whip out some pseudo-random numbers based on your key and a sequence (maybe the name of the file). Using this,
select some reasonable number of pixels in which to
encode your encrypted message; leave the remainder alone.
The statistical properties of the picture won't change as much (as little as you like), making it much harder to detect the manipulation. At the other end, you feed the filename into the crypto-system to initialize the PRNG, get the list of pixels generated in step 2, extract their LSB's to regenerate the message put in them in step 3, and decrypt as normal. Just make sure you never use the same filename twice.
This would be even safer to use if the authorities are not comprehensively scanning the contents of CD-RW's, and you don't need real-time communications. You could carry a megabyte or more of encrypted communications per disc, all safely hidden in harmless pictures. Heck, if the authorities are letting discs in without scanning them, you can just use a one-time pad and burn your discs as you use them. Even you can't regenerate the plaintext from the cyphertext until you get home again! --
Is THAT what Cerenkov radiation is? Does anyone know what Cerenkov radiation itself is? Is it EM, or beta particles, or what?
It's EM, photons around the visible spectrum mostly. Have you ever seen a picture of a "swimming pool" style research reactor, with the core engulfed in an angry blue glow? That's Cerenkov radiation. Gammas from the reaction, decay of fission products and neutron captures by hydrogen scatter off electrons, and the momentum transferred to the electrons leaves them moving through water faster than light. The electron transfers energy to all the little quantum EM fluctuations moving in more or less the same direction (the photonic equivalent of a "sonic boom"), and the electron rapidly slows down to less than the speed of light in water while the quantum fluctuations become real photons. Judging from the spectrum I'd guess that there's a lot of Cerenkov radiation in the ultraviolet, but given the lack of sunburn warnings it must not get very far in water. --
But how about the calorimetric determination of mass?
Let me put it this way: when a high-energy physicist says "calorimeter" and a chemist says "calorimeter", they mean two very different things. The Collider-Detector at Fermilab wraps the collision zone in calorimeters, but they don't have a single thermocouple. The "calorimeters" are stacks of iron plates with particle detectors in the gaps between, presumably to see how far the particles can penetrate and thus how much energy they had to begin with. The outside of the thing is wrapped in muon detectors, because muons tend not to stop for small amounts (several feet) of iron. Note that what's being measured isn't the energy of the collisions over time, but the energy of individual particles coming away from the point of collision.
I'll speculate here that the calorimetry in the underwater muon detectors involves measuring the total energy of the Cerenkov flash, which allows the kinetic energy of the original lepton to be calculated, which specifies the energy of the incident neutrino. If you have an event which generates a whole lot of neutrinos more or less all at once (like a supernova), looking at the distribution of energy vs. time of arrival would allow a good shot at calculating the rest mass of the particle. (Massless particles must all travel at c, so they'd arrive in the order of departure. The more massive neutrinos are, the more the low-energy ones will lag behind the high-energy ones. The delay would increase with distance. Watch a few dozen supernovae with some sensitive neutrino telescopes, and you'd have increasingly precise figures for the neutrino's mass.) --
anyone else as curious as I am as to whether having the slashdot effect on fermilabs network connection caused the world of neutrino science to be slowed down for one day?
You wish. The data hoses which get the particle tracks from the detectors to the recorders at Fermilab are
dedicated, and
enormous.
There are hundreds of coaxes coming off of just the CDF at Fermilab, and that's only one of their experiments. The amount of data they can crunch in a second is probably equivalent to an hour's work for Slashdot. Some of the detectors are crunching data internally because they can't move the un-reduced mass of stuff to a room upstairs; it would take a bundle of cables as fat as the detector, instead of only as fat as your torso. --
I thought that the reason neutrino bursts seem to show up prior to the photons from a nova...
There's no "seem" to it. They do.
...was because the fusion process releases neutrinos, and the nova is an accelerated fusion process
Yes and no, but first, neutrinos are produced in a supernova when the protons of the collapsing core have electrons rammed into them, forming neutrons by inverse beta-decay (electron capture) and releasing neutrinos. Smack a neutron hard enough with a neutrino, and you can get an electron and a proton again (assuming the energy state of the nucleus allows this; a free neutron will decay by itself). Light escapes from a star when the overlying gas is no longer dense enough to be opaque. For a neutrino, "opaque" is at roughly the density of a neutron star, and it takes the density of matter falling into a collapsing stellar core to be a serious obstacle to escaping neutrinos. Once the neutrinos have leaked out to the less-dense sections of the collapsing star, they're gone (but before that, they are believed to exert a lot of upward pressure on the infalling matter and actually produce much if not most of the supernova explosion). Light can't get out of the supernova until the shock wave, no longer driven by solar masses of neutrinos, gets to the visible surface of the star. This takes hours, whereas the neutrinos are out within seconds. --
I still haven't heard of a practical use for the neutrinos other than to give scientists something to do. Is there someway we can use these for a practical purpose or to explain anything???
Not trying to duplicate what other people said too much, but it was well over a century from the time of the first experiments with electricity until we had things like the Edison lightbulb. Now look at what we do with electricity.
