Exactly.. remember the ringworld: It's got a huge useable area but at significant cost:
1. it leaks. There's no getting around this. It's open at the top and unless they seal it in with some kind of clear covering, it's going to leak. It's probably cheaper to find a way of regenerating the atmosphere than to plug all the leaks.
2. It's very thin. Just thick enough to support itself and a little more. Sufficiently large meteors punch right through, adding to the leakage problem. Changing the surface features also will have an effect on the internal weather, which with all that open plains space could get pretty rough.
3. It's not in a stable orbit. It's orbit is afaik, at unstable equilibrium. If perturbed, it will continue to fall off center with the sun until it intersects the sun.
Planets on the other hand have some nice advantages as well.
1. Ok, still open top, but particles must attain excape velocity to.. you know, escape. Particles on the ringworld only need to make it to the top and fall over the side. Vulcanism tends to replace lost atmospheres.
2. Thick atmosphere protects from charged particles and radiation. From below, the whole planet protects.
3. Planets are structurally sound: they will never colapse as they are really just piles of rock. Tectonics may result in local shaking, but the structure in general is stable.
3a. Planetary surfaces are self correcting. Large impactors (up to abou a tenth the size of the planet) will be absorbed into the planet and the surface will return to roughly spherical eventually.
4. Planets are smaller than ringworlds, so high speed winds have less land to develop over.
In the ringworld series, the most cautious species ever chose to live on a "fleet of worlds" around an artificial sun rather than on the ringworld itself.
A note about space weapons..
The death star, as a kind of space onion makes little sense: A space onion maximizes useable space within a given volume, but would limit the military usefulness of the structure. People probably wouldn't like living one one as there's no outside: there's a ceiling and lower gravity section above you all the time. All the light's below your feet, so there aren't many windows to the outside either. (note that "grav plating" changes the skylight problem a little bit.) Heat disipation goes like the surface area available, so space weapons would seek to maximize surface area with views to space. Spheres are not very useful to that end. Spherical shells probably are useful, They maximize area and firing directions for a given mass of structure, so I would guess that the deathstar is probably largely void in the center, much like deathstar II. Long flat ships would also be a good choice for heat disipation to volume ratios. The key is to make your vessel very thin... Great properties for a warship, but not someplace you want to live.
The Nabooians (naboos?) are human. Most of the galaxy appears to be human and Naboo is somewhat of a backwater border planet (it's not far from Tatooine which is on the outer rim after all) It is reasonable to assume that the humans are not native. The gungans may very well be native however, so it would appear that the apt comparison is the conquering of the americas.. eventually all of the natives (who were technologically at a lower level) end up in reservations
All of those are benefits of micro-power systems, all can be achieved with conventional technologies. Your home could run off of vegetable oil if you wanted and an efficient cycle would probably be cheaper than the grid. Plain-old ordinary fission has already made diesel free ships a reality. Automobiles and airplanes will always be tricky because their powerplants must not only be efficient, but also light. Right now, they're doing pretty well on "light."
Most of the "US is teh sux0r" posts seem to be IN the comments for something like this. It's as if the dictators are ok because we know they're dictators. (implying that we have dictators that are much more clever at hiding their dictatorness)
It's got a P/E of 115. that's almost 10x what most investment resourses will tell you is a reasonable level. Think of it this way: if all those earnings were profit and they issued that to shareholders as dividends, you'd make less than 1% on your money. You would do better in a bank account. Its price is rising faster than that can only mean one thing: it's going to burst.. it has to.. unless they grow a lot. and quickly.
You want it to be lighter for the walk to the dive site. Ironically, steel tanks though having worse strength-to-weight ratio than aluminum tanks and generally being less buoyant than the aluminum ones, are also often lighter for the same volume of air. This thing doesn't even need to be neutrally buoyant until its in the water and fills up, that space can be filled with air until then.
A typical open water scuba tank (aluminum 80 ft^3) will weigh about 40 lbs (mass 18 kg) and will last a typical diver a little under hour at 30 ft. or 25 minutes at 100 ft. (assuming ideal tanks and breathing the thing down to "zero"). Since this device appears to be mostly void space (it's a turbine that will be mostly full of water during operation right?) It probably is pretty light (it does not need to be neutrally buoyant when empty: it'll fill with water at the dive site.)
