A site that doesn't charge based on a percentage of sales would be a good improvement. Ebay's contribution to the sale is completely independent of the value of the item. It is entirely dependent on the volume of interest. A site that did what ebay does: classified listings with pretty good (but still finicky) searching and auction-style valuation, but charges the way godaddy does (as in, for bandwidth and storage).
Encouraging users to properly classify items for database searches would be another valuable step. For instance, if you're looking for cheap laptops, you probably don't want cheap laptop cases or spent^h^h^h^h^hrefurbished laptop batteries, but your search results will be full of them if you do a keyword search on ebay.
Yeah, but we wouldn't know until the wave hit us. For all intents and purposes, the star exists in our current reference frame in the state that we observe it in. It's not like you can see the star explode and then say, "Ok, we've got 8,000 years to get our act together.
It seems to maintains a list of all of the words that it has helpfully suggested corrections for, for you. So, you must be one terrible misspeller.
But, why would you leave your web browser open for weeks at a time? You should be turning the machine off when you go home for the night / leave for work in the morning (depending on home/work status) to save electricity. Only servers need to be on all the time.
Except, Calculus, specifically, was invented by the same guy who used it to basically describe classical physics. And he also proved all of his theorems using geometry, since the new-fangled calculus might not be acceptable for proofs just yet, having only just been invented, by him.
The point is, how can you separate the invention of calculus from his work in classical physics? They were obviously developed hand-in-hand.
And neither did yours. He might've thought he did, but it's likely that they all discharged through the dielectric in short timescales. At least, likely for anything maintaining a high voltage, and enough charge to have a noticeable discharge while still being able to fit on a science-classroom shelf, that is.
No, you don't need a bootable CD at all. You need a bootable flash drive. One in which only the database is actually editable. Just plug it in to any computer to update the database. You still need some way to verify the signatures. Perhaps a built-in crypto module, such that the actual signatures aren't sent unencrypted through the network or even decrypted on the computer.
From the user's point of view the procedure if their computer was severely broken would be to plug in the stick on a friend's computer to get the updates, using drivers from the flash drive, then plug the disk into their own computer and boot.
What aluminum doesn't do, but steel does, is rust through. Iron rust exposes more iron to the air, and eventually you've got a nice pile of barn pigment. Note that progress in alloys has developed mixtures that are resistant to this.
Aluminum however just forms that oxide layer, then it stops. A thin layer of oxide prevents any further oxidation (at least until you scratch it, or go hella crazy with the polishing compound.)
I wasn't going to suggest a crane though. I thought you could put the seating area on overhead rails like factories have. Match those suckers up, and drive the passenger module into the plane at 3g with a linear motor.
The most practical though would probably be to take the weight hit and put doors every six rows. Redesign the jetway for multiple access points and load all at once. The exit rows can have fold-away seats so that space won't be wasted.
Only cheap-ass cars require you to load everyone in from the front, and even they have two doors for it. Why are planes so much chintzier.
Also, turn the damn seats around. Sure, it's cool to be facing the way you're going, but you can't see out the front, anyway, and studies have shown that the seats reversed position is significantly more survivable in a disaster.
I never understood why they would want to board first, then sit, with their heads a just about ass level, 8 inches away from the aisle that a hundred fifty slow-moving, smelly ovine-Americans shuffle their way into the cramped third-class cabin. I mean, I have to fly cattle class due to the price, but I'll go out of my way to avoid being the first one seated. That's why I like Southwest: I can board with the final group, and since there isn't assigned seating, I'm not responsible for the irregular order everyone before me took.
anytime you use a sterling engine to harvest energy you have to be affecting the temperature
Yes, but they do it by getting in the way of heat flow from hot to cold. You'd be better off sticking a hunk of copper on there or a gorgon of heat pipes.
If you are recovering waste heat that you can do something with, there's something wrong in that chain of energy. It's almost always better to improve the efficiency of the main thing (even by a few percent) than to tack on the extra maintenance problems of secondary waste heat regeneration systems.
I was in a hurricane during which I lost power for two weeks and phone (landline. My cell was fine the whole time, oddly enough) for three days. In order for either of those companies have five 9s of reliability, they'd have to have nearly 4,000 years or 800 years respectively of uninterrupted uptime. So it's already too late.
Further, I've had phone interruptions of up to a day on multiple occasions, I was not living in the boonies, either, but a mostly urban area with a population of about 500,000. So it's already too late. I would not say that "the telcos" are achieving anywhere near 5 9s of uptime in the consumer market.
Further, it's much more important how long an outage is than the cumulative average length of an outage. A web site for instance could easily sustain hundreds of 1s outages a day transparently. Most users of the famed blackberries probably wouldn't even notice blocks of 5 minutes at a time (assuming it queues messages when service is unavailable like a well designed mobile communications device would). Even 911 could probably handle outages of a minute or so as long as they were spaced several "average call lengths" apart.
So, yeah, 5 9s would be nice, but acceptable results can be had by investing in response time, and the important bit is the total cost to achieve your goals.
