those efforts are based on DMFC technology which derives hydrogen from methanol, producing small amounts of carbon dioxide (itself a greenhouse gas) in the process. Canon's cells obtain hydrogen from a refillable cartridge with no toxic byproducts.
As long as we're considering small quantities of C02 a 'toxic byproduct' as a greenhouse gas, I would like to point out that that all hydrogen fuel cells generate dihydrogen monoxide as their principle biproduct, which is an even worse greenhouse gas.
The commission concluded that 'profound scientific questions relating to the history of the solar system and the existence of life beyond Earth can best - perhaps only - be achieved by human exploration on the Moon or Mars, supported by appropriate automated systems.
That's cool stuff and all, but I'm something of a pragmatist, so hopefully I won't offend too many of the resident idealist when I suggest that the previously enumerated justifications don't hold water as far as spending billions on a space program goes.
Knowing the history of solar system has next to zero humanitarian worth. And while maybe, just maybe finding alien life could yield some pharmaceutical benefits, all present evidence indicates that life is a localized earth phenomena. There is not much reason to expect to find any microbes on Titan or Mars or anywhere else except for hopeful thinking. Which is fine, and maybe there's a full fledged intelligent civilization living under ice sheets on one of the Jovian moons, but you don't send an expedition to the back of the moon looking for the Fountain of Youth just because it might be there.
That's not to say this knowledge doesn't have any worth. It has aesthetic worth, like the Sistine Chapel. Heck, as a student of physics, my defining goal is to further elucidate the nature of the universe. Personally, I assosciate an incredible worth with knowing more about its formation.
But I wouldn't support my government spending billions on an art project, even one I would appreciate, and likewise, I don't think 'history of the solar system' is likely to be the best allocation of the funds.
Now, colonizing space is a whole nother spiel as far as justifying an investment. I think there are immense humanitarian benefits inherit to that--many, as exampled by the U.S. space program, that will arise sheerly incidental to the effort without us having any idea about them beforehand. Zero gravity refinement of synthetic materials, solar mirrors to assist in growing crops (and maybe dissipating hurricanes?), extending our habitat to deal with overcrowding... these all seem like things that a wealthy government might be doing its people a favor by investing in.
The right way to judge a situation is not emotionally, or sentimentally, but through cost-benefit analysis. As an example, I'm afraid that environment==good:. kyoto == good is simply not a logical assertion. First of all, the environment is not intrinsically worthy... what makes a bunch of carbon atoms organized as molecular skeletons any more important than carbon atoms organized as a rock? You would be hard pressed to come up with a formula. Sentience on the other hand introduces a whole new prospect of morality and evaluations of worth that can exist without a reductionist deduction from particles and and particle properties. (You can argue that sentience does not make us any more important than other molecular aggregates, but then you are arguing the irrelevance of your own stake in the argument, so forgive me if I don't feel too bad about neglecting a critical analysis of that philosophy.)
So in an analytic, rational way, we should look at what outcome, subsuming all its possible advantages and disadvantages, is to the greatest benefit of mankind. Global warming is not ipso facto a bad thing just because that's how people spin it when they talk about it. The earth used to be rather more tropical than it is now. Is it's moving back in that direction a bad thing? Was it's moving out of the ice age a bad thing? Could global warming stave off what would cyclically appear to be the inevitable of another earth iceage?
I think most people are rather more reactionary than they should be about this topic. Global warming != the sky is falling, global warming == gradual climactic change we are faced with drawing up a reasonable response to. Rising sea levels over a hundred years is not a big deal. Coastal cities face infinitely more peril from sudden oceanic storms than waters that will take hundreds of years to reach them. We should certainly consider what the effect will be on ecosystems, what species will die off, and whether we want to accept this as another stage in earth's evolution (mass extinctions are nothing new) or if we want to stick our noses in and try to keep things the way we like it. But "The earth is doomed!" is not a terribly levelheaded approach. The sky is not falling, people. Climactic change is something that planets do. It is quite possible that a warmer earth may be a bad thing for us, and that we should invest to arrest its change. It is also possible that it is a very good thing, or that we simply do not have the capacity to affect it significantly at all. My recommendation is simply that we recognize (1) change != apocalypse (2) that doesn't mean taking action is not warranted, only that we should not be reactionary about it.
If you're using Linux simply use the keyboard switching option. I have mine setup so that pressing capslock switches to internation mode. Then I just enter Shr"odinger for Shrödinger or h^opital for hôpital etc. Another space prints the actual character, or you can just hit capslock again to go back to US keyboard mode.