Extending bottom time with a typical scuba tank involves bringing ever heavier tanks with more air. (or risky rebreathers.. they are at least as complex as this device appears to be from the article). This system appears to have some of the same advantages as a rebreather: namely that volume of gas available is not dependant on depth. This is a huge advantage for deep dives. It also seems to avoid some of the more worrying dangers of rebreather operation: there is no CO2 removing compound to react poisonously with water in the event of flooding, the O2 partial pressure is almost certainly above the minimum requirement for life (though must still be monitored). It introduces other dangers which must be evaluated: parts moving at high speed which could fail, does not have the favorable buoyancy characterists of a rebreather (each breath, buoyancy varies by the volume of O2 consumed rather than by the volume of an entire breath)
I would imagine that this would be about the same weight as a similarly capable rebreather assuming the 1kg/hour marginal weight cost. A typical laptop battery is a little under a kilogram. It would seem that the fuel-cell replacements for same would be a pretty good fit here (few moving parts, high energy density, relatively low power) Though it would add additional complexity. I'm not sure I'd want to have my primary breathing gas dependant on a battery that loses capacity as quickly as LiIon though.
I have not been able to fully play a game of KOTOR as dark side. You have to be truely evil to do it and it involves a lot of taunting, extortion and killing people for money (they *were* dumb enough to tell me about the bounties though). The concious decision to murder fake people and rob others (using the line, "I'm here to rob you. I'll take what i want" or something like it) starts to affect me psychologically and I must put down the game before long. Needless to say, I've tried only a couple of times to get any appreciable distance as dark side. When I finally break down and buy kOTOR II I'll think about playing darkside first so I don't know the possible *good* outcomes I'm missing. (perhaps that will damp the pain a bit)
Price could drop to several hundred dollers as they replicate...
Assuming binary replication (each machine makes two and the owner gives them to their buddies) 10 generations gives us more than enough machines for everyone on earth... The cost of making one should be the cost of materials, plus asking your buddy with the replicator to please make one for you right?
So, extrapolating, the cost of materials to produce one replicator is on the order of several hundred dollars. I really don't see how these are going to help third world countries. Anything a "third world inventor" could make that would be reasonably useful to his/her neighbors would have to cost orders of magnitude less than the prototype to produce even in relatively small numbers.
Also it's "Going to be" 'open source' and might not even actually exist.. the picture in the article does not exactly look like something robust enough to.. say.. spray sand and glue on a table while moving with precision. or.. move precisely and reliably for more than three seconds.
$250 is the right price for it, a lot of effort was required to doctor up the photos and point out what effects were bad and what were good: the green swirls (apparantly bad) were eliminated by introducing the appropriate pest, but "fading" indicates dead plants. There may well be dying plants in that picture, but i'll never know because it's washed out for reasons other than that (or are the dead plants making the shadows less dark too?) and what's wrong with the greenhouses (other than the fact that the satellite photos don't show them being actually green) compared to the farms that were there before? Or comparing obvious false color imagery to apparantly true-color images. (one of the hi-res photos pointed out in this forum)
In short, they know their audience and its size and have priced it to maximize profit in that regard. It's a pity, because it adds noise and takes away from the real environmental problems.
The difference between bitching about, say armageddon, which had some bad physics and a watchable plot (It was an oil driller movie rather than an asteroid movie after all.. kinda like abyss was actually a trucker movie) and 'the core' is that the core didn't just have SOME bad physics. it had ALL bad physics and was a formula movie to boot. It's the shiniest example of hollywood's willing violation of the laws of thermodynamics (for no good reason... many of these movies could've been made with reasonable physics without changing the plot all that much) - a case study if you will. In fact, by some accounts it deserves the title of worst movie phyics ever. (which is why I watched it. It's so bad, it starts people talking about good physics. check out http://www.badastronomy.com/ sometime to see what I'm talking about.
I think the question remains: Is a 4000+ underclocked to 3000+ more reliable or efficient that the 3000+ would've been in its place: the 3000+ definately costs less.
I have been looking to buy a music player dealy and after seeing all the fanboys here I thought i'd look into an iPod. perhaps I will buy one in the future..as of right now, all of the players cost more than I am instersted in paying.
