10K binary: 10,240 ??
( I just hate my Sony car CD player-- no way I see to turn off the barber-pole advertising-- front-panel eject button too easy to hit-- other buttons too hard to hit-- and it often thinks it has a CD in it when it doesnt-- yechhh! )
Adaptive Optics... Hmmmm....
AFAIK adaptive optics works just swell when you have pico-pico-pico-watts coming down from a star.
But when you're pumping up megawatts, you might encounter some glitches:
Making a flexible mirror that can handle megawatts may be a bit of a challenge. All you need is a few degrees of unisotropic heating and your mirror becomes only useful in a carnival fun-house, until it cools down.
Sending up megawatts is going to heat the air, leading to all kinds of refractive effects. You can compensate for these in a telescope, as you're on the receiving end, and you don't care about the deflected photons that don't hit your mirror. Ergo AO is really swell for watching the stars. But when you're pumping up megawatts, you can't pre-compensate for these effects, and it DOES matter that the energy dosnt make it to the collector.
The laser light might be in a tight bunch as it leaves the laser, but going up it will get pulled around a lot by thermal diffraction. Even if the wandering can be held down to 0.1%, that's many miles of wandering up at 5000 miles up. How are you going to collect the energy from a beam that's randomly wobbling across many miles?
We're talking on the order of TEN MEGAWATTS of energy delivered. That's only about 2kw per square foot average, which the ribbon *might* be able to stand, but what happens when the random wobbling ends up heating a small area of the ribbon? Remember, this ribbon is ultra-thin, so it doesnt take much heat to raise its temperature way up there, and IIRC carbon burns.
There's never been anything that long ever made in one continuous piece. Not even 1% that long.
Is there a way to bond together shorter pieces? Glue? Pop Rivets? Super duct-tape?
Even if it could be built, the odds of something that long being *perfect enough* are vanishingly small.
Assume you have some "rollers" pressing against the thin fabric. The motors are delivering about 10 megawatts to the rollers. Assume the rollers have perfect grip on the cloth. Then assume that a greasy seagull goes splay against the fabric. Lifter encounters the greasy patch, a little roller slipping occurs. Assume just 1% of the ten megawatts gets converted to frictional heat. What's the temperature the fabric gets heated to? What's the temperature and the temperature gradients going to do to the fabric? Nothing good.
What effect does a a lightning hit do on the fabric? Nothing good. And carbon IIRC burns in air. Yipes.
Those are just a few major quibbles off the top of my head. It's a nice idea, but most likely has waay too many complete show-stoppers.
It doesnt make much difference if they're going to use better encryption-- when the plain-text is so vulnerable to trojans, phishes, BHO's and viruses.
There's the dang Laws of Scale in the way of making anything small and useful.
If you shrink anything by a factor of ten in length, height, and width, it has only 1/1000th the volume, and therefore only 1/1000th the horsepower. Do this a few times and friction, surface tension and static electricity rule. Your doo-thingy can't move, much less do any useful work. Don't buy any nanobot stock.
it helps your argument if you use points in your FAVOR, not against:
Apple has always advertised heavily, because they CAN, they've traditionally had huge margins.
Satellite radio is used by approx 1% of US residents. Sirius has to advertise to the tune of $145 to grab each bleepin customer (from their 2005 SEC statement). Not exactly a market whopper, even with those huge adv costs.
Tivo stock IPO'd at 30, tanked down to 5 within months, and has been hovering around 5 for the last three years. They tossed out their prez. Not exactly a magic company.
Apple stock TANKED right after the Mac intro. I know, I lost many $K speculating it would zoom. Sigh. All the cool expensive ads couldnt make up for having to pay $2,495 for a 128k machine or $495 for a 400K external floppy drive. They could afford the ads because rumor has it Sculley demanded they raise the intro price by $500 JUST TO PAY FOR THE Bleepin ADS!
Similarly, the converse isnt true. If a company DOESNT advertise much, that doesnt imply they have a great product. Examples do include Segway an Daikatana. The jury's still out on Rokr.
Regards,
A_H
... my theory is:... Good products don't need much if any advertising.
Ever see an ad like:
"Try Sex! It's really good!"
"Air -- the real refresher!"
"Food - Tastes good!"
The opposite is that crappy products need a LOT of flogging, and indirectly at that. Witness all the "Amazing Discoveries" quasi-show infomercials. And perhaps the Sun ads.