...I am willing to offer a one year tour around a nearby star, getting at a distance of about 1 AU. To maintain the comforts of gravity and atmosphere, I have identified a suitable location on a nearby planet. The external atmosphere contains mild contaminants, however, should be quite breathable. A mass particle transport utility shall be provided upon receipt of first half of my requested sum.
"You talking about AC vs DC as the biggest difference?"
I'm only an acolyte as far as electrical stuff goes, but I know that galvanic cells (i.e. batteries) are necessarily dc. If you have a battery running a power supply then it has to be transformed to ac, and then back to dc again. I would imagine there would be a fairly significant loss of energy, meaning a lot more current has to be pulled from the battery than is actually being used. Anyway, you oughtn't have increduility that a small battery would sustain motors like that. I have worked on robots which do some pretty grueling things on AA's. Granted, they had to be recharged quite often, but then that's the case here, isn't it?
How big does the battery have to be to run a *laser printer* for even a couple of minutes? Hmmm...
Not very big at all. All it's really doing is moving sheets of paper from the input tray to the output tray. The internals would probably only require 12-24v dc, and a lot of current, which is consistent with the grandparent's assertion that it would run off one battery with a very short lifespan.
Besides, the concept is brilliant. I don't care if the story turns out to be fabricated, it's funny, ingenious, and well-worth implementing in other scenarios. >:)
"Bah... the universe is mostly empty space. It would compress nicely."
In truth, no space is empty; and you can compress the data, but then you will not have a perfect simulation; your computer will take longer to process the data than the span of the events which are occuring. As far as predicting the future goes, it would be useless, because the real universe would complete its 'calculations' long before your more space-efficient machine did--you would in effect only be able to 'predict' the past.
Price differentiation is good for us little guys, and for the economy.
Example: Coupons. Coupons allow stores to set two prices, a high price and a discount price. People with small budgets use coupons and save money; people with large budgets are generally not concerned with cutting out coupons and pay the higher price. More transactions occur--there is less deadweight loss in the economy; the store makes more money; and those with smaller incomes can buy more than they would be able to otherwise. If there was not a coupon, the profit-maximizing price would be higher than the coupon price, but lower than the high price. The store makes less money, the poorest purchasers miss out on the item because the marginal cost of purchasing it is now too high for them, and those slightly better off than the poorest get a worse deal.
As a general rule, everybody is best off when sales are maximized in a non-coercive fashion. This applies to pretty much all forms of price discrimination in competitive markets.
You are either a scammer rationalizing your behavior or simply delusional. Joe Businessman does not fall for fake citibank websites. If he's one of these evil rich folks you despise so much, he probably doesn't even do his old accounting.
The majority of people who fall for these scams are elderly persons (principally women) who have little internet experience and don't understand things like "http://68.12.34.5/wellsfargo" is probably not the real deal.
That aside, I am at a loss to explain your argument against banks. Your words imply that you dislike them because they loan money to wealthy inviduals who create the dredded "corporations." I'm curious who is it that you think gives the "working stiff" a salary to put food on the table, anyway? Has it occurred to you that an "economy" is somehow involved in creating the wealth which finances things like homeless shelters? Do you realize how critical banks are to the economy? How many are you willing to toss into poverty to exact your vengeance on those so presumptuous as to be better off than yourself?
At any event, as a college student, I can tell you that banks don't just give loans to the wealthy (I don't even have a regular job). And almost everyone, regardless of income level, has a bank account, from which they often make money off of having their money loaned to these evil rich.
"Troll"
Glad to see the slashdot censors are doing there part to make sure only their side of the debate is heard.
Meanwhile, the parent poster is modded +5 Insightful? How the commentary significantly different from the commentary here, other than in the politics it favors?
Given that most geeks get few enough phone calls to render an answering machine pointless, why do they need a PBX system?
An answering machine allows me to ignore people I don't absolutely have to talk to.
A PBX system allows me avoid interaction altogether by setting up an interactive system (i.e., "press one now").
Combine this with internet groceries and shopping, an income based solely on doing well in everquest, and many of us will never have to leave our mother's basements. Ever. BUWAHAHAHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!
So instead of having dashingly handsome and witty mathematicians who know kung fu and have packs of women trailing at their feet... now we're going to have eccentric old guys with frizzy hair talking for half an hour about homogeneous manifolds not realizing until an hour later that they came in on the wrong day and that's why none of their students are there?