Neutrinos may never be of such practical importance, but just for understanding what the universe is about and thus what we are a part of... this knowledge is priceless. --
What actually happens is that the neutrino smashes into something and leaves a charged particle moving through the water faster than c/refractive index (the speed of light in the medium), and that makes Cerenkov radiation. It's not quite as direct as you paint it. --
How many freakin mountain tops do I have to scream it from for you to understand? I DONT CARE ABOUT THE DAMN COST!!!
All I can say is, given the things you like to do with your money I'm glad you're not Bill Gates.
This vehicle feels very stable, and when I was "breaking it in" I did some on/off ramps much faster than the posted limit and it didnt even give me the feeling of going over...
In my 32-MPG-when-driven-carefully passenger sedan (4 doors, practical as all get out), I can do about 80% over the posted limit on ramps. If it says 25 MPH, I can do 45. And my car won't roll, it will break traction long before. It's extremely comfortable on long trips, which is why I bought it in the first place. It climbs hills during ice storms, as I've proven while humiliating a number of Canadians. My next car will be better in all respects, including "double or nothing" on ramps and better mileage.
who have no choice about where they live
this statement is SOOO dumb
Really? The Bengalis who drowned last year in the hurricane which inundated the river delta, the Hondurans, Nicaraguans, Guatemalans and El Salvadorans killed or flooded out by Hurricane Mitch, and Mozambiquans whose homes disappeared under completely unseasonable and unprecedented floods... they had a choice?
So you advocate the unrestricted trashing of Earth
no I advocate personal freedom and unrestricted progress.
Define "progress" in your lexicon. To me, progress is getting more from less, more goods for less time at work, more cycles out of a smaller and less power-hungry processor, more goods for a given amount of environmental impact, more miles out of less fuel. I've seen progress; SUV's that are barely as efficient on the highway as a 60's muscle car aren't it. We can do a hell of a lot better, and we ought not to settle for less.
I believe I have said SEVERAL times that my first priority was comfort... why should I get something I am unhappy with for YOUR piece of mind? it was MY $24,000... and its MY $14 bucks a day... and I pay just as much and more to the EPA and DOE etc.. to regulate and clean up all this shit...
No, your SUV is a "light truck" and is allowed to emit more carbon monoxide, hydrocarbons and nitrogen oxides than a car. You're not footing an equal amount of the bill for the environment, right there. You're only getting that SUV in the first place because "light trucks" aren't subject to the same CAFE requirements as cars (a reduced standard carved out for work-related uses, not personal transport); if you didn't have that "out", you probably wouldn't be able to afford the price premium or the gas-guzzler taxes. As a matter of fact, if not for that little quirk in the law, the entire SUV market category would not exist. You would not be driving one, because there would be none to buy.
I really wonder if you'll be singing the same tune when OPEC's pumping capacity falls below the level of demand at $30/bbl and gas heads for $2/gallon, then points above. We only got the nice prices a couple years ago because of the collapse in the Asian economies and the consequent fall in demand. Don't expect to see that again any time soon; situations like last winter's heating-oil shortfall are likely to be repeated this winter, with natural gas inventories already running low. And with short natural gas supplies comes more demand for oil as users who can switch, switch; gasoline goes up as a consequence. Enjoy.
I'm not evading anything... I just figured someone as "open minded" as your self would already know where to go to find this kind of information... but obviously you base your "knowledge" off the same bullshit the enviro-nazis have been spounting for years... Its just sooo much EASIER to believe we are destroying the planet than to believe the planet is VERY dynamic and changes all the time on it's own... so you go ahead and take the easy way... sheep
You seem to have a problem distinguishing "baaa" from "Nothing good can come out of doing this, and if we decide to stop we can do it at a profit, so even if we turn out to be wrong about the global consequences we'll still laugh all the way to the bank." It's called "no regrets". I don't expect to have Social Security to depend on, so I'm taking my $14/day (and more) and shoving it into a 401(k). I expect to live more comfortably than you.
Anyone can set up a page at tripod. You'd have to be a fool to use such a page as a source for trustworthy information. I'm not even going to pull it up.
http://www.setfortruth.org/index.html
here is a chart! - http://www.setfortruth.org/report.htm
"The Society for Environmental Truth". The newest thing I found on that site was 5 months old. You'd think that if they had the truth on their side, it would keep rolling in.
http://www.sovereignty.net/p/clim/
Last update apparently October 1999, even older than SET. The list of "global warming skeptic" scientists (who mostly aren't climatologists, oddly enough) doesn't seem to have grown in 2 years. On the other hand, the evidence for global warming continues to pile up, including borehole temperature data taken just this year which confirms the ground-based temperature readings.
http://www.globalwarming.org/sciup/sci11-11-99.htm l
Not updated since March 12 except for the "high gas prices" page, as far as I can tell. Some of the lies are revealing; under the headline "U.S. Greenhouse Gas Emissions Slow" they admit "...U.S. emission of greenhouse gases rose in 1998, but at a slower rate than the average for the last ten years." In other words, we didn't start pumping out less, we just slowed the rate of increase. Well, progress has to start somewhere. Since we're doing so well at increasing the amount of GDP we can make per BTU, I don't see why we shouldn't make a point of cutting the BTU requirements of our economy just for the cost savings. Every barrel of oil saved is $30 that stays here instead of going to OPEC.
http://www.sepp.org/pressrel/petition.html
http://www.sepp.org/NewSEPP/gore.html
The press release is 2 years old, and long since overtaken by events. "gore.html" is an unapologetic political screed having nothing to do with evidence of effects on the environment.