If they'd done a little more research, they might have come across the report of a certain national crypto agency, in the 1950's, having several blind personnel able to do the same thing with typewriters. it's a bit easier with typewriters as the fwap! of the type bars hitting the paper has more variation than your typical computer keyboard.
Doctrine is what's written down. Back in the 1960's when Curtis Le May was head of SAC, he flatly told most anybody who would listen that he reserved the right to do whatever he pleased with SAC. He knew it was quite possible for a few SLBM's to wipe out Washington without any warning. He wouldnt promise to wait until the Secretary of the Interior or whomever was left could be found before launching a strike.
Let's do the math. MAth is FUN!
As I figure it, to raise water from 10 feet down in the ocean, using 100 subs, each with 100,000 horsepower, you can do 28,000 sq miles per day.
Sounds huge, but the earth has an awful of of surface area. If you assume that we can narrow down the "bad" areas to plow to 1% of the earths oceans, you still can only do 2.1% of those areas each day, even with 100 subs.
ANd don'tforget, the subs are each putting out over 100 megawatts of heat each!
Thanks to the law of conservation of energy, we can be pretty sure, never having seen said small white equipment, aforesaid device cannot power your typical car speakers to anything anybody would consider "loud".
Most little handheld gadgets are powered by *tiny* batteries. Tiny battery, even the most power-packed variety, holds only a *tiny* amount of power. Just enough to power the guts of the thingamagig, plus put out enough audio power to satisfy the average non-Harley rider. That would be in the neighborhood of 0.050 to 0.100 of one electrical watt.
Most car speakers don't get loud until they're getting something more than 10 watts. Yes, there are some very efficient speakers that can cause the police to knock on your door but these are rather inconveniently large to install in a average vehicle. The old Wester Electric horns come to mind, which could fill a large movie theater with under one watt.
So if we assume the first-poster has average speakers, there's no way the little bleached saltine lookalike was directly hammering on the speakers.
So you get to Mars, somehow, and start digging up "valuable" minerals for the space stations.
Only one glitch-- how do you deliver the goods? You think UPS Air is expensive, try UPS Vacuum. At least $10K a pound, and what if they're not home?.
The survey probably assumes that any time you spend away from direct work-related focusing is "wasted" time.
However if your job involves any amount of "thinking" or "judgement", as mine does, I find that if I take a few minutes to just walk around, very very often my mind finds solutions to things that have been stumping me during the previous hour or two of "focused" work. Happens almost every day.
You might recall:
Newton got the idea of gravity while looking at a falling apple.
Einstein formulated part of relativity while watching a tower clock while rising a streetcar.
Richard Feynman did path integrals on his bar napkins at a strip joint.
At least that's what I tell my boss as I'm heading out for a sit-down under a tree/walk around the hottie-desk areas/joyride on the tram/trip to Hooters.
No really, I do get some of my best ideas in the shower too.
One sentence from the article:
" it should yield 3.5 units of energy for every 1 unit used in production. "
Let's assume that since it's coming from a SHell PR department, they're putting the best possible spin on this. That means for each unit of energy delivered down the hole, they get back 3.5 units of equivalent heat back up, in the form of oil and gas.
But if the heat comes from electrical heaters, the electricity came from coal and oil-fired generators, said plants are only about 30 percent efficent.
So you're burning about 3 units of good oil and coal and gas to get, maybe, if the stuff really is down there, 3.5 units back up. Doesnt sound like a good deal.
I suppose they could do something a bit more efficient, like burn coal down in the hole, or put down a small cleanish nuke down the holes, but those ideas have some non-negligble drawbacks too..:)
Um, doesnt sound even remotely possible. All the IR links I've seen use a simple IR detector with intrinsically very limited bandwidth. Even with aggressive feedback it's hard to get over 100K BPS.
you can't patent something that's already well known to the trade.
Microsoft has been field testing their hallucination generator for some time now-- it's called their "help" pages.
Ahem, there's radiation and there's RADIATION. Plastics are good at stopping low-energy radiation because they have lots of hydrogen in them, and hydrogen has a good cross-section to interact with yur basic alpha beta radiation.
But out in space you have to contend with COSMIC RAYS, which are a whole other kettle of fish. They're much more energetic. So much so that if your typical plastic stops a cosmic "ray" (they're usually particles), the plastic emits a spray of even less desireable radiation.