The question is, is it more efficient than heat pipes? Since they also are heat engines (with no moving parts! sort of), but they're a LOT quieter and more flexible (literally!) than fans.
You're absolutely correct that an ideal Carnot engine would have to have about a thousand degrees if it rejects heat to room temperature.
Typically what's done in these cases is to compare the efficiency of the engine to the Carnot efficiency. So the claim of 70% efficiency really means that the engine is 70% as efficient as a Carnot engine at the temperatures it operates between. The real efficiency then is n_carnot*n_engine. Their real efficiency claim is therefore probably closer to 4.9%.
But that's not the only convention. Sometimes the comparison is made to the ideal version of whatever cycle they're using. For a stirling engine, I believe the ideal still approaches Carnot efficiency, so that wouldn't affect their claims, but you can see how some shady math can be used to get people excited.
Well, yeah, but once you get a call, you've already passed the "getting a call" hurdle. You're going to go out for it. Of course you'd rather not get any crank calls. But, I'm hoping you'd rather not get any real fires, either (might be rewarding for you to put them out, but for you to do that, someone's house or business has to catch on fire).
Therefore, if you get a call, I know you're not hoping it turns out to be a real fire, right?
Meh. Effective occupation is key to any land claim.
Since the moon is a lot harder to get to than Antarctica, and those countries permanent presence on the resource and research-rich continent being as limited as it is, I find the possibility of troublesome land claims a bit preposterous.
Re:Err.. Why do we need H20 for fuel again when,
on
New Radar Maps of Moon
·
· Score: 2, Funny
Yeah, the moon has no atmosphere and a very low escape velocity (only ~1.5 km/s!, less than 5% of the kinetic energy required to escape earth).
So you run a mag-lev track around an arc and use your ion drive on it, or use a linear motor for the initial acceleration. Probably you'll stay away from things like rail guns though, unless your goal is to shell the earth with nearly useless slugs o' matter.
If I were a fireman, I'd hope that all of the calls I went out on were pranks. Because that would mean that there weren't any actual fires. Of course, if there's a prank AND a fire, that's a problem. But if I'm going to get 10 calls, I'd rather have 9 pranks and one fire than ten fires.
i think fox is run by the guy who kept changing the time slot of 'quantum leap' over on another network that's done this kinda ridiculous stuff before...
Y'know, fans of Quantum Leap of all shows should expect and even appreciate that kind of thing.
Slashdot Mirror
A site that doesn't charge based on a percentage of sales would be a good improvement. Ebay's contribution to the sale is completely independent of the value of the item. It is entirely dependent on the volume of interest. A site that did what ebay does: classified listings with pretty good (but still finicky) searching and auction-style valuation, but charges the way godaddy does (as in, for bandwidth and storage).
Encouraging users to properly classify items for database searches would be another valuable step. For instance, if you're looking for cheap laptops, you probably don't want cheap laptop cases or spent^h^h^h^h^hrefurbished laptop batteries, but your search results will be full of them if you do a keyword search on ebay.
And, what do you propose using to set the room temperature to 20 degrees?
Yeah, no one's ever been murdered in the name of atheism.
Yeah, but we wouldn't know until the wave hit us. For all intents and purposes, the star exists in our current reference frame in the state that we observe it in. It's not like you can see the star explode and then say, "Ok, we've got 8,000 years to get our act together.
It seems to maintains a list of all of the words that it has helpfully suggested corrections for, for you. So, you must be one terrible misspeller.
But, why would you leave your web browser open for weeks at a time? You should be turning the machine off when you go home for the night / leave for work in the morning (depending on home/work status) to save electricity. Only servers need to be on all the time.
Except, Calculus, specifically, was invented by the same guy who used it to basically describe classical physics. And he also proved all of his theorems using geometry, since the new-fangled calculus might not be acceptable for proofs just yet, having only just been invented, by him.
The point is, how can you separate the invention of calculus from his work in classical physics? They were obviously developed hand-in-hand.
And neither did yours. He might've thought he did, but it's likely that they all discharged through the dielectric in short timescales. At least, likely for anything maintaining a high voltage, and enough charge to have a noticeable discharge while still being able to fit on a science-classroom shelf, that is.
No, you don't need a bootable CD at all. You need a bootable flash drive. One in which only the database is actually editable. Just plug it in to any computer to update the database. You still need some way to verify the signatures. Perhaps a built-in crypto module, such that the actual signatures aren't sent unencrypted through the network or even decrypted on the computer.
From the user's point of view the procedure if their computer was severely broken would be to plug in the stick on a friend's computer to get the updates, using drivers from the flash drive, then plug the disk into their own computer and boot.
What aluminum doesn't do, but steel does, is rust through. Iron rust exposes more iron to the air, and eventually you've got a nice pile of barn pigment. Note that progress in alloys has developed mixtures that are resistant to this.