That's not even a news site; the "Global Warming Myths" link goes to a page that collects other links, including the disreputable sovereignty.net and globalwarming.org pages you already listed. In other words, it just recycles other people's propaganda. While I agree that there are wackos on the environmental left, this doesn't justify dismissing the threat of environmental damage OR using the possibility as a very good reason to cut every bit of CO2 emission that you can do at a profit. Saving money is smart anyway, the environment just puts it higher on the list of priorities. --
So long as you don't want to do anything more than connect a Ma Bell-compatible phone line to the truck, just about anything will do. Ma Bell's children still use pretty much the same thing, with a somewhat tougher jacket, and bury it.
If I were doing this I would just bury a conduit going from parking space to parking space and pull cable though it. Bring the cable up at the parking-space pylons, terminate one pair at each pylon in an RJ-11 phone jack in a weatherproof enclosure; the trucker snakes a cable with a normal phone plug out to the pylon, and he's live. Leave a few spare pairs for expansion or to route around broken wires. At your central building (you will have one, won't you?) connect the pairs from the lot to the outgoing lines, maybe with a switch so you can activate and deactivate them at will. Adding MOV's and lightning arresters is probably a good idea.
That's the hard way. The easy way is to get a bunch of lines, connect each one to a 900 MHz spread-spectrum portable phone, and pass out handsets along with the parking receipts. You might want to collect a deposit on the handsets.
If you are using a PBX that doesn't use standard Bell phones (say, in order to do per-call billing or restrict callers to local/toll-free calls), you need to get the specs from the PBX mfgr. --
I didnt make my choice based on gas mileage.. I asked about it after the fact, but it was a NON factor... I knew I would be spending 3 hours a day in it for 3 months then probably driving around the country in it after that.. So comfort was priority one, so instantly all the cars were out because being close to the ground makes me edgy, personal problem I guess...
Let's see what you could have had. The Subaru Outback is EPA rated at 21 MPG city, 26 MPG highway with the automatic transmission. It would keep all your stuff dry, go into the woods, and still reduce your CO2 emissions by 23% over the truck. Using a manual transmission would save you around a thousand bucks and save an extra 3% over the truck on the highway. It's hard to guess from the prices available from nadaguides.com, but it looks like you would have been about even if you got the completely decked-out model with extras like the double power sunroof, and several thousand dollars to the good if you got the base model with the AWD and CD player.
I look at people driving trucks like yours, and I think "What a fool. That nitwit is paying a ton extra for gas and is risking his life from rollovers, and is smogging up the air to boot. In five years that truck will be worth almost nothing; maybe in three years, if gas prices spike again. After that, this bozo will have nothing to show for it except a depleted bank account and an increasingly polluted environment."
I guess I just dont care about people who would live in a flood zone... sorry... tough shit.. The sea level has changed often over the last 10,000 years... its to be expected...
So you don't care that the hundreds of millions of people who happened to be born in, e.g. Bangladesh, who have no choice about where they live and nowhere to go, are likely to have the sea reduce their farmland to inhospitable salt marsh if a hurricane doesn't wash it away entirely along with everyone who lived on it. You don't care that the pace of human-induced change is enormously faster than natural changes.
Thanks for giving me a picture of your sense of personal responsibility. I think.
There are 8 other planets and many smaller bodies orbitting Sol, but I haven't heard of anyone making a living on any of them yet.
YET!!!!! jeeze...
So you advocate the unrestricted trashing of Earth, because we might be able to live on other planets... someday. There's a bit of wisdom which goes "Don't burn your bridges before you've crossed them." If it turns out to cost $1 billion per off-earth colonist, would you still think that trashing the Earth was a smart thing? Even if keeping the Earth in good shape saved money overall?
But what does happen is we learn how to burn more effiecently.. and eventually how not to burn at all.. we learn what impact chemicals have on life.. we see better ways to do it..
More efficient ways were available to you when you were making your purchase.
Did you pick the most efficient way? No. Did you help drive demand for more efficient products? No. Did you try to exercise any kind of responsibility for your choice when you were out shopping? I quote you: "I didnt make my choice based on gas mileage.... it was a NON factor.."
Even if someone HAD a better way for sale, you just weren't interested.
As for the ozone layer, speed of climate shift, and so forth: Cites, please. (Not that I expect you to be able to support your assertions, but I find your evasions amusing.) --
I can see one situation where the LE's might demand to use their own sniffer. Suppose one or more of the people under investigation are working for the ISP (or has a friend doing the same)? If anyone at the ISP knows whose messages are to be captured, that fact is likely to leak back to the subject.
Thus, if an ISP with its own sniffer capabilities encounters a demand to use Carnivore instead, someone is going to know that something's up. The only way for the FBI to avoid this is to demand to use Carnivore (or the equivalent) as a matter of course, regardless of the capabilities of the ISP to meet the requirements of the court order without it.
