The internet is not some abstract infinite channel, where packets are created from nothing and move globally for free. It is a finite amount of expensive optical fiber and routing equipment with finite capacity. How is that to be used? Presumably to generate financial returns for those who paid for all that equipment. Where do the packets come from? Increasingly, from Hollywood, via services like Netflix.
Netflix video-on-demand is a horribly inefficient and intrusive way to use internet infrastructure. If you move gigabytes of high definition low latency video through a finite web, peer-to-peer, my web searches and information downloads are in competition. True net neutrality means you get as much bandwidth as I do, inbound and outbound, for the same price, which is a lot less bandwidth and lower Quality of Service than you are demanding now. At least Netflix understands that their video-on-demand model requires expensive physical equipment to implement; too bad their customer's brains have been turned into pudding by that video.
I used to offer unrestricted free wifi to my neighborhood. I liked the idea that poor schoolkids could work on their homework, travellers could consult online maps, visitors could check their email. Then the TV addicts discovered it, and filled my pipe with netflix packets. So I "violated net neutrality" and throttled the maximum bandwidth. The wifi can still be used for the beneficial uses I encourage, but video QOS sucks. As a bonus, I can worry less about a DMCA takedown. People can still move video, but they must wait a while.
Video addicts - please, please, please do boycott the internet. Feed your brain-rotting addiction with cable, DVDs, broadcast, satellite, and all the other low-cost ways that actually pay the producers and purveyors of your high-definition drivel. Your gigabyte road trains do not belong on the information highway until you pay for the extra resources to accomodate them.
Freedom of speech means Libre, not Gratis. Pay for what you take.
I just learned about this when I went looking for a report, CR-2357, Peter Glaser et. al.'s "Feasibility study of a satellite solar power station" from 1974 . I've downloaded hundreds of NASA reports as part of my research, but not all of them. There are millions of pages of documents there; to review them to ITAR requirements would take everyone working at the agency years to do.
Sorry I'm late to the party, but I've been busy actually putting this government research to work, creating jobs and healing the environment. With this one heinous act, the politicians (R and D, it took both) just flushed a trillion dollars worth of scientific and technical research down the crapper, and possibly the survival of the U.S. You can bet that the (Name of Current Enemy Here) have already downloaded every one of those reports; all that the Feds have done is deny access to Americans. The really sad thing is that most Americans are such ignorant partisan illiterates that this modern "burning of the library of Alexandria" went unnoticed, perhaps was even applauded when the politicians reported their security triumph to the fools (R and D both) who elected them.
Any one of those reports, no matter how trivial, is more important to our future than the whole pack of politicians in DC. Let's ITAR house.gov, senate.gov, and whitehouse.gov instead, those maniacs are more dangerous than a nuclear arsenal.
Fun fact: Water vapor makes up 98% of the greenhouse effect.
Funner fact: Where the effect happens is more important. The troposphere is close to IR opaque, with gas and black body temperatures closely coupled. The black body temperature of the earth, and hence the amount of IR radiation emitted into deep space, is the deep cold of the upper atmosphere. Clouds and sulfate particulates determine the amount of light reaching the surface (mostly ocean), where almost all is turned into heat. In the longer term, that heat is equal to the IR black body radiation, with whole system temperatures adjusting until they do.
Atmospheric temperature decreases about 6.5C per kilometer altitude, and density decreases by about a factor of two every 7 kilometers. Water vapor pressure drops rapidly with temperature, and the water freezes out around 0C forming clouds and precipitation. There is very little water vapor above the high cloud tops, and that region is ruled by CO and methane, which do not freeze out at atmospheric temperatures. At some even higher altitude, the remaining amount of CO is transparent to space. Double the CO, and the transparency altitude goes up around 7km, to a region 45C colder than 7km below it.
If you could see the earth in the infrared, from space, it would appear colored by high altitude haze from the CO and methane, with lower altitude islands of cloud floating in an opaque sea of water vapor. The land and oceans are be invisible - and irrelevant to black body radiation. If you double the CO or methane, the long term effect is to increase the coloring, raise the water vapor "sea level" altitude somewhat. The temperature at this level stays close to constant (remember, that is the temperature where water freezes out), but at a higher altitude, there is more 6.5C/km air beneath. A very small change in atmospheric properties, raising the top of the troposphere a few percent, can easily result in an average 5C change down here on the surface.
I started out as a climate change sceptic, horrified by the pseudo-scientific and pseudo-technical nonsense spewed by the media. As a responsible technologist, I studied primary sources and ran the numbers myself, and changed my mind. Atmospheric scientists know a lot, have a lot more to learn, and cannot produce a definite prediction of exactly when our fiendishly complex, multi-billion cubic kilometer atmosphere will be broken beyond repair. The fate of civilization is dependent on the slow integration of effects that depend on other integrals of integrals; when the first pebbles of the landslide reach us, the unstoppable wall of rock will follow soon after, far too late to stabilize the slope.
Nature could soak up much of the excess CO, turning it into climax forest, plankton sea floor sediment, and perennial-plant root-mediated carbonate rock, but we are destroying the absorbers with annual-crop agriculture, especially atrocities such as "biofuel". We could reduce our methane use; instead we invest in erratic sources of "energy" such as wind turbines and grid-scale solar, which must be backed kilowatt-for-kilowatt with fast turn-on natural gas turbines instead of slow-response base-load hydro and thermal generation.
The natgas pipelines are overcapacity, leaking methane, bursting, even catching fire and exploding, compounding the problem of leaky production fields and leaky aging cities. If this is a problem in Europe and the US, imagine how bad it could get if impoverished India and China tried to copy our example.
No responsible technologist should blindly repeat numbers without checking them out, whether those numbers are ideologically comforting or not. Better to shut the hell up than to drown out the few responsible people who, whatever conclusions they come to, at least try to build those conclusions from direct observation, primary data, and replicable calculation.
Self-education and calculation is not only responsible, it is lucrative. Instead of
Apple doesn't shut down their data centers when the wind stops or when it is cloudy, and their biogas generators works only as fast as the microbes make methane, a process that is difficult to quickly throttle up and down. Perhaps they have vast underground tank farms storing methane for winter. Or perhaps this is all a fashion show to impress gullible green-wannabee customers.
So Apple is drawing the bulk of their power, most of the time, from the same grid the rest of us draw power from. They are building a new data center here in the Pacific Northwest, making the same claims about wind power. Wind power availability is random, on average less than 15% of nameplate capacity, and often entirely stopped for weeks at a time. On the rare occasions when wind farms produce much more than their tiny average, the Bonneville Power Administration is forced to buy it, regardless of the state of the power grid. BPA is being forced to spill water over the dams on the Columbia, which super-nitrogenates the water and kills salmon, thus violating their former "prime directive" - preserve fish runs. While maintaining navigation, controlling floods, providing irrigation, and about a dozen other important goals written into their charter. No wonder their director recently quit.
Solar - similar deal. The worst case solar insolation in winter is tiny, even in "sunny" New Mexico. No sunlight at night, of course, thin sunlight under week-long cloudy skies. Look at a December or January solar insolation map from NREL, and do the math yourself.
Where does the makeup energy come from? Given the short-term intermittency and quick-start requirements, mostly from natural gas turbines, increasingly fed through the national pipeline network from frack gas fields in the east and midwest. Gas magnate T. Boone Pickens/loves/ windmills.
Many of us here are technologists, capable of finding the numbers and doing the math. We do not have to rely on the pronouncements of corporate PR departments, government agencies, or conspiracist crackpot websites to figure out what is going on. We can go to primary sources, we can build our own spreadsheets, and we can replace magic thinking with nuts-and-bolts analysis to learn what works and what doesn't. The risk to the global climate is real (key phrases: IR column opacity versus altitude, adiabatic lapse rate), but the popular notions of how to deal with it are often worse than doing nothing.
And that is scary as hell.
Buy Apple products if you think the unregulated pollution from the power plants feeding Apple Chinese factories is better than the unregulated pollution due to their competitor's Chinese factories. If you don't, consider using free software on recycled/rebuilt/hot-rodded computers, like I am doing right now.
Every dollar a company charges above marginal cost is a big red flag to potential competitors - "money to be made here!" Australia has many crackerjack programmers. Perhaps as a write this, some small Australian startup is selling a product or service that is superior to Adobe products in some specialized market niche. From there, the upstart could grow too big to dislodge, while Adobe's attention is focused elsewhere. From that secure position, the upstart could grow to dominate the world market. It's happened plenty of times before.
The base platform for this hypothetical startup could copy code from Gimp and Inkscape, which are not identical to Adobe products and hence (to the mentally inflexible single-trick end-user) "sucks a bag of aids dicks". Doesn't matter. You can't copy code from Adobe products, so only Adobe (a tiny fraction of the world's programmers) gets to build new products with it. The rest of the world gets to build on open source tools, forking and remixing and sometimes stumbling across something that redefines the game.
The real victims of this will be inflexible Adobe customers, who are trapped deeper and deeper into one way of doing things with every project, and who must add an "Adobe tax" onto every project to pay for their expensive tools. When game change becomes unavoidable, they will struggle to find time to become adept with new tools, while still maintaining competence with (and paying for) the Adobe tools to support legacy projects. Most will fail, becoming obsolete like all the competent-but-struggling musicians who depended on the old record company label system for occasional gigs, and are now unemployable in the age of online independent artists and globe-spanning internet collaboration.
Because of the profit-rich environment that Adobe and its distributors have fostered in Australia, those new tools and new collaborations may originate there, fostered by the spirit of an intelligent and fiercely independent nation. Adobe, with their pricing, have made their own demise inevitable, taking far too many of their loyal customers with them.
I run a modded Thinkpad T60, and have stockpiled two more, and extra screens and keyboards. A lifetime supply, if necessary, though batteries will be a problem someday. I want 4x3. I want trackpoint. I want Linux compatibility. And I break warranties - look inside, repair inside, change inside.
The T60 is my main work tool. I calculate. I design. I program. I write papers and books. I can display two 8.5x11 pages on a 4x3 screen and fill it nicely. I can drive a 4x3 computer projector (still the most common) without clipping. 16x10 and 16x9 may present movies and games better, but I don't make movies or games.
Donald Knuth borrowed the T60 I'm typing on now. He's not going to borrow your windows 8 media vending machine.
I modded the T60 to a 15 inch 2048x1536 screen, from an NEC prototype run that M$ did not support. I built a kludge to rewrite the EDID eprom so the Thinkpad BIOS accepts it.
