledge necessary to completely project all possible chemical and physical impacts of any given molecule in any natural system of practical complexity.
We need time to experiment and study each new type of nanoscopic structure we introduce into the world before we allow the crazy money-counting maniacs to spread these things ubiquitously throughout our environment.
I hope that most people considering the distribution of nanotechnology will exhibit a little more profound insight into the possible dangers than just "It's just carbon silly, so it can't possibly be dangerous!"
Sigh.
I'm guessing that since CNT's are electrically conductive, they apparently have an outer electron cloud that facilitates electron motion almost as if they were free electrons (like in metal or something).