Cheaper: Although the iPod is competetive with other similar products, it is by no means cheaper than other items of same or even sometimes more features. Its famed robustness probably edges it out in these markets, but we're seing crackups even in that
Lighter: meh you're probably right, though none of these players seem to be above the weight i'd be willing to carry for portable music
stronger: probably right also
Overhyped: definately.. that's how they maintain their price point. If it wasn't a status symbol, it wouldn't be overhyped, but they also wouldn't be defining the player market right now
Ugly: I have been impressed in general with the designs of apple products, but the design of the iPod is not very inspiring. Its simplicity and general lack of pretension makes it accessable and acceptable, but it reminds me of a subway sign or bus station lettering: Big, simple, obvious symbols so that even people of poor eyesight or who are unable to read can understand the simple message. I don't think this is a bad direction to go in, but its utilitarian look (especially the more recent generations.. the shuttle looks like a construx piece) fails to inspire.
I will further butcher the analogy by pointing out that the core is likely composed of two regions: a liquid outer core and a solid inner core. So the earth is really more like those crazy chocloate covered cherry liquor thingies. (if covered in a sweet candy shell. mmmm)
Venus has lower gravity than earth, higher mean velocity molecules (higher temp) and very little magnetic field. Yet its atmosphere is hundreds of times thicker than earth's. Why should mars be any different? (other than the fact that if it had an atmosphere once, it's gone now...) How much of mars' original atmosphere blew away vs. was absorbed in the surface? (If there was significant oxygen, it's all trapped in the soil now as oxides.)
The AC following your post supplies the solution: charge the peers for membership in the system. Doesn't have to be high, even a dollar a year should prevent thousands of rogue peers from descending on the network (and you can always raise the cost o' entry if it proves a dollar is not enough). (and that dollar just guarantees you get info about new peers, you could continue to connect to the existing peers for as long as they remain active or perhaps a one time fee would be enough to discourage rogues)
At the worst case, the clearinghouse for adding peers to the web can be taken down through DDoS, but that would mean that new peers wouldn't be added rather than rogue peers actually destabilizing the network, there'd be time to figure out what to do. If the dollar fees turn out to be enough, just raise the bandwidth to insane levels. Actually i can't figure out what to spend the fees on other than bandwidth (and the occasional server upgrade.. but that's really the same thing ultimately) perhaps keep some in reserve to massively bolster bandwith in the event of attack?
I think this would limit the usefulness of patents for small inventors. The kind who can't afford to have an army of temps watching for patent slots to open up. I would suggest ammending your idea: the patent tax. The tax would be a percentage of sales of the product and/or a perctentage of total revinue for the specified time period or until the holder relinquishes it. patents that aren't actively making money would become a burden on the company and quickly dropped. This would also prevent taking out hundreds of patents to cover what is really one thing. If total revinue approach is taken, this would naturally exclude large monopolies from holding lots of patents (the upper limit would be 100% of revinue right?)
Depth of discharge really reduces the cycle life (as defined by factor of 2 reduction in capacity) of batteries. (did you think these devices use 100% of the battery every time? that's a quick way to kill any battery of any chemistry.) One of my textbooks puts it at about 500 cycles for 80% discharge in a LiIon. (NiCds are about 10,000 for the same DoD, but they have other disadvantages such as low power density) On the other hand, lower depth of discharge can extend the cycle life. There is, of course, some variation depending on manufacturer.
It seems apple engineers choose a cycle life/DoD that would only last some users one year of normal use. Either they underrestimated how much these things would get used or they deliberately chose a higher DoD to give high play times at begining of life for marketing purposes, but having a very short 'useful life.' The first is a careless mistake, the second is clearly unethical.
8 ohms is impedance at some audio frequency, not resistance to DC. In general, at the same volume levels, higher DC resistance should mean more wasted power, but mismatched impedences can be much worse. look up standing wave ratio. All "reflected power" as a result of mismatched impedences is dissipated as heat. Fortunately, there are ways to couple impedences reducing such losses.
What the parent meant to say was less power wasted in resistances because more of it is converted to sound instead of heat. This is a qualified true: we need to know more about the real and imaginary parts of the impedence. afaik, "8 ohm" refers to the magnitude only.
It is therefore interesting that the things government chooses to tax the most, (cigarettes, gasoline, salaries) (possibly in that order by percent, i'd have to look a little harder) have the most inelastic demand. (possibly in that order, I have no way to prove this speculation).
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But if they'd jumped out of plane, they'd have had a clear shot from the 'git-go'
Exactly.. remember the ringworld: It's got a huge useable area but at significant cost:
1. it leaks. There's no getting around this. It's open at the top and unless they seal it in with some kind of clear covering, it's going to leak. It's probably cheaper to find a way of regenerating the atmosphere than to plug all the leaks.