I bought my first Thinkpad (a 560) when my Dell laptop spent TWO MONTHS waiting for a power supply repair. That first Thinkpad developed a similar problem, and IBM fixed it 36 hours door-to-door. In fact, the morning after I sent it, I got a call from a service tech at IBM, who said "We see you are running Redhat 5. We have a new BIOS, which we've tested with Redhat 5. Before we ship your machine out in a few minutes, will you permit us to upgrade the BIOS?" Oh. My. God. SOLD.
That kind of service (no longer offered by Lenovo) is worth a huge premium. Laptops pack a lot of technology and heat into a small space, an unavoidable reliability compromise. Excellent manufacture and excellent service turn a consumable into a capital investment. Sadly, Lenovo is now following the race to the bottom. Thank goodness it is not leading it. Yet.
I am 59 years old. I've fooled with computers since I was 15, and built two from scratch. I'm old enough to NEED a trackpoint (hands too jittery to use a touch-touch-touch-touchpad). My visual acuity is dropping - handheld screen text is too small, and I must have a matte screen.
And there are millions like me. Most boomers are self-absorbed gimme-pigs, but some of us still design the hardware that the world depends on. The tools we need are disappearing. The tools that genX and genY engineer/entrepreneurs will need when they pass 40 won't be there. I weep for them.
Perhaps someday, some manufacturer will wise up, make a run of 15 inch 4x3 display glass, put a decent computer and keyboard underneath it, and own the engineer/business/senior market segment. They won't sell 100 million units, but they will get ten times the profit. It would be great if this was a branch of Lenovo, but my loyalty is to the usefulness and quality of the product, not to the nameplate.
Change? I'm all for change, if it is improvement, not atrophy.
These will be 3 gram, dinner-plate-diameter 50 micron thick satellites, based on some recent advances in semiconductor technology and Ivan Bekey's "Advanced Space System Concepts and Technologies: 2010-2030+". We are doing most of this as open technology, and I make presentations to groups that might help. Monday at NIST Gaithersburg, for example.
Satellites are surfaces that combine stimuli and solar power to make microwave transmissions to earth. A one micron thick layer of graded junction indium phosphide makes a 20% efficient solar cell and is very rad-hard. Ditto for Penryn-process silicon. That recent work, plus a number of other fortuitous recent discoveries, plus the kind of manufacturing techniques we use to make LCD displays, plus solar-sail-like maneuvering means we can built extremely thin satellites. They need to be heavier than 100g/m^2 to stabilize their orbits against light pressure, but they still can beat current satellite watt-to-kilogram ratios by more than a factor of 100.
The "satellites" will be arrays of thousands of these thinsats - a 99 kg array will contain 33 thousand of them, and collect about 160 kilowatts. That fits the sub-100kg definition of "micro satellite", though I hate the abuse of the scaling unit.
This is all very speculative, of course, and the thinsats that get launched will be very different from our early designs.
See the server sky website for more. Pretty chaotic right now. I use it as a public notebook, slowly improving the content as we learn new things, attempting to establish all this as public domain and attract informed discussion. While most readers will be highly skeptical until experiments get launched, non-analytical skepticism merely keeps competitors befuddled, giving us a head start. Folks with imagination, who can do research and the math and physics, have the opinions we care about.
For "conventional" cubesats, there are many universities working with the US Naval Academy. They have a "2U" cubesat design with a slightly-smaller-than-1U-sized plug-in compartment, which provides power and communications to a plug-in experiment provided by a university research partner. So, the university partner provides the experimental plugin, and a Really Good Story to convince the USNA that the experiment is worthwhile. USNA launches the cubesat, and the middies manage it, to get experience managing satellite assets without risking big military birds. At least, that is what I remember from attending the Amsat symposium a couple of years ago to give a paper on something Completely Different.
My name is on 12 patents. Mostly electronics, though one can be construed as a software patent. I would rather not have my name on most of them, and many result from the same situation you are in.
With my first employer, this was in my original contract years before I gave any thought to it. When I did, I said "no patents, or I quit". I did valuable work, so the quid pro quo extended another 5 years (the sneaky patent attorneys did get a European patent on some of my work, and never told me or my coinventors, but...). When I finally left, they took out four US patents on the stuff in my notebooks, and threatened legal action if I didn't go along.
Then I helped a startup. They took out three US patents on my work for them. This time, to refuse would have torpedoed the company. In time, the foolish V.C.s torpedoed them anyway (high growth, high profit, market dominance, but the product was hard to explain at IPO - so the VCs made them work on easy-to-explain but low value products).
Then I consulted. I started putting "no patents" into my contracts. With one startup, that resulted in a four month delay in contract approval, resulting in a delay in further work. Which meant the startup was missing essential skills, the prototype failed, and so did the startup.
I learned to make my ideas look like someone else's idea at the clients. There were still some patents filed, but at least my name wasn't on them.
Now I have my own company. With four patents. And three on the way. I hope to release four of them into some kind of "public patents commons" arrangement, if I can find an organization that can leverage them properly into more public patents
I would rather that all patents go away, even if the global abolishment means the three I expect to continue to draw income from go away also. Sadly, in the world I live in, the alternative structures just aren't well developed, so if I don't patent an idea, a competitor will, locking me out of using my own idea. Or a client will treat the work and customization I provide them with as less valuable, because they notice "IP" more than they notice "good product". That is a cultural problem which I cannot fix myself. I hope to help with the fix, though, and I am always looking for alternatives.
I have managed to get a dozen or so potentially patentable ideas released directly into the public domain, mostly through publication in professional journals, and professional standards work. This is the best route available, given the existing situation. So:
Publish. Teach. Participate in standards bodies. Share all the ideas publically that your job permits. Write open source code. Use open source code, and attempt to make it the way things are done where you work. At the end of the day, those who want to contribute ideas to the public should just do it. Frequently. If that is not your job within the organization, morph your job until it is. If you cannot morph your job that way, find a new one elsewhere.
In the golden age of U.S. science, many great ideas were publically shared by scientists and engineers working for private companies. Many Nobel prizes resulted. Companies shared this work because it helped them hire the best, and showed their customers that they did first rate science, leading to first rate products. That age seems to be ending, but I think that is because the researchers value their salaries more than their scientific reputation. Now open source software seems to be heading into that golden age, and it will only stay that way if software innovators value their reputations more than the size of their paycheck. I respect the hell out of these people, and help out where I can. But it is a tough choice, it means forgoing some lucrative jobs, and if you have a family to feed, there is no easy answer. You have to decide whether you want to eat well, or sleep well.
smellsofbikes gave us a good description. End users don't have a whole lot of information to work with, though, and most of our critical systems are not military. So most individuals and companies rely on the reputation of the manufacturing and vendor chain.
In addition to size, an added chunk of evil circuitry is likely to detectably affect performance. The evil circuit has to connect to the normal circuit somehow, and it will add capacitance to the bus lines it connects to, or gate delays to the path it is inserted into. There is always some white space on a chip, and always some slow wires that can be tapped into, but Murphy's Law (which also applies to the bad guys) says these are not likely to be the exploitable ones.
Making runs of integrated circuits is expensive (mask sets cost millions of dollars), so counterfeiting chip designs typically only makes sense with run sizes in the millions. Failure analysis by the legitimate manufacturer is likely to detect the fraud, especially if the counterfeits are of lower quality. If you buy from reputable manufacturers and vendors (and you verify those reputations by praying to Saint Google), then you have some assurance that those companies are protecting their reputations (and profits) by looking for problems such as counterfeiting before their critics and competitors see them.
My SiidTech company ( http://www.siidtech.com/ ) licenses "ICID", a chip individualizing technology, to some semiconductor fabs for tracking their parts through production. For end user privacy protection, we mandate that the ID is inaccessible during normal operation, soldered into a board (enabling the ID with the RESET pin asserted is one way; most chips become nonfunctional during reset). Before final assembly, our manufacturer customers can use that ID to detect counterfeits. If an ID shows up that is not in the database, or appears too many times in the database, then the ICID cell was cloned or it was faked with a ROM. Not perfect detection, but it makes counterfeiting more expensive.
BTW, the main use of ICID is for quality control and failure analysis, and this involves logging measured characteristics of the individual chip in addition to its ID, so counterfeiting becomes even harder. One form of counterfeiting is to re-mark legitimate but low-grade parts as higher grade parts (like re-marking a 2.4GHz Pentium as a 2.8GHz Pentium - it will work, sorta, for a while). A combination of ID and characteristic logging is a good way to detect this.
The ICID could be designed to be available during normal operation, and this would enable consumers to query the manufacturer's website to find out whether the component is authentic. However, we can't think of a good way to keep the bad guys from using the ID to track the component (and the consumer) as well. The consumer gets privacy, but can't verify authenticity.
So consumers must rely on manufacturers for authenticity and quality, both designed in and monitored after the fact. Personally, I am a little more concerned about some unexpected interaction between new processes and the consumer environment. Perhaps we will learn that cigarette smoke dissolves the hafnium gate oxides in the new Penryn CPUs, how would Intel know in advance?
I am a LOT more concerned about inadequately verified function (some companies are too cheap to hire professionals like smellsofbikes), and the poorly tested software that runs on these systems. The bad guys don't need to inject expensive and potentially detectable vulnerabilities into the hardware when there are a multitude of system vulnerabilities already available.
One of my little companies, SiidTech of Oregon, makes ICID, a clever little identification circuit for silicon chips (see http://www.kl-ic.com/isscc2K.pdf ). It is being used by some of our integrated circuit manufacturing customers to identify and track chips through manufacturing and field return, in order to improve yield and minimize failures.
The opportunities for abuse are frightening, and we designed both the circuit and its deployment to make it difficult to access the ICID on the chip when it is connected to a system. In essence, the system functions must be disabled and the isolated chip in test mode to get at the ICID. While that doesn't make it impossible to abuse the ICID, it does make it expensive and obvious.
While we had our arguments during startup, we agreed that our corporate charter would forbid the involuntary tracking of human beings with the technology, and make any application involving voluntary tracking of people or their equipment conditional on public disclosure and discussion, and require a unanimous vote of the board. So far, we have steered well clear of such applications, and if we consider them, you will hear about it!
ID technologies and techniques are here to stay, and cannot be suppressed. Three years after our ICID patent, a very large Japanese company attempted a similar patent, so the idea was waiting to happen, and others have tried to patent it since. While I don't like patents much, our patent is partly an attempt to reduce deployment of the technology for unsavory applications. Time will tell whether this strategy works or not.
