The average automobile engine is 48% efficent, so it's physically impossible to have something more than twice as efficient.
My experience with coal fired power plants is that they are nearing 40% thermodynamic efficiency.
There is no magic bullet to make this picture multiple orders of magnatude better. The problem is complex, and requires a comprehensive (complex) solution. Hydrogen isn't it.
--Mike--
Hydrogen - The future of Buzzword Energy
on
Light Bulb Replacements
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Hydrogen is often used to conjure up visions of a clean future. If only the greedy oil companies would see the purity of the vision... blah blah blah...
The fact is that you need energy to produce hydrogen, and that energy is probably going to come from either Coal, or Natural Gas. The end user thinks their helping the environment, but what really happens is that the production of a carbon exhaust is moved back in the supply chain. The amount of Hydrogen produced by a renewable source in any reasonably short time frame (20 years) is going to be almost negligible.
The Hydrogen Future seems too good to be true, because it is.
I remember the last big M$ push when they were saying how great their Uptime was. 99.9999%?
If I have to reboot my servers every time a major bug hits (3 times/year) for 5 minutes, that's bad enough. (99.9971% availability) If I have to reboot the servers every week, now we're down to 99.95% uptime.
This, of course, doesn't count downtime or technical support issues caused by workstations missing their server connections, or the patches that didn't happen in time, or any of the various other factors that help kill capitalism, and endanger our National Security.
Tuneable tactical nukes have been around for some time. The W31 device used in the Ajax-Nike missle programs had a selectable yield of 40, 20, or 2 Kilotons. This matched up with your first attempt to shoot down the enemy at 90 miles, or second pass at 45 miles, or last change right overhead. It as first deployed in 1958, and retired in 1974.
Ok, I'm mystified by the/. rating system sometimes myself.
I understand electromagnetic polarity, opposites attracting, etc... I don't want to play with the physics of that right now... just those darned unipolar gravitons.
If you assume a very high flux of gravitons, all with a very low mass (or energy), and a low probability of interacting with a given unit of mass, the following conditions start to fall out of the math:
a sufficiently dense mass will stop a very small, but consistent fraction of the gravitons that pass through it.
If the flux of gravitons is uniform from all directions, the net effect on a single mass is zero.
A mass in a uniform graviton flux will create a graviton shadow in which there will be a gradient of less gravitons nearer the mass.
Two masses near each other will be effected by the graviton shadown with a result just like that of Mr Newton, except that "Big G" isn't really a constant, just a constant times the overall ambient graviton flux.
The push of the two objects together is from an EXTERNAL source of gravitons. (Left over from the big bang?)
Prediction: If a material is found that shields gravity... it will effect materials in an unorthodox manner in the eyes of physicists as follows:
A mass below a said "shield" will be lighter. If you could stop 100% of gravitons in their tracks, you'd have a very effective artificial black hole.
A mass above the shield will get heavier.
The material will have the appearance of having a great deal of mass, which might be greatly different than it's inertial mass.
It'll be hard to find, because it'll just appear to be a dense material. A material based on an interference filter might be the only possible hope for an efficient gravity stop.
I haven't done tons of simulations, but I'd be willing to do them if someone were to take the idea seriously, and make it worth my time.
Rather than assuming some bizarre physics of gravitons where they pull something they ram into, why not take a simpler approach and assume that they push things along, just like a baseball and the milk bottle at the faire?
The earth stops some of them passing through, and thus the ones from above us push us down. All the standard laws of physics still work on the local level, and nobody has to get a migrane trying to wrap their heads around weird concepts.
This is much simpler than "dark energy"... the farther you are from the source (or field) of gravitons (?? I have no idea where they come from), the less the "gravitational constant" appears to be.
No, it means that the plea bargain process has effectively subverted the process of justice in this country. Pleading guilty, in the eyes of the Court is the same as being found guilty. This is a convinience for the court system, but does not imply reality.
When you're innocent, but pleady guilty in court as part of a plea agreement, it really means you know you've been screwed, but you're taking the lessor of two evils.