Having a backward or downward pointing radar on all the time is a very poor idea. It undoes all the stealthyness that's been put into the airplane, and it takes about a $39 Fuzz-buster-like receiver on the bad-guys end to home in on the radar. Not a good thing.
The swivel idea would work, but for the fact that if you look at your typical fighter plane, there's darn few or no places where you can mount anything that can see more than an eighth of the sky. Especially on fighters where all the internal space is already committed.
And shooting a laser back through the very heated air your plane has left behind is extremely problematical. Your nice focused laser beam wil end up wiggling all over the place more than an itchy toddler in goin-to-church clothes.
Cool if it works. But how does the laser know there's a missle on the way? And how does it keep focused on it while the pilot is trying to pull a 9-G turn? It would take gonads of neutronium to maintain a straight course while the missle is heading your way.
Wing-morphing on real airplanes is usually done thru the auspices of flaps, droops and leading-edge slats. These are the sucessful morphing methods, as seen on almost every high-performance airplane.
If they're particularly adventurous, the designers will do ti by making the wing sweep angle changeable, like in the F-111, F-14 and B-1. Hmmm, two dogs out of three....
It hasnt been done the way this video depicts in real planes as there's a lot of costs:
Making the wing hinged or flexible means you need a whole heapin helping of actuators to keep it in position. Actuators are made of steel-- very heavy. if it's a fighter plane, the actuators have to be able to hold the wing in position under multiple-G loads. But that requires heavier actuators, which increase the loads...
Actuators are usually hydraulically powered. Not good in a military airplane which often loses hydraulics due to flak and bullets.
Hinged or flexible wings usually can't be hollowed out to hold fuel, landing gear, or munitons. Which makes the rest of the plane bigger in proportion to hold those items.
So you end up with a plane that's big, heavy, unreliable all the time, versus having the flexible wing, which only helps in some flight regimes, some of the time. Generally the good doesnt outweigh the bad.
I kinda thought HyperThreading was a really cool idea, but a real woof-woof when even Intel's benchmarks showed it to be slower than not using HT, in some cases. It may be one of the few times when even jury-rigged benchmarks didnt quite make the grade.
One might suspect the real purpose is more along the lines of keeping the aircraft industry ticking over at some minor level. There have been billions already spent on supersonic wind-tunnel tests. It's extremely unlikely any new design will be found that's even 10% more efficient than those already developed. And as long as oil is at the current prices, there's no chance the plane would be able to pay for itself, even at $15,000 a seat.
Slashdot Mirror
10K hex : 65,536
or
10K binary: 10,240 ?? ( I just hate my Sony car CD player-- no way I see to turn off the barber-pole advertising-- front-panel eject button too easy to hit-- other buttons too hard to hit-- and it often thinks it has a CD in it when it doesnt-- yechhh! )
- The laser light might be in a tight bunch as it leaves the laser, but going up it will get pulled around a lot by thermal diffraction. Even if the wandering can be held down to 0.1%, that's many miles of wandering up at 5000 miles up. How are you going to collect the energy from a beam that's randomly wobbling across many miles?
- We're talking on the order of TEN MEGAWATTS of energy delivered. That's only about 2kw per square foot average, which the ribbon *might* be able to stand, but what happens when the random wobbling ends up heating a small area of the ribbon? Remember, this ribbon is ultra-thin, so it doesnt take much heat to raise its temperature way up there, and IIRC carbon burns.
- There's never been anything that long ever made in one continuous piece. Not even 1% that long.
- Is there a way to bond together shorter pieces? Glue? Pop Rivets? Super duct-tape?
- Even if it could be built, the odds of something that long being *perfect enough* are vanishingly small.
- Assume you have some "rollers" pressing against the thin fabric. The motors are delivering about 10 megawatts to the rollers. Assume the rollers have perfect grip on the cloth. Then assume that a greasy seagull goes splay against the fabric. Lifter encounters the greasy patch, a little roller slipping occurs. Assume just 1% of the ten megawatts gets converted to frictional heat. What's the temperature the fabric gets heated to? What's the temperature and the temperature gradients going to do to the fabric? Nothing good.
- What effect does a a lightning hit do on the fabric? Nothing good. And carbon IIRC burns in air. Yipes.