While VeriChip's push to implant their tags in humans is wrong, it is the kind of thing that can happen in a struggling small company that has saturated its original market. The real question is not whether there is somebody willing to sell the tools of tyranny (with 6 billion people on the planet, there will always be somebody) but what people are willing to buy. The scariest thing is not that VeriChip is willing to put chips into immigrants, but that so many people want to close the borders at such a great risk to freedom.
A constituency for slavery develops because of the unaddressed fears of the slaves and the incoherence of the opposition. Calling the slaves perjorative names does not free them, breaking their chains does. The people that want to close the borders to immigration and trade are afraid of unemployment and afraid of people that look and act differently. These fears are valid, and will not go away until more of us have the skills and the confidence to insure our own prosperity and safety, and have been learned to enjoy the riches that other cultures bring.
Indeed, VeriSign's pursuit of the chip-humans market is a sign of their own fear and lack of opportunities - they have a hard-won technology, but few places to sell it. On some ideal planet of 6 billion free and prospering people, there would be lots of opportunities for implantable transponder technology that does not involve tracking and controlling people. For example, the same technology could be applied to implantable medical monitoring, but our culture is too lawsuit-ridden and regulation-bound (fear, fear!) to channel inventiveness in that direction.
This whole posting has been about fear; fear of tyranny, fear of misuse, fear of failure. Fear is the soil that grows tyranny. Fear sucks.
As I understand it, the math really says "nothing MASSIVE travels AT the speed of light", because infinite energy is required for mass to move at that exact velocity. However, infinite energy is not required for particles that move faster than the speed of light, though admittedly they might be impossible to directly measure or detect. Since tachyons cannot be measured directly, speculations about tachyons tend towards metaphysics. The same is true of inflation and other theories, measurements become quite indirect. However, tachyons can explain multiple problems (uniformity, acceleration, and galactic rotation, perhaps even deep space variations on solar G) that are now explained by multiple theories.
Posit some form of tachyon with imaginary mass and real kinetic and intrinsic energy, so that their energy follows E=(iM)C^2/sqrt(1-(V/C)^2) . If V>C, the square root denominator is imaginary, but iM is imaginary also, so the result is real energy, curving spacetime and sometimes exchanging energy with other particles, vaguely like normal sublight massive particles. If the average kinetic energy of these tachyons was the same thermal 2.7K as normal matter, they would be zipping around at very high multiples of the speed of light. In events where they gained energy, they would slow down, and they would speed up if they lost energy. If we assume that most of the tachyons have an imaginary mass of the same magnitude as a real proton, then their median (not average!) speed would be something like 800,000 times the speed of light in deep space.
Galaxies are not deep space, but rather deep gravity wells - falling into such a deep gravity well will add quite a bit of energy to a tachyon, and slow it down substantially. It will still zip through the galaxy in a few months, but it will linger, and increase the local concentration of mass-energy, affecting rotation rates. However, it will not slow down very much extra at all in the vicinity of a "mere" star or planet or benchtop G measurement experiment, so tachyons will be impossible to detect in the lab, and will have small local effects in solar systems. So these tachyons behave something like Weakly Interacting Massive Particles.
Next, the number of tachyons captured in the galaxies and their overall effects will vary in deep time - tachyons with hotter median energy will linger more often in more closely spaced galaxies closer to the big bang. This may have an effect on the mechanics of expansion, and appear as acceleration effects in the expansion of the universe (mad hand waving here - I might have blundered on a sign error).
Lastly, very near the moment of the big bang, when all the massive unbound quarks are zipping around at high relativistic thermal velocities, we might expect the tachyons to move around at "low" relativistic thermal velocities as well. Particles moving at speeds just below and just above the speed of light will be much more likely to interact directly than particles in very separated velocity ranges. The closely coupled tachyons could flatten variations in thermal energy well beyond the the limits of light speed.
Admittedly, this is all wild speculation, and as I am unable to do the proper mathematics I probably have no business making such speculations. I don't have any good idea of how tachyons could interact with anything besides their effects on the curvature of spacetime, or even the details of their adiabatic cooling as the universe expanded. I don't think tachyons would interact much with each other, or with light, or with other force exchange particles, except through gravitational curvature. And I am very uncomfortable positing something I cannot directly measure.
But hey, this is Shashdot, the home of the halfbaked opinion. So I can get this off my chest, perhaps to be found someday by some physicist looking for loonytoon ideas to use for target practice.
There are already systems that convert metals into oxides, producing power. They are called batteries. They are heavy, because metal atoms are a lot more massive for a lot less energy per reaction than hydrocarbon fuels.
That said, this is a bass-ackwards way to do something that was done better at Livermore perhaps 30 years ago ( you can find a reference in the old "Access to Energy" newsletter
by Petr Beckmann, if any of those are online ). Some Lawrence Livermore scientists
developed a metal-air battery, which produced electricity directly from the reaction of
the metal (aluminum or zinc plates, IIRC) with air via some catalytic electrode system.
Like the Israeli system, you ended up with powdered metal oxide. Unlike the Israeli indirect-combustion system, the metal-air battery
efficiencies were high and direct drive electrical power was produced, so you could
control power to the wheels, do regenerative braking, etc. Since the metal-air battery
produces electricity directly, the energy efficiency is probably 4X to 5X better than
a hydrogen generator feeding a heat engine. With the metal-air battery you also can
get the additional efficiency of a hybrid-type vehicle, so my guess is that you have
10X to 20X more energy efficiency than the Israeli Metal / Hydrogen / Internal
Combustion / Mechanical Linkage system.
The Livermore engineers did not use magnesium, or sodium, or lithium, or other light metals. These metals pack
higher energy density than aluminum. They also easy to ignite and burn very easily,
with flames that are impossible to put out in air (sodium even burns in water). Yes,
hydrogen burns faster (Hindenburg! Hindenburg! Oooooh scary!). But hydrogen burns
UP, while burning metal just stays around and does a thermite/napalm number on you and
your car. A magnesium slab in a car is NOT safer than a hydrogen tank in a car.
Even with the much better efficiency, Air-Metal batteries are not practical. It takes
far too much energy to refine the metal, and handling metal and debris, cleaning the
system, etc. are all far too much work. Now divide the value by 20, and wonder what
those Israelis are smoking...
P.S. Some researchers claim that the Hindenburg caught fire because of the ignition of the highly volatile doped fabric, which in turn set fire to the metal in the dirigible frame. The hot hydrogen vented upwards, remember, heating up the air far above the Hindenburg,
but not affecting the passengers underneath. They got roasted by the burning dirigible body.
Keith Lofstrom here. Right now I am in Southampton UK, on my way to the Isle of Wight Ferry to visit old buddy Paul Birch. We worked on launch loop / orbital ring technology 25 years ago (just after Fountains of Paradise from Arthur C. Clarke, that book kicked off all the modern speculations including Hyde's Space Fountain, other claims of priority are mistaken). We will be joined by John Knapman, who lives just north of here and is working on a similar idea that he just published in one of the AIAA journals.
Some salient points: If there was a market and funding, we can design and build a launch loop in T+5 years or so, with profitable (non-space-related) intermediate stages. However, there is no market or funding, and the people that read Slashdot are unlikely to provide it:-/ When there is a market, things like this will happen. MAKE A MARKET HAPPEN, PLEASE. Hint, that means earning and spending YOUR OWN MONEY.
The information on the website is rather primitive. John does better drawings, see his Spacecable site (I think.co.uk or.org . Difficult to look up right now ). If anyone wants to help, I can easily set up a wiki. Most of the help I need involves clever solutions of fourth order nonlinear partial differential equations, and no, it is not very informative to build billion point FEM models. The appropriate analytical math will do it.
Complexity - yes. But only in the sense of many identical, communicating, redundant units. I can stand 10% to 20% track controller failures, for example, their spacing is set by spatial frequency concerns, not for the need to have every one function all the time. In general, the launch loop fails gracefully. The worst case problem - and it is a big one - is a chunk of stuff getting loose between ribbon and track. I suspect that is quite solvable with some kind of "cowcatcher" or other cleverness. There is room for quite a bit of outside cleverness (I want to do it "open source") but I do not have much use for sloppy, vague suggestions. That is my department:-)
Read the paper, online. It is hard to answer many questions when they are unmotivated to get easily available primary data. www.launchloop.com . Yes, I need to work on the paper, but there are other things to do right now.
Indeed, the cryonics folks have been working on this stuff for years. I've seen dogs that have been washed out and chilled and revived, then nursed back to health. The really gruesome part is that after the dogs are healthy again, the law requires that they be euthanized. Apparently this is to prevent "suffering".
The logic behind cooling is the Arrhenius Equation. Typically, chemical reactions slow by a factor of 2 for every 10C drop in temperature. A problem is that this is a crude approximation, and depends on the activation energy of the reaction, so the rate is different for all the different reactions.
Since a cell contains thousands of chemical cascades, some reactions start going more slowly than the reactions that feed them, and intermediate products start stacking up or running out. Different organs do different processes at different rates, so whole body is more difficult than chilling one organ (which they have been doing for years, to move transplant organs). Different organs need different perfusions and cooling rates for optimum survival, and some organs survive cooling better than others. At the other end of the process, you end up with a few organs damaged. Hence, the nursing back to health - it is probably similar to the damage caused by a major infection.
However, the number of organ-targeted chemical adjustments to make is probably small enough that we can probably learn what they all are, step by experimental step, and come up with a process that will preserve a soldier for a couple of hours, which should get them from the field to a hospital. A nasty process, and the soldier will be in bed for weeks or months, but it sure beats a dirt nap.
I bought a laptop from Dell, under warranty, and the battery charger board failed. I called Dell support, they said "send it in, it will be back in a week". Lie #1
A week later - no laptop. Another call to Dell: "Airborne Express hasn't delivered it yet". Lie #2 A call to Airborne Express in Austin: "Dell refused delivery. Dell's got a warehouse full of broken gear waiting to be repaired, and no more room, so they are making Airborne rent a warehouse to store incoming shipments until they are ready for them."
One day, I stayed on hold to Dell's 800 number for 12 hours (they were on holiday, but didn't change the message), so for fun I put it on speakerphone and went about my day. I figured I might get a callback when they saw the large incoming WATS charge - no such luck.
I won't bore you with the rest of the story, except that it involved 11 more lies, and frequent plane trips for my laptop as it was turfed between Dell service centers. High comedy. I finally got the laptop back from Dell 6 months later.