Now that this case is effectively closed, and justice left unserved, the effects are:
The facts of the case are effectively sealed from the public forever.
The administration now has a precident for use to coherce more people into similar deals
Joe SixPack gets to believe we found a Nazi = Communist = AlQueda = Taliban in our midst.
The sad fact is now we'll never really know the facts in this case.
Everyone assumes that because he copped a plea he's guilty. Wrong!
Everyone assumes that he's a terrorist. Wrong!
I assumed that the typical/. reader would have a little more brains than the average 6Pack Joe. Wrong!
My fellow citizens, you no longer live in a Democracy, and it's just a matter of time before they come for you, your family, or your friends.
If it lifts both itself, and the bag off the ground, there is probable cause to suspect that it's not airflow alone doing the lift. If it's done inside an aluminized mylar bag, not touching the ground, then you know it's not airflow, nor ion wind of any type.
The fact is, they want to hide things behind a paywall, and most folks resent it. They need to decide a few things:
Are they going to expose their archives, and enjoy the benefits of far more exposure (on google, etc), or hide behind a paywall, and complain that they're increasingly irrelevant.
Are they going to start practicing journalism, or stick with their current direction of corporate propaganda for the masses? (and become increasingly irrelevant)
An alternative suggested in the article was to install gear from the Global Hawk system (which completed testing by flying a plane across the pacific, 3 months before 9/11).
I was suggesting (in a conspiracy theorist kind of way) that perhaps that very system (not the soft wall) had been used on 9/11 by elements unknown.
This system has already proven its usefulness to terrorists, see the proof of concept runs on September 11, 2001 for an example of the effectiveness of remotely controlled passenger jets.
--Mike--
Heat and Radiation
on
RAID for Zero-G?
·
· Score: 5, Informative
I see three main challenges in this scenario:
Heat
Convection cooling gets assumed into almost everything, so you'll have to make sure the gear gets some air forced over everything to keep it cool. Inside the hard drives, you've got those nice platters pushing the air for you, so that should be ok.
Air pressure
You indicate that there will be air, but not the pressure. You should test your system at the operating atmosphere and pressure for an extended amount of time. This is critical because the hard drives typically float on a cushion of the ambient atmosphere.
Radiation
Since you're outside the 50 or so miles of air which filters out most of the radation common in space, make sure you have hardware ECC RAM, etc. It would also be good to make sure there is a hardware watchdog in place to protect the OS from hanging do to an induced CPU error.
Testing tip:
I'd suggest you test the unit, then run the same test with the unit operating upside down, and on each of it's other 4 faces, as a minimum.
Contrary to popular opinion, the ability to travel or send information faster than light does not allow one to travel backwards in time. If you leave earth, get to Alpha Centauri and come back, and it takes you only one day to go each way, you still show up 2 days after you left.
If you're using a digital camera, you MUST have a source of power to recharge the batteries anyway, so just plan to need to recharge from time to time.
Organization Stuff
Stuff the pictures into folders like this:
\yyyy\yyyymmdd
This allows the directory size to be managable, and since you're not likely to cause the camera to roll over, filenames aren't an issue.
Use a program such as Thumbs Plus to view the photos, and prune (if you must). The "slide show" mode lets you rip through images for review like a dream. For editing, I use Paint Shop Pro.
These programs have served me well for the 82,000 I've accumulated so far.
Gear
If you can, get an old laptop that burns CDs. It doesn't have to be fast, or pretty, it just has to run at least 2 hours on a charge. If that can't be done, try to get a pair of old Toshiba Librettos (they look like old PDAs, and are less likely to be stolen).
Get power adapters, cables, etc, for all the countries you plan to visit. If you're technical at all, take some alligator clips, and a small multimeter for use in rigging up power. (They make them small and cheap at Radio Shack)
Figure out some way to back the stuff up (via CD if possible, or cloning the Librettos)
The propaganda term "Intellectual Property" is a creative fiction designed to confuse two separate types of limited control granted by government.
