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User: Ancient_Hacker

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  1. well, no on Single Photons Bounced Off Orbiting Satellite · · Score: 1, Insightful

    Ah, from some angles, this experiment proves the opposite. You need the photons to be "entangled". That means effectively in their own little world, not intereacting with the universe in any way. Shooting them up through 10^38 atoms of the atmosphere and bouncing them off a satellite is the exact opposite of entanglement.

  2. Moron on The Joy of the Flash Drive · · Score: 0

    Those zoot-zoot noises are not the hard disk, moron. They're the CD drive. Getting a flash disk is not going to make any difference in those noises.

  3. Silly article on Samurai-Sword Maker May Cool Nuclear Revival · · Score: 1
    Silly article.


    Forging the reactor vessel midsection in one piece at this factory is not all that much better.

    • If it's all one piece, it can't be easily heat-treated to relieve the stresses of forging the thing.
    • If it's one piece, you need very special cranes and barges to move it to its destination.
    • Even if it's one piece, it still will need a whole lot of cuts and welds to attach the flanges, sensors, and pipes.


  4. There can't be a shortage, basic econ on IT Labor Shortage Is Just a Myth · · Score: 1
    There's probably a shortage of GOOD people that will work at low wages.

    In fact, that's probably as it should be.

    The real problem might be that companies can't easily figure out who is worth nothing and who is worth 4x the average salary.

  5. *Think* on Underground Freight Networks · · Score: 1
    Pipelines are just swell for moving liquids.

    Tunnels are not so good for moving solid items. There are just too many logistical and physical problems. Every foot of tunnel is a potential point for derailments and jams. Not too bad for a short tunnel, but if you have hundreds of miles, the chances of a jam get quite high. And jams take a lot of time and effort to clear. And think of the logistical problems of shuttling off loads at intermediate places.

    The system under Chicago was abandoned, which gives you some idea how impractical it was.

    As a sidenote, a few years ago the old Chicago tunnels flooded, flooding many business places that had long ago forgotten their basements had openings to these tunnels.

  6. "Those who forget the past", etc, etc, etc on Experiment Shows Traffic 'Shock Waves' Cause Jams · · Score: 3, Interesting
    Very silly article. IIRC traffic researchers in the mid 60's figured out the same thing, by running simulations on a 0.22 MIPS IBM/360. In FORTRAN.

    Guys, there really is a benefit to hitting the library and thumbing through back issues of ld technical journals.

  7. Let's do the math on Wave Powered Boat to Sail From Hawaii to Japan · · Score: 2, Interesting
    let's try to calculate how man horsepower you can get from this scheme.
    • Let's assume they have a 550 pound float at the end of a xx-foot beam.
    • And assume there's a three-foot wave going by every five seconds.
    • You probably don't wnt to be out in a 3-ton catamaran in much bigger waves that that.
    • And assume you have some differential flotation going on so there's three feet of motion between the float and the boat.
    • So you have 550 pounds moving 3/5 of a foot per second.
    • That's a not very whopping 0.6 horsepower.
    • Just about enough to move the float at a knot or two through the water.
    • Of course it would be easier to just cut loose the float.
  8. Re:Why the power plants shut down on Reactor Shutdown Darkens South Florida · · Score: 1

    You have no idea what you're talking about. Phasing was worked out around 1880 and is not even a slight issue. Substations and wires don't blow up, as there are these things called circuit breakers and fuses.

  9. Makes absolutely no sense on Nanotechnology-Powered Wiper-Less Windshield · · Score: 2, Interesting
    At first glance this article makes absolutely no sense.

    A top layer that repels water. Swell. But how long does that layer last when subjected to your typical environment?

    A second layer of microscopic dust that somehow pushes dirt to the side. Can anybody fathom any mechanism for this?

    A third layer that's a sensor for dust? WTF?

    A fourth conductive layer?

    One possible mechanism might be that the fourth layer is charged up to several thousand volts, charging the unwanted dust, then it reverses polarity, repelling the dust. Which might have a chance of working at 0% humidity and very fine dust.

    Also note that the gratuitous reference to nanotechnology, which in this context probably refers to what we normally call "powdered ingredients".

  10. Let's do the math on this one. on 100-MPG Air-Powered Car Headed To US Next Year · · Score: 1
    Kinda ridiculous, from a thermodynamics perspective, to compress air or exhaust to store energy, for maaaaany reasons:

    • It's hard to compress hot exhaust gas-- the stuff can barely be handled by sodium-filled exhaust valves. The gas is going to be rough on the compressor.
    • If you compress hot exhaust, you have really hot resulting gas, which is not the optimum thing to be stuffing nito a storage tank.
    • If you cool off the compressed gases with like a intercooler, you're wasting a ton of that energy, and lowering the pressure you just paid a lot to generate.
    • If the gases sit in the storage tank for a while, you're going to lose even more pressure due to the tank cooling off.
    • Same problem when you let out the gas to use it-- the tank will cool off, which is swell if you need AC, not so good if you want a tank with remaining high pressure.