Of course, I couldn't wait 6 months; I went out and bought an IBM Thinkpad, back in the days when IBM really cared about service. Unfortunately, that Thinkpad suffered the very same problem (a broken charger) soon after I bought it. Reluctantly, I sent it in for repair, also via Airborne Express, on a Monday afternoon (Airborne had delivered a packing box that morning).
I get a phone call Tuesday morning from the repair tech at IBM. He had fixed the laptop (it took a few minutes), and it would be sent back that day. However, he wanted my permission to upgrade the BIOS. He was knowledgable, and we had a detailed conversation of the pros and the hypothetical cons of that particular upgrade. We couldn't find any, so he went ahead, and I got the laptop back Wednesday morning. Elapsed time door-to-door, 44 hours.
They asked. They ASKED They were even knowledgable about Linux (which is why they asked about the BIOS change, they had only tested it on a few hundred kernels, not all yet). This treatment gave me the confidence to switch the laptop to Linux, since I could trust IBM to take care of me after I did.
That was the best damned customer service interaction I have ever had, and I have bought half a dozen Thinkpads since (running Linux, of course). Recent repair experiences have not been as good; IBM outsourced their service organization, then outsourced their whole damned PC business to Levono. Oh, well, now I am looking for a trustworthy source of laptops again. It was great while it lasted, though,
I host dirvish ( http://www.dirvish.org/ ), a backup application for Linux/Unix, using Rsync and Perl. Like Chuck Messenger, I rotate the target drives. You can only trust an air-gap between your backed-up data and a hostile world.
Rsync ( http://rsync.samba.org/ is really great for backup of Unix-like systems. The ability to hardlink identical files allows me to store hundreds of daily full images of 100GB of sources to a single target 250GB hard disk. Rsync is very smart about moving only changed data over the network, resulting in speedups of 10x to 100x. This allows me to do full backup on my offsite colo without using a lot of bandwidth. Note that Rsync is great for Mac/Unix/Linux, but it does sometimes have problems with windoze clients. But then, so do I...
Dirvish (originally written by jw schultz) is a Perl wrapper around Rsync. It facilitates the scheduling and management of Rsync based backups.
We have a fairly active mailing list and contributions from around the world (open source is so cool!).
Backups should be safe against:
Failed hard drives
Stupid mistakes
Enemy action
Fire, flood, and theft
Host and power supply failure
Unauthorized access
Backups should be automatic (or they will not get done) and cheap (hard disks are cheaper than tape, and much cheaper when you use hard linking). Rsync stores the data in a file system closely approximating the original, which facilitates restores.
If a cheap electrolytic filter capacitor dries out in your power supply, and the 5V output decides to start making a 15V squarewave instead, everything in your computer case will get fried. Including every one of the RAID disks. External USB enclosures (or airgaps!) protect against host and power supply failure.
If I was really paranoid about protecting my data, I would run a long ethernet cable to a nerdly neighbor a few houses away, and put a second dirvish server there. While I do rotate my drives into ziplok bags in a fire-resistant safe, the maximum credible accident (a furnace explosion) would tear open the firesafe. If I was paranoid and rich, I would use a high bandwidth VPN connection to a big disk in a colo machine in a different city.
The best backup is server-pull, frequent, automated backup onto multiple R/W media in multiple places, and frequent checking of that data. The closer you can approximate this, the more secure your data will be.
Actually, two, including one for my wife's laptop. I fully sympathize with Timothy, and will not purchase a series 2 because what he complains about is obvious just looking at the stupid things. Some industrial designer needs a different job, hopefully in the fast food industry. If he designed fast food boxes the way he designs N-Charge batteries, far less junk food would be sold and we all would be a lot healthier.
The rest of you may be wondering, what is so cool about these batteries? They are thin, and fit in just the right place in a laptop bag -- screen side, protecting it from impact dimples on the LCD. As Timothy mentioned, they fit in the right place for use, underneath the laptop. For this and a lot of other reasons, the old ones are the proper form factor, and the new ones are not.
But the overall system design is the best part. These batteries can be charged in series, between the AC adapter and the laptop. You can charge both units at once in the airport or at home, and keep working besides. As an external battery, you never have to shut down the laptop to swap batteries (my Linux Thinkpad is sometimes up for months at a time). As a chip designer, I sometimes run simulations that take days. I never have to futz with swapping the laptop battery. I used to. It sucked.
Another good reason for the N-Charge units is that the laptop adapter on the unit can be changed, and that changes the voltage and the connector. I am a Thinkpad kinda guy, 5mm barrel and 16V, but with IBM selling to Levono I may switch allegance to HP. I can buy a new adapter, and keep using the same battery with the new laptop. Meanwhile, I have a stack of old batteries for old Dells and old Thinkpads, all incompatable with current and future laptops -- they are just toxic waste now. N-Charge batteries are easily re-used.
One of the neat hacks you can do with these batteries is power many kinds of wall-warted peripheral. Most Linksys networking gear runs off a 5mm barrel 12V 1Amp wall wart, and will work quite happily with the 16V produced by the N-Charge battery (look inside the Linksys, and you will see a circuit that can take 25V). So I can power up an EWRT-hacked Linksys WRT54G, and hub an improvised wireless network with my friends in a park or pub. A WRT runs for about 16 hours on a VNC-130 battery, perfect for a long day's event.
I get 8 hours of computation on a fast laptop that normally lasts 2.5 hours. That gets me coast-to-coast. Yes, I can buy some wimpola 1 GHz unit that will last 5 hours on a single battery, but that is neither long enough duration, nor nearly enough compute power for a real computing task.
All that said, these batteries suck! Don't even consider bidding against me for them on Ebay! If you have an N-Charge 1, sell it to me for $10 and I will torment myself with it when this one eventually fails.:-)
Whenever some thoughtless person lets sensitive information get copied, a chorus of twits call for blood. This is stupid.
Copied information leaves no trace. The only clue we have that something like this has happened is when the person responsible for that data makes a public admission of their error. If the punishment for disclosure is high, they will simply not say anything, and we will not find out until the secure data is abused.
This is a training and management problem, and it goes up the UC administration to the top. From the chancellor on down, it should be made a primary job function that any information gathered for any purpose receives the appropriate amount of protection, and those with access are properly trained. Otherwise, the information is simply not allowed to be collected.
UCB has one of the best computer science departments in the world, and one of the best business schools. Those two groups could easily come up with technical and organizational procedures to robustly and cost-effectively protect sensitive data. This is a great opportunity for UCB, if they have the intelligence to pursue it.
With arch-rival Stanford just across the bay, such programs could turn into another entertaining and productive rivalry, as the two schools compete to penetrate each other's security. Better than football!
The only blood I would call for would be that of administrators who treat this as an excuse for punishment rather than an opportunity for learning.
Therefore, societies with high percentages of children should be dynamic examples of forward thinking? I should drop everything and move to central Africa!:-)
Stuff and nonsense. As "we" get older, "we" become more individual. Some folks vegetate. Others blossom, and are cut off by morbidity and mortality. Some of the most creative and entertaining people I know are old.
Anyone who has tried to feed a four year old knows that child=conservative .
... who knows what additional, unknown issues will crop up once you hit 200? Or 300 years old?
If I manage to live that long, I will know. And as a professional problem solver, I hope I will be blessed with the opportunity to contribute to the solution to these and other hypothetical problems.
If instead, you tell me that the future will be devoid of new and challenging and important problems, and there will be nothing to do but sit around and watch TV and eat bonbons and fondle myself, I'll drink the hemlock now.
And if you think there are too many people now, the hemlock is available to you, too.
Yes, many end up as coasters. But I have gotten positive feedback from dozens of people, negative feedback from two, and "could you help me learn this" from many. On slashdot, you have gotten a lot of negative feedback from a bunch of reactive people that have never tried this, or even thought it through very much; their opinions are unfounded and worth very little.
You will probably want to include some explanatory information. I put a "Dr. Bronner" style label on my CDs. See http://www.keithl.com/knoppix.ps for an example. I modify the index page and startup information so there are pointers to help pages. I install the latest Mozilla, and apt-get the latest security mods more often than Klaus Knopper does. I assume that most of these CDs will sit on the shelf for a while, but will save people's butts when the next Windoze worm hits. I don't want there to be any unnecessary vulnerabilities to hypothetical Linux worms.
I run a complete image check after I burn the disks, so I am not passing out dead disks. I use high quality media (Taiyo Yuden or equivalent). Still, there are some CD drives that choke on some CD/R media, and I get some calls about this. A couple of disks got replaced. The fact that most CD drives are NOT marginal and most CDs work suggests that I am NOT getting calls from most people that try it. 90% of users, voters, etc. do not communicate positive feedback - you have to extrapolate from the 10% that do.
A lot of people try the disk, and go back to Windoze. That's OK; Linux isn't for everyone... yet. But many are thrilled to learn that their computer can do something besides what it already does, and that empowers them and kindles their imagination. Folks may be forced by circumstance to live through a New York winter, but it is nice to know that Tahiti is a reboot away.
At the end of the day, nobody is forced to install or even look at these disks, This is not like some telephone solicitor calling during dinner. On the other hand, these disks have saved more than a few people's butts already. Like my sister-in-law, who was faced with an update to XP and a new computer to support it when Comcast told her they would not support her old Win98 machine anymore. A switch to boot-from-CD Linux saved her $1000.
And you meet interesting people this way. I have had talks with an Amish furniture maker, the CEO of a billion dollar medical corporation, and a number of others that were really enthusiastic about discovering Linux. These and other contacts were worth the time and cost of making those thousand Knoppix disks, and the potential embarassment of passing them out to strangers. I am only sorry that I don't yet do enough volume in a two month period to justify getting a run pressed professionally. But I know what to do when that situation occurs.
Do not embark on this unless you want to spend some time helping people learn. But in the future, when software becomes inexpensive and service becomes a differentiator, practicing on friends and relatives will teach you a performance advantage. It will also educate an important source of seed capital for your Linux service startup. So be ready to help the people you care about, ignore the carping naysayers, and go for it!
In late August, I lost my good friend Gary Groessehoeme of Oregon Electronics to an infected heart. 53YO SWM, somewhat overweight mouse potato. The heart infection affected his mentation. Two days of I/V antibiotic would have saved him. Because his judgement was affected, he did not understand his doctor's suggestion to get admitted (and his doctor was not forceful enough, IMHO).