It's for this reason that I think we can expect to see the FBI demand that ISP's do it their way, no matter what's best for the customers, the Constitution, or the society at large. --
The manure and consequent smell and flies are much more worthy causes for complaint.
thats my point exactly! no matter what mode of trasportation I use you would find fault in it..
Why shouldn't I complain, when the problems are completely unnecessary and non-problem transportation is available at dealers nationwide? Besides, you wouldn't be able to even make your 70-mile-one-way commute on a horse.
You have almost a ludite point of view.. my brand new SUV is just as fuel effiecent as the majority of cars in your local used car lot if not better... but everyone gets down on my SUV as 100 black smoke pouring cellicas drive by...
Who's this "everyone" you talk about? I haven't seen any posts under that nick, and I thought you were talking to me anyway. Besides, you haven't addressed the point:
Was such an SUV among the more efficient or less efficient choices you could have made? What kind of mileage do you get?
With 6 billion other people on earth having to live with the consequences of your choice (especially those who live on river deltas barely above sea level, or on atolls which will vanish if sea levels rise very much), what's your moral justification for your choice?
Not terribly difficult questions, assuming that you'd actually pondered the issues before and thought them through by yourself.
Sure you aren't describing yourself there? Seems to me that if you didn't have a difficult time thinking, you'd have better arguments in favor of your lifestyle choices and less guilt as implied by your heated reaction.
I was a bit enraged at your calling me "greedy" (which you still have yet to support) and I didnt feel your respose deserved too much thought as there was nothing new or interesting there.. your opinions are that of so many other sheep who fail to see or understand that humanity IS nature and humanity IS evolution and this planet is OURS. There are MANY other planets out there and as soon as we leave this one it will begin to recover all on it's own...
"Greedy" wasn't the proper adjective, perhaps. Maybe "spendthrift" or "reckless" is better. But you seem to be tightly attached to a number of funny misconceptions. For instance, because humanity is part of nature We Can Do No Wrong (either morally, or just in the sense of shooting ourselves in the collective foot). Or because there are other planets in the universe we have no need to keep this one in good shape, whether for our survival or just for the sake of aesthetics. There are 8 other planets and many smaller bodies orbitting Sol, but I haven't heard of anyone making a living on any of them yet. Maybe you should move from Maine to Venus. You won't need an SUV to deal with the winters, and I bet you'll achieve your panacea: really cheap rent.
Environmentalism is just an attempt to hold back progress which would solve all these lame environmental complaints in a decade anyway.
Uh, yeah. Exactly how would the continued use of DDT have solved the "lame complaint" of the imminent extinction of the American bald eagle, the peregrine falcon, and other bird species? (Other than by making them extinct, and thus making pointless any effort to keep them from dying off, I mean?) How will continued spewing of fossil carbon into the atmosphere solve the dual growing problems of global warming and increasingly severe weather? They're baking from Arizona to Alabama and north to Oklahoma this week, you know. If this actually is driven by CO2 in the atmosphere as the growing scientific majority claims, and the lifespan of fossil CO2 in the air is about 200 years, how is your SUV going to solve it in the next ten years?
I'd think you were an utterly hilarious troll, except I know people who really believe the kind of things you're saying. --
how Heroshima and nagasaki? ring a bell? chernoble?
Let's see:
Hiroshima: A military action. A deliberate attack on a city, not a test. Death toll, under 100K.
Nagasaki: See Hiroshima.
Chernobyl: An explosion and fire at a reactor designed to produce weapons-grade plutonium along with electric power, brought on by irresponsible control technicians who defeated the reactor safety systems. Aggravated in the extreme by the lack of a containment building around the reactor. Arguably a "test", if you consider fucking around in direct violation of the rules of operation to be a test. Death toll: Estimates are up to 800,000 cancers in Europe over the next 20 years, but cancer is increasingly curable.
I still want to know who these millions of dead are, and what tests killed them.
Moving closer to work would mean nearly a doubling of my cost of living (namely rent).. Why shouldn't I maintain the lifestyle I choose? I am not here to simply exist.. I am making the most of my life and doing what I want cause thats the fscking point of being alive!!!
Why shouldn't you take responsibility for the consequences of your choices, while you're at it? It's called "being a grown-up".
Your rent is another issue. You mentioned driving 70 miles to work (one way?). If you're getting 14 MPG and pay $1.40/gallon, that's $14/day for gas. Cost of operating a vehicle is several times the fuel cost, but for you I'll assume it's only twice. That makes $28/day operating cost. If you work 20 days a month, that's $560/month. If you moved 20 miles from work, that's 100 miles/day off your commute and $20/day in your pocket. You could pay an additional $400/month in rent with that, be financially even, and have another hour or even two hours a day to yourself.
Know something? You're really funny. And that's true whether you're joking or serious. --
Don't forget that more privacy = more opportunities for random scumbags to screw us around and MUCH less chance of them ever being caught.
Unfortunately, the random scumbags aren't the people of most interest to those in power. Even the police are often less interested in random scumbags than the people trying to rein in their excesses.
