Just on general principles, the idea sounds ridiculous:
Astrophysical theories and estimates of dark matter, miniature black holes, "wimps", "gimps",
renegade neutrino varieties, and more-- the estimated magnitude of these effects can only be guessed at, and the best guesses vary by factors of two to ten.
Newton's law, F = MA has been tested hundreds of times, in all kinds of places, on earth, in deep mines, in the air, in space, and as far as Vger 10 has wandered. IIRC it's always passed within the precision of the measuring devices.
So it's basically LUDICROUS to look for TINY variations, we're talking parts per million, to "explain" wild guesses with tolerances of plus or minus 1,000%.
And to think that one time and place on Earth are somehow "special" for 1/1000 of a second, well, that's more in the realm of religion than science or logic.
There were two oversights in the older VW's electrical system:
(1) You needed the key to close the sunroof.
(2) But.. a sneak path in the headlight wiring meant you could instead just turn on the headlights and pull on the high-beam flasher (on the turn-signal lever). Enough electricity would flow backwards through the sneak path to operate the sunroof motor.... ooops, that's more hardware than software. sorry.
I helps if one looks at these things with a certain perspective.
First, is there a problem that needs solving? Are we really that short of spectrum?
Secondly, if this is so great, why hasnt it been done already?
Next, did anybody do a literature search to see if it has been done?
Next, is this the most economical way to do this?
Otherwise, we end up with wildly expensive proposed solutions using already tried and rejected technology that violates basic laws of physics, scale, or economics, to attack a non-problem. Again.
The reason France does lots of things nobody else does is simple: the Govt there owns the power company, the phone company, and more.
When you don't have to show a profit, and in fact can always go back to the govt for a handout, there's a lot of things you can try to do. And when you can call out the army to stop protests around breeder reactors and reprocessing plants, then there's a lot more you can do again.
Look at the total costs of reprocessing, including the costs to the environment, the radioactive deer, turtles, fish, etc. Then come back and tell us ow super the French are.
Breeders, reprocessing, thorium, no such things
on
The Coming Uranium Crisis
·
· Score: 3, Informative
I'm amazed how many people have posted about the wonders of breeder reactors, reprocessing, or thorium as fuel, without really looking into these things.
These things havent been done, or have been tried and discarded, all for very good reasons.
Many tens of billions of $ have been spent on breeder reactors. Total fuel generated, near zero. In fact the generated plutonium has negative value-- there's a huge surplus of Plutonium in the world to day. I.E. Huge supply, no demand.
Reprocessing is expensive and polluting. Even at todays 10x uranium prices, nobody's going to try reprocessing, because it's still too expensive, especially if all the external costs are factored in.
Thorium in general can't be plugged into existing reactors, not without considerable modification of the reactor cores and control systems. Not likely to happen anytime soon.
Folks, before you hop on a wishful bandwagon, how about making sure there is a wagon?
>The registry can be backed up and restored, in whole or in subsections.
... not when it's scrozzled so the ReadRegistry API crashes to the BSOD.
I'm not typing thru my hat-- I've had this happen more than once.
>Which files under/boot,/etc,/sbin, and so on would you be willing to stake your career on being "safe to corrupt by 1 byte" and still guarantee a bootable system?
Apples and Oranges. I can edit the text files and cp the binary files. Can't do either with the Registry.
>The format of the registry is largely irrelevant, but it is described to some extent in the "Inside Windows xxx"
Well, when my Registry got scrozzled I looked all over the net for source code that could read a Registry and didnt find anything. So the descriptions out there are likely less than usable.
Assuming a Prius can only go 100K miles Vs a Hummer at 300K gives the Humemr a 3x advantage... Hmmmmm.
The Nickel doesnt get consumed, when the battery wears out the Nickel gets recycled.
Perhaps more significant is the Cadmium in the battery! Nasty stuff. yet they don't mention it. Hmmmm..
The Fine Article claims the smelter in Canada makes a "dead zone". A quick Googling Earth shows lots of trees--- even houses litterally in the shadow of the smokestack. Hmmm...
The Prius may not be all that great, but this FA doesnt prove anything.
Since I have to kill several rogue AcrobatReader.Exe processes every day for the last five years, I hope this NEW Adobe product will maybe have a built-in ctrl-alt-del button?
Will save a lot of time.
Overheard at the SATA connector design meeting:
on
eSATA Connectors
·
· Score: 4, Funny
"Everyone please now and listen to OverLord Amphe Knoll!"
AK: "You have done well, pilgrims. The connector conspiracy advances! Let us review our proud history:
1938: The holy RCA Phono connector! The one that connects the center conductor FIRST and blows out the speakers with hum! Also, it has no detent so it can fall out given a light breeze! That was a goodie!