A good university or teaching hospital would be good, Mayo would be good, a small community 20 bed hospital probably would not be good.
The bacteria are chewing up stuff that will never grow back. Even if you "get better", every hour these little bastards are nibbling on you may represent months shaved off your lifespan.
Yes, your insurance may not cover it. Yes, it might turn out to be nothing. Over the past year, we have admitted my mother to the hospital 6 times and 4 of those times turned out to be nothing, and 2 times saved her life. Those are pretty good odds. Further, the stuff you learn about the hospital now might save your life a few years down the road - and lead to some open-source aids for the rest of us!
But first, you need to stay on the road. Get help now, don't wait for an appointment, the bacteria aren't. Head for the ER and let them look at you; have one of your parents and your friends collect the history and medical information the doctors might need later.
If you need to hear it from a doctor, my wife the Internal Medicine doctor will be home at 5pm PST. But I hope you are already admitted by that time.
Slashdot Mirror
The internet is not some abstract infinite channel, where packets are created from nothing and move globally for free. It is a finite amount of expensive optical fiber and routing equipment with finite capacity. How is that to be used? Presumably to generate financial returns for those who paid for all that equipment. Where do the packets come from? Increasingly, from Hollywood, via services like Netflix.
Netflix video-on-demand is a horribly inefficient and intrusive way to use internet infrastructure. If you move gigabytes of high definition low latency video through a finite web, peer-to-peer, my web searches and information downloads are in competition. True net neutrality means you get as much bandwidth as I do, inbound and outbound, for the same price, which is a lot less bandwidth and lower Quality of Service than you are demanding now. At least Netflix understands that their video-on-demand model requires expensive physical equipment to implement; too bad their customer's brains have been turned into pudding by that video.
I used to offer unrestricted free wifi to my neighborhood. I liked the idea that poor schoolkids could work on their homework, travellers could consult online maps, visitors could check their email. Then the TV addicts discovered it, and filled my pipe with netflix packets. So I "violated net neutrality" and throttled the maximum bandwidth. The wifi can still be used for the beneficial uses I encourage, but video QOS sucks. As a bonus, I can worry less about a DMCA takedown. People can still move video, but they must wait a while.
Video addicts - please, please, please do boycott the internet. Feed your brain-rotting addiction with cable, DVDs, broadcast, satellite, and all the other low-cost ways that actually pay the producers and purveyors of your high-definition drivel. Your gigabyte road trains do not belong on the information highway until you pay for the extra resources to accomodate them.
Freedom of speech means Libre, not Gratis. Pay for what you take.
I just learned about this when I went looking for a report, CR-2357, Peter Glaser et. al.'s "Feasibility study of a satellite solar power station" from 1974 . I've downloaded hundreds of NASA reports as part of my research, but not all of them. There are millions of pages of documents there; to review them to ITAR requirements would take everyone working at the agency years to do.
Sorry I'm late to the party, but I've been busy actually putting this government research to work, creating jobs and healing the environment. With this one heinous act, the politicians (R and D, it took both) just flushed a trillion dollars worth of scientific and technical research down the crapper, and possibly the survival of the U.S. You can bet that the (Name of Current Enemy Here) have already downloaded every one of those reports; all that the Feds have done is deny access to Americans. The really sad thing is that most Americans are such ignorant partisan illiterates that this modern "burning of the library of Alexandria" went unnoticed, perhaps was even applauded when the politicians reported their security triumph to the fools (R and D both) who elected them.
Any one of those reports, no matter how trivial, is more important to our future than the whole pack of politicians in DC. Let's ITAR house.gov, senate.gov, and whitehouse.gov instead, those maniacs are more dangerous than a nuclear arsenal.
CO(subscript 2). Slashdot editor kept the unicode subscript for previews, dropped them from the final. Fooey. Live and learn.
Fun fact: Water vapor makes up 98% of the greenhouse effect.
Funner fact: Where the effect happens is more important. The troposphere is close to IR opaque, with gas and black body temperatures closely coupled. The black body temperature of the earth, and hence the amount of IR radiation emitted into deep space, is the deep cold of the upper atmosphere. Clouds and sulfate particulates determine the amount of light reaching the surface (mostly ocean), where almost all is turned into heat. In the longer term, that heat is equal to the IR black body radiation, with whole system temperatures adjusting until they do.
Atmospheric temperature decreases about 6.5C per kilometer altitude, and density decreases by about a factor of two every 7 kilometers. Water vapor pressure drops rapidly with temperature, and the water freezes out around 0C forming clouds and precipitation. There is very little water vapor above the high cloud tops, and that region is ruled by CO and methane, which do not freeze out at atmospheric temperatures. At some even higher altitude, the remaining amount of CO is transparent to space. Double the CO, and the transparency altitude goes up around 7km, to a region 45C colder than 7km below it.
If you could see the earth in the infrared, from space, it would appear colored by high altitude haze from the CO and methane, with lower altitude islands of cloud floating in an opaque sea of water vapor. The land and oceans are be invisible - and irrelevant to black body radiation. If you double the CO or methane, the long term effect is to increase the coloring, raise the water vapor "sea level" altitude somewhat. The temperature at this level stays close to constant (remember, that is the temperature where water freezes out), but at a higher altitude, there is more 6.5C/km air beneath. A very small change in atmospheric properties, raising the top of the troposphere a few percent, can easily result in an average 5C change down here on the surface.
I started out as a climate change sceptic, horrified by the pseudo-scientific and pseudo-technical nonsense spewed by the media. As a responsible technologist, I studied primary sources and ran the numbers myself, and changed my mind. Atmospheric scientists know a lot, have a lot more to learn, and cannot produce a definite prediction of exactly when our fiendishly complex, multi-billion cubic kilometer atmosphere will be broken beyond repair. The fate of civilization is dependent on the slow integration of effects that depend on other integrals of integrals; when the first pebbles of the landslide reach us, the unstoppable wall of rock will follow soon after, far too late to stabilize the slope.
Nature could soak up much of the excess CO, turning it into climax forest, plankton sea floor sediment, and perennial-plant root-mediated carbonate rock, but we are destroying the absorbers with annual-crop agriculture, especially atrocities such as "biofuel". We could reduce our methane use; instead we invest in erratic sources of "energy" such as wind turbines and grid-scale solar, which must be backed kilowatt-for-kilowatt with fast turn-on natural gas turbines instead of slow-response base-load hydro and thermal generation.
The natgas pipelines are overcapacity, leaking methane, bursting, even catching fire and exploding, compounding the problem of leaky production fields and leaky aging cities. If this is a problem in Europe and the US, imagine how bad it could get if impoverished India and China tried to copy our example.
No responsible technologist should blindly repeat numbers without checking them out, whether those numbers are ideologically comforting or not. Better to shut the hell up than to drown out the few responsible people who, whatever conclusions they come to, at least try to build those conclusions from direct observation, primary data, and replicable calculation.
Self-education and calculation is not only responsible, it is lucrative. Instead of
Apple doesn't shut down their data centers when the wind stops or when it is cloudy, and their biogas generators works only as fast as the microbes make methane, a process that is difficult to quickly throttle up and down. Perhaps they have vast underground tank farms storing methane for winter. Or perhaps this is all a fashion show to impress gullible green-wannabee customers.
So Apple is drawing the bulk of their power, most of the time, from the same grid the rest of us draw power from. They are building a new data center here in the Pacific Northwest, making the same claims about wind power. Wind power availability is random, on average less than 15% of nameplate capacity, and often entirely stopped for weeks at a time. On the rare occasions when wind farms produce much more than their tiny average, the Bonneville Power Administration is forced to buy it, regardless of the state of the power grid. BPA is being forced to spill water over the dams on the Columbia, which super-nitrogenates the water and kills salmon, thus violating their former "prime directive" - preserve fish runs. While maintaining navigation, controlling floods, providing irrigation, and about a dozen other important goals written into their charter. No wonder their director recently quit.
Solar - similar deal. The worst case solar insolation in winter is tiny, even in "sunny" New Mexico. No sunlight at night, of course, thin sunlight under week-long cloudy skies. Look at a December or January solar insolation map from NREL, and do the math yourself.
Where does the makeup energy come from? Given the short-term intermittency and quick-start requirements, mostly from natural gas turbines, increasingly fed through the national pipeline network from frack gas fields in the east and midwest. Gas magnate T. Boone Pickens /loves/ windmills.
Many of us here are technologists, capable of finding the numbers and doing the math. We do not have to rely on the pronouncements of corporate PR departments, government agencies, or conspiracist crackpot websites to figure out what is going on. We can go to primary sources, we can build our own spreadsheets, and we can replace magic thinking with nuts-and-bolts analysis to learn what works and what doesn't. The risk to the global climate is real (key phrases: IR column opacity versus altitude, adiabatic lapse rate), but the popular notions of how to deal with it are often worse than doing nothing.
And that is scary as hell.
Buy Apple products if you think the unregulated pollution from the power plants feeding Apple Chinese factories is better than the unregulated pollution due to their competitor's Chinese factories. If you don't, consider using free software on recycled/rebuilt/hot-rodded computers, like I am doing right now.
Every dollar a company charges above marginal cost is a big red flag to potential competitors - "money to be made here!" Australia has many crackerjack programmers. Perhaps as a write this, some small Australian startup is selling a product or service that is superior to Adobe products in some specialized market niche. From there, the upstart could grow too big to dislodge, while Adobe's attention is focused elsewhere. From that secure position, the upstart could grow to dominate the world market. It's happened plenty of times before.
The base platform for this hypothetical startup could copy code from Gimp and Inkscape, which are not identical to Adobe products and hence (to the mentally inflexible single-trick end-user) "sucks a bag of aids dicks". Doesn't matter. You can't copy code from Adobe products, so only Adobe (a tiny fraction of the world's programmers) gets to build new products with it. The rest of the world gets to build on open source tools, forking and remixing and sometimes stumbling across something that redefines the game.
The real victims of this will be inflexible Adobe customers, who are trapped deeper and deeper into one way of doing things with every project, and who must add an "Adobe tax" onto every project to pay for their expensive tools. When game change becomes unavoidable, they will struggle to find time to become adept with new tools, while still maintaining competence with (and paying for) the Adobe tools to support legacy projects. Most will fail, becoming obsolete like all the competent-but-struggling musicians who depended on the old record company label system for occasional gigs, and are now unemployable in the age of online independent artists and globe-spanning internet collaboration.