Do you remember anything about Watergate and the activities of the "plumbers"? That was privacy invasion in the service of political dirty tricks. Even if more privacy leads to fewer opportunities to catch scumbags electronically and a requirement for more good old police work, this is better than the kind of manipulations and other abuses that a lack of privacy will inevitably produce.
You can't tell me that the powerful can be forced into the open the way little people are. The powerful have ways of putting their affairs behind closed doors that most people do not. For this reason, the average person needs European-style data security laws, anonymous digital cash, and 100% encrypted communications. This is the only thing which can keep individual rights free from wholesale manipulation as we fall headlong into the digital age. --
But I want to make sure that the information that I'm sending is worst than useless.
But if the data are useful on average (meaning, most people don't do what you do), they'll still keep doing it.
A more devious trick would be to infect other people's computers with a worm which doesn't spread per se, but it does surf. It does the same corrupting of the click-stream for thousands or millions of people that your personal corrupter does for you. NOW DoubleClick is seriously hurting, not only because their entire database is being seeded with corruption, but because the main "benefit" of their tracking (targeted ads) is diluted. People's patience with DoubleClick goes away, there's less click-through revenue, and their business withers before their very eyes. --
Everyone can and should have an email address that they keep as separate as possible from the real me. If the email address that the gov't or a corp is tracking is not related to the real you, you have created a sort of privacy.
It sounds like you have re-invented the concept of 'nyms'. If you are careful not to mix the uses of various [pseudo]nyms, you could theoretically keep your affairs with A, B, and C all private from the government and each other. Right now, with obnoxious inventions like shared cookies, you have to be really careful to avoid that. I'm eagerly looking forward to a privacy-enhanced version of Mozilla that's designed to work with SSL and web proxies to give an untraceable surfing experience unless you want to be traced, and then only traceable to the people to whom you wish to be known. --
Of course, you know me not at all, and you have no idea which group of "you people" I belong to. You have stereotyped me and gotten yourself into a lather based on a small bit of devil's advocacy. I find this most amusing, as I doubt you'd have become so exercised over the issue if you didn't have a fairly guilty conscience.
If I drove a damn horse you would bitch about the damn grain...
The manure and consequent smell and flies are much more worthy causes for complaint. And I've never used an iMac, thankyouverymuch. OTOH, I think I may very well be a customer for the Toyota Prius or one of the next-generation vehicles (preferably one with flywheel storage for surge power requirements).
ever have a thought of your own? did it hurt?
Sure you aren't describing yourself there? Seems to me that if you didn't have a difficult time thinking, you'd have better arguments in favor of your lifestyle choices and less guilt as implied by your heated reaction.
Oh, I'm not an environmental propagandist. Among other things, I'm pro-nuclear-power, and I take a lot of heat over it from green wackos. But unlike you, I'm informed and reasonably good at arguing for my positions. You're just using ad-hominems, where you haven't fallen to outright flaming. Pitiful. --
Millions of people have died from radiation from nuke testing.
Even if this is correct (and I'd like to see a cite), how does it absolve you of blame for the damage you're doing over and above what you need to maintain your lifestyle, let alone what you could do by some very simple changes such as moving closer to work? --
Both the power extracted and the power required to overcome drag are proportional to v^3.
Yes. However, in the upwind-travel case, the vehicle speed will always be less than the airspeed. Depending on the design, the vehicle may also be travelling in the wind-shadow of the turbine and enjoy a lower drag coefficient as a result.
You can continue to claim this is impossible, but the fact remains that it has been done. By a children's toy, no less. It was a little boat with an air turbine on one end of a slanted shaft and a water propeller at the other end. Dropped into the water, it would weathervane so that the air turbine was downwind and then plow upwind until it ran into something. Put it on the lee side of a pond, recover it on the windward side.
The boat had a disadvantage that a car does not; a propeller operating in a fluid loses considerable energy to slip, where a tire on pavement loses very little under normal conditions. At the limit, you could have a turbine turning a ballscrew pushing at a tiny fraction of the windspeed. It's painfully obvious from this that you could shove the platform carrying the turbine directly into the wind. Once you've settled this, the only question remaining is how efficiently this can be done. The efficiency determines how fast you can go. Go back and run my numbers for groundspeed = 1/2 airspeed, and see how low your efficiency could be and still make it work. --
The power available from a stationary wind turbine is *NOT* proportional to airspeed^3.
Yes, it is. I'll show you your error.
A volume of moving air has kinetic energy equal to its mass X its speed squared, or KE = V * density * speed^2. V(t) = Area * t.
So far, so good.
The maximum power that can be extracted is dKE(t)/dt = dV(t)/dt * density * speed^2, which reduces to Area * density * speed^2.
Nope, that's the maximum energy per unit volume. You seem to be confusing power and energy; power is in units of energy per unit time.
So, the power that can be extracted is proportional to speed^2.
Nope. The power that can be extracted is proportional to the energy per unit volume, times the volume per unit time. The former is proportional to v^2, the latter is proportional to v, so the power is proportional to v^3, QED. --
By the way, the average car today burn at roughly 30-50% effecient, which is really poor. All of the SUVs out there are in the 30%s. Thats 30% of the USEABLE energy. Some of the most effecient vehicles burn at 70-80%, but those are your standard "featherweight deathbox" cars.
There is nothing on the road today with a combustion engine which hits 50% thermal efficiency. Nothing. Diesels can hit 40%. Gasoline engines manage figures in the low 30's under good operating conditions; at idle, they get an efficiency of ZERO.
That's all gasoline engines, not just SUV's. You're lucky to get your fuel burn below 0.44 lb/horsepower-hour. The big difference between fuel demand in an SUV vs. an econobox isn't in the engine, but in the amount of energy required to get them moving (E=1/2mv^2) and shove them through the air (power=drag*speed, air drag=0.5*Cd*rho*A*v^2). The SUV either needs a bigger engine (more fuel burn) or works the same engine harder (more fuel burn, plus shorter lifespan). But efficiency of the engine (which is often shared among many different model lines of both cars and trucks) varies only a little for the same operating conditions. --
There are millions of Big Rigs out there that do far more damage in accidents and burn far more fuel than SUV's...
Some of them even haul the gas you buy. Buy half as much gas, there'll be half as many rigs hauling gasoline to filling stations.
there are thousands of industrial processes that use more fuel every second than my SUV burns in a year..
If you drive 13,000 miles a year and get 13 MPG, that would be a thousand gallons a second. How many of those processes are refineries, turning out gasoline for people like you... and subject to the same observation about how many would be needed if you weren't so greedy?
I find it hard to believe that Iraq, china and india have neuclear weapons and ANYONE gives a RATS ASS what I'm driving...
In the case of Iraq, its weapons were purchased with oil revenues. In other words, if it wasn't for people with attitudes like you, they'd still be pre-industrial instead of a nuclear threat. That shoe fits, hope you like the looks... --
Slashdot Mirror
--
- whip out some pseudo-random numbers based on your key and a sequence (maybe the name of the file). Using this,
- select some reasonable number of pixels in which to
- encode your encrypted message; leave the remainder alone.
The statistical properties of the picture won't change as much (as little as you like), making it much harder to detect the manipulation. At the other end, you feed the filename into the crypto-system to initialize the PRNG, get the list of pixels generated in step 2, extract their LSB's to regenerate the message put in them in step 3, and decrypt as normal. Just make sure you never use the same filename twice.This would be even safer to use if the authorities are not comprehensively scanning the contents of CD-RW's, and you don't need real-time communications. You could carry a megabyte or more of encrypted communications per disc, all safely hidden in harmless pictures. Heck, if the authorities are letting discs in without scanning them, you can just use a one-time pad and burn your discs as you use them. Even you can't regenerate the plaintext from the cyphertext until you get home again!
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I'll speculate here that the calorimetry in the underwater muon detectors involves measuring the total energy of the Cerenkov flash, which allows the kinetic energy of the original lepton to be calculated, which specifies the energy of the incident neutrino. If you have an event which generates a whole lot of neutrinos more or less all at once (like a supernova), looking at the distribution of energy vs. time of arrival would allow a good shot at calculating the rest mass of the particle. (Massless particles must all travel at c, so they'd arrive in the order of departure. The more massive neutrinos are, the more the low-energy ones will lag behind the high-energy ones. The delay would increase with distance. Watch a few dozen supernovae with some sensitive neutrino telescopes, and you'd have increasingly precise figures for the neutrino's mass.)
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- dedicated, and
- enormous.
There are hundreds of coaxes coming off of just the CDF at Fermilab, and that's only one of their experiments. The amount of data they can crunch in a second is probably equivalent to an hour's work for Slashdot. Some of the detectors are crunching data internally because they can't move the un-reduced mass of stuff to a room upstairs; it would take a bundle of cables as fat as the detector, instead of only as fat as your torso.--
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Neutrinos may never be of such practical importance, but just for understanding what the universe is about and thus what we are a part of... this knowledge is priceless.
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What actually happens is that the neutrino smashes into something and leaves a charged particle moving through the water faster than c/refractive index (the speed of light in the medium), and that makes Cerenkov radiation. It's not quite as direct as you paint it.
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I really wonder if you'll be singing the same tune when OPEC's pumping capacity falls below the level of demand at $30/bbl and gas heads for $2/gallon, then points above. We only got the nice prices a couple years ago because of the collapse in the Asian economies and the consequent fall in demand. Don't expect to see that again any time soon; situations like last winter's heating-oil shortfall are likely to be repeated this winter, with natural gas inventories already running low. And with short natural gas supplies comes more demand for oil as users who can switch, switch; gasoline goes up as a consequence. Enjoy.
