While I agree that almost always true that its cheaper to buy a new product than to repair it (esp. for electronic gadgets, cell phones, and computers, but also increasingly true for large items like cars, appliences, etc), i find it funny how few people stop and think how absurd the whole situation is-
you can either:
a) Pay one person in a western country (where there may be 5% or more unemployment and a large majority or people doing dead-end service jobs) to spend 2-3 hours to take a device apart, figure out what's wrong, fix it.
or
b) Extract several pounds of different non-renewable resources, including many rare minerals (like gold), synthesise several more pounds of materials from fossil fuels (a computer takes 20x its final mass in chemicals and materials to produce), ship these materials across the world through dozens of factories where they are processed into parts (and pay for an army of R&D people, manufacturing engineers, assembly line workers, marketing poeple, managers, etc), ship the parts to Asia where they're assembled into a product (again involving the same number of people), test the finished parts extensively and repair any defective units, put the device pounds of packaging material, ship the finished devices across the world to the western country, pay for all the marketing, sales, acocunting, managers, logistics retail people at the store, and dispose of the old device and control the hazardous wastes released by the device that's disposed for thousands of years.
Something tells me that there is something drastically wrong with our economic system for the second scenerio come out cheaper than the first. It would be intersting if someone compared these two in terms of energy and non-renewable resource consumption and waste products discharged to the environment. Maybe if companies (and therefore consumers) had to pay for "externalities" and not simply extract as much out of the earth as they are capable of doing and discharging as many pollutants as they wish to the environment, this situation would change. In any case, I don't see any way that our current lifestyle is sustainable in economic or environmental terms; i'm sure one day in the future people will look back on what we accept as common sense and see how rediculous it is....
The grandparent poster is completely correct- this poster has no clue what he is talking about, and is completely making up BS
The T40 has a 15" 4:3 screen standard(though some IT departments may try to save money by putting in a small screen), which has exactly the same screen area as a 15.4" 16:10 screen used on the Tibook, now known as the Powerbook 15". All the specs the grandparent quoted were for the 15" models from each company.
The 17" version of the powerbook was never called a TiBook, and it is significantly larger and slower than the IBM T-40. It weighs around 7 pounds (too much to carry around on a daily basis) and is too large to fit in almost every laptop bag. How can one possibly call the IBM a "boat anchor" when it weights 2/3 as much? And even though the IBM is much smaller, it is still significantly faster in every respect than the powerbook.
Well, don't blame the executives at IBM and others who make these deals- they're obligated by law to maximize shareholder value, not to look after the economy or the country's viability. In fact, they would open themselves up to class action lawsuits if they made business decisions based on "mantaining the US technological base" or any other reason not related to the botom line.
No, that role entrusted to the government, and the vast majority of the population only looks at "moral issues" or "gun rights" or taxation or any number of special intersests when choosing their leaders.
THe bottom line is that the US is consuming far more than it is producing, which means it needs to constantly borrow money/sell off its assets to sustain this lifestyle. The US is entirely dependent on the central banks of Japan, China, and Saudi Arabia to buy up their debt in order to finance this unsustainable lifestyle-Right now they are mostly buying up US debt, but with their enormous wealth and the US's poor fiscal policy, they are turning to buying up morgages and US companies. This is just the begining of the trend, as US treasury bonds become less attractive, they will likely use their money to take over US companies instead.
So unless the US somehow finds a way to change its massive current-accounts deficit, there can only be two possible results- Either the counties continue to invest, leading to widescale foreign ownership of everything in the country, or those countries pull their money from the US market, leading to total economic colapse.
here's an interesting article from the same issue of nyt: http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/04/business/w orldbu siness/04banker.html
It doesn't matter, it only gives you the true local time anyways, which is guaranteed to be totally different from the standard time for the time zone you're living in.
It could easily be off by half an hour or more anyways
And what's wrong with increasing power through economics? Why WOULDN'T a country want to increase the living standards for its people?
