Can we please stop using these terms interchangeably? They're totally different scams. The pyramid scam can be quasi-legal since it doesn't necessarily involve lying to the new members, just hoping they're gullible enough to think they are near the top of the pyramid. A ponzi scheme only has ONE person/group at the "top" and works by convincing members that the scam is a legitimate investment, and is definitely illegal.
another little secret: Michigan has a business team (yes, team as in many members and its own command structure) that courts that industry help. Most of the other teams don't have the manpower or organization to do that.
The race is set up in multiple stages, so that cars can travel more or less together. The winner is determined by the total elapsed time between stages. The final stage was only 200 miles, so the finish order was pretty much determined by then.
I definitely agree that UM gets a little too competitive. I have tried to rein in their secrecy in the interests of the sport, but it's part of the culture. I think that they would have had a much better shot at using their concentrators in NASC had they disclosed them about 6 months earlier. Their secrecy in this case hurt them a lot, and deprived them of a lot of hype and publicity, which is really what all of this is about- spreading the word on vehicle efficiency.
A great story of this year's NASC is Minnesota's tracker problems- an integral part of their car stopped working the night before the race. They were able to get replacement hardware from Principia (2nd place team), firmware from another team, and a help reprogramming the firmware from Michigan.
Speakin about safety, I have personally looked at every aspect of Michigan's mechanical design for their last 2 cars, and I can honestly say that they have one of the safest cars in WSC and one of the safest in NASC. Their current car has brakes on all 3 wheels (a rarity in solar cars), a full steel roll cage, a very strong aluminum/steel suspension, and a composite chassis that has been heavily analyzed for crash worthiness. While its acceleration is lacking, its handling is similar to a sports sedan and has been tested for hundreds of miles at an automotive proving ground.
Every one of their designs is reviewed by a committee of past team members, industry engineers, and professors. Anything that they deem is not safe gets redesigned before they are even allowed to begin construction.
As for sporting talk, IMO solar car racing in the USA is in danger of dying out because teams are more focused on their own rules and fairness and less concerned with publicity, which comes from competition and cool engineering. In order to keep going, we need to have the top teams help bring the rest of the pack up to their level.
U of M had by far the most innovative car in WSC. Yes, they spent the $$ to get a good array, but only 1/4 as much as the winners from the Netherlands. The UM solar concentrator system was, IMO the biggest new thing to solar car racing since MIT's '95 "short car" aero design. And I'm not counting industry improvements like solar cells or batteries.
If you want to harp on teams that spend money and don't improve much, just look at the top 5 teams in that race- similar cars with fancy arrays.
This, for those of you that care (probably no one) was a system of 12 mirrors mounted in the rear of the car that focused the sunlight about 20x on small, ~1cm wide strips of ultra-efficient concentrator cells. Everything in that design had to be designed and built by the team, from the system to rotate the mirrors to track the sun within 2 degrees, to re-engineering the mounting and encapsulation of the specialized solar cells.
All told, they were able to get several hundred watts out of about 0.1 m^2 of solar cells, something unheard of on a MOVING vehicle, let alone a system that weighed under 50lbs and was packaged within a very aerodynamic shape. They even developed a new method of body construction in order to shape an upper surface that had a giant hole in the middle, yet was still stiff enough to survive the road. If UM had won, it may have even become the standard way for future solar cars to build their arrays.
Yes, the design was risky, but the advantage was huge, a 20% gain in power, and recall that 1 other team tried concentrating sunlight (not very successfully) and it was approved by the WSC rules committee a year in advance.
Michigan was poised to win the 2007 World Solar Challenge until they crashed into their lead support vehicle. Their lead had to break hard after being cut off by STANFORD's support vehicle, which was panicking after they lost their solar car in the heavy Darwin (Australia) traffic. Next time your team enters an international event, please practice driving your race caravan in traffic.
Congratulations on winning the 2005 stock race on a car largely based on Michigan's (embarrassing) 2003 car- one of your lead mechanical designers was a UM veteran.
Sorry about the flame- I am an ex-UM member and am still a little bitter.