Because of the profit-rich environment that Adobe and its distributors have fostered in Australia, those new tools and new collaborations may originate there, fostered by the spirit of an intelligent and fiercely independent nation. Adobe, with their pricing, have made their own demise inevitable, taking far too many of their loyal customers with them.
I run a modded Thinkpad T60, and have stockpiled two more, and extra screens and keyboards. A lifetime supply, if necessary, though batteries will be a problem someday. I want 4x3. I want trackpoint. I want Linux compatibility. And I break warranties - look inside, repair inside, change inside.
The T60 is my main work tool. I calculate. I design. I program. I write papers and books. I can display two 8.5x11 pages on a 4x3 screen and fill it nicely. I can drive a 4x3 computer projector (still the most common) without clipping. 16x10 and 16x9 may present movies and games better, but I don't make movies or games.
Donald Knuth borrowed the T60 I'm typing on now. He's not going to borrow your windows 8 media vending machine.
I modded the T60 to a 15 inch 2048x1536 screen, from an NEC prototype run that M$ did not support. I built a kludge to rewrite the EDID eprom so the Thinkpad BIOS accepts it.
I bought my first Thinkpad (a 560) when my Dell laptop spent TWO MONTHS waiting for a power supply repair. That first Thinkpad developed a similar problem, and IBM fixed it 36 hours door-to-door. In fact, the morning after I sent it, I got a call from a service tech at IBM, who said "We see you are running Redhat 5. We have a new BIOS, which we've tested with Redhat 5. Before we ship your machine out in a few minutes, will you permit us to upgrade the BIOS?" Oh. My. God. SOLD.
That kind of service (no longer offered by Lenovo) is worth a huge premium. Laptops pack a lot of technology and heat into a small space, an unavoidable reliability compromise. Excellent manufacture and excellent service turn a consumable into a capital investment. Sadly, Lenovo is now following the race to the bottom. Thank goodness it is not leading it. Yet.
I am 59 years old. I've fooled with computers since I was 15, and built two from scratch. I'm old enough to NEED a trackpoint (hands too jittery to use a touch-touch-touch-touchpad). My visual acuity is dropping - handheld screen text is too small, and I must have a matte screen.
And there are millions like me. Most boomers are self-absorbed gimme-pigs, but some of us still design the hardware that the world depends on. The tools we need are disappearing. The tools that genX and genY engineer/entrepreneurs will need when they pass 40 won't be there. I weep for them.
Perhaps someday, some manufacturer will wise up, make a run of 15 inch 4x3 display glass, put a decent computer and keyboard underneath it, and own the engineer/business/senior market segment. They won't sell 100 million units, but they will get ten times the profit. It would be great if this was a branch of Lenovo, but my loyalty is to the usefulness and quality of the product, not to the nameplate.
Change? I'm all for change, if it is improvement, not atrophy.
For the last four years, I (and a tiny part-time team of volunteers) have been working on a different way to think about satellites:
http://server-sky.com/
These will be 3 gram, dinner-plate-diameter 50 micron thick satellites, based on some recent advances in semiconductor technology and Ivan Bekey's "Advanced Space System Concepts and Technologies: 2010-2030+". We are doing most of this as open technology, and I make presentations to groups that might help. Monday at NIST Gaithersburg, for example.
Satellites are surfaces that combine stimuli and solar power to make microwave transmissions to earth. A one micron thick layer of graded junction indium phosphide makes a 20% efficient solar cell and is very rad-hard. Ditto for Penryn-process silicon. That recent work, plus a number of other fortuitous recent discoveries, plus the kind of manufacturing techniques we use to make LCD displays, plus solar-sail-like maneuvering means we can built extremely thin satellites. They need to be heavier than 100g/m^2 to stabilize their orbits against light pressure, but they still can beat current satellite watt-to-kilogram ratios by more than a factor of 100.
The "satellites" will be arrays of thousands of these thinsats - a 99 kg array will contain 33 thousand of them, and collect about 160 kilowatts. That fits the sub-100kg definition of "micro satellite", though I hate the abuse of the scaling unit.
This is all very speculative, of course, and the thinsats that get launched will be very different from our early designs.
See the server sky website for more. Pretty chaotic right now. I use it as a public notebook, slowly improving the content as we learn new things, attempting to establish all this as public domain and attract informed discussion. While most readers will be highly skeptical until experiments get launched, non-analytical skepticism merely keeps competitors befuddled, giving us a head start. Folks with imagination, who can do research and the math and physics, have the opinions we care about.
For "conventional" cubesats, there are many universities working with the US Naval Academy. They have a "2U" cubesat design with a slightly-smaller-than-1U-sized plug-in compartment, which provides power and communications to a plug-in experiment provided by a university research partner. So, the university partner provides the experimental plugin, and a Really Good Story to convince the USNA that the experiment is worthwhile. USNA launches the cubesat, and the middies manage it, to get experience managing satellite assets without risking big military birds. At least, that is what I remember from attending the Amsat symposium a couple of years ago to give a paper on something Completely Different.
My name is on 12 patents. Mostly electronics, though one can be construed as a software patent. I would rather not have my name on most of them, and many result from the same situation you are in.
With my first employer, this was in my original contract years before I gave any thought to it. When I did, I said "no patents, or I quit". I did valuable work, so the quid pro quo extended another 5 years (the sneaky patent attorneys did get a European patent on some of my work, and never told me or my coinventors, but ...). When I finally left, they took out four US patents on the stuff in my notebooks, and threatened legal action if I didn't go along.
Then I helped a startup. They took out three US patents on my work for them. This time, to refuse would have torpedoed the company. In time, the foolish V.C.s torpedoed them anyway (high growth, high profit, market dominance, but the product was hard to explain at IPO - so the VCs made them work on easy-to-explain but low value products).
Then I consulted. I started putting "no patents" into my contracts. With one startup, that resulted in a four month delay in contract approval, resulting in a delay in further work. Which meant the startup was missing essential skills, the prototype failed, and so did the startup.
I learned to make my ideas look like someone else's idea at the clients. There were still some patents filed, but at least my name wasn't on them.
Now I have my own company. With four patents. And three on the way. I hope to release four of them into some kind of "public patents commons" arrangement, if I can find an organization that can leverage them properly into more public patents
I would rather that all patents go away, even if the global abolishment means the three I expect to continue to draw income from go away also. Sadly, in the world I live in, the alternative structures just aren't well developed, so if I don't patent an idea, a competitor will, locking me out of using my own idea. Or a client will treat the work and customization I provide them with as less valuable, because they notice "IP" more than they notice "good product". That is a cultural problem which I cannot fix myself. I hope to help with the fix, though, and I am always looking for alternatives.
I have managed to get a dozen or so potentially patentable ideas released directly into the public domain, mostly through publication in professional journals, and professional standards work. This is the best route available, given the existing situation. So:
Publish. Teach. Participate in standards bodies. Share all the ideas publically that your job permits. Write open source code. Use open source code, and attempt to make it the way things are done where you work. At the end of the day, those who want to contribute ideas to the public should just do it. Frequently. If that is not your job within the organization, morph your job until it is. If you cannot morph your job that way, find a new one elsewhere.
In the golden age of U.S. science, many great ideas were publically shared by scientists and engineers working for private companies. Many Nobel prizes resulted. Companies shared this work because it helped them hire the best, and showed their customers that they did first rate science, leading to first rate products. That age seems to be ending, but I think that is because the researchers value their salaries more than their scientific reputation. Now open source software seems to be heading into that golden age, and it will only stay that way if software innovators value their reputations more than the size of their paycheck. I respect the hell out of these people, and help out where I can. But it is a tough choice, it means forgoing some lucrative jobs, and if you have a family to feed, there is no easy answer. You have to decide whether you want to eat well, or sleep well.
smellsofbikes gave us a good description. End users don't have a whole lot of information to work with, though, and most of our critical systems are not military. So most individuals and companies rely on the reputation of the manufacturing and vendor chain.
In addition to size, an added chunk of evil circuitry is likely to detectably affect performance. The evil circuit has to connect to the normal circuit somehow, and it will add capacitance to the bus lines it connects to, or gate delays to the path it is inserted into. There is always some white space on a chip, and always some slow wires that can be tapped into, but Murphy's Law (which also applies to the bad guys) says these are not likely to be the exploitable ones.
Making runs of integrated circuits is expensive (mask sets cost millions of dollars), so counterfeiting chip designs typically only makes sense with run sizes in the millions. Failure analysis by the legitimate manufacturer is likely to detect the fraud, especially if the counterfeits are of lower quality. If you buy from reputable manufacturers and vendors (and you verify those reputations by praying to Saint Google), then you have some assurance that those companies are protecting their reputations (and profits) by looking for problems such as counterfeiting before their critics and competitors see them.
My SiidTech company ( http://www.siidtech.com/ ) licenses "ICID", a chip individualizing technology, to some semiconductor fabs for tracking their parts through production. For end user privacy protection, we mandate that the ID is inaccessible during normal operation, soldered into a board (enabling the ID with the RESET pin asserted is one way; most chips become nonfunctional during reset). Before final assembly, our manufacturer customers can use that ID to detect counterfeits. If an ID shows up that is not in the database, or appears too many times in the database, then the ICID cell was cloned or it was faked with a ROM. Not perfect detection, but it makes counterfeiting more expensive.
BTW, the main use of ICID is for quality control and failure analysis, and this involves logging measured characteristics of the individual chip in addition to its ID, so counterfeiting becomes even harder. One form of counterfeiting is to re-mark legitimate but low-grade parts as higher grade parts (like re-marking a 2.4GHz Pentium as a 2.8GHz Pentium - it will work, sorta, for a while). A combination of ID and characteristic logging is a good way to detect this.
The ICID could be designed to be available during normal operation, and this would enable consumers to query the manufacturer's website to find out whether the component is authentic. However, we can't think of a good way to keep the bad guys from using the ID to track the component (and the consumer) as well. The consumer gets privacy, but can't verify authenticity.
So consumers must rely on manufacturers for authenticity and quality, both designed in and monitored after the fact. Personally, I am a little more concerned about some unexpected interaction between new processes and the consumer environment. Perhaps we will learn that cigarette smoke dissolves the hafnium gate oxides in the new Penryn CPUs, how would Intel know in advance?
I am a LOT more concerned about inadequately verified function (some companies are too cheap to hire professionals like smellsofbikes), and the poorly tested software that runs on these systems. The bad guys don't need to inject expensive and potentially detectable vulnerabilities into the hardware when there are a multitude of system vulnerabilities already available.