The only country that's sacrificing their living standards, running up massive deficits, to prepare for war is the US.
Only to a Neocon does economic growth = threat to the US that must be eliminated. Instead of improving living standards for its own people, they're willing to reduce their own standards as long as they can prevent anyone else from becoming catching up to them.
Unfortunately, if there is a world war 3, it will be this aditude that causes it.
UV light is non-ionizing radiation, yet it is a well known cancer risk and is able to fuse together adjacent nucleotides in the DNA. It is frequently used to kill bacteria because it is so effective at damaging DNA.
Your microwave oven is also non-ionizing, yet it obviously has a significant effect on biological matter. And cell phone frequencies are rapidly approaching the microwave bands.
I don't think radiation is a serious concern, and occasional use of a cell phone is unlikely to cause permanent damage. But we really don't know enough about the effects of non-ionizing radiation on the body (historically most biologists don't know physics, and most physicists don't know biology) to say so definitively, and some studies suggest that cell phone radiation does affect the development of the brain. Considering the exponential growth of wireless devices (high-bandwidth cell phones, wireless internet, bluetooth, etc) it would be foolish to say that they are safe simply because they don't have enough energy to ionize our bodies.
Take a DC fan, reverse it, and you reverse bias the electronics that convert the DC to the pulsed/AC signal used to actually power the motor, possibly blowing up the circuit.
Of course, if you reversed the signal comming out of the electronics, you would get the motor to reverse. And since efficiency is crucial, brushless motors will certainly be the dominant technology. I don't know what they use in electric cars today (i didn't know there were any), but when they do become available, brussless motors will certainly be used.
LED lights aren't wide spectrum- they only emit light at discrete wavelengths (bandgap energy). Most white LED's use phospors to convert light from another wavelength to white light, using the exact same process as flourescent lights, therefore yeilding a similar spectrum.
And most LED's are actually less efficent than flourescent lights.
Subduction zones are typically under the ocean, and you still have to dig over a kilometer down from the bottom of the ocean to reach the mantle
This is so far beyond our current technology that making a winged monkey sounds easy in comparason.
And anyways, if you learned your basic geology, you'd know that above every subduction zone is a large range of volcanoes that eject a large amount of the melted magma that goes down in the subduction zone- can you imagine a mount st. helen's type eruption, except with radioactive dust spewing out?
And about putting it in the middle of the desert, how is that any different from yucca mountain? At least the mountain will be sheltered from the elements, be much easier to guard against, and can be permanantly sealed off if the government doesn't want to pay for armed guards.
In this country, you obey the laws of thermodynamics.
Technology can't break the laws of physics.
- There's no way to get around the carnot efficiency in a heat engine. Maybe if billions of dollars were invested into a hydrogen economy you might be able to get up to 40 percent efficency with fuel cells, but if the hydrogen comes from fossil fuels and you account for the losses in the H2 production process, you're better off sticking with internal combustion engines.
- THere's no way of avoiding newton's second law- F=ma and its derivation E=1/2mv^2. Even if we could make the theoreticlaly impossible 80% engine, a 5 tonne SUV will still consume twice as much energy as a 2.5 tonne car to accelerate.
-And once you get to speed, there's no way of avoiding fluid dynamics- The drag force is proportional to cross sectional area, so driving a giant car will always waste fuel, no matter how much technology you have.
No, the answer isn't technology (unless cold fusion gets developed, which is highly unlikely in our lifetimes). The answer is conservation- why spend billions of dollars to develop a 300HP high efficiency SUV when a 150 HP car is enough for people's needs, and a current 150 HP car will consume less fuel than ANY 300 HP SUV made with ANY technology that could ever be developed?
Technically, the first computers were analog computers, which were complex tube-based circuits that performed mathematical operations on signals in the analog domain. Virtually every mathematical operation can be performed in the analog domain, like addition, subtaction, multiplication, integration, differentiation, etc...Programming was done by wiring the circuit elements to solve the required equation....