Those are just a few major quibbles off the top of my head. It's a nice idea, but most likely has waay too many complete show-stoppers.It doesnt make much difference if they're going to use better encryption-- when the plain-text is so vulnerable to trojans, phishes, BHO's and viruses.
There's the dang Laws of Scale in the way of making anything small and useful. If you shrink anything by a factor of ten in length, height, and width, it has only 1/1000th the volume, and therefore only 1/1000th the horsepower. Do this a few times and friction, surface tension and static electricity rule. Your doo-thingy can't move, much less do any useful work. Don't buy any nanobot stock.
- Apple has always advertised heavily, because they CAN, they've traditionally had huge margins.
-
Satellite radio is used by approx 1% of US residents. Sirius has to advertise to the tune of $145 to grab each bleepin customer (from their 2005 SEC statement). Not exactly a market whopper, even with those huge adv costs.
- Tivo stock IPO'd at 30, tanked down to 5 within months, and has been hovering around 5 for the last three years. They tossed out their prez. Not exactly a magic company.
-
Apple stock TANKED right after the Mac intro. I know, I lost many $K speculating it would zoom. Sigh. All the cool expensive ads couldnt make up for having to pay $2,495 for a 128k machine or $495 for a 400K external floppy drive. They could afford the ads because rumor has it Sculley demanded they raise the intro price by $500 JUST TO PAY FOR THE Bleepin ADS!
Similarly, the converse isnt true. If a company DOESNT advertise much, that doesnt imply they have a great product. Examples do include Segway an Daikatana. The jury's still out on Rokr. Regards, A_HThe opposite is that crappy products need a LOT of flogging, and indirectly at that. Witness all the "Amazing Discoveries" quasi-show infomercials. And perhaps the Sun ads.
If they'd done a little more research, they might have come across the report of a certain national crypto agency, in the 1950's, having several blind personnel able to do the same thing with typewriters. it's a bit easier with typewriters as the fwap! of the type bars hitting the paper has more variation than your typical computer keyboard.
Doctrine is what's written down. Back in the 1960's when Curtis Le May was head of SAC, he flatly told most anybody who would listen that he reserved the right to do whatever he pleased with SAC. He knew it was quite possible for a few SLBM's to wipe out Washington without any warning. He wouldnt promise to wait until the Secretary of the Interior or whomever was left could be found before launching a strike.
Let's do the math. MAth is FUN! As I figure it, to raise water from 10 feet down in the ocean, using 100 subs, each with 100,000 horsepower, you can do 28,000 sq miles per day. Sounds huge, but the earth has an awful of of surface area. If you assume that we can narrow down the "bad" areas to plow to 1% of the earths oceans, you still can only do 2.1% of those areas each day, even with 100 subs. ANd don'tforget, the subs are each putting out over 100 megawatts of heat each!
Most little handheld gadgets are powered by *tiny* batteries. Tiny battery, even the most power-packed variety, holds only a *tiny* amount of power. Just enough to power the guts of the thingamagig, plus put out enough audio power to satisfy the average non-Harley rider. That would be in the neighborhood of 0.050 to 0.100 of one electrical watt.
Most car speakers don't get loud until they're getting something more than 10 watts. Yes, there are some very efficient speakers that can cause the police to knock on your door but these are rather inconveniently large to install in a average vehicle. The old Wester Electric horns come to mind, which could fill a large movie theater with under one watt.
So if we assume the first-poster has average speakers, there's no way the little bleached saltine lookalike was directly hammering on the speakers.
So you get to Mars, somehow, and start digging up "valuable" minerals for the space stations. Only one glitch-- how do you deliver the goods? You think UPS Air is expensive, try UPS Vacuum. At least $10K a pound, and what if they're not home?.
However if your job involves any amount of "thinking" or "judgement", as mine does, I find that if I take a few minutes to just walk around, very very often my mind finds solutions to things that have been stumping me during the previous hour or two of "focused" work. Happens almost every day.
You might recall:
At least that's what I tell my boss as I'm heading out for a sit-down under a tree/walk around the hottie-desk areas/joyride on the tram/trip to Hooters.
No really, I do get some of my best ideas in the shower too.
- supernovae just happen to match what would happen to a star under gravitational collapse when it runs short of fusion to support itesf.
