Anyone know if this requires extremely sensitive and expensive antennas?
I can't say I know, but I strongly doubt it. What you probably need is an array of omnidirectional antennas and a lot of DSP horsepower. What you're looking for is a changing reflection/scattering in a relatively constant signal. Think of something like an electronically-steered phased-array radar without the transmitter and I expect you're on the right track. -- Advertisers: If you attach cookies to your banner ads,
... I doubt you could hit a bumble bee with a stinger no matter how hard you tried.
I assume you mean a Stinger, not a stinger.;-)
A Stinger won't guide to a bumblebee, not because the bumblebee is so small, but because it's barely warmer than the air. Stingers are infrared-guided missiles, not radar. If you heated the bumblebee up to red heat, you could probably hit it with a Stinger. -- Advertisers: If you attach cookies to your banner ads,
now they'll have to go back to building wooden planes....
Even that wouldn't work, because the technology appears to operate by detecting the disturbances in the air left by the airplane. Metal, wood, aerogel... the construction materials wouldn't make any difference.
On the other hand, the fact that this technology can only detect the disturbance in the air opens possibilities. Decoys look just the same as real aircraft to the turbulence detectors, and if they're cheaper than AA missiles you can make it too expensive to shoot at things. Another possibility is transmitter technology which can fake the signature of turbulence trails, causing the enemy to "see" aircraft which aren't there. As long as you make them overlook the ones that are there, it doesn't matter much does it?
This also has counter-counter-offensive possibilities for cruise missiles. Cruise missiles are hard to see because they're so small and fly low, but the effects they have on broadcast-band radiation can be seen nonetheless. On the other hand, using the same radiation signatures any aircraft scrambled to intercept the missile can be detected by the offense and the missile signalled to evade them. Missiles (or decoys) which get shot down mark the locations of AA guns which can be avoided by the rest. It's all one big game of one-upmanship, and since the USA already has a system like this proposed for air traffic control (talk about civilian conversion of military technologies!), you can bet that our side has some way to deal with the military issues already under development. -- Advertisers: If you attach cookies to your banner ads,
You're damn straight about the productive features. It's impossible to maintain an on-going discussion on Slashdot because you cannot distinguish between material that's new to you and that which you've seen once (twice, N times) before. Aside from watching your own user page to see who's responded to you, you cannot track new material only; the overwhelming task of sifting through the existing stuff to check for new posts directed to others means that almost nobody does it. Discussions go for a couple of days at most, then die from the "horizon effect" (new users never see them on the list) and their own overwhelming mass.
This may be just fine for Slashdot, which explicitly says it is News for nerds and not a discussion forum. But as a model for a cyber community, it leaves much to be desired. -- Advertisers: If you attach cookies to your banner ads,
Why would Intel serailize the CPU, with all these other "unique numbers on hardware" already present in every computer sold? Why on earth create yet another number for no (apparent) reason? The answer is obvious: serializing the CPU makes not just the computer, but the work that has ever been done on it, easilly traceable in ways MMAC addresses and HD serial numbers cannot.
That is not obvious to me at all; if software does not embed the PSN into files then there is no direct way to link the file to the CPU used to create it.
What is obvious is that Intel has a problem with chip theft and they would like to be able to recover stolen property. Being able to prove that a given CPU was in fact stolen on such-and-such a date from this plant / truck / warehouse is essential to having a case. This is one absolutely legit use of the PSN. (What isn't legit is the ease of turning it back on after it has been turned off, which appears to be aimed at letting the computer "rat out" its owner and allow Intel to sniff documents or the Internet for traces of stolen chips. That much was done badly.) -- Advertisers: If you attach cookies to your banner ads,
Your final point about the Athlon is very good; it may point out opportunities to profit from buying AMD if Intel doesn't cave. -- Advertisers: If you attach cookies to your banner ads,
I got a chuckle out of "Vice-president aluminium Gore". Especially because the symbols for chemical elements are international; they don't need translation! -- Advertisers: If you attach cookies to your banner ads,
In every case where multiple vendors were providing licensed copies of the same operating system they have chosen to differentiate their offering with proprietary 'enhancements'. It is really hard to market something as being 'Just like theirs -- no different at all.' But if you say 'Just like theirs, only better.' you stand a chance.
By that logic, Hondas and Ferraris could