2. It's very thin. Just thick enough to support itself and a little more. Sufficiently large meteors punch right through, adding to the leakage problem. Changing the surface features also will have an effect on the internal weather, which with all that open plains space could get pretty rough.
3. It's not in a stable orbit. It's orbit is afaik, at unstable equilibrium. If perturbed, it will continue to fall off center with the sun until it intersects the sun.
Planets on the other hand have some nice advantages as well.
1. Ok, still open top, but particles must attain excape velocity to.. you know, escape. Particles on the ringworld only need to make it to the top and fall over the side. Vulcanism tends to replace lost atmospheres.
2. Thick atmosphere protects from charged particles and radiation. From below, the whole planet protects.
3. Planets are structurally sound: they will never colapse as they are really just piles of rock. Tectonics may result in local shaking, but the structure in general is stable.
3a. Planetary surfaces are self correcting. Large impactors (up to abou a tenth the size of the planet) will be absorbed into the planet and the surface will return to roughly spherical eventually.
4. Planets are smaller than ringworlds, so high speed winds have less land to develop over.
In the ringworld series, the most cautious species ever chose to live on a "fleet of worlds" around an artificial sun rather than on the ringworld itself.
A note about space weapons..
The death star, as a kind of space onion makes little sense: A space onion maximizes useable space within a given volume, but would limit the military usefulness of the structure. People probably wouldn't like living one one as there's no outside: there's a ceiling and lower gravity section above you all the time. All the light's below your feet, so there aren't many windows to the outside either. (note that "grav plating" changes the skylight problem a little bit.) Heat disipation goes like the surface area available, so space weapons would seek to maximize surface area with views to space. Spheres are not very useful to that end. Spherical shells probably are useful, They maximize area and firing directions for a given mass of structure, so I would guess that the deathstar is probably largely void in the center, much like deathstar II. Long flat ships would also be a good choice for heat disipation to volume ratios. The key is to make your vessel very thin... Great properties for a warship, but not someplace you want to live.
The Nabooians (naboos?) are human. Most of the galaxy appears to be human and Naboo is somewhat of a backwater border planet (it's not far from Tatooine which is on the outer rim after all) It is reasonable to assume that the humans are not native. The gungans may very well be native however, so it would appear that the apt comparison is the conquering of the americas.. eventually all of the natives (who were technologically at a lower level) end up in reservations
All of those are benefits of micro-power systems, all can be achieved with conventional technologies. Your home could run off of vegetable oil if you wanted and an efficient cycle would probably be cheaper than the grid. Plain-old ordinary fission has already made diesel free ships a reality. Automobiles and airplanes will always be tricky because their powerplants must not only be efficient, but also light. Right now, they're doing pretty well on "light."
Most of the "US is teh sux0r" posts seem to be IN the comments for something like this. It's as if the dictators are ok because we know they're dictators. (implying that we have dictators that are much more clever at hiding their dictatorness)
It's got a P/E of 115. that's almost 10x what most investment resourses will tell you is a reasonable level. Think of it this way: if all those earnings were profit and they issued that to shareholders as dividends, you'd make less than 1% on your money. You would do better in a bank account. Its price is rising faster than that can only mean one thing: it's going to burst.. it has to.. unless they grow a lot. and quickly.
You want it to be lighter for the walk to the dive site. Ironically, steel tanks though having worse strength-to-weight ratio than aluminum tanks and generally being less buoyant than the aluminum ones, are also often lighter for the same volume of air. This thing doesn't even need to be neutrally buoyant until its in the water and fills up, that space can be filled with air until then.
A typical open water scuba tank (aluminum 80 ft^3) will weigh about 40 lbs (mass 18 kg) and will last a typical diver a little under hour at 30 ft. or 25 minutes at 100 ft. (assuming ideal tanks and breathing the thing down to "zero"). Since this device appears to be mostly void space (it's a turbine that will be mostly full of water during operation right?) It probably is pretty light (it does not need to be neutrally buoyant when empty: it'll fill with water at the dive site.)