1941: The Ubiquitous UHF connector! The one that connects the center pin first and either blows out the receiver, or burns up the hapless HAM or CB user! Also it seems to have a detent, but there's aq 50% chance its a false fit and will wiggle loose
1961: The Japanese hollow tube power plug! 10001 different voltages and currents in one connector! Lotsa sales there of replacement radios.
1972: Of the Ma Bell RJ modular connectors, we will not speak. Anybody can make a mistake and make a sturdy, usable, latching connector once in a while. Luckily our agents infiltrated the factories and made the latches prone to snag on wires and break off after five uses. A partial recovery for the forces of connector darkness!
1974: 40-pin flat cable connectors: Another goal for our side! Connectors with no latching or detents, plus 180 degree ambiguity! Lots of smoke if you guess wrong!
1985: The Mac AppleTalk connector! Supposedly a DIN standard, but we sneaked in plenty of gotchas, like no detent and easily confused with and smashed into the DIN 3 connector!
2003: The SATA connector! A home run! No useful grounding, no shielding, and it falls out if you just look at it!
2006: External SATA connector: Well,a partial win. A few improvements got sneaked in. Our hope is the users will confuse the old and new styles and break off some disk drive pins. No soup for anybody until you dream up a new SATA3 connector with more confounding features.
I'm thinking: explosions, or at least melt-downs
Two most common characters, nice and short: E: . T: -
Third most common character, very long: O: ---
TeleText and Closed Captions:
CC: Error protocol: Send each character twice.
TeleText: Assume everybody has a 16-color 24x80 screen.
Telex:
USe a 5-bit character code, with a half-dozen different conventions
for character sets, sometimes a bell on shift-G, sometimes a quote,
sometimes a bunch of funny old weather symbols. Miss a downshift
and you get a line of numbers and punctuation instead of text.
An infinite number of endof-line conventions. Printers that can
slice off your fingers. Sweet.
Building up and keeping a substantial charge may be difficult-- the solar wind will tend to get in the way.
"Steering" is a bit misleading. Assuming you can only shoot out electrons, you're limited to one polarity of charge, so you can only turn in one direction, normal to the magnetic field.
Most planets have a bit of inclination, so you're going to be turning into an angle to the ecliptic-- not very useful if you want to aim at another planet.
A sudden solar flare is likely to really mess up the charge, leading to unexpected twists and turns.
It's a proposed technical solution for a past social problem. barn door and all that. even if it worked perfectly, the bad guys would just change their approach in some small way.
Pilots will never give up the principle that they're in charge, always.
There are over 100,000 flights every day. All it takes is a false positive rate of 0.0001% to be totally unacceptable.
ooooooh! A copper tube soldered to a bent piece of metal! Call the networks!
Seriously, Seymour Cray's cooling guy did this in 1962. The hot and fast RAM of that era was a 4K by 12 bit module, about the size and weight of three bricks, and costing about $15K each. These needed a 1/2 inch thick aluminum heat spreader, bolted to a thick aluminum frame with chilled freon running thru it.
... and you don't get much of a speedup by cooling your RAM. Silicon speed is close to PTAT (Proportional to Absolute Temperature), so you don't get many percent from going from 40C to 30C.
A page and a half of blather, and not one single salient number. Like the costs. Or the lifetime. Or the maintenance costs. Or the costs in bringing the power to shore. Or the cost of building more peaking power plants to take up the slack. Or how you keep these things in one piece for 20 years or until they pay back their original cost.
A rough guess says these things can't even pay for the interest and maintenance costs, much less ever pay back their original cost in $$,$$$,$$$ or energy.
The basic probelm is the sea has many more hazards, in the way of waves, corrosion, and stress, than it does easily capturable energy.
A dish, for best effect, had better be parabolic. Most Woks are not.
The $20K cost includes not only the $50 dish, but the feed horn, the Gallium-Arsenide MOSFET low-noise amplifier, downconverter, mount, and warranty.
You have to compare the downside-- if the Wok setup goes down for any reason, what is the cost per hour to the station? Initial purchase price isnt a very good barometer here.
And this is not exactly new, mack in the 1970's we used to use $7 snow sleds to pirate HBO.
"interpret what they see": is a bit of a strong statement.
lat time I checked, AI wasnt up to the task of discerning whether someone was spraying a wall with Lysol, or spray paint. or spraying with the intent to cover grafitti, or to add new grafitti.
Methinks someone is applying a generous dollop of wishful thinking.
This guy used to be technical, but now he apparently is a PR-flack.
Notice all the blab about these new features, but a notable lack of bottom-line-- i.e. how much faster is bootup, shutdown, and file i/o. Funny, you'd think if the numbers were good, they'd crow about them? Hmmm....
Also note that with the boot information in a database instead of a text file, it's no longer possible to fix partition or booting problems with a text editor.
This is a very silly concept. What they've done is rename "Steganography", the art of hiding messages.