Analog computers were widely used to solve differential equations and for control systems, years before digital computers were practical....
If there's no immediate threat to our safety, then that money could be better spent. The opportunity cost of defending against every concievable threat is too high-
The US became the world's superpower by becoming a world leader in scientific knowlege, education, manufacturing, and economy. What the hawks in the administration don't realize is that the way to ensure a "new american century" is to maintain those strengths, rather than bankrupting the treasury on wars and weapons that are beyond our means.
If a major war did break out a decade or more from now, the country would be much better off with the money having been invested in science/education/economy than having outdated laser system.
Its not the size of the media that takes up the space, its the size of the drive itself-
If you built a SFF with a laptop dvd burner, it would take up a fraction of the space, without sacrificing any features. I'm sure the average laptop DVD drive is smaller than the floppy drive on a desktop... There have been "SFF"'s, built right into the back of LCD monitors for years that use laptop drives....
If you can afford it, laptops are much smaller and quieter than any SFF- they basically take up NO space, since a good laptop takes up no more space than your keyboard, mouse, and monitor... With video cards like the mobile 128MB radeon 9700 and 7200RPM laptop hard drives, they can equal the performance of pretty well any SFF...
Global warming is a global problem, so everyone needs to help fight the problem, espcially the country that contains approx 2% of the world's population but emits a quarter of the word's CO2 emissions...
The US is by far the highest emissions per capita, and its worse in that the US doesn't even do much of its own manufacturing....(imports far exceed exports)
Global warming will affect everyone, and the costs of not acting will be far greater than the cost of implimenting the protocol- that's why every other country is still going ahead with the plan, even without US participation. Yes, even Russia agreed to the plan, with the terrible shape its economy is in, because it knows the costs of not acting will be greater.
And the fact that the economy will be hurt is BS- the underlying assumption in economics is that our living standards are proportional to number of goods/services we produce- But what about air quality? pollution? clean water? moderate temperatures? None of those are accounted for in our economic models, so a naive economist would say destroying those for greater manufacturing output would improve our living standards, when in reality it would do the exact oposite.
And considering that cutting greenhouse gasses will require substantial investments in technology by companies all around the world, and the fact that the US is a global leader in research and development, it stands to gain much more from developing and marketing these technologies than it stands to lose from job cuts at the oil companies and SUV manufacturers.
Actually, exhailing CO2 is probably the only positive thing humans do for the "environoment". Our ecological niche is to consume oxygen and emit carbon dioxide- if we didn't help keep the concentrations of those gases in equilibrium, the O2 level would increase by a fraction of a percent, probably resulting widespread forest fires.
Now, emitting large amounts of CO2 from sources outside the carbon cycle, IE burning consuming fossil fuels to make your video card, is bad because it thows the equilibrium off in the opposite direction. There was a recent report that stated that computers consume far more resources and produce far more waste than any other manufactured good. Whereas something like a car uses 4-5 times its weight in materials, a computer component uses more than 20 times.... And the materials used in computers is far more dangerous- heavy metals, lead solder, PCB's, epoxy, strong acids to etch boards, etc...
While one or two video cards isn't a problem, when people upgrade computers every 2-3 years for the rest of their lives, an enourmous amount of resources is consumed and an equally large amount of waste is produced.
Firstly, your comparason isn't valid because a powersupply works on up to 500 watts of power while a hard drive works on maybe 5 watts. The power dissipated in a powersupply is so much greater that any comparson is useless.
Transformer-based powersupplies almost never fail. I've never heard of one failing for any reason other than a power surge or a short in the circuit that resulted in too much current passing through the transformer.
Any properly designed system will choose a transformer with wire gauges large enough that "fusing" isn't a problem.
However, all computer powersupplies these days are switch-mode supplies, which use transistor switching instead of transformers to step up the voltage. So even if transformer "fusing" was possible, it can't be the cause...