- we just happen to have the distribution of elements that would happen to a star under runaway fusion in spherical shells....
- supernovae just happen to put out scads of neutrinos, just what would happen under runaway fusion.
- supernovae just happen to push waves of matter in front of them, at the speeds and in the quantities expected under runaway fusion.
I'm an astronomy news bottom-feeder, and even I see the problems with an "electrical" theory of supernovae.Let's assume that since it's coming from a SHell PR department, they're putting the best possible spin on this. That means for each unit of energy delivered down the hole, they get back 3.5 units of equivalent heat back up, in the form of oil and gas.
But if the heat comes from electrical heaters, the electricity came from coal and oil-fired generators, said plants are only about 30 percent efficent.
So you're burning about 3 units of good oil and coal and gas to get, maybe, if the stuff really is down there, 3.5 units back up. Doesnt sound like a good deal.
I suppose they could do something a bit more efficient, like burn coal down in the hole, or put down a small cleanish nuke down the holes, but those ideas have some non-negligble drawbacks too.. :)
- Space technologists, knowing the throw-weight, cost, and $/pound of every every available booster..
- Having access to all kinds of miniatureized technology....
- Having access to custom-made integrated circuits, nimble-fingered assembly robots, a wide assortment of ultra-light alloys and composites....
- .... still opt to make large, heavy, clunky satellites.
I suspect they have been trying to make things lighter, smaller every since Vanguard lifted up that grapefruit.Um, doesnt sound even remotely possible. All the IR links I've seen use a simple IR detector with intrinsically very limited bandwidth. Even with aggressive feedback it's hard to get over 100K BPS.
you can't patent something that's already well known to the trade. Microsoft has been field testing their hallucination generator for some time now-- it's called their "help" pages.
But out in space you have to contend with COSMIC RAYS, which are a whole other kettle of fish. They're much more energetic. So much so that if your typical plastic stops a cosmic "ray" (they're usually particles), the plastic emits a spray of even less desireable radiation.
Having a backward or downward pointing radar on all the time is a very poor idea. It undoes all the stealthyness that's been put into the airplane, and it takes about a $39 Fuzz-buster-like receiver on the bad-guys end to home in on the radar. Not a good thing. The swivel idea would work, but for the fact that if you look at your typical fighter plane, there's darn few or no places where you can mount anything that can see more than an eighth of the sky. Especially on fighters where all the internal space is already committed. And shooting a laser back through the very heated air your plane has left behind is extremely problematical. Your nice focused laser beam wil end up wiggling all over the place more than an itchy toddler in goin-to-church clothes.
Most missles come from down and/or behind, exactly where the pilot can't see.
Cool if it works. But how does the laser know there's a missle on the way? And how does it keep focused on it while the pilot is trying to pull a 9-G turn? It would take gonads of neutronium to maintain a straight course while the missle is heading your way.
If they're particularly adventurous, the designers will do ti by making the wing sweep angle changeable, like in the F-111, F-14 and B-1. Hmmm, two dogs out of three....
It hasnt been done the way this video depicts in real planes as there's a lot of costs:
- Making the wing hinged or flexible means you need a whole heapin helping of actuators to keep it in position. Actuators are made of steel-- very heavy. if it's a fighter plane, the actuators have to be able to hold the wing in position under multiple-G loads. But that requires heavier actuators, which increase the loads...
- Actuators are usually hydraulically powered. Not good in a military airplane which often loses hydraulics due to flak and bullets.
- Hinged or flexible wings usually can't be hollowed out to hold fuel, landing gear, or munitons. Which makes the rest of the plane bigger in proportion to hold those items.
So you end up with a plane that's big, heavy, unreliable all the time, versus having the flexible wing, which only helps in some flight regimes, some of the time. Generally the good doesnt outweigh the bad.I kinda thought HyperThreading was a really cool idea, but a real woof-woof when even Intel's benchmarks showed it to be slower than not using HT, in some cases. It may be one of the few times when even jury-rigged benchmarks didnt quite make the grade.
One might suspect the real purpose is more along the lines of keeping the aircraft industry ticking over at some minor level. There have been billions already spent on supersonic wind-tunnel tests. It's extremely unlikely any new design will be found that's even 10% more efficient than those already developed. And as long as oil is at the current prices, there's no chance the plane would be able to pay for itself, even at $15,000 a seat.