This is quite possibly the worst idea the record companies have ever come up with. I would be very surprised if any ISPs ever give in. I can see it now:
Monthly internet bill: 50.00 - connection fee 5.00 - music extortion fee 5.50 - movies extortion fee 8.25 - television extortion fee 3.00 - print media extortion fee 4.00 - software warez extortion fee 2.00 - images possibly out of copyright 4.00 - independent music fee 3.00 - documentaries fee 2.50 - guitar tabs/sheet music 3.00 - song lyrics 2.00 - spambot fee (just in case I'm a node) 7.00 - fee for everyone else wanting my pound of flesh
total: $100 per month, and I think I'm being quite generous
Where will this stop? If the record labels get their fee, I want my fee for everyone that downloaded that one picture from my blog that I told you that you shouldn't save but you did anyways. You can just send me those $.02 per subscriber per month, or I'll take a flat fee of $3,000,000 - thanks.
I was a proud owner of the Rio500, and pumped that sucker up to 128mb with a SmartMedia card- total cost: $280. That was a lot for a poor high school student, but in return I was showered with first-adopter nerd envy. At that time, the idea of bringing 3 Cd's worth of music to school with me in 1/4 the space of a CD player was just awesome.
I can just see the internet comments now: "Put 512mb on a player and I'll buy it right now- 32mb is just too small."
Read the article, not the commentary- he is working on 1-3" wings for ultra-light UAVs. Just imagine a mechanical hummingbird. The part of the article comparing them to manned jets is just PR fluff.
In these days of scarce resources, having a personal library, unless they are of historical, professional, or sentimental value, is selfish. Donate your books to a local library and let professionals do the organizing and lending. You will never have more books than a real library, so why try? Dead tree books are incredibly wasteful when they are only read once or twice. Yes, you may loan them to your friends, but there's no way your personal network of friends will rival the reading power of the visitors to a public library.
It's obvious to me why not many have finished this game- the orange box! The first game I played when I got it was Portal, then I played an hour or so of Episode 2. I'm more likely to revisit Portal for the challenge levels then slog through the second two thirds of Episode 2, though I'll probably get around to it in the next few months.
What really sealed the deal against finishing the game was TF2. Every time I think about finishing Episode 2, I think of how much more fun it would be to play a few rounds of TF2 instead. Even though there are only a few maps, the team-based play never gets old. I would really like to see a stat of hours of TF2 played vs. Episode 2, for those players that have both installed.
The comments in this thread are just more evidence for why we should leave the aircraft construction up to the engineers and not try to figure things out here.
Carbon fiber is a VERY active area of research, and it is definitely true that more is known about aluminum than CF structures, but this is for the simple fact that aluminum is about 10x simpler to understand and model than CF. You are talking about a metal that is isotropic (material properties the same no matter what direction you measure them) versus two different polymers, bonded together. Composite mechanics are incredibly complex, but that doesn't mean we don't understand them enough to make them safe. It only means that we have to use larger safety margins in our designs. As research continues, you will not see airplanes get safer, only cheaper and lighter. Safety is driven by FAA regs, and performance that is driven by material knowledge.
In general, carbon fiber is stiffer and stronger than aluminum. This means that you can make the plane weigh less and flex more. Good, right? It also will have better fatigue properties than Aluminum, since it does not have to deal with crack propagation. Aluminum will fail catastrophically, while CF will go gradually. Chances are that you will detect a CF failure long before it becomes a safety problem, as long as you use those fancy infrared/X-ray/gamma ray inspection devices. For those concerned about "water fatigue", there are a number of industry standard tests to measure this degredation, and it is included with every roll of CF that you order. It's definitely not something they haven't thought of.
The FAA has some of the most stringent regulations of any government agency when it comes to airplanes. The chances of an unsafe product making it to market are very low, simply because of the maintenance required and number of test hours needed. If you remember scandals of the past, they all come from companies either cheating the regulations or the regs failing to be applied. Please don't get riled up unless one of these two things is happening.
I thought that they barely took office format at all anymore. I was under the impression that they preferred LaTeX. Everyone that I know in my department (Aerospace Engineering) would not think of using anything but LaTeX for journal submissions- to do otherwise is cruel to the typesetters and asking for your article to look horrible.
In general, a WYSIWYG format, whether ODF or DOC format, will not be what you get in the journal, since any good journal will do some heavy formatting changes in order to make your article fit and play nice with the rest of them.