Powersupplies fail for one reason- they are poorly designed- Most people won't hesitate to spend extra for a high-quality motherboard, but when they go to buy a powersupply, they choose the cheapest one they can get. Those cheap powersupplies cut corners, using transitors+heatsinks too small for their specified wattage, and extremely cheap capacitors. Most often, its the large filter capacitor that blows up, and that has nothing to do with oscillations or spinning.
But if people bought powersupplies of comparable quality to their hard drives, they would likely last longer than the hard drive.
Maybe a better question would be what fails more often in cars? Reciprocating engines or rotary engines?
The DOE does not compute folding patterns or anything else that will benefit humanity.
The sole purpose of this computer is for the development/simulation of new generations of nuclear weapons.
If they go with open source software, will they also post electronics schematics, info about scientific instruments, and CAD drawings of mechanical systems?
I think those would be even more interesting to look at than the code....
The thing is if you look at the complexity of the circuit/number of transistors in a delta-sigma DAC, it is orders of magnitude more complex than the traditional current-stearing DAC.
The reason that the "digital" system, the delta sigma DAC, comes out ahead is the real strength of digital systems- noise immunity.
With the traditional DAC's, there are only 16 current sources/resistors in the whole chip, but each one needed to be trimmed by a laser to a very precise value. This costs a lot of money, which is why you need to spend 10x more on the chip to produce the same performance as a delta-sigma DAC. (most industrial DAC's and high-end audio still use this system)
With the delta-sigma DAC, you can put in several thousand transistors, but each one only needs to respond to two voltage levels. Each transistor can be poorly made, it just needs to be good enough to turn on when the voltage goes high and turn off when the voltage goes low. So digital chips require much less precision and can be made at much lower cost.
Basically, it is much cheaper to make tons of cheap transistors rather than one precise/accurate one.
That is the same reason binary is better than trinary- Trinary systems would probably require less transistors than a comparable binary system, but each one would need to be much more precise.
YOu might want to work out the math behind your idea first. As you may know, the electric force decreases with the SQUARE of the distance, so any the electric force you can produce in a balloon of macroscopic proportions is going to be negligible. Certainly not enough to counteract the 15 pounds of force acting on every square inch of the balloon.
And you can't increase the voltage past a few thousand volts, that would simply ionize the air and cause arcing.
Even if you could supply enough voltage, the control system would be impossible to achieve, as any turbulance in the air will change the shape in certain areas of the balloon, requiring massive real-time corrections to the voltage for it to maintain its shape. This is would require solving in real time millions of simultaneous non-linear equations, something we're not about to achieve.
But what is the advantage of that system over DLP, which appears to work on the exact same principal. Sure, a few minute details are different, but they appear to be just ways to get around Ti's DLP patents....
How is something like this moderated informative???
The whole spectrum of schizophrenia related disorders is characterized by a lack of empathy for others- ie people unable to understand or care about the feelings of other people.
What is the message of EVERY modern religion? Love your neighbour as yourself. Compassion for others. Helping the poor.
Anyone who can draw a link between the two is someone with a poor understanding of both science and religion.
And anyways, your post totally misrepresents the thesis of the article, which is religion and imagination are built in human characteristics that makes each person unique. He was referring to certain aspects of religion like numerology that had aspects in common with what incorrectly call mental ilnesses, by no means is he suggesting that belief in a god itself has anything to do with mental illness.
And if you think you become "rather competent" in utilizing it, then you're only fooling yourself.
That exact course outline is the standard curiculum of the upper year physics course in Canadian high schools. Of course different schools/universities cover topics at different levels, but the fact that you study BASIC QM and relativity is far from unique. There is simply no way you can truely understand relativity and QM without completing a few courses in advanced calculus and electrodynamics.