1. Patents - A limited monopoly over the commercial implementation and distribution of a novel concept IN A PRODUCT. Patents represent a trade-off to encourage open distribution of the concept after the limited term of the patent. Note that a patent doesn't prevent someone from using a concept for their own use.
2. Copyright - A time limited monopoly over the commercial distribution of an authored work. The term is limited and this is traded by the government to encourage the creation of a large public domain. Note that this is intended to prevent PUBLISHERS from making money off of other publishers works.
Note that in both cases the primary motivation is creation of goods for the public.
The fiction is that it isn't property at all... it's a time limited grant of monopoly, and it's meant to expire. Property is a durable item, not a lease.
Since the only legal specie are Gold and Silver, it's time to start mining. According to XE, you'd have to cough up 2,820 ounces of Gold, or 222,223 ounces of Silver.
According to the constitution, however... $1,000,000 should be equal to 28,571 ounces of gold... notice the 10:1 descrepancy? Someone's been ripped off.
The comparison with BitTorrent is written by a person who is being very defensive of his creation. Combining the two ideas would really be cool. I hope they eventually see that, and overcome their emotions.
The fact is, it would be a great idea to combine the idea of a secure distribution channel and a swarming distribution mechanism. If the protocol extended to permit a web of trust like PGP, then you could have groups of people who could send files to a secure, very fast, distribution channel.
Now if we could get rid of the BitTorrent need to trust a single host with the task of tracking who has what... then we're there.
Slashdot Mirror
My experience with coal fired power plants is that they are nearing 40% thermodynamic efficiency.
There is no magic bullet to make this picture multiple orders of magnatude better. The problem is complex, and requires a comprehensive (complex) solution. Hydrogen isn't it.
--Mike--
The fact is that you need energy to produce hydrogen, and that energy is probably going to come from either Coal, or Natural Gas. The end user thinks their helping the environment, but what really happens is that the production of a carbon exhaust is moved back in the supply chain. The amount of Hydrogen produced by a renewable source in any reasonably short time frame (20 years) is going to be almost negligible.
The Hydrogen Future seems too good to be true, because it is.
--Mike--
If I have to reboot my servers every time a major bug hits (3 times/year) for 5 minutes, that's bad enough. (99.9971% availability) If I have to reboot the servers every week, now we're down to 99.95% uptime.
This, of course, doesn't count downtime or technical support issues caused by workstations missing their server connections, or the patches that didn't happen in time, or any of the various other factors that help kill capitalism, and endanger our National Security.
--Mike--
--Mike--
--Mike--
I said that gravitons ineract very weakly with matter, so alignment doesn't matter.
--Mike--
I understand electromagnetic polarity, opposites attracting, etc... I don't want to play with the physics of that right now... just those darned unipolar gravitons.
If you assume a very high flux of gravitons, all with a very low mass (or energy), and a low probability of interacting with a given unit of mass, the following conditions start to fall out of the math:
Prediction: If a material is found that shields gravity... it will effect materials in an unorthodox manner in the eyes of physicists as follows:
I haven't done tons of simulations, but I'd be willing to do them if someone were to take the idea seriously, and make it worth my time.
--Mike--
The earth stops some of them passing through, and thus the ones from above us push us down. All the standard laws of physics still work on the local level, and nobody has to get a migrane trying to wrap their heads around weird concepts.
This is much simpler than "dark energy"... the farther you are from the source (or field) of gravitons (?? I have no idea where they come from), the less the "gravitational constant" appears to be.
--Mike--
When you're innocent, but pleady guilty in court as part of a plea agreement, it really means you know you've been screwed, but you're taking the lessor of two evils.
Now that this case is effectively closed, and justice left unserved, the effects are:
The sad fact is now we'll never really know the facts in this case.
--Mike--
Everyone assumes that he's a terrorist. Wrong! I assumed that the typical
My fellow citizens, you no longer live in a Democracy, and it's just a matter of time before they come for you, your family, or your friends.
--Mike--
Copyright IS NOT property.