Heh, I look forward to having the movie theaters all to myself when these new movies come out.:)
NASA is paying Rice University $11 million Rice has four years to build a one-meter-long quantum wire,
Wouldn't it make a lot more sense to put out a bounty on this wire? Instead of the four year plan, you get the "everyone scrambling to complete it first" plan, and as a bonus, even when someone collects the bounty, all the research done by other institutions still stands.
Slashdot Mirror
Somewhere between twenty-five and seventy-five billion dollars.
As long as we're considering small quantities of C02 a 'toxic byproduct' as a greenhouse gas, I would like to point out that that all hydrogen fuel cells generate dihydrogen monoxide as their principle biproduct, which is an even worse greenhouse gas.
That's cool stuff and all, but I'm something of a pragmatist, so hopefully I won't offend too many of the resident idealist when I suggest that the previously enumerated justifications don't hold water as far as spending billions on a space program goes.
Knowing the history of solar system has next to zero humanitarian worth. And while maybe, just maybe finding alien life could yield some pharmaceutical benefits, all present evidence indicates that life is a localized earth phenomena. There is not much reason to expect to find any microbes on Titan or Mars or anywhere else except for hopeful thinking. Which is fine, and maybe there's a full fledged intelligent civilization living under ice sheets on one of the Jovian moons, but you don't send an expedition to the back of the moon looking for the Fountain of Youth just because it might be there.
That's not to say this knowledge doesn't have any worth. It has aesthetic worth, like the Sistine Chapel. Heck, as a student of physics, my defining goal is to further elucidate the nature of the universe. Personally, I assosciate an incredible worth with knowing more about its formation.
But I wouldn't support my government spending billions on an art project, even one I would appreciate, and likewise, I don't think 'history of the solar system' is likely to be the best allocation of the funds.
Now, colonizing space is a whole nother spiel as far as justifying an investment. I think there are immense humanitarian benefits inherit to that--many, as exampled by the U.S. space program, that will arise sheerly incidental to the effort without us having any idea about them beforehand. Zero gravity refinement of synthetic materials, solar mirrors to assist in growing crops (and maybe dissipating hurricanes?), extending our habitat to deal with overcrowding... these all seem like things that a wealthy government might be doing its people a favor by investing in.
The right way to judge a situation is not emotionally, or sentimentally, but through cost-benefit analysis. As an example, I'm afraid that environment==good :. kyoto == good is simply not a logical assertion. First of all, the environment is not intrinsically worthy... what makes a bunch of carbon atoms organized as molecular skeletons any more important than carbon atoms organized as a rock? You would be hard pressed to come up with a formula. Sentience on the other hand introduces a whole new prospect of morality and evaluations of worth that can exist without a reductionist deduction from particles and and particle properties. (You can argue that sentience does not make us any more important than other molecular aggregates, but then you are arguing the irrelevance of your own stake in the argument, so forgive me if I don't feel too bad about neglecting a critical analysis of that philosophy.)
So in an analytic, rational way, we should look at what outcome, subsuming all its possible advantages and disadvantages, is to the greatest benefit of mankind. Global warming is not ipso facto a bad thing just because that's how people spin it when they talk about it. The earth used to be rather more tropical than it is now. Is it's moving back in that direction a bad thing? Was it's moving out of the ice age a bad thing? Could global warming stave off what would cyclically appear to be the inevitable of another earth iceage?
I think most people are rather more reactionary than they should be about this topic. Global warming != the sky is falling, global warming == gradual climactic change we are faced with drawing up a reasonable response to. Rising sea levels over a hundred years is not a big deal. Coastal cities face infinitely more peril from sudden oceanic storms than waters that will take hundreds of years to reach them. We should certainly consider what the effect will be on ecosystems, what species will die off, and whether we want to accept this as another stage in earth's evolution (mass extinctions are nothing new) or if we want to stick our noses in and try to keep things the way we like it. But "The earth is doomed!" is not a terribly levelheaded approach. The sky is not falling, people. Climactic change is something that planets do. It is quite possible that a warmer earth may be a bad thing for us, and that we should invest to arrest its change. It is also possible that it is a very good thing, or that we simply do not have the capacity to affect it significantly at all. My recommendation is simply that we recognize (1) change != apocalypse (2) that doesn't mean taking action is not warranted, only that we should not be reactionary about it.
If you're using Linux simply use the keyboard switching option. I have mine setup so that pressing capslock switches to internation mode. Then I just enter Shr"odinger for Shrödinger or h^opital for hôpital etc. Another space prints the actual character, or you can just hit capslock again to go back to US keyboard mode.
"Yes." -- some slashdotters
"No." -- other slashdotters
Oh, and your horoscope for today is "Give generously to people you meet online who make you laugh."