If you listen to the podcasts, you will find that there are so many fillers in season 3 because they blew their budget on the occupation episodes to start the season. Does anyone remember how crazy those were? It is really difficult to build that many amazing sets for a series that is on a cable network. Keep telling all your friends to watch, because the more money they get, the better the series will be.
Like other posters, I think it would be awesome if they ended with season 4 and then put the finale out as a feature film. Kind of like Firefly and Serenity, only in this case the movie would tie the series together with a massive final battle.
I can't believe this hasn't been harped on before. Why can't I open a PDF in my browser window? I'm on a Intel Mac and as far as I know there is no way to do this. Macs have so much built in that already uses the pdf format- why is this so difficult?
Um... Couldn't you just use another bank of capacitors? At home, you can charge one bank slowly, and when you get back from the trip, use them to dump power into your car. The ones at home would be cheaper because there are much lower size and weight restrictions.
The same concept applies at the gas station- just have a big bank of capacitors. On the other hand, this type of power is perfectly doable if you have a high voltage line going to the gas station. I think people forget how much juice is going through those things, thousands of times more than what gets to your house.
UNSW is a true veteran of the solar car racing world. I wish them all the best of luck in their treck across the outback, and hope they bring lots of spare tires!
Let me take this opportunity to plug the premire solar car race, coming up this October, for its 20th anniversary, the World Solar Challenge. I hope to be there, and I'm sure UNSW will join the rest of the field. Everyone come watch if you can, or at least follow along online.
One more comment- the "Total War" games, when played against the computer, are not dependent on your speed with a pointing device. The battle can be paused at any time, at which any number of orders can be issued. While it may take you a little longer than real-time battles, it still lets you play a very engaging strategy game, complete with first rate 3d graphics.
I've played tons of games, and if I had to play one of them one last time, it would have to be Rome:Total War. Nothing can compare to the feeling of power you get from commanding 5000 Roman troops going up against the barbarian horde. All of the "Total War" games are amazing, but this one is my favorite.
For the future, let me take the chance to plug my favorite turn-based MMORPG, Kingdom of Loathing (kingdomofloathing.com). This game may seem very "silly" at first glance, but the game has two wonderful levels of play. At first, you can become very involved in just solving the complex puzzles needed to complete the game. After you have mastered all of the puzzles, character building takes over. The game's world is constantly evolving, with new content every week. The community around the game is almost universally friendly and supportive, and is one of the best parts of the game. The whole thing is free with a few special items that cost money (gotta run servers somehow), but they can also be purchased with in-game money.
I don't get how having a cool notebook translates into a battery that doesn't blow up. As far as I remember, the whole battery recall was because of a slight possibility of an internal short in LiIon cells. This had everything to do with manufacturing process and perhaps gravity, and nothing at all to do with the rest of the notebook. To suggest that these products avoided the recall because of their design is ignorant. They avoided the recall because they sourced different batteries.
Granted, a cooler notebook will result in longer batteries, since heat will reduce the effective capacity over time. That is the only advantage, from a power standpoint.
That alone takes up about 1 gig to run smoothly, mostly because of iTunes and Illustrator, and Mathematica if it is running something.
Now, in Parallels I run some heavier stuff: Unigraphics SolidWorks Hypermesh Matlab
Not that I have all of these going at once, but they like to have at least 700mb to themselves, and if I want to run a Hypermesh simulation, I really need all I can get.
What I wouldn't give to be able to have another gig of ram so that I can run Illustrator in OSX to work on figures for research while doing some full-tilt FEA analysis in Parallels. 4 Gb would be just about perfect, though I cringe at what it would do to my already dismal battery life.
Megaman 2 - oh so satisfying Homeworld 1 - best story ever NBA Jam TE - all my favorite players, with MONSTER JAMS Pac man - enough said. Tie Fighter - all time best space shooter, my fav.
Slashdot Mirror
Can we please stop using these terms interchangeably? They're totally different scams. The pyramid scam can be quasi-legal since it doesn't necessarily involve lying to the new members, just hoping they're gullible enough to think they are near the top of the pyramid. A ponzi scheme only has ONE person/group at the "top" and works by convincing members that the scam is a legitimate investment, and is definitely illegal.
TOTALLY DIFFERENT IDEAS
another little secret: Michigan has a business team (yes, team as in many members and its own command structure) that courts that industry help. Most of the other teams don't have the manpower or organization to do that.
The race is set up in multiple stages, so that cars can travel more or less together. The winner is determined by the total elapsed time between stages. The final stage was only 200 miles, so the finish order was pretty much determined by then.
I definitely agree that UM gets a little too competitive. I have tried to rein in their secrecy in the interests of the sport, but it's part of the culture. I think that they would have had a much better shot at using their concentrators in NASC had they disclosed them about 6 months earlier. Their secrecy in this case hurt them a lot, and deprived them of a lot of hype and publicity, which is really what all of this is about- spreading the word on vehicle efficiency.
A great story of this year's NASC is Minnesota's tracker problems- an integral part of their car stopped working the night before the race. They were able to get replacement hardware from Principia (2nd place team), firmware from another team, and a help reprogramming the firmware from Michigan.
Speakin about safety, I have personally looked at every aspect of Michigan's mechanical design for their last 2 cars, and I can honestly say that they have one of the safest cars in WSC and one of the safest in NASC. Their current car has brakes on all 3 wheels (a rarity in solar cars), a full steel roll cage, a very strong aluminum/steel suspension, and a composite chassis that has been heavily analyzed for crash worthiness. While its acceleration is lacking, its handling is similar to a sports sedan and has been tested for hundreds of miles at an automotive proving ground.
Every one of their designs is reviewed by a committee of past team members, industry engineers, and professors. Anything that they deem is not safe gets redesigned before they are even allowed to begin construction.
As for sporting talk, IMO solar car racing in the USA is in danger of dying out because teams are more focused on their own rules and fairness and less concerned with publicity, which comes from competition and cool engineering. In order to keep going, we need to have the top teams help bring the rest of the pack up to their level.
U of M had by far the most innovative car in WSC. Yes, they spent the $$ to get a good array, but only 1/4 as much as the winners from the Netherlands. The UM solar concentrator system was, IMO the biggest new thing to solar car racing since MIT's '95 "short car" aero design. And I'm not counting industry improvements like solar cells or batteries.
If you want to harp on teams that spend money and don't improve much, just look at the top 5 teams in that race- similar cars with fancy arrays.
This, for those of you that care (probably no one) was a system of 12 mirrors mounted in the rear of the car that focused the sunlight about 20x on small, ~1cm wide strips of ultra-efficient concentrator cells. Everything in that design had to be designed and built by the team, from the system to rotate the mirrors to track the sun within 2 degrees, to re-engineering the mounting and encapsulation of the specialized solar cells.
All told, they were able to get several hundred watts out of about 0.1 m^2 of solar cells, something unheard of on a MOVING vehicle, let alone a system that weighed under 50lbs and was packaged within a very aerodynamic shape. They even developed a new method of body construction in order to shape an upper surface that had a giant hole in the middle, yet was still stiff enough to survive the road. If UM had won, it may have even become the standard way for future solar cars to build their arrays.
Yes, the design was risky, but the advantage was huge, a 20% gain in power, and recall that 1 other team tried concentrating sunlight (not very successfully) and it was approved by the WSC rules committee a year in advance.
For some reason, Michigan is still able to race on Michelin tires. The MIT team has, as far as I know, pulled out of solar racing completely.
Michigan was poised to win the 2007 World Solar Challenge until they crashed into their lead support vehicle. Their lead had to break hard after being cut off by STANFORD's support vehicle, which was panicking after they lost their solar car in the heavy Darwin (Australia) traffic. Next time your team enters an international event, please practice driving your race caravan in traffic.
Congratulations on winning the 2005 stock race on a car largely based on Michigan's (embarrassing) 2003 car- one of your lead mechanical designers was a UM veteran.
Sorry about the flame- I am an ex-UM member and am still a little bitter.