They're intentionally sending MANY photons, to get a stronger signal, to improve the data rate. So they're not using "quantum" anything. They're also adding a bunch of decoy photons, to confuse the evesdroppers.
One might suspect that a press release that is very short on critical technical and factual details, and long on manager-speak, like "partnerships", is mainly marketing snake-oil.
Things we'd like to have pinned down befor ewe get at all excited:, little details like:
Is there a working prototype?
Has it been tested under typical usage cycles in a real car over a realistic temperature range?
How many times can you recharge this battery?
How hot does it get? 10% of 600KW is a LOT of heat.
How much does it cost?
Is it manufacturable? Like right now do you need to have some poor sod choose 1000 well-matched cells out of a crate of 5,000? That's not manufacturable in quantity.
What's the reliability of these cells? If only 0.1% fail per recharge, that's unacceptable.
Slashdot Mirror
There were two oversights in the older VW's electrical system:
... ooops, that's more hardware than software. sorry.
(1) You needed the key to close the sunroof.
(2) But.. a sneak path in the headlight wiring meant you could instead just turn on the headlights and pull on the high-beam flasher (on the turn-signal lever). Enough electricity would flow backwards through the sneak path to operate the sunroof motor.
Otherwise, we end up with wildly expensive proposed solutions using already tried and rejected technology that violates basic laws of physics, scale, or economics, to attack a non-problem. Again.
The reason France does lots of things nobody else does is simple: the Govt there owns the power company, the phone company, and more. When you don't have to show a profit, and in fact can always go back to the govt for a handout, there's a lot of things you can try to do. And when you can call out the army to stop protests around breeder reactors and reprocessing plants, then there's a lot more you can do again. Look at the total costs of reprocessing, including the costs to the environment, the radioactive deer, turtles, fish, etc. Then come back and tell us ow super the French are.
Folks, before you hop on a wishful bandwagon, how about making sure there is a wagon?
So maybe it's not the greatest idea to have politicos making IT policy?
>Which files under /boot, /etc, /sbin, and so on would you be willing to stake your career on being "safe to corrupt by 1 byte" and still guarantee a bootable system?
Apples and Oranges. I can edit the text files and cp the binary files. Can't do either with the Registry.
>The format of the registry is largely irrelevant, but it is described to some extent in the "Inside Windows xxx"
Well, when my Registry got scrozzled I looked all over the net for source code that could read a Registry and didnt find anything. So the descriptions out there are likely less than usable.
Not exactly most people's idea of robust and recoverable.
The Prius may not be all that great, but this FA doesnt prove anything.
Will save a lot of time.
Two most common characters, nice and short: E: . T: - Third most common character, very long: O: ---
TeleText and Closed Captions:
CC: Error protocol: Send each character twice. TeleText: Assume everybody has a 16-color 24x80 screen.
Telex:
USe a 5-bit character code, with a half-dozen different conventions for character sets, sometimes a bell on shift-G, sometimes a quote, sometimes a bunch of funny old weather symbols. Miss a downshift and you get a line of numbers and punctuation instead of text. An infinite number of endof-line conventions. Printers that can slice off your fingers. Sweet.
Let's get the guys that designed all those "wonderful" networks:
Oh yeah, let's get the "EXPERTS" involved!
Seriously, Seymour Cray's cooling guy did this in 1962. The hot and fast RAM of that era was a 4K by 12 bit module, about the size and weight of three bricks, and costing about $15K each. These needed a 1/2 inch thick aluminum heat spreader, bolted to a thick aluminum frame with chilled freon running thru it.
A rough guess says these things can't even pay for the interest and maintenance costs, much less ever pay back their original cost in $$,$$$,$$$ or energy.
The basic probelm is the sea has many more hazards, in the way of waves, corrosion, and stress, than it does easily capturable energy.
And this is not exactly new, mack in the 1970's we used to use $7 snow sleds to pirate HBO.
lat time I checked, AI wasnt up to the task of discerning whether someone was spraying a wall with Lysol, or spray paint. or spraying with the intent to cover grafitti, or to add new grafitti.
Methinks someone is applying a generous dollop of wishful thinking.
It was used by 80-col card sorters, since circa 1925.
See Knuth, Volume 3
Notice all the blab about these new features, but a notable lack of bottom-line-- i.e. how much faster is bootup, shutdown, and file i/o. Funny, you'd think if the numbers were good, they'd crow about them? Hmmm....
Also note that with the boot information in a database instead of a text file, it's no longer possible to fix partition or booting problems with a text editor.
But I still think it's not "quantum" at all if they're upping the photon count.
They're intentionally sending MANY photons, to get a stronger signal, to improve the data rate. So they're not using "quantum" anything. They're also adding a bunch of decoy photons, to confuse the evesdroppers.
Nothing at all new here, move on...
Try "sheer".
Things we'd like to have pinned down befor ewe get at all excited:, little details like: