You get pure O2 by liquifying air, then fractionally distilling it to get the various pure gases.
And in one very common design for an air-fractionating plant, you re-evaporate all of the gases to chill the incoming air stream for the distillation step. (Oxygen furnaces and such don't need liquid.) You have a stream of high-purity nitrogen coming out of such a plant, but it isn't liquid. Making liquid requires more energy input. --
If you have large numbers of vehicles cranking out N2 gas (esp. cool or cold N2 gas) in a confined space such as a garage or in a depression where the temperature would keep it confined, you would displace the oxygen. Displace enough oxygen, and the environment becomes very inhospitable for humans.
This problem goes away if you just include the oxygen in your liquid. Unfortunately, liquid air has a tendency to fractionate itself during evaporation, leaving behind LOX. LOX is fire and explosion hazard (add LOX to asphalt and set it on fire, it goes BOOM). --
ThermoVoltaics for producing electricty directly from heat are in developement now.
What you have described is a Peltier junction. Apply a heat source at one side, a heat sink at the other, and some of the heat flowing through the device can be converted to electricity. It also works in reverse; put juice in to pump heat (which is how your CPU coolers work).
The mistake you seem to be making is in the assumption that a thermovoltaic system could convert heat to electricity without using a heat sink. That assumption is false. Consider the photovoltaic cell. A typical PV cell is maybe 15% efficient, so 85% of the absorbed energy is converted to heat. If the sun radiates at 5700 K (the source temperature) and the PV cell is dumping heat to the environment at 323 K, the entropy change per joule of light is (0.85/323) - (1/5700) which is greater than zero. Even the PV cell is subject to the Second Law, and so will the postulated TV cell. --
You turn off page-specified colors in IE using the "Accessibility options". Netscape only allows overriding the background, so e.g. the article name bars on Slashdot become white-on-white. (Hey Taco, FIX THAT ALREADY!) --
Definitely music. I prefer interesting jazz without commercials. I don't do MP3's because I'd rather listen to the local NPR station than my own collection, and I use headphones because I don't want to hear anything else. The biggest problem I have is that the signal strength for my favorite station sucks inside the building, so I have great difficulty getting things in the right configuration to get listenable audio.
When I can come up with a way of managing it so that I can handle my phone through the headphones as well, I may never take them off from the time I sit down until the time I leave.
I have quit several jobs because the environment was so noisy that I could not concentrate effectively. IMHO "bullpens" ought to be banned, walls should be at least 2.2 meters height minimum, and there should be standards for acoustic damping and isolation which companies must meet or exceed. The ability to sit and do work when the guy in the next cube is on the phone would be more than enough to compensate for the inability to "prairie dog". --
It takes an additional amount of power to pump that generated heat out of the office too.
Only about 1/3 as much, though. The savings would be about another 100 watts, not 320 watts.
If you really wanted to save power you would light with daylight, and perhaps even have some system for using outdoor light as the backlight for your LCD flatscreen (with a fluorescent backup). Natural light is about half visible, half IR; the best fluorescent lamps are between 20% and 27% efficient, giving you between 3 and 4 watts of waste heat for each watt of light instead of 1. --
Most people are familiar with a white browser and black text that has the familiar look of paper and india ink --instantly recognizable as user friendly software, but can be brutaly harsh on the eyes after long periods of time.
You forget that glare and reflections are far less noticable for black-on-white pages than white-on-black. A major part of my eyestrain is caused by glare, and I have all web color settings over-ridden in order to manage it. (I despise web "designers" who insist on setting text colors which cannot be read on the normal white or gray background. Netscape will not force the foreground color to something sensible; IE will. Have I mentioned that Slashdot is one of the offenders?) --
I don't think the lack of money explains why DC-X was created by SDIO instead of by NASA (and quietly killed once NASA took control of it). DC-X and its ilk are very cheap. Unfortunately, DC-Y and DC-1 threatened the Shuttle cash cow; continuing on that path would have bothered Powerful People. As Shuttle must be retired before serious progress can be made, this is a serious problem for the institution.
Unfortunately for NASA, the interests of too many people are tied to not rocking the boat. --
The derogation of 'career bureaucrats' is the kind of stuff we used to hear from Newt Gingrich.
Contrast the performance of NASA since 1971 with the performance of NASA 1961-1969. We went from never having sent a man to orbit to having people spend DAYS on the Moon in 8 years. That included 3 generations of launch vehicles. We haven't made a serious improvement on the Space Shuttle since it was built! The various factions which run the show find that it's not in their interest for us to get anywhere with large projects (it rocks the boat too much), so we don't. Careerists who can't do anything bold because they can't afford a failure are only one of these factors, and they come third on my list (in case you hadn't noticed).
There are a lot of great engineers at NASA. There are some freaking amazing people on just the Deep Space 1 project (have you any idea what they've done to keep that thing alive, and the kind of miracles they've performed? No? I do). The problem is that they aren't calling the shots; the money interests who hold e.g. the contract for Space Shuttle maintenance (and make lots of campaign contributions) are calling the shots. --
NASA is a deeply divided organization, whose purpose depends on who you're talking to:
To the pols, NASA is a way of distributing federal pork.
To the State Department, NASA is a way of targeting foreign aid at Russian rocket designers to keep them from selling their skills to Iraq or North Korea.
To the career bureaucrats, NASA is a way of keeping themselves employed until retirement if they can only avoid big screwups.
To the investigators, NASA is a way of developing new technologies and doing science. This is the only legitimate purpose of NASA, but it often gets swamped by 1-3.
When NASA is throwing away billions each year on the aging and obsolete Space Shuttle, and billions more on the station-without-a-mission ISS, it's not likely that they're going to be able to take on a manned Mars project. The pork money is already allocated and the good personnel are probably spread too thin. --
You only build two because you aren't going to learn enough to justify launching three. The purpose of the probes is to learn what they can, but especially learn what the next set of probes is going to have to deal with in order to get more data.
I think we should be sending a different mission to Mars, like the balloon mapping scheme proposed by Zubrin (used to be detailed at http://www.nw.net/mars/docs/maphunts.txt, but the entire docs directory is gone now). --
First one $350 mil, second one $150 mil. I make that a 57% discount, which ain't half bad.
If you build two of something you only have to do the engineering once, the design verification once... a whole lot of non-recurring expenses can be split between more units. The way we'll get really cheap space exploration is when (and if) we can engineer a probe which can then be built inexpensively and in large numbers. Launch a hundred of something, and even a billion dollars in NRE is cheap per-unit compared to this probe effort (which in turn is cheap compared to Viking). --
...all the money in the world couldn't have prevented the loss of the first probe, and mistakes like that would be made at any price point.
History indicates otherwise. Many successful probes were sent to Mars, including two Viking landers, without any difficulties due to English-metric conversion errors. They were nuclear-powered, too. This works, but it gets very few probes for a given amount of money and it can take 20 years to go from proposal to data. The scheme of Better-Faster-Cheaper was supposed to get more science out of the same amount of money, but it appears (based on some early failures) to have cut a bit too much out of the QA. NASA is going back a bit in the other direction to increase their chances of success.
If you had all the money in the world you could test a probe design to death and guarantee that it would work. It would be one of the most over-engineered, gold-plated things ever built, but it could be done. But we don't have all the money in the world, so that's not the best way to do science. --
Who cares if they suspend the use of the box? The big issues are dual:
Whether the people at the university can be trusted, or have been vetted by the FBI to guarantee a conclusion favorable to them (a la the Tricot investigation of the Rainbow Warrior bombing in France), and
Whether the university people doing the investigation are getting the exact Carnivore system which will actually be put into the field.
While I still have enough faith in academics that I would doubt that a committee could be chosen which could whitewash the system a la #1, #2 is impossible to guarantee. Any time that the Carnivore box gets into the FBI's possession, it could be loaded with software which does literally anything within the capabilities of the hardware. Examination of one set of software by a universe of absolutely trustworthy academics cannot rule out this possibility, and it is the reason why Carnivore cannot be ruled trustworthy. --
Some spammers have developed Gnutella client / node software that serves ads instead of what was asked for.
It can scramble the IP (return address) so that its users don't get "wacked" in revenge.
Legitimate sites wouldn't do that, so it's time to change the protocol so that any responders have to allow themselves to be "pinged" to confirm that they actually exist and issued the response. No response to the ping, or a "That wasn't me" response, and the client doesn't bother displaying anything. Result: Sharezilla becomes useless.
I can see another spam-cancelling service arising from this, too. Once each server has to confirm its existence before its search results will display and the anonymous spam problem is dealt with, it wouldn't be at all difficult to generate random queries and look for returns that have the characteristics of spam. Once a spamming host is identified, it can be put in a blocklist (or hacked, or DDOS'ed, etc). The mind boggles at the possibilities. --
So have some trusted authorities that moderate stuff - they don't have to be centralized...
Then you have the problem of knowing which moderators to trust. It's almost circular, but not quite. It also means that the next targets of the spammers will be the moderation services.
We're right back to the assertion that the most valuable service in the networked age is editting. The editorial services of the moderators are going to be the only things which make this searchable in any reasonable amount of time, and therefore give it value. The future, it is now. --
The real opportunity here is for attorneys who can push several thousand small-claims actions at once, for $10 each. For the cases they win and collect on, they take a percentage and forward the rest to the members of the class. This would Stop Spammers Dead.
It occurs to me that spamcop.net is in a perfect position to take on this role, so I would expect things to happen very quickly if the law is passed and holds up.
Keeping the law in force is the problem. If a company can claim legitimately that they cannot distinguish a Colorado user from a non-Colorado user by the e-mail address (mostly they can't), and that this would interfere with interstate commerce (it would - loosely defined), it'll be struck down by the courts. On the other hand, it'll be another good lever to get Congress to pass decent anti-spam legislation with a right of individual action and statutory damages. That's all we really need to stomp spammers flatter than a pancake. --
ABC News could always refuse to publish pieces with known factual errors. Moody's editorial certainly qualifies as that. If Moody's piece would have the opposite spin without the lies\\\\errors in interpretation of statistics, or would appear as a mean-spirited rant if the numbers were merely deleted, that's Moody's problem. ABC would look better.
I wonder if ABC is going to put an "errata" link on Moody's editorial, or reference Security Focus' rebuttal? When pigs fly, I bet. --
That number double counts redhat's security errors.
To compound the sin, it counts every distinct security vulnerability in any Linux distribution. A Red Hat user doesn't have to worry about a Debian-only security hole, and Slackware folks needn't concern themselves with problems particular to SuSE, but the author (who obviously flunked statistics) decided that "Linux was less secure".
Looks to me like Red Hat has 38, NT has 99, so NT is more than 250% as vulnerable as Red Hat (and, being closed-source, far more difficult to fix). --
Slashdot Mirror
--
This problem goes away if you just include the oxygen in your liquid. Unfortunately, liquid air has a tendency to fractionate itself during evaporation, leaving behind LOX. LOX is fire and explosion hazard (add LOX to asphalt and set it on fire, it goes BOOM).
--
The mistake you seem to be making is in the assumption that a thermovoltaic system could convert heat to electricity without using a heat sink. That assumption is false. Consider the photovoltaic cell. A typical PV cell is maybe 15% efficient, so 85% of the absorbed energy is converted to heat. If the sun radiates at 5700 K (the source temperature) and the PV cell is dumping heat to the environment at 323 K, the entropy change per joule of light is (0.85/323) - (1/5700) which is greater than zero. Even the PV cell is subject to the Second Law, and so will the postulated TV cell.
--
--
You turn off page-specified colors in IE using the "Accessibility options". Netscape only allows overriding the background, so e.g. the article name bars on Slashdot become white-on-white. (Hey Taco, FIX THAT ALREADY!)
--
When I can come up with a way of managing it so that I can handle my phone through the headphones as well, I may never take them off from the time I sit down until the time I leave.
I have quit several jobs because the environment was so noisy that I could not concentrate effectively. IMHO "bullpens" ought to be banned, walls should be at least 2.2 meters height minimum, and there should be standards for acoustic damping and isolation which companies must meet or exceed. The ability to sit and do work when the guy in the next cube is on the phone would be more than enough to compensate for the inability to "prairie dog".
--
If you really wanted to save power you would light with daylight, and perhaps even have some system for using outdoor light as the backlight for your LCD flatscreen (with a fluorescent backup). Natural light is about half visible, half IR; the best fluorescent lamps are between 20% and 27% efficient, giving you between 3 and 4 watts of waste heat for each watt of light instead of 1.
--
--
(This should be moderated up to at least 1, maybe 2. "Insightful", definitely.)
--
Unfortunately for NASA, the interests of too many people are tied to not rocking the boat.
--
There are a lot of great engineers at NASA. There are some freaking amazing people on just the Deep Space 1 project (have you any idea what they've done to keep that thing alive, and the kind of miracles they've performed? No? I do). The problem is that they aren't calling the shots; the money interests who hold e.g. the contract for Space Shuttle maintenance (and make lots of campaign contributions) are calling the shots.
--
- To the pols, NASA is a way of distributing federal pork.
- To the State Department, NASA is a way of targeting foreign aid at Russian rocket designers to keep them from selling their skills to Iraq or North Korea.
- To the career bureaucrats, NASA is a way of keeping themselves employed until retirement if they can only avoid big screwups.
- To the investigators, NASA is a way of developing new technologies and doing science. This is the only legitimate purpose of NASA, but it often gets swamped by 1-3.
When NASA is throwing away billions each year on the aging and obsolete Space Shuttle, and billions more on the station-without-a-mission ISS, it's not likely that they're going to be able to take on a manned Mars project. The pork money is already allocated and the good personnel are probably spread too thin.--
I think we should be sending a different mission to Mars, like the balloon mapping scheme proposed by Zubrin (used to be detailed at http://www.nw.net/mars/docs/maphunts.txt, but the entire docs directory is gone now).
--
You mean like this?
--
If you build two of something you only have to do the engineering once, the design verification once... a whole lot of non-recurring expenses can be split between more units. The way we'll get really cheap space exploration is when (and if) we can engineer a probe which can then be built inexpensively and in large numbers. Launch a hundred of something, and even a billion dollars in NRE is cheap per-unit compared to this probe effort (which in turn is cheap compared to Viking).
--
If you had all the money in the world you could test a probe design to death and guarantee that it would work. It would be one of the most over-engineered, gold-plated things ever built, but it could be done. But we don't have all the money in the world, so that's not the best way to do science.
--
- Whether the people at the university can be trusted, or have been vetted by the FBI to guarantee a conclusion favorable to them (a la the Tricot investigation of the Rainbow Warrior bombing in France), and
- Whether the university people doing the investigation are getting the exact Carnivore system which will actually be put into the field.
While I still have enough faith in academics that I would doubt that a committee could be chosen which could whitewash the system a la #1, #2 is impossible to guarantee. Any time that the Carnivore box gets into the FBI's possession, it could be loaded with software which does literally anything within the capabilities of the hardware. Examination of one set of software by a universe of absolutely trustworthy academics cannot rule out this possibility, and it is the reason why Carnivore cannot be ruled trustworthy.--
I can see another spam-cancelling service arising from this, too. Once each server has to confirm its existence before its search results will display and the anonymous spam problem is dealt with, it wouldn't be at all difficult to generate random queries and look for returns that have the characteristics of spam. Once a spamming host is identified, it can be put in a blocklist (or hacked, or DDOS'ed, etc). The mind boggles at the possibilities.
--
Hackers view advertising as noise, and work to filter it.
--
We're right back to the assertion that the most valuable service in the networked age is editting. The editorial services of the moderators are going to be the only things which make this searchable in any reasonable amount of time, and therefore give it value. The future, it is now.
--
A lot of mailing list traffic comes marked "X-priority: bulk" too. The distinction has to be drawn between solicited and unsolicited instead.
--
It occurs to me that spamcop.net is in a perfect position to take on this role, so I would expect things to happen very quickly if the law is passed and holds up.
Keeping the law in force is the problem. If a company can claim legitimately that they cannot distinguish a Colorado user from a non-Colorado user by the e-mail address (mostly they can't), and that this would interfere with interstate commerce (it would - loosely defined), it'll be struck down by the courts. On the other hand, it'll be another good lever to get Congress to pass decent anti-spam legislation with a right of individual action and statutory damages. That's all we really need to stomp spammers flatter than a pancake.
--
I wonder if ABC is going to put an "errata" link on Moody's editorial, or reference Security Focus' rebuttal? When pigs fly, I bet.
--
--
I was smart, I un-checked "Automatically load images" before visiting the site. Makes the page load a lot faster, too.
--