The opportunities for abuse are frightening, and we designed both the circuit and its deployment to make it difficult to access the ICID on the chip when it is connected to a system. In essence, the system functions must be disabled and the isolated chip in test mode to get at the ICID. While that doesn't make it impossible to abuse the ICID, it does make it expensive and obvious.
While we had our arguments during startup, we agreed that our corporate charter would forbid the involuntary tracking of human beings with the technology, and make any application involving voluntary tracking of people or their equipment conditional on public disclosure and discussion, and require a unanimous vote of the board. So far, we have steered well clear of such applications, and if we consider them, you will hear about it!
ID technologies and techniques are here to stay, and cannot be suppressed. Three years after our ICID patent, a very large Japanese company attempted a similar patent, so the idea was waiting to happen, and others have tried to patent it since. While I don't like patents much, our patent is partly an attempt to reduce deployment of the technology for unsavory applications. Time will tell whether this strategy works or not.
While VeriChip's push to implant their tags in humans is wrong, it is the kind of thing that can happen in a struggling small company that has saturated its original market. The real question is not whether there is somebody willing to sell the tools of tyranny (with 6 billion people on the planet, there will always be somebody) but what people are willing to buy. The scariest thing is not that VeriChip is willing to put chips into immigrants, but that so many people want to close the borders at such a great risk to freedom.
A constituency for slavery develops because of the unaddressed fears of the slaves and the incoherence of the opposition. Calling the slaves perjorative names does not free them, breaking their chains does. The people that want to close the borders to immigration and trade are afraid of unemployment and afraid of people that look and act differently. These fears are valid, and will not go away until more of us have the skills and the confidence to insure our own prosperity and safety, and have been learned to enjoy the riches that other cultures bring.
Indeed, VeriSign's pursuit of the chip-humans market is a sign of their own fear and lack of opportunities - they have a hard-won technology, but few places to sell it. On some ideal planet of 6 billion free and prospering people, there would be lots of opportunities for implantable transponder technology that does not involve tracking and controlling people. For example, the same technology could be applied to implantable medical monitoring, but our culture is too lawsuit-ridden and regulation-bound (fear, fear!) to channel inventiveness in that direction.
This whole posting has been about fear; fear of tyranny, fear of misuse, fear of failure. Fear is the soil that grows tyranny. Fear sucks.
Posit some form of tachyon with imaginary mass and real kinetic and intrinsic energy, so that their energy follows E=(iM)C^2/sqrt(1-(V/C)^2) . If V>C, the square root denominator is imaginary, but iM is imaginary also, so the result is real energy, curving spacetime and sometimes exchanging energy with other particles, vaguely like normal sublight massive particles. If the average kinetic energy of these tachyons was the same thermal 2.7K as normal matter, they would be zipping around at very high multiples of the speed of light. In events where they gained energy, they would slow down, and they would speed up if they lost energy. If we assume that most of the tachyons have an imaginary mass of the same magnitude as a real proton, then their median (not average!) speed would be something like 800,000 times the speed of light in deep space.
Galaxies are not deep space, but rather deep gravity wells - falling into such a deep gravity well will add quite a bit of energy to a tachyon, and slow it down substantially. It will still zip through the galaxy in a few months, but it will linger, and increase the local concentration of mass-energy, affecting rotation rates. However, it will not slow down very much extra at all in the vicinity of a "mere" star or planet or benchtop G measurement experiment, so tachyons will be impossible to detect in the lab, and will have small local effects in solar systems. So these tachyons behave something like Weakly Interacting Massive Particles.
Next, the number of tachyons captured in the galaxies and their overall effects will vary in deep time - tachyons with hotter median energy will linger more often in more closely spaced galaxies closer to the big bang. This may have an effect on the mechanics of expansion, and appear as acceleration effects in the expansion of the universe (mad hand waving here - I might have blundered on a sign error).
Lastly, very near the moment of the big bang, when all the massive unbound quarks are zipping around at high relativistic thermal velocities, we might expect the tachyons to move around at "low" relativistic thermal velocities as well. Particles moving at speeds just below and just above the speed of light will be much more likely to interact directly than particles in very separated velocity ranges. The closely coupled tachyons could flatten variations in thermal energy well beyond the the limits of light speed.
Admittedly, this is all wild speculation, and as I am unable to do the proper mathematics I probably have no business making such speculations. I don't have any good idea of how tachyons could interact with anything besides their effects on the curvature of spacetime, or even the details of their adiabatic cooling as the universe expanded. I don't think tachyons would interact much with each other, or with light, or with other force exchange particles, except through gravitational curvature. And I am very uncomfortable positing something I cannot directly measure.
But hey, this is Shashdot, the home of the halfbaked opinion. So I can get this off my chest, perhaps to be found someday by some physicist looking for loonytoon ideas to use for target practice.
That said, this is a bass-ackwards way to do something that was done better at Livermore perhaps 30 years ago ( you can find a reference in the old "Access to Energy" newsletter by Petr Beckmann, if any of those are online ). Some Lawrence Livermore scientists developed a metal-air battery, which produced electricity directly from the reaction of the metal (aluminum or zinc plates, IIRC) with air via some catalytic electrode system. Like the Israeli system, you ended up with powdered metal oxide. Unlike the Israeli indirect-combustion system, the metal-air battery efficiencies were high and direct drive electrical power was produced, so you could control power to the wheels, do regenerative braking, etc. Since the metal-air battery produces electricity directly, the energy efficiency is probably 4X to 5X better than a hydrogen generator feeding a heat engine. With the metal-air battery you also can get the additional efficiency of a hybrid-type vehicle, so my guess is that you have 10X to 20X more energy efficiency than the Israeli Metal / Hydrogen / Internal Combustion / Mechanical Linkage system.
The Livermore engineers did not use magnesium, or sodium, or lithium, or other light metals. These metals pack higher energy density than aluminum. They also easy to ignite and burn very easily, with flames that are impossible to put out in air (sodium even burns in water). Yes, hydrogen burns faster (Hindenburg! Hindenburg! Oooooh scary!). But hydrogen burns UP, while burning metal just stays around and does a thermite/napalm number on you and your car. A magnesium slab in a car is NOT safer than a hydrogen tank in a car.
Even with the much better efficiency, Air-Metal batteries are not practical. It takes far too much energy to refine the metal, and handling metal and debris, cleaning the system, etc. are all far too much work. Now divide the value by 20, and wonder what those Israelis are smoking ...
P.S. Some researchers claim that the Hindenburg caught fire because of the ignition of the highly volatile doped fabric, which in turn set fire to the metal in the dirigible frame. The hot hydrogen vented upwards, remember, heating up the air far above the Hindenburg, but not affecting the passengers underneath. They got roasted by the burning dirigible body.
Keith Lofstrom here. Right now I am in Southampton UK, on my way to the Isle of Wight Ferry to visit old buddy Paul Birch. We worked on launch loop / orbital ring technology 25 years ago (just after Fountains of Paradise from Arthur C. Clarke, that book kicked off all the modern speculations including Hyde's Space Fountain, other claims of priority are mistaken). We will be joined by John Knapman, who lives just north of here and is working on a similar idea that he just published in one of the AIAA journals.
:-/ When there is a market, things like this will happen. MAKE A MARKET HAPPEN, PLEASE. Hint, that means earning and spending YOUR OWN MONEY.
.co.uk or .org . Difficult to look up right now ). If anyone wants to help, I can easily set up a wiki. Most of the help I need involves clever solutions of fourth order nonlinear partial differential equations, and no, it is not very informative to build billion point FEM models. The appropriate analytical math will do it.
:-)
Some salient points:
If there was a market and funding, we can design and build a launch loop in T+5 years or so, with profitable (non-space-related) intermediate stages. However, there is no market or funding, and the people that read Slashdot are unlikely to provide it
The information on the website is rather primitive. John does better drawings, see his Spacecable site (I think
Complexity - yes. But only in the sense of many identical, communicating, redundant units. I can stand 10% to 20% track controller failures, for example, their spacing is set by spatial frequency concerns, not for the need to have every one function all the time. In general, the launch loop fails gracefully. The worst case problem - and it is a big one - is a chunk of stuff getting loose between ribbon and track. I suspect that is quite solvable with some kind of "cowcatcher" or other cleverness. There is room for quite a bit of outside cleverness (I want to do it "open source") but I do not have much use for sloppy, vague suggestions. That is my department
Read the paper, online. It is hard to answer many questions when they are unmotivated to get easily available primary data. www.launchloop.com . Yes, I need to work on the paper, but there are other things to do right now.
Keith Lofstrom
The logic behind cooling is the Arrhenius Equation. Typically, chemical reactions slow by a factor of 2 for every 10C drop in temperature. A problem is that this is a crude approximation, and depends on the activation energy of the reaction, so the rate is different for all the different reactions.
Since a cell contains thousands of chemical cascades, some reactions start going more slowly than the reactions that feed them, and intermediate products start stacking up or running out. Different organs do different processes at different rates, so whole body is more difficult than chilling one organ (which they have been doing for years, to move transplant organs). Different organs need different perfusions and cooling rates for optimum survival, and some organs survive cooling better than others. At the other end of the process, you end up with a few organs damaged. Hence, the nursing back to health - it is probably similar to the damage caused by a major infection.
However, the number of organ-targeted chemical adjustments to make is probably small enough that we can probably learn what they all are, step by experimental step, and come up with a process that will preserve a soldier for a couple of hours, which should get them from the field to a hospital. A nasty process, and the soldier will be in bed for weeks or months, but it sure beats a dirt nap.
A week later - no laptop. Another call to Dell: "Airborne Express hasn't delivered it yet". Lie #2 A call to Airborne Express in Austin: "Dell refused delivery. Dell's got a warehouse full of broken gear waiting to be repaired, and no more room, so they are making Airborne rent a warehouse to store incoming shipments until they are ready for them."
One day, I stayed on hold to Dell's 800 number for 12 hours (they were on holiday, but didn't change the message), so for fun I put it on speakerphone and went about my day. I figured I might get a callback when they saw the large incoming WATS charge - no such luck.
I won't bore you with the rest of the story, except that it involved 11 more lies, and frequent plane trips for my laptop as it was turfed between Dell service centers. High comedy. I finally got the laptop back from Dell 6 months later.