Extending bottom time with a typical scuba tank involves bringing ever heavier tanks with more air. (or risky rebreathers.. they are at least as complex as this device appears to be from the article). This system appears to have some of the same advantages as a rebreather: namely that volume of gas available is not dependant on depth. This is a huge advantage for deep dives. It also seems to avoid some of the more worrying dangers of rebreather operation: there is no CO2 removing compound to react poisonously with water in the event of flooding, the O2 partial pressure is almost certainly above the minimum requirement for life (though must still be monitored). It introduces other dangers which must be evaluated: parts moving at high speed which could fail, does not have the favorable buoyancy characterists of a rebreather (each breath, buoyancy varies by the volume of O2 consumed rather than by the volume of an entire breath)
I would imagine that this would be about the same weight as a similarly capable rebreather assuming the 1kg/hour marginal weight cost. A typical laptop battery is a little under a kilogram. It would seem that the fuel-cell replacements for same would be a pretty good fit here (few moving parts, high energy density, relatively low power) Though it would add additional complexity. I'm not sure I'd want to have my primary breathing gas dependant on a battery that loses capacity as quickly as LiIon though.
I have not been able to fully play a game of KOTOR as dark side. You have to be truely evil to do it and it involves a lot of taunting, extortion and killing people for money (they *were* dumb enough to tell me about the bounties though). The concious decision to murder fake people and rob others (using the line, "I'm here to rob you. I'll take what i want" or something like it) starts to affect me psychologically and I must put down the game before long. Needless to say, I've tried only a couple of times to get any appreciable distance as dark side. When I finally break down and buy kOTOR II I'll think about playing darkside first so I don't know the possible *good* outcomes I'm missing. (perhaps that will damp the pain a bit)
NASA's Opportunity rover has broken free from the Martian sand dune where it had been stuck for more than a month,
Now that's a whole lotta floorin'
If he's your lawyer, how come he's getting millions of dollars and you're getting a coupon for more defective parts?
Price could drop to several hundred dollers as they replicate...
Assuming binary replication (each machine makes two and the owner gives them to their buddies) 10 generations gives us more than enough machines for everyone on earth... The cost of making one should be the cost of materials, plus asking your buddy with the replicator to please make one for you right?
So, extrapolating, the cost of materials to produce one replicator is on the order of several hundred dollars. I really don't see how these are going to help third world countries. Anything a "third world inventor" could make that would be reasonably useful to his/her neighbors would have to cost orders of magnitude less than the prototype to produce even in relatively small numbers.
Also it's "Going to be" 'open source' and might not even actually exist.. the picture in the article does not exactly look like something robust enough to.. say.. spray sand and glue on a table while moving with precision. or.. move precisely and reliably for more than three seconds.
$250 is the right price for it, a lot of effort was required to doctor up the photos and point out what effects were bad and what were good: the green swirls (apparantly bad) were eliminated by introducing the appropriate pest, but "fading" indicates dead plants. There may well be dying plants in that picture, but i'll never know because it's washed out for reasons other than that (or are the dead plants making the shadows less dark too?)
and what's wrong with the greenhouses (other than the fact that the satellite photos don't show them being actually green) compared to the farms that were there before?
Or comparing obvious false color imagery to apparantly true-color images. (one of the hi-res photos pointed out in this forum)
In short, they know their audience and its size and have priced it to maximize profit in that regard. It's a pity, because it adds noise and takes away from the real environmental problems.
The difference between bitching about, say armageddon, which had some bad physics and a watchable plot (It was an oil driller movie rather than an asteroid movie after all.. kinda like abyss was actually a trucker movie) and 'the core' is that the core didn't just have SOME bad physics. it had ALL bad physics and was a formula movie to boot. It's the shiniest example of hollywood's willing violation of the laws of thermodynamics (for no good reason... many of these movies could've been made with reasonable physics without changing the plot all that much) - a case study if you will. In fact, by some accounts it deserves the title of worst movie phyics ever. (which is why I watched it. It's so bad, it starts people talking about good physics. check out http://www.badastronomy.com/ sometime to see what I'm talking about.
I think the question remains: Is a 4000+ underclocked to 3000+ more reliable or efficient that the 3000+ would've been in its place: the 3000+ definately costs less.
I have been looking to buy a music player dealy and after seeing all the fanboys here I thought i'd look into an iPod. perhaps I will buy one in the future..as of right now, all of the players cost more than I am instersted in paying.
Cheaper: Although the iPod is competetive with other similar products, it is by no means cheaper than other items of same or even sometimes more features. Its famed robustness probably edges it out in these markets, but we're seing crackups even in that
Lighter: meh you're probably right, though none of these players seem to be above the weight i'd be willing to carry for portable music
stronger: probably right also
Overhyped: definately.. that's how they maintain their price point. If it wasn't a status symbol, it wouldn't be overhyped, but they also wouldn't be defining the player market right now
Ugly: I have been impressed in general with the designs of apple products, but the design of the iPod is not very inspiring. Its simplicity and general lack of pretension makes it accessable and acceptable, but it reminds me of a subway sign or bus station lettering: Big, simple, obvious symbols so that even people of poor eyesight or who are unable to read can understand the simple message. I don't think this is a bad direction to go in, but its utilitarian look (especially the more recent generations.. the shuttle looks like a construx piece) fails to inspire.
I will further butcher the analogy by pointing out that the core is likely composed of two regions: a liquid outer core and a solid inner core. So the earth is really more like those crazy chocloate covered cherry liquor thingies. (if covered in a sweet candy shell. mmmm)
Venus has lower gravity than earth, higher mean velocity molecules (higher temp) and very little magnetic field. Yet its atmosphere is hundreds of times thicker than earth's. Why should mars be any different? (other than the fact that if it had an atmosphere once, it's gone now...) How much of mars' original atmosphere blew away vs. was absorbed in the surface? (If there was significant oxygen, it's all trapped in the soil now as oxides.)
Well that would explain why they called it phoenix then.
The AC following your post supplies the solution: charge the peers for membership in the system. Doesn't have to be high, even a dollar a year should prevent thousands of rogue peers from descending on the network (and you can always raise the cost o' entry if it proves a dollar is not enough). (and that dollar just guarantees you get info about new peers, you could continue to connect to the existing peers for as long as they remain active or perhaps a one time fee would be enough to discourage rogues)
At the worst case, the clearinghouse for adding peers to the web can be taken down through DDoS, but that would mean that new peers wouldn't be added rather than rogue peers actually destabilizing the network, there'd be time to figure out what to do. If the dollar fees turn out to be enough, just raise the bandwidth to insane levels. Actually i can't figure out what to spend the fees on other than bandwidth (and the occasional server upgrade.. but that's really the same thing ultimately) perhaps keep some in reserve to massively bolster bandwith in the event of attack?
I think this would limit the usefulness of patents for small inventors. The kind who can't afford to have an army of temps watching for patent slots to open up. I would suggest ammending your idea: the patent tax. The tax would be a percentage of sales of the product and/or a perctentage of total revinue for the specified time period or until the holder relinquishes it. patents that aren't actively making money would become a burden on the company and quickly dropped. This would also prevent taking out hundreds of patents to cover what is really one thing. If total revinue approach is taken, this would naturally exclude large monopolies from holding lots of patents (the upper limit would be 100% of revinue right?)
Depth of discharge really reduces the cycle life (as defined by factor of 2 reduction in capacity) of batteries. (did you think these devices use 100% of the battery every time? that's a quick way to kill any battery of any chemistry.) One of my textbooks puts it at about 500 cycles for 80% discharge in a LiIon. (NiCds are about 10,000 for the same DoD, but they have other disadvantages such as low power density) On the other hand, lower depth of discharge can extend the cycle life. There is, of course, some variation depending on manufacturer.
It seems apple engineers choose a cycle life/DoD that would only last some users one year of normal use. Either they underrestimated how much these things would get used or they deliberately chose a higher DoD to give high play times at begining of life for marketing purposes, but having a very short 'useful life.' The first is a careless mistake, the second is clearly unethical.
8 ohms is impedance at some audio frequency, not resistance to DC. In general, at the same volume levels, higher DC resistance should mean more wasted power, but mismatched impedences can be much worse. look up standing wave ratio. All "reflected power" as a result of mismatched impedences is dissipated as heat. Fortunately, there are ways to couple impedences reducing such losses.
What the parent meant to say was less power wasted in resistances because more of it is converted to sound instead of heat. This is a qualified true: we need to know more about the real and imaginary parts of the impedence. afaik, "8 ohm" refers to the magnitude only.
Soulless doesn't mean they can't have soul.
It is therefore interesting that the things government chooses to tax the most, (cigarettes, gasoline, salaries) (possibly in that order by percent, i'd have to look a little harder) have the most inelastic demand. (possibly in that order, I have no way to prove this speculation).