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While I agree that almost always true that its cheaper to buy a new product than to repair it (esp. for electronic gadgets, cell phones, and computers, but also increasingly true for large items like cars, appliences, etc), i find it funny how few people stop and think how absurd the whole situation is-
you can either:
a) Pay one person in a western country (where there may be 5% or more unemployment and a large majority or people doing dead-end service jobs) to spend 2-3 hours to take a device apart, figure out what's wrong, fix it.
or
b) Extract several pounds of different non-renewable resources, including many rare minerals (like gold), synthesise several more pounds of materials from fossil fuels (a computer takes 20x its final mass in chemicals and materials to produce), ship these materials across the world through dozens of factories where they are processed into parts (and pay for an army of R&D people, manufacturing engineers, assembly line workers, marketing poeple, managers, etc), ship the parts to Asia where they're assembled into a product (again involving the same number of people), test the finished parts extensively and repair any defective units, put the device pounds of packaging material, ship the finished devices across the world to the western country, pay for all the marketing, sales, acocunting, managers, logistics retail people at the store, and dispose of the old device and control the hazardous wastes released by the device that's disposed for thousands of years.
Something tells me that there is something drastically wrong with our economic system for the second scenerio come out cheaper than the first. It would be intersting if someone compared these two in terms of energy and non-renewable resource consumption and waste products discharged to the environment. Maybe if companies (and therefore consumers) had to pay for "externalities" and not simply extract as much out of the earth as they are capable of doing and discharging as many pollutants as they wish to the environment, this situation would change. In any case, I don't see any way that our current lifestyle is sustainable in economic or environmental terms; i'm sure one day in the future people will look back on what we accept as common sense and see how rediculous it is....
Informative?!?!
The grandparent poster is completely correct- this poster has no clue what he is talking about, and is completely making up BS
The T40 has a 15" 4:3 screen standard(though some IT departments may try to save money by putting in a small screen), which has exactly the same screen area as a 15.4" 16:10 screen used on the Tibook, now known as the Powerbook 15". All the specs the grandparent quoted were for the 15" models from each company.
The 17" version of the powerbook was never called a TiBook, and it is significantly larger and slower than the IBM T-40. It weighs around 7 pounds (too much to carry around on a daily basis) and is too large to fit in almost every laptop bag. How can one possibly call the IBM a "boat anchor" when it weights 2/3 as much? And even though the IBM is much smaller, it is still significantly faster in every respect than the powerbook.
Well, don't blame the executives at IBM and others who make these deals- they're obligated by law to maximize shareholder value, not to look after the economy or the country's viability. In fact, they would open themselves up to class action lawsuits if they made business decisions based on "mantaining the US technological base" or any other reason not related to the botom line.
w orldbu siness/04banker.html
No, that role entrusted to the government, and the vast majority of the population only looks at "moral issues" or "gun rights" or taxation or any number of special intersests when choosing their leaders.
THe bottom line is that the US is consuming far more than it is producing, which means it needs to constantly borrow money/sell off its assets to sustain this lifestyle. The US is entirely dependent on the central banks of Japan, China, and Saudi Arabia to buy up their debt in order to finance this unsustainable lifestyle-Right now they are mostly buying up US debt, but with their enormous wealth and the US's poor fiscal policy, they are turning to buying up morgages and US companies.
This is just the begining of the trend, as US treasury bonds become less attractive, they will likely use their money to take over US companies instead.
So unless the US somehow finds a way to change its massive current-accounts deficit, there can only be two possible results- Either the counties continue to invest, leading to widescale foreign ownership of everything in the country, or those countries pull their money from the US market, leading to total economic colapse.
here's an interesting article from the same issue of nyt:
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/04/business/
It doesn't matter, it only gives you the true local time anyways, which is guaranteed to be totally different from the standard time for the time zone you're living in.
It could easily be off by half an hour or more anyways
And what's wrong with increasing power through economics? Why WOULDN'T a country want to increase the living standards for its people?
The only country that's sacrificing their living standards, running up massive deficits, to prepare for war is the US.