Of course, I couldn't wait 6 months; I went out and bought an IBM Thinkpad, back in the days when IBM really cared about service. Unfortunately, that Thinkpad suffered the very same problem (a broken charger) soon after I bought it. Reluctantly, I sent it in for repair, also via Airborne Express, on a Monday afternoon (Airborne had delivered a packing box that morning).
I get a phone call Tuesday morning from the repair tech at IBM. He had fixed the laptop (it took a few minutes), and it would be sent back that day. However, he wanted my permission to upgrade the BIOS. He was knowledgable, and we had a detailed conversation of the pros and the hypothetical cons of that particular upgrade. We couldn't find any, so he went ahead, and I got the laptop back Wednesday morning. Elapsed time door-to-door, 44 hours.
They asked. They ASKED They were even knowledgable about Linux (which is why they asked about the BIOS change, they had only tested it on a few hundred kernels, not all yet). This treatment gave me the confidence to switch the laptop to Linux, since I could trust IBM to take care of me after I did.
That was the best damned customer service interaction I have ever had, and I have bought half a dozen Thinkpads since (running Linux, of course). Recent repair experiences have not been as good; IBM outsourced their service organization, then outsourced their whole damned PC business to Levono. Oh, well, now I am looking for a trustworthy source of laptops again. It was great while it lasted, though,
Keith
Rsync ( http://rsync.samba.org/ is really great for backup of Unix-like systems. The ability to hardlink identical files allows me to store hundreds of daily full images of 100GB of sources to a single target 250GB hard disk. Rsync is very smart about moving only changed data over the network, resulting in speedups of 10x to 100x. This allows me to do full backup on my offsite colo without using a lot of bandwidth. Note that Rsync is great for Mac/Unix/Linux, but it does sometimes have problems with windoze clients. But then, so do I ...
Dirvish (originally written by jw schultz) is a Perl wrapper around Rsync. It facilitates the scheduling and management of Rsync based backups. We have a fairly active mailing list and contributions from around the world (open source is so cool!).
Backups should be safe against:
Backups should be automatic (or they will not get done) and cheap (hard disks are cheaper than tape, and much cheaper when you use hard linking). Rsync stores the data in a file system closely approximating the original, which facilitates restores.
If a cheap electrolytic filter capacitor dries out in your power supply, and the 5V output decides to start making a 15V squarewave instead, everything in your computer case will get fried. Including every one of the RAID disks. External USB enclosures (or airgaps!) protect against host and power supply failure.
If I was really paranoid about protecting my data, I would run a long ethernet cable to a nerdly neighbor a few houses away, and put a second dirvish server there. While I do rotate my drives into ziplok bags in a fire-resistant safe, the maximum credible accident (a furnace explosion) would tear open the firesafe. If I was paranoid and rich, I would use a high bandwidth VPN connection to a big disk in a colo machine in a different city.
The best backup is server-pull, frequent, automated backup onto multiple R/W media in multiple places, and frequent checking of that data. The closer you can approximate this, the more secure your data will be.
Keith
Actually, two, including one for my wife's laptop. I fully sympathize with Timothy, and will not purchase a series 2 because what he complains about is obvious just looking at the stupid things. Some industrial designer needs a different job, hopefully in the fast food industry. If he designed fast food boxes the way he designs N-Charge batteries, far less junk food would be sold and we all would be a lot healthier.
:-)
The rest of you may be wondering, what is so cool about these batteries? They are thin, and fit in just the right place in a laptop bag -- screen side, protecting it from impact dimples on the LCD. As Timothy mentioned, they fit in the right place for use, underneath the laptop. For this and a lot of other reasons, the old ones are the proper form factor, and the new ones are not.
But the overall system design is the best part. These batteries can be charged in series, between the AC adapter and the laptop. You can charge both units at once in the airport or at home, and keep working besides. As an external battery, you never have to shut down the laptop to swap batteries (my Linux Thinkpad is sometimes up for months at a time). As a chip designer, I sometimes run simulations that take days. I never have to futz with swapping the laptop battery. I used to. It sucked.
Another good reason for the N-Charge units is that the laptop adapter on the unit can be changed, and that changes the voltage and the connector. I am a Thinkpad kinda guy, 5mm barrel and 16V, but with IBM selling to Levono I may switch allegance to HP. I can buy a new adapter, and keep using the same battery with the new laptop. Meanwhile, I have a stack of old batteries for old Dells and old Thinkpads, all incompatable with current and future laptops -- they are just toxic waste now. N-Charge batteries are easily re-used.
One of the neat hacks you can do with these batteries is power many kinds of wall-warted peripheral. Most Linksys networking gear runs off a 5mm barrel 12V 1Amp wall wart, and will work quite happily with the 16V produced by the N-Charge battery (look inside the Linksys, and you will see a circuit that can take 25V). So I can power up an EWRT-hacked Linksys WRT54G, and hub an improvised wireless network with my friends in a park or pub. A WRT runs for about 16 hours on a VNC-130 battery, perfect for a long day's event.
I get 8 hours of computation on a fast laptop that normally lasts 2.5 hours. That gets me coast-to-coast. Yes, I can buy some wimpola 1 GHz unit that will last 5 hours on a single battery, but that is neither long enough duration, nor nearly enough compute power for a real computing task.
All that said, these batteries suck! Don't even consider bidding against me for them on Ebay! If you have an N-Charge 1, sell it to me for $10 and I will torment myself with it when this one eventually fails.
There's the first! Who's next?
Whenever some thoughtless person lets sensitive information get copied, a chorus of twits call for blood. This is stupid.
Copied information leaves no trace. The only clue we have that something like this has happened is when the person responsible for that data makes a public admission of their error. If the punishment for disclosure is high, they will simply not say anything, and we will not find out until the secure data is abused.
This is a training and management problem, and it goes up the UC administration to the top. From the chancellor on down, it should be made a primary job function that any information gathered for any purpose receives the appropriate amount of protection, and those with access are properly trained. Otherwise, the information is simply not allowed to be collected.
UCB has one of the best computer science departments in the world, and one of the best business schools. Those two groups could easily come up with technical and organizational procedures to robustly and cost-effectively protect sensitive data. This is a great opportunity for UCB, if they have the intelligence to pursue it.
With arch-rival Stanford just across the bay, such programs could turn into another entertaining and productive rivalry, as the two schools compete to penetrate each other's security. Better than football!
The only blood I would call for would be that of administrators who treat this as an excuse for punishment rather than an opportunity for learning.
Keith Lofstrom, MSEE UCB 1974
Therefore, societies with high percentages of children should be dynamic examples of forward thinking? I should drop everything and move to central Africa! :-)
Stuff and nonsense. As "we" get older, "we" become more individual. Some folks vegetate. Others blossom, and are cut off by morbidity and mortality. Some of the most creative and entertaining people I know are old.
Anyone who has tried to feed a four year old knows that child=conservative .
If I manage to live that long, I will know. And as a professional problem solver, I hope I will be blessed with the opportunity to contribute to the solution to these and other hypothetical problems.
If instead, you tell me that the future will be devoid of new and challenging and important problems, and there will be nothing to do but sit around and watch TV and eat bonbons and fondle myself, I'll drink the hemlock now.
And if you think there are too many people now, the hemlock is available to you, too.
Yes, many end up as coasters. But I have gotten positive feedback from dozens of people, negative feedback from two, and "could you help me learn this" from many. On slashdot, you have gotten a lot of negative feedback from a bunch of reactive people that have never tried this, or even thought it through very much; their opinions are unfounded and worth very little.
You will probably want to include some explanatory information. I put a "Dr. Bronner" style label on my CDs. See http://www.keithl.com/knoppix.ps for an example. I modify the index page and startup information so there are pointers to help pages. I install the latest Mozilla, and apt-get the latest security mods more often than Klaus Knopper does. I assume that most of these CDs will sit on the shelf for a while, but will save people's butts when the next Windoze worm hits. I don't want there to be any unnecessary vulnerabilities to hypothetical Linux worms.
I run a complete image check after I burn the disks, so I am not passing out dead disks. I use high quality media (Taiyo Yuden or equivalent). Still, there are some CD drives that choke on some CD/R media, and I get some calls about this. A couple of disks got replaced. The fact that most CD drives are NOT marginal and most CDs work suggests that I am NOT getting calls from most people that try it. 90% of users, voters, etc. do not communicate positive feedback - you have to extrapolate from the 10% that do.
A lot of people try the disk, and go back to Windoze. That's OK; Linux isn't for everyone ... yet. But many are thrilled to learn that their computer can do something besides what it already does, and that empowers them and kindles their imagination. Folks may be forced by circumstance to live through a New York winter, but it is nice to know that Tahiti is a reboot away.
At the end of the day, nobody is forced to install or even look at these disks, This is not like some telephone solicitor calling during dinner. On the other hand, these disks have saved more than a few people's butts already. Like my sister-in-law, who was faced with an update to XP and a new computer to support it when Comcast told her they would not support her old Win98 machine anymore. A switch to boot-from-CD Linux saved her $1000.
And you meet interesting people this way. I have had talks with an Amish furniture maker, the CEO of a billion dollar medical corporation, and a number of others that were really enthusiastic about discovering Linux. These and other contacts were worth the time and cost of making those thousand Knoppix disks, and the potential embarassment of passing them out to strangers. I am only sorry that I don't yet do enough volume in a two month period to justify getting a run pressed professionally. But I know what to do when that situation occurs.
Do not embark on this unless you want to spend some time helping people learn. But in the future, when software becomes inexpensive and service becomes a differentiator, practicing on friends and relatives will teach you a performance advantage. It will also educate an important source of seed capital for your Linux service startup. So be ready to help the people you care about, ignore the carping naysayers, and go for it!
A good university or teaching hospital would be good, Mayo would be good, a small community 20 bed hospital probably would not be good.
The bacteria are chewing up stuff that will never grow back. Even if you "get better", every hour these little bastards are nibbling on you may represent months shaved off your lifespan.
Yes, your insurance may not cover it. Yes, it might turn out to be nothing. Over the past year, we have admitted my mother to the hospital 6 times and 4 of those times turned out to be nothing, and 2 times saved her life. Those are pretty good odds. Further, the stuff you learn about the hospital now might save your life a few years down the road - and lead to some open-source aids for the rest of us!
But first, you need to stay on the road. Get help now, don't wait for an appointment, the bacteria aren't. Head for the ER and let them look at you; have one of your parents and your friends collect the history and medical information the doctors might need later.
If you need to hear it from a doctor, my wife the Internal Medicine doctor will be home at 5pm PST. But I hope you are already admitted by that time.