...I am willing to offer a one year tour around a nearby star, getting at a distance of about 1 AU. To maintain the comforts of gravity and atmosphere, I have identified a suitable location on a nearby planet. The external atmosphere contains mild contaminants, however, should be quite breathable. A mass particle transport utility shall be provided upon receipt of first half of my requested sum.
It's just like an empire game!
"You found scrolls of ancient wisdom!"
"You found patent for modern technology!"
Free Republic is a news aggregator. There was no "Free Republic author", the article is from Tech Central Station: http://www.techcentralstation.com/091605F.html.
Fear my awesome powers!
I'm only an acolyte as far as electrical stuff goes, but I know that galvanic cells (i.e. batteries) are necessarily dc. If you have a battery running a power supply then it has to be transformed to ac, and then back to dc again. I would imagine there would be a fairly significant loss of energy, meaning a lot more current has to be pulled from the battery than is actually being used. Anyway, you oughtn't have increduility that a small battery would sustain motors like that. I have worked on robots which do some pretty grueling things on AA's. Granted, they had to be recharged quite often, but then that's the case here, isn't it?
Not very big at all. All it's really doing is moving sheets of paper from the input tray to the output tray. The internals would probably only require 12-24v dc, and a lot of current, which is consistent with the grandparent's assertion that it would run off one battery with a very short lifespan.
Besides, the concept is brilliant. I don't care if the story turns out to be fabricated, it's funny, ingenious, and well-worth implementing in other scenarios. >:)
"Bah... the universe is mostly empty space. It would compress nicely."
In truth, no space is empty; and you can compress the data, but then you will not have a perfect simulation; your computer will take longer to process the data than the span of the events which are occuring. As far as predicting the future goes, it would be useless, because the real universe would complete its 'calculations' long before your more space-efficient machine did--you would in effect only be able to 'predict' the past.
Example: Coupons. Coupons allow stores to set two prices, a high price and a discount price. People with small budgets use coupons and save money; people with large budgets are generally not concerned with cutting out coupons and pay the higher price. More transactions occur--there is less deadweight loss in the economy; the store makes more money; and those with smaller incomes can buy more than they would be able to otherwise. If there was not a coupon, the profit-maximizing price would be higher than the coupon price, but lower than the high price. The store makes less money, the poorest purchasers miss out on the item because the marginal cost of purchasing it is now too high for them, and those slightly better off than the poorest get a worse deal.
As a general rule, everybody is best off when sales are maximized in a non-coercive fashion. This applies to pretty much all forms of price discrimination in competitive markets.
The majority of people who fall for these scams are elderly persons (principally women) who have little internet experience and don't understand things like "http://68.12.34.5/wellsfargo" is probably not the real deal.
That aside, I am at a loss to explain your argument against banks. Your words imply that you dislike them because they loan money to wealthy inviduals who create the dredded "corporations." I'm curious who is it that you think gives the "working stiff" a salary to put food on the table, anyway? Has it occurred to you that an "economy" is somehow involved in creating the wealth which finances things like homeless shelters? Do you realize how critical banks are to the economy? How many are you willing to toss into poverty to exact your vengeance on those so presumptuous as to be better off than yourself?
At any event, as a college student, I can tell you that banks don't just give loans to the wealthy (I don't even have a regular job). And almost everyone, regardless of income level, has a bank account, from which they often make money off of having their money loaned to these evil rich.
Well, now we have a motive for the murder, at least.
"Troll" Glad to see the slashdot censors are doing there part to make sure only their side of the debate is heard. Meanwhile, the parent poster is modded +5 Insightful? How the commentary significantly different from the commentary here, other than in the politics it favors?
An answering machine allows me to ignore people I don't absolutely have to talk to.
A PBX system allows me avoid interaction altogether by setting up an interactive system (i.e., "press one now").
Combine this with internet groceries and shopping, an income based solely on doing well in everquest, and many of us will never have to leave our mother's basements. Ever. BUWAHAHAHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!
Winzip.
Brian Greene is a physicist. It's fairly well-known that we physicists are all much cooler and sexier than mathematicians.
Heh, I look forward to having the movie theaters all to myself when these new movies come out. :)
The best way for robots to help blind people is to shove them.
Traceroute? :p
NASA is paying Rice University $11 million
Rice has four years to build a one-meter-long quantum wire,
Wouldn't it make a lot more sense to put out a bounty on this wire? Instead of the four year plan, you get the "everyone scrambling to complete it first" plan, and as a bonus, even when someone collects the bounty, all the research done by other institutions still stands.
Works every time!