Only to a Neocon does economic growth = threat to the US that must be eliminated. Instead of improving living standards for its own people, they're willing to reduce their own standards as long as they can prevent anyone else from becoming catching up to them.
Unfortunately, if there is a world war 3, it will be this aditude that causes it.
UV light is non-ionizing radiation, yet it is a well known cancer risk and is able to fuse together adjacent nucleotides in the DNA. It is frequently used to kill bacteria because it is so effective at damaging DNA.
Your microwave oven is also non-ionizing, yet it obviously has a significant effect on biological matter. And cell phone frequencies are rapidly approaching the microwave bands.
I don't think radiation is a serious concern, and occasional use of a cell phone is unlikely to cause permanent damage. But we really don't know enough about the effects of non-ionizing radiation on the body (historically most biologists don't know physics, and most physicists don't know biology) to say so definitively, and some studies suggest that cell phone radiation does affect the development of the brain. Considering the exponential growth of wireless devices (high-bandwidth cell phones, wireless internet, bluetooth, etc) it would be foolish to say that they are safe simply because they don't have enough energy to ionize our bodies.
Take a DC fan, reverse it, and you reverse bias the electronics that convert the DC to the pulsed/AC signal used to actually power the motor, possibly blowing up the circuit.
Of course, if you reversed the signal comming out of the electronics, you would get the motor to reverse. And since efficiency is crucial, brushless motors will certainly be the dominant technology. I don't know what they use in electric cars today (i didn't know there were any), but when they do become available, brussless motors will certainly be used.
Most hybrids and solar cars use brushless motors.
LED lights aren't wide spectrum- they only emit light at discrete wavelengths (bandgap energy). Most white LED's use phospors to convert light from another wavelength to white light, using the exact same process as flourescent lights, therefore yeilding a similar spectrum.
And most LED's are actually less efficent than flourescent lights.
Subduction zones are typically under the ocean, and you still have to dig over a kilometer down from the bottom of the ocean to reach the mantle
This is so far beyond our current technology that making a winged monkey sounds easy in comparason.
And anyways, if you learned your basic geology, you'd know that above every subduction zone is a large range of volcanoes that eject a large amount of the melted magma that goes down in the subduction zone- can you imagine a mount st. helen's type eruption, except with radioactive dust spewing out?
And about putting it in the middle of the desert, how is that any different from yucca mountain? At least the mountain will be sheltered from the elements, be much easier to guard against, and can be permanantly sealed off if the government doesn't want to pay for armed guards.
In this country, you obey the laws of thermodynamics.
Technology can't break the laws of physics.
- There's no way to get around the carnot efficiency in a heat engine. Maybe if billions of dollars were invested into a hydrogen economy you might be able to get up to 40 percent efficency with fuel cells, but if the hydrogen comes from fossil fuels and you account for the losses in the H2 production process, you're better off sticking with internal combustion engines.
- THere's no way of avoiding newton's second law- F=ma and its derivation E=1/2mv^2. Even if we could make the theoreticlaly impossible 80% engine, a 5 tonne SUV will still consume twice as much energy as a 2.5 tonne car to accelerate.
-And once you get to speed, there's no way of avoiding fluid dynamics- The drag force is proportional to cross sectional area, so driving a giant car will always waste fuel, no matter how much technology you have.
No, the answer isn't technology (unless cold fusion gets developed, which is highly unlikely in our lifetimes). The answer is conservation- why spend billions of dollars to develop a 300HP high efficiency SUV when a 150 HP car is enough for people's needs, and a current 150 HP car will consume less fuel than ANY 300 HP SUV made with ANY technology that could ever be developed?
Technically, the first computers were analog computers, which were complex tube-based circuits that performed mathematical operations on signals in the analog domain. Virtually every mathematical operation can be performed in the analog domain, like addition, subtaction, multiplication, integration, differentiation, etc...Programming was done by wiring the circuit elements to solve the required equation....