Aluminum however just forms that oxide layer, then it stops. A thin layer of oxide prevents any further oxidation (at least until you scratch it, or go hella crazy with the polishing compound.)
Darn it, you beat me to it.
I wasn't going to suggest a crane though. I thought you could put the seating area on overhead rails like factories have. Match those suckers up, and drive the passenger module into the plane at 3g with a linear motor.
The most practical though would probably be to take the weight hit and put doors every six rows. Redesign the jetway for multiple access points and load all at once. The exit rows can have fold-away seats so that space won't be wasted.
Only cheap-ass cars require you to load everyone in from the front, and even they have two doors for it. Why are planes so much chintzier.
Also, turn the damn seats around. Sure, it's cool to be facing the way you're going, but you can't see out the front, anyway, and studies have shown that the seats reversed position is significantly more survivable in a disaster.
Statistically, the safest part of the plane is in the rear. One possible reason was horrifyingly portrayed in the film, "Alive."
I never understood why they would want to board first, then sit, with their heads a just about ass level, 8 inches away from the aisle that a hundred fifty slow-moving, smelly ovine-Americans shuffle their way into the cramped third-class cabin. I mean, I have to fly cattle class due to the price, but I'll go out of my way to avoid being the first one seated. That's why I like Southwest: I can board with the final group, and since there isn't assigned seating, I'm not responsible for the irregular order everyone before me took.
If you are recovering waste heat that you can do something with, there's something wrong in that chain of energy. It's almost always better to improve the efficiency of the main thing (even by a few percent) than to tack on the extra maintenance problems of secondary waste heat regeneration systems.
I was in a hurricane during which I lost power for two weeks and phone (landline. My cell was fine the whole time, oddly enough) for three days. In order for either of those companies have five 9s of reliability, they'd have to have nearly 4,000 years or 800 years respectively of uninterrupted uptime. So it's already too late.
Further, I've had phone interruptions of up to a day on multiple occasions, I was not living in the boonies, either, but a mostly urban area with a population of about 500,000. So it's already too late. I would not say that "the telcos" are achieving anywhere near 5 9s of uptime in the consumer market.
Further, it's much more important how long an outage is than the cumulative average length of an outage. A web site for instance could easily sustain hundreds of 1s outages a day transparently. Most users of the famed blackberries probably wouldn't even notice blocks of 5 minutes at a time (assuming it queues messages when service is unavailable like a well designed mobile communications device would). Even 911 could probably handle outages of a minute or so as long as they were spaced several "average call lengths" apart.
So, yeah, 5 9s would be nice, but acceptable results can be had by investing in response time, and the important bit is the total cost to achieve your goals.
The question is, is it more efficient than heat pipes? Since they also are heat engines (with no moving parts! sort of), but they're a LOT quieter and more flexible (literally!) than fans.
You're absolutely correct that an ideal Carnot engine would have to have about a thousand degrees if it rejects heat to room temperature.
Typically what's done in these cases is to compare the efficiency of the engine to the Carnot efficiency. So the claim of 70% efficiency really means that the engine is 70% as efficient as a Carnot engine at the temperatures it operates between. The real efficiency then is n_carnot*n_engine. Their real efficiency claim is therefore probably closer to 4.9%.
But that's not the only convention. Sometimes the comparison is made to the ideal version of whatever cycle they're using. For a stirling engine, I believe the ideal still approaches Carnot efficiency, so that wouldn't affect their claims, but you can see how some shady math can be used to get people excited.
tensile strength != toughness. And, unfortunately, aluminum is not particularly ductile. At least, not when compared to, say, steel.
But aluminum does have a very good strength to weight ratio. Also, it doesn't rust. Instead it forms an oxide layer which prevents further oxidation.
Well, yeah, but once you get a call, you've already passed the "getting a call" hurdle. You're going to go out for it. Of course you'd rather not get any crank calls. But, I'm hoping you'd rather not get any real fires, either (might be rewarding for you to put them out, but for you to do that, someone's house or business has to catch on fire).
Therefore, if you get a call, I know you're not hoping it turns out to be a real fire, right?
Fortunately, we also know of a virus which suppresses the immune system...
Meh. Effective occupation is key to any land claim.
Since the moon is a lot harder to get to than Antarctica, and those countries permanent presence on the resource and research-rich continent being as limited as it is, I find the possibility of troublesome land claims a bit preposterous.
Yeah, the moon has no atmosphere and a very low escape velocity (only ~1.5 km/s!, less than 5% of the kinetic energy required to escape earth).
So you run a mag-lev track around an arc and use your ion drive on it, or use a linear motor for the initial acceleration. Probably you'll stay away from things like rail guns though, unless your goal is to shell the earth with nearly useless slugs o' matter.
It's a container format. It could very well be mpeg4 under the hood.
If I were a fireman, I'd hope that all of the calls I went out on were pranks. Because that would mean that there weren't any actual fires. Of course, if there's a prank AND a fire, that's a problem. But if I'm going to get 10 calls, I'd rather have 9 pranks and one fire than ten fires.