This is quite possibly the worst idea the record companies have ever come up with. I would be very surprised if any ISPs ever give in. I can see it now:
Monthly internet bill:
50.00 - connection fee
5.00 - music extortion fee
5.50 - movies extortion fee
8.25 - television extortion fee
3.00 - print media extortion fee
4.00 - software warez extortion fee
2.00 - images possibly out of copyright
4.00 - independent music fee
3.00 - documentaries fee
2.50 - guitar tabs/sheet music
3.00 - song lyrics
2.00 - spambot fee (just in case I'm a node)
7.00 - fee for everyone else wanting my pound of flesh
total: $100 per month, and I think I'm being quite generous
Where will this stop? If the record labels get their fee, I want my fee for everyone that downloaded that one picture from my blog that I told you that you shouldn't save but you did anyways. You can just send me those $.02 per subscriber per month, or I'll take a flat fee of $3,000,000 - thanks.
Two Words:
Rolltop Desk.
I was a proud owner of the Rio500, and pumped that sucker up to 128mb with a SmartMedia card- total cost: $280. That was a lot for a poor high school student, but in return I was showered with first-adopter nerd envy. At that time, the idea of bringing 3 Cd's worth of music to school with me in 1/4 the space of a CD player was just awesome.
I can just see the internet comments now:
"Put 512mb on a player and I'll buy it right now- 32mb is just too small."
Read the article, not the commentary- he is working on 1-3" wings for ultra-light UAVs. Just imagine a mechanical hummingbird. The part of the article comparing them to manned jets is just PR fluff.
In these days of scarce resources, having a personal library, unless they are of historical, professional, or sentimental value, is selfish. Donate your books to a local library and let professionals do the organizing and lending. You will never have more books than a real library, so why try? Dead tree books are incredibly wasteful when they are only read once or twice. Yes, you may loan them to your friends, but there's no way your personal network of friends will rival the reading power of the visitors to a public library.
It's obvious to me why not many have finished this game- the orange box! The first game I played when I got it was Portal, then I played an hour or so of Episode 2. I'm more likely to revisit Portal for the challenge levels then slog through the second two thirds of Episode 2, though I'll probably get around to it in the next few months.
What really sealed the deal against finishing the game was TF2. Every time I think about finishing Episode 2, I think of how much more fun it would be to play a few rounds of TF2 instead. Even though there are only a few maps, the team-based play never gets old. I would really like to see a stat of hours of TF2 played vs. Episode 2, for those players that have both installed.
More like the Russian Mafia doesn't like sharing profits.
The comments in this thread are just more evidence for why we should leave the aircraft construction up to the engineers and not try to figure things out here.
Carbon fiber is a VERY active area of research, and it is definitely true that more is known about aluminum than CF structures, but this is for the simple fact that aluminum is about 10x simpler to understand and model than CF. You are talking about a metal that is isotropic (material properties the same no matter what direction you measure them) versus two different polymers, bonded together. Composite mechanics are incredibly complex, but that doesn't mean we don't understand them enough to make them safe. It only means that we have to use larger safety margins in our designs. As research continues, you will not see airplanes get safer, only cheaper and lighter. Safety is driven by FAA regs, and performance that is driven by material knowledge.
In general, carbon fiber is stiffer and stronger than aluminum. This means that you can make the plane weigh less and flex more. Good, right? It also will have better fatigue properties than Aluminum, since it does not have to deal with crack propagation. Aluminum will fail catastrophically, while CF will go gradually. Chances are that you will detect a CF failure long before it becomes a safety problem, as long as you use those fancy infrared/X-ray/gamma ray inspection devices. For those concerned about "water fatigue", there are a number of industry standard tests to measure this degredation, and it is included with every roll of CF that you order. It's definitely not something they haven't thought of.
The FAA has some of the most stringent regulations of any government agency when it comes to airplanes. The chances of an unsafe product making it to market are very low, simply because of the maintenance required and number of test hours needed. If you remember scandals of the past, they all come from companies either cheating the regulations or the regs failing to be applied. Please don't get riled up unless one of these two things is happening.
I thought that they barely took office format at all anymore. I was under the impression that they preferred LaTeX. Everyone that I know in my department (Aerospace Engineering) would not think of using anything but LaTeX for journal submissions- to do otherwise is cruel to the typesetters and asking for your article to look horrible.