Analog computers were widely used to solve differential equations and for control systems, years before digital computers were practical....
If there's no immediate threat to our safety, then that money could be better spent. The opportunity cost of defending against every concievable threat is too high-
The US became the world's superpower by becoming a world leader in scientific knowlege, education, manufacturing, and economy. What the hawks in the administration don't realize is that the way to ensure a "new american century" is to maintain those strengths, rather than bankrupting the treasury on wars and weapons that are beyond our means.
If a major war did break out a decade or more from now, the country would be much better off with the money having been invested in science/education/economy than having outdated laser system.
Its not the size of the media that takes up the space, its the size of the drive itself-
If you built a SFF with a laptop dvd burner, it would take up a fraction of the space, without sacrificing any features. I'm sure the average laptop DVD drive is smaller than the floppy drive on a desktop... There have been "SFF"'s, built right into the back of LCD monitors for years that use laptop drives....
If you can afford it, laptops are much smaller and quieter than any SFF- they basically take up NO space, since a good laptop takes up no more space than your keyboard, mouse, and monitor... With video cards like the mobile 128MB radeon 9700 and 7200RPM laptop hard drives, they can equal the performance of pretty well any SFF...
"Generations have been working in jobs they hate, just so they can buy what they don't really need"
-fight club
Global warming is a global problem, so everyone needs to help fight the problem, espcially the country that contains approx 2% of the world's population but emits a quarter of the word's CO2 emissions...
The US is by far the highest emissions per capita, and its worse in that the US doesn't even do much of its own manufacturing....(imports far exceed exports)
Global warming will affect everyone, and the costs of not acting will be far greater than the cost of implimenting the protocol- that's why every other country is still going ahead with the plan, even without US participation. Yes, even Russia agreed to the plan, with the terrible shape its economy is in, because it knows the costs of not acting will be greater.
And the fact that the economy will be hurt is BS- the underlying assumption in economics is that our living standards are proportional to number of goods/services we produce- But what about air quality? pollution? clean water? moderate temperatures? None of those are accounted for in our economic models, so a naive economist would say destroying those for greater manufacturing output would improve our living standards, when in reality it would do the exact oposite.
And considering that cutting greenhouse gasses will require substantial investments in technology by companies all around the world, and the fact that the US is a global leader in research and development, it stands to gain much more from developing and marketing these technologies than it stands to lose from job cuts at the oil companies and SUV manufacturers.
Actually, exhailing CO2 is probably the only positive thing humans do for the "environoment". Our ecological niche is to consume oxygen and emit carbon dioxide- if we didn't help keep the concentrations of those gases in equilibrium, the O2 level would increase by a fraction of a percent, probably resulting widespread forest fires.
Now, emitting large amounts of CO2 from sources outside the carbon cycle, IE burning consuming fossil fuels to make your video card, is bad because it thows the equilibrium off in the opposite direction. There was a recent report that stated that computers consume far more resources and produce far more waste than any other manufactured good. Whereas something like a car uses 4-5 times its weight in materials, a computer component uses more than 20 times.... And the materials used in computers is far more dangerous- heavy metals, lead solder, PCB's, epoxy, strong acids to etch boards, etc...
While one or two video cards isn't a problem, when people upgrade computers every 2-3 years for the rest of their lives, an enourmous amount of resources is consumed and an equally large amount of waste is produced.