    Now let's do the math for how many miles you can go on a 4000 psi tank. The pressure in a firing cylinder is about 2000 psi, so assume you can drain the tank to half-empty. A typical engine cylinder is about 500cc. At top=-dead center it's about 1/8th of that, say 60cc A BIG storage tank could be 60 liters. So you could fill up an engine cylinder 1,000 times. Most engines do about 2000 RPM in top gear at 60MPH, one cylinder firing for every revolution on a 4-cylinder engine, so you can go, hmmm, half a mile on a very expensively compressed tank of air. Not terribly impressive.

  11. Ony the facts could stop this intrepid adventurer! on Inventor to Launch Pop Bottle Rocket into Space · · Score: 4, Informative

    If you dropped a pop bottle onto Earth from a great height, say a million miles, it would splat (air resistance excluded) at about 25,000 MPH. Seven miles per second. Analogously, if you wanted to reverse the course of the pop bottle, you'd have to launch it from the Earth's surface at a similar speed. Now IIRC at about Mach 1.5, aluminum begins to soften. I suspect the plastic in a pop bottle melts at a somewhat lower temperature. So even if you could get enough dry ice or Mentos to launch the bottle at seven miles per second, it would probably melt in about two seconds. Not to mention that air resistance would slow it down considerably on its upward journey, so it's unlikely to have enough speed for the long run.

  12. Re:Huh? on Outer Space has a Smell · · Score: 1
    >Bravo! Not only mixing imperial and metric but areas and volume to boot!

    Well that apparent clusterfarge is actually apropos-- The RCA handbook uses cm^3, and the tube in question was rerally close to having a square inch of exposed plate surface.

    And gas absorption is a surface phenomenon, so inches^2 does happen to be the right dimensionality.

  13. Huh? on Outer Space has a Smell · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I'd hope our space travelers would have a skosh better grasp of physics. The vacuum of near space is darn good, certainly lower than the vapor pressure of most anything we loft into space. Experience with evacuating radio and TV tubes says you can get up to 500 cm^3 of gas out of every few square inches of metal. I would not be surprised if he's smelling the outgassing of items from our earthly spehere, not the "smell of space".

  14. Re:A reality check on this on Submersible Glider Powered By Thermal Changes · · Score: 1
    >But given this is a robotic submersible, why does it need air conditioners and lights?

    But it still needs to be able to move around. If it gets into a large area of homogenous water, like the Gulf Stream, what's it gonna do? Even in a perfect environment with steep thermal contrasts, I don't think it can buoyancy-glide it's way out of even a minor current. In the Gulf Stream, it's gonna flounder.

  15. A reality check on this on Submersible Glider Powered By Thermal Changes · · Score: 1
    Er, um, there's quite a few problems with this concept:
    • The efficiency is very low. Whatever the temperature difference is between the inside and outside of the sub in degrees C, divide that by 273, that's the maximum possible efficiency. If you wait forever for the heat to transfer. And assuming there is a difference to exploit.
    • Your typical sub has like 10 to 80 thousand horsepower. This sub, on a good day, might do 2% of that. Not exactly a barn-burner. And not even enough to run the lights and air-conditioners.
  16. Let's do the math on this one on Energy From Raindrops · · Score: 4, Informative
    Hmm, raindrops... Why didn't someone think of this before? For a good reason:

    • Let's be generous and assume it's raining all the time.
    • And it's a real gully-washer, say an inch an hour.
    • And let's be really generous and assume this gadget captures 50% of the energy of falling water.
    • And each raindrop is at maximum terminal velocity, about 10MPH.
    • So that's about 700000 gallons of water per day per acre falling at 10MPH.
    • Which works out about 6 million pounds per acre per day at 10MPH.
    • Which is about 100 million foot-pounds per day per acre.
    • But that's only 1157 foot-pounds per second, barely 2 horsepower.
    • Roughly 750 watts at 50% efficiency.
    • Or roughly 17 milliwatts per square foot.
    • Or at ten cents a kwh, it's making almost 100 watt-hours a year, or almost a penny.
  17. Oh, won't somebody please think of the math on Reaction Engines plan Mach 5 Airliner · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I'd love to see how they can make an "eco-friendly" airliner that goes Mach 5. There are some really basic laws of aero and thermo dynamics that put the kibosh on most of these schemes. Look at the Concorde, XB-70, SR-71, for examples of how difficult and expensive it is to design, test, and operate anything going Mach 2 to Mach 3.3. And the problems just go up from there, often by squares and cubes.