--Mike--
It's not at all clear that sharing a file with a friend is illegal, and it's clearly not immoral.
Copyright exists to provide incentives to push works into the public domain, not to keep them out of it.
--Mike--
--Mike--
--Mike--
You only need to test it for a few seconds, so heat shouldn't be a real issue. Inflate the thing if you need to keep the edges away from the HV.
Why hasn't anyone tried it?!?!?!
--Mike--
Once that's accomplished, we wait for a random backhoe to take something out, and civilization falls apart.
Only an idiot would classify maps.
--Mike--
I was suggesting (in a conspiracy theorist kind of way) that perhaps that very system (not the soft wall) had been used on 9/11 by elements unknown.
--Mike--
--Mike--
- Heat
- Air pressure
- Radiation
Testing tip:Convection cooling gets assumed into almost everything, so you'll have to make sure the gear gets some air forced over everything to keep it cool. Inside the hard drives, you've got those nice platters pushing the air for you, so that should be ok.
You indicate that there will be air, but not the pressure. You should test your system at the operating atmosphere and pressure for an extended amount of time. This is critical because the hard drives typically float on a cushion of the ambient atmosphere.
Since you're outside the 50 or so miles of air which filters out most of the radation common in space, make sure you have hardware ECC RAM, etc. It would also be good to make sure there is a hardware watchdog in place to protect the OS from hanging do to an induced CPU error.
I'd suggest you test the unit, then run the same test with the unit operating upside down, and on each of it's other 4 faces, as a minimum.
You've got an interesting project, good luck!
--Mike--
Where's annotation?
Why do we put up with a crappy hierarchical database eXpansion and Mangling Language?
--Mike--
--Mike--
IANAP
Organization Stuff
Stuff the pictures into folders like this:
\yyyy\yyyymmdd
This allows the directory size to be managable, and since you're not likely to cause the camera to roll over, filenames aren't an issue.
Use a program such as Thumbs Plus to view the photos, and prune (if you must). The "slide show" mode lets you rip through images for review like a dream. For editing, I use Paint Shop Pro.
These programs have served me well for the 82,000 I've accumulated so far.
Gear
If you can, get an old laptop that burns CDs. It doesn't have to be fast, or pretty, it just has to run at least 2 hours on a charge. If that can't be done, try to get a pair of old Toshiba Librettos (they look like old PDAs, and are less likely to be stolen).
Get power adapters, cables, etc, for all the countries you plan to visit. If you're technical at all, take some alligator clips, and a small multimeter for use in rigging up power. (They make them small and cheap at Radio Shack)
Figure out some way to back the stuff up (via CD if possible, or cloning the Librettos)
--Mike--
IANAL
The propaganda term "Intellectual Property" is a creative fiction designed to confuse two separate types of limited control granted by government.
1. Patents - A limited monopoly over the commercial implementation and distribution of a novel concept IN A PRODUCT. Patents represent a trade-off to encourage open distribution of the concept after the limited term of the patent. Note that a patent doesn't prevent someone from using a concept for their own use.
2. Copyright - A time limited monopoly over the commercial distribution of an authored work. The term is limited and this is traded by the government to encourage the creation of a large public domain. Note that this is intended to prevent PUBLISHERS from making money off of other publishers works.
Note that in both cases the primary motivation is creation of goods for the public.
The fiction is that it isn't property at all... it's a time limited grant of monopoly, and it's meant to expire. Property is a durable item, not a lease.
</ANTIPROPAGANDA>
According to the constitution, however... $1,000,000 should be equal to 28,571 ounces of gold... notice the 10:1 descrepancy? Someone's been ripped off.
--Mike--
Yeah, yeah, I know... off topic
The fact is, it would be a great idea to combine the idea of a secure distribution channel and a swarming distribution mechanism. If the protocol extended to permit a web of trust like PGP, then you could have groups of people who could send files to a secure, very fast, distribution channel.
Now if we could get rid of the BitTorrent need to trust a single host with the task of tracking who has what... then we're there.
--Mike--