Firstly, your comparason isn't valid because a powersupply works on up to 500 watts of power while a hard drive works on maybe 5 watts. The power dissipated in a powersupply is so much greater that any comparson is useless. Transformer-based powersupplies almost never fail. I've never heard of one failing for any reason other than a power surge or a short in the circuit that resulted in too much current passing through the transformer. Any properly designed system will choose a transformer with wire gauges large enough that "fusing" isn't a problem. However, all computer powersupplies these days are switch-mode supplies, which use transistor switching instead of transformers to step up the voltage. So even if transformer "fusing" was possible, it can't be the cause... Powersupplies fail for one reason- they are poorly designed- Most people won't hesitate to spend extra for a high-quality motherboard, but when they go to buy a powersupply, they choose the cheapest one they can get. Those cheap powersupplies cut corners, using transitors+heatsinks too small for their specified wattage, and extremely cheap capacitors. Most often, its the large filter capacitor that blows up, and that has nothing to do with oscillations or spinning. But if people bought powersupplies of comparable quality to their hard drives, they would likely last longer than the hard drive. Maybe a better question would be what fails more often in cars? Reciprocating engines or rotary engines?
The DOE does not compute folding patterns or anything else that will benefit humanity. The sole purpose of this computer is for the development/simulation of new generations of nuclear weapons.
If they go with open source software, will they also post electronics schematics, info about scientific instruments, and CAD drawings of mechanical systems?
I think those would be even more interesting to look at than the code....
The thing is if you look at the complexity of the circuit/number of transistors in a delta-sigma DAC, it is orders of magnitude more complex than the traditional current-stearing DAC.
The reason that the "digital" system, the delta sigma DAC, comes out ahead is the real strength of digital systems- noise immunity.
With the traditional DAC's, there are only 16 current sources/resistors in the whole chip, but each one needed to be trimmed by a laser to a very precise value. This costs a lot of money, which is why you need to spend 10x more on the chip to produce the same performance as a delta-sigma DAC. (most industrial DAC's and high-end audio still use this system)
With the delta-sigma DAC, you can put in several thousand transistors, but each one only needs to respond to two voltage levels. Each transistor can be poorly made, it just needs to be good enough to turn on when the voltage goes high and turn off when the voltage goes low. So digital chips require much less precision and can be made at much lower cost.
Basically, it is much cheaper to make tons of cheap transistors rather than one precise/accurate one.
That is the same reason binary is better than trinary- Trinary systems would probably require less transistors than a comparable binary system, but each one would need to be much more precise.
Actually, almost all LED's have a maximum current of under 5mA, and in normal use you wouldn't put more than about 1mA into one.
YOu might want to work out the math behind your idea first. As you may know, the electric force decreases with the SQUARE of the distance, so any the electric force you can produce in a balloon of macroscopic proportions is going to be negligible. Certainly not enough to counteract the 15 pounds of force acting on every square inch of the balloon.
And you can't increase the voltage past a few thousand volts, that would simply ionize the air and cause arcing.
Even if you could supply enough voltage, the control system would be impossible to achieve, as any turbulance in the air will change the shape in certain areas of the balloon, requiring massive real-time corrections to the voltage for it to maintain its shape. This is would require solving in real time millions of simultaneous non-linear equations, something we're not about to achieve.
But what is the advantage of that system over DLP, which appears to work on the exact same principal. Sure, a few minute details are different, but they appear to be just ways to get around Ti's DLP patents....
How is something like this moderated informative???
The whole spectrum of schizophrenia related disorders is characterized by a lack of empathy for others- ie people unable to understand or care about the feelings of other people.
What is the message of EVERY modern religion? Love your neighbour as yourself. Compassion for others. Helping the poor.
Anyone who can draw a link between the two is someone with a poor understanding of both science and religion.
And anyways, your post totally misrepresents the thesis of the article, which is religion and imagination are built in human characteristics that makes each person unique. He was referring to certain aspects of religion like numerology that had aspects in common with what incorrectly call mental ilnesses, by no means is he suggesting that belief in a god itself has anything to do with mental illness.
And if you think you become "rather competent" in utilizing it, then you're only fooling yourself.
That exact course outline is the standard curiculum of the upper year physics course in Canadian high schools. Of course different schools/universities cover topics at different levels, but the fact that you study BASIC QM and relativity is far from unique. There is simply no way you can truely understand relativity and QM without completing a few courses in advanced calculus and electrodynamics.