You seem to have a problem distinguishing "baaa" from "Nothing good can come out of doing this, and if we decide to stop we can do it at a profit, so even if we turn out to be wrong about the global consequences we'll still laugh all the way to the bank." It's called "no regrets". I don't expect to have Social Security to depend on, so I'm taking my $14/day (and more) and shoving it into a 401(k). I expect to live more comfortably than you. Anyone can set up a page at tripod. You'd have to be a fool to use such a page as a source for trustworthy information. I'm not even going to pull it up. "The Society for Environmental Truth". The newest thing I found on that site was 5 months old. You'd think that if they had the truth on their side, it would keep rolling in. Last update apparently October 1999, even older than SET. The list of "global warming skeptic" scientists (who mostly aren't climatologists, oddly enough) doesn't seem to have grown in 2 years. On the other hand, the evidence for global warming continues to pile up, including borehole temperature data taken just this year which confirms the ground-based temperature readings. Not updated since March 12 except for the "high gas prices" page, as far as I can tell. Some of the lies are revealing; under the headline "U.S. Greenhouse Gas Emissions Slow" they admit "...U.S. emission of greenhouse gases rose in 1998, but at a slower rate than the average for the last ten years." In other words, we didn't start pumping out less, we just slowed the rate of increase. Well, progress has to start somewhere. Since we're doing so well at increasing the amount of GDP we can make per BTU, I don't see why we shouldn't make a point of cutting the BTU requirements of our economy just for the cost savings. Every barrel of oil saved is $30 that stays here instead of going to OPEC. The press release is 2 years old, and long since overtaken by events. "gore.html" is an unapologetic political screed having nothing to do with evidence of effects on the environment. That's not even a news site; the "Global Warming Myths" link goes to a page that collects other links, including the disreputable sovereignty.net and globalwarming.org pages you already listed. In other words, it just recycles other people's propaganda. While I agree that there are wackos on the environmental left, this doesn't justify dismissing the threat of environmental damage OR using the possibility as a very good reason to cut every bit of CO2 emission that you can do at a profit. Saving money is smart anyway, the environment just puts it higher on the list of priorities.--
If I were doing this I would just bury a conduit going from parking space to parking space and pull cable though it. Bring the cable up at the parking-space pylons, terminate one pair at each pylon in an RJ-11 phone jack in a weatherproof enclosure; the trucker snakes a cable with a normal phone plug out to the pylon, and he's live. Leave a few spare pairs for expansion or to route around broken wires. At your central building (you will have one, won't you?) connect the pairs from the lot to the outgoing lines, maybe with a switch so you can activate and deactivate them at will. Adding MOV's and lightning arresters is probably a good idea.
That's the hard way. The easy way is to get a bunch of lines, connect each one to a 900 MHz spread-spectrum portable phone, and pass out handsets along with the parking receipts. You might want to collect a deposit on the handsets.
If you are using a PBX that doesn't use standard Bell phones (say, in order to do per-call billing or restrict callers to local/toll-free calls), you need to get the specs from the PBX mfgr.
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I look at people driving trucks like yours, and I think "What a fool. That nitwit is paying a ton extra for gas and is risking his life from rollovers, and is smogging up the air to boot. In five years that truck will be worth almost nothing; maybe in three years, if gas prices spike again. After that, this bozo will have nothing to show for it except a depleted bank account and an increasingly polluted environment."
So you don't care that the hundreds of millions of people who happened to be born in, e.g. Bangladesh, who have no choice about where they live and nowhere to go, are likely to have the sea reduce their farmland to inhospitable salt marsh if a hurricane doesn't wash it away entirely along with everyone who lived on it. You don't care that the pace of human-induced change is enormously faster than natural changes.Thanks for giving me a picture of your sense of personal responsibility. I think.
So you advocate the unrestricted trashing of Earth, because we might be able to live on other planets... someday. There's a bit of wisdom which goes "Don't burn your bridges before you've crossed them." If it turns out to cost $1 billion per off-earth colonist, would you still think that trashing the Earth was a smart thing? Even if keeping the Earth in good shape saved money overall? More efficient ways were available to you when you were making your purchase.Did you pick the most efficient way? No.
Did you help drive demand for more efficient products? No.
Did you try to exercise any kind of responsibility for your choice when you were out shopping? I quote you: "I didnt make my choice based on gas mileage.... it was a NON factor.."
Even if someone HAD a better way for sale, you just weren't interested.
As for the ozone layer, speed of climate shift, and so forth: Cites, please. (Not that I expect you to be able to support your assertions, but I find your evasions amusing.)
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Thus, if an ISP with its own sniffer capabilities encounters a demand to use Carnivore instead, someone is going to know that something's up. The only way for the FBI to avoid this is to demand to use Carnivore (or the equivalent) as a matter of course, regardless of the capabilities of the ISP to meet the requirements of the court order without it.
It's for this reason that I think we can expect to see the FBI demand that ISP's do it their way, no matter what's best for the customers, the Constitution, or the society at large.
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- Was such an SUV among the more efficient or less efficient choices you could have made? What kind of mileage do you get?
- With 6 billion other people on earth having to live with the consequences of your choice (especially those who live on river deltas barely above sea level, or on atolls which will vanish if sea levels rise very much), what's your moral justification for your choice?
Not terribly difficult questions, assuming that you'd actually pondered the issues before and thought them through by yourself. "Greedy" wasn't the proper adjective, perhaps. Maybe "spendthrift" or "reckless" is better. But you seem to be tightly attached to a number of funny misconceptions. For instance, because humanity is part of nature We Can Do No Wrong (either morally, or just in the sense of shooting ourselves in the collective foot). Or because there are other planets in the universe we have no need to keep this one in good shape, whether for our survival or just for the sake of aesthetics. There are 8 other planets and many smaller bodies orbitting Sol, but I haven't heard of anyone making a living on any of them yet. Maybe you should move from Maine to Venus. You won't need an SUV to deal with the winters, and I bet you'll achieve your panacea: really cheap rent. Uh, yeah. Exactly how would the continued use of DDT have solved the "lame complaint" of the imminent extinction of the American bald eagle, the peregrine falcon, and other bird species? (Other than by making them extinct, and thus making pointless any effort to keep them from dying off, I mean?) How will continued spewing of fossil carbon into the atmosphere solve the dual growing problems of global warming and increasingly severe weather? They're baking from Arizona to Alabama and north to Oklahoma this week, you know. If this actually is driven by CO2 in the atmosphere as the growing scientific majority claims, and the lifespan of fossil CO2 in the air is about 200 years, how is your SUV going to solve it in the next ten years?I'd think you were an utterly hilarious troll, except I know people who really believe the kind of things you're saying.
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- Hiroshima: A military action. A deliberate attack on a city, not a test. Death toll, under 100K.
- Nagasaki: See Hiroshima.
- Chernobyl: An explosion and fire at a reactor designed to produce weapons-grade plutonium along with electric power, brought on by irresponsible control technicians who defeated the reactor safety systems. Aggravated in the extreme by the lack of a containment building around the reactor. Arguably a "test", if you consider fucking around in direct violation of the rules of operation to be a test. Death toll: Estimates are up to 800,000 cancers in Europe over the next 20 years, but cancer is increasingly curable.
I still want to know who these millions of dead are, and what tests killed them. Why shouldn't you take responsibility for the consequences of your choices, while you're at it? It's called "being a grown-up".Your rent is another issue. You mentioned driving 70 miles to work (one way?). If you're getting 14 MPG and pay $1.40/gallon, that's $14/day for gas. Cost of operating a vehicle is several times the fuel cost, but for you I'll assume it's only twice. That makes $28/day operating cost. If you work 20 days a month, that's $560/month. If you moved 20 miles from work, that's 100 miles/day off your commute and $20/day in your pocket. You could pay an additional $400/month in rent with that, be financially even, and have another hour or even two hours a day to yourself.
Know something? You're really funny. And that's true whether you're joking or serious.
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Do you remember anything about Watergate and the activities of the "plumbers"? That was privacy invasion in the service of political dirty tricks. Even if more privacy leads to fewer opportunities to catch scumbags electronically and a requirement for more good old police work, this is better than the kind of manipulations and other abuses that a lack of privacy will inevitably produce.
You can't tell me that the powerful can be forced into the open the way little people are. The powerful have ways of putting their affairs behind closed doors that most people do not. For this reason, the average person needs European-style data security laws, anonymous digital cash, and 100% encrypted communications. This is the only thing which can keep individual rights free from wholesale manipulation as we fall headlong into the digital age.
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A more devious trick would be to infect other people's computers with a worm which doesn't spread per se, but it does surf. It does the same corrupting of the click-stream for thousands or millions of people that your personal corrupter does for you. NOW DoubleClick is seriously hurting, not only because their entire database is being seeded with corruption, but because the main "benefit" of their tracking (targeted ads) is diluted. People's patience with DoubleClick goes away, there's less click-through revenue, and their business withers before their very eyes.
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And thank you for letting me try to teach.
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Oh, I'm not an environmental propagandist. Among other things, I'm pro-nuclear-power, and I take a lot of heat over it from green wackos. But unlike you, I'm informed and reasonably good at arguing for my positions. You're just using ad-hominems, where you haven't fallen to outright flaming. Pitiful.
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You can continue to claim this is impossible, but the fact remains that it has been done. By a children's toy, no less. It was a little boat with an air turbine on one end of a slanted shaft and a water propeller at the other end. Dropped into the water, it would weathervane so that the air turbine was downwind and then plow upwind until it ran into something. Put it on the lee side of a pond, recover it on the windward side.
The boat had a disadvantage that a car does not; a propeller operating in a fluid loses considerable energy to slip, where a tire on pavement loses very little under normal conditions. At the limit, you could have a turbine turning a ballscrew pushing at a tiny fraction of the windspeed. It's painfully obvious from this that you could shove the platform carrying the turbine directly into the wind. Once you've settled this, the only question remaining is how efficiently this can be done. The efficiency determines how fast you can go. Go back and run my numbers for groundspeed = 1/2 airspeed, and see how low your efficiency could be and still make it work.
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See the reply to it.
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That's all gasoline engines, not just SUV's. You're lucky to get your fuel burn below 0.44 lb/horsepower-hour. The big difference between fuel demand in an SUV vs. an econobox isn't in the engine, but in the amount of energy required to get them moving (E=1/2mv^2) and shove them through the air (power=drag*speed, air drag=0.5*Cd*rho*A*v^2). The SUV either needs a bigger engine (more fuel burn) or works the same engine harder (more fuel burn, plus shorter lifespan). But efficiency of the engine (which is often shared among many different model lines of both cars and trucks) varies only a little for the same operating conditions.
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