In general, a WYSIWYG format, whether ODF or DOC format, will not be what you get in the journal, since any good journal will do some heavy formatting changes in order to make your article fit and play nice with the rest of them.
If you listen to the podcasts, you will find that there are so many fillers in season 3 because they blew their budget on the occupation episodes to start the season. Does anyone remember how crazy those were? It is really difficult to build that many amazing sets for a series that is on a cable network. Keep telling all your friends to watch, because the more money they get, the better the series will be.
Like other posters, I think it would be awesome if they ended with season 4 and then put the finale out as a feature film. Kind of like Firefly and Serenity, only in this case the movie would tie the series together with a massive final battle.
I can't believe this hasn't been harped on before. Why can't I open a PDF in my browser window? I'm on a Intel Mac and as far as I know there is no way to do this. Macs have so much built in that already uses the pdf format- why is this so difficult?
Um... Couldn't you just use another bank of capacitors? At home, you can charge one bank slowly, and when you get back from the trip, use them to dump power into your car. The ones at home would be cheaper because there are much lower size and weight restrictions.
The same concept applies at the gas station- just have a big bank of capacitors. On the other hand, this type of power is perfectly doable if you have a high voltage line going to the gas station. I think people forget how much juice is going through those things, thousands of times more than what gets to your house.
UNSW is a true veteran of the solar car racing world. I wish them all the best of luck in their treck across the outback, and hope they bring lots of spare tires!
Let me take this opportunity to plug the premire solar car race, coming up this October, for its 20th anniversary, the World Solar Challenge. I hope to be there, and I'm sure UNSW will join the rest of the field. Everyone come watch if you can, or at least follow along online.
http://www.wsc.org.au/2007/
One more comment- the "Total War" games, when played against the computer, are not dependent on your speed with a pointing device. The battle can be paused at any time, at which any number of orders can be issued. While it may take you a little longer than real-time battles, it still lets you play a very engaging strategy game, complete with first rate 3d graphics.
I've played tons of games, and if I had to play one of them one last time, it would have to be Rome:Total War. Nothing can compare to the feeling of power you get from commanding 5000 Roman troops going up against the barbarian horde. All of the "Total War" games are amazing, but this one is my favorite.
For the future, let me take the chance to plug my favorite turn-based MMORPG, Kingdom of Loathing (kingdomofloathing.com). This game may seem very "silly" at first glance, but the game has two wonderful levels of play. At first, you can become very involved in just solving the complex puzzles needed to complete the game. After you have mastered all of the puzzles, character building takes over. The game's world is constantly evolving, with new content every week. The community around the game is almost universally friendly and supportive, and is one of the best parts of the game. The whole thing is free with a few special items that cost money (gotta run servers somehow), but they can also be purchased with in-game money.
I don't get how having a cool notebook translates into a battery that doesn't blow up. As far as I remember, the whole battery recall was because of a slight possibility of an internal short in LiIon cells. This had everything to do with manufacturing process and perhaps gravity, and nothing at all to do with the rest of the notebook. To suggest that these products avoided the recall because of their design is ignorant. They avoided the recall because they sourced different batteries.
Granted, a cooler notebook will result in longer batteries, since heat will reduce the effective capacity over time. That is the only advantage, from a power standpoint.
Let's make a list of the programs I like to have running:
In OSX:
Firefox
iCal
Adobe Illustrator (huge hog)
TeXshop/Preview
Adium
Mathematica
iTunes
That alone takes up about 1 gig to run smoothly, mostly because of iTunes and Illustrator, and Mathematica if it is running something.
Now, in Parallels I run some heavier stuff:
Unigraphics
SolidWorks
Hypermesh
Matlab
Not that I have all of these going at once, but they like to have at least 700mb to themselves, and if I want to run a Hypermesh simulation, I really need all I can get.
What I wouldn't give to be able to have another gig of ram so that I can run Illustrator in OSX to work on figures for research while doing some full-tilt FEA analysis in Parallels. 4 Gb would be just about perfect, though I cringe at what it would do to my already dismal battery life.
Megaman 2 - oh so satisfying
Homeworld 1 - best story ever
NBA Jam TE - all my favorite players, with MONSTER JAMS
Pac man - enough said.
Tie Fighter - all time best space shooter, my fav.