  18. Oh, the basic glitches in the ointment on Cell Phone Radiation Detectors Proposed to Protect Against Nukes · · Score: 1
    Lotsa problems:
    • There are three kinds of radiation, alpha, beta, and gamma.
    • Alpha and Beta don't penetrate most materials, so it's rather easy to stop these from leaking out of your "weapon", and (b) It's hard to make sturdy sensors. So count Alpha and Beta as non-starters.
    • Gammas penetrate rather deeply, BUT your basic refined Plutonium and Uranium, the necessary materials for a real bomb, don't emit Gammas.
    • That leaves our Gamma-sensitive cell phones only useful at sniffing out cosmic rays, terrorists carrying nuclear waste, and not much else.
    • And oh, for $149.95 the terrorists could carry around a cell-phone jammer, a cheap and effective countermeasure.
    • How's about we try some other angle, something that won't cost billions to deploy, will work, and won't be easily jammed?
  19. A better showplace... on Robotic Fly to Descend on New York · · Score: 2, Interesting
    Maybe a better venue would be to show it at The Museum Of Modern Fascism.

    On the other hand, your basic laws of scaling are going to be an effective law to limit the usefulness of these gadgets. The battery power goes down as the cube, while the air resistance is at least one power below that, so they're going to be mighty short-lived, like seconds rather than minutes.

  20. Let's DO THE MATH, and,hmm it works on Origami Plane to Fly From the Int. Space Station · · Score: 1
    Lesse, how about a reality-check here:

    30 grams starting out at 18,000 MPH, that's just shy of a MILLION Joules of kinetic energy to start out with.

    Now to keep the paper from burning, the rate of energy loss had better be oh, let's say 40 watts as a ballpark estimate. We estimate that because if we aim a fan at a 40-watt light bulb, we can keep our finger on it without burning.

    Now a watt is one Joule per second, so the plane has to stay in the air about 1 million over 40 seconds, or about 25,000 seconds-- 416 minutes, or almost seven hours.

    Now a good paper airplane might have a glide ratio of ten to one, so in dropping 100 miles it would go forward 1000 miles. One thousand miles over seven hours is about 142.85 MPH.

    That's probably about ten times faster than a paper airplane is going to go, so whew, we are on the safe side, by about a factor of ten. i.e. the plane going 14.28 MPH will take ten times as long, thereby dissipating only 4 watts, thereby not heating up very much at all.

  21. All I really want is..... not a new whale on perl6 and Parrot 0.5.2 Released · · Score: 1
    My wish list for Perl 5 was not all that long, but it looks like I get none of it:
    • Goodbye to $ @ and %. There's no reason you should need them if you have declarations.
    • Nested subs with lexical variables that work as expected.
    • Memory management that's not Flintstone-level.
    • Built-in interpreter level profiling.
  22. saw the first 20 minutes on Cloverfield Discussion · · Score: 1

    My general principle is, if the first 20 minutes suck, it's not going to get any better. The dialogue in the first 20 minutes was awfully lame. The situation was illogical. How many 23 yr old guys get a VP job in Japan? Who are these people? Why are they so dumb? Why do we care about them? Mightnt we be better off with them smashed to a pulp?

  23. Worse yet, the laws for VCR's: on French Fine Amazon For Free Shipping · · Score: 1
    I read this somewhere so it must be true:

    The French govt did not impose a cap on VCR imports. That would be mean.

    Instead they ruled that the official VCR import customs inspections would be done at Pied en Merde, a lovely country village in the mountains. There they built a customs shack, at the top of the highest hill in town, with a very nice stone stairway to it. In the shack, experienced customs inspector Pierre La Douche-Tableau, age 78, would cheerfully inspect each and every VCR. Every ten minutes or so he'd finish his inspection of yet another foreign VCR. Thorough, that Pierre.

  24. Re:That's incident light, and asymptotic to boot on Nanotubes Form The Darkest Material Yet Created · · Score: 1
    Oh, you're right, if you are using this to absorb stray light.

    I was responding to the perception that this was 3x better at collecting energy.

  25. That's incident light, and asymptotic to boot on Nanotubes Form The Darkest Material Yet Created · · Score: 3, Insightful
    Um, although this thing is by some measure "three times blacker", that's no big deal, in an energy absorption sense.

    It just means instead of using cheap carbon black, 99.6% blac, you use expensive and fragile nanotubes, 99.9% black.

    Not a significant increase in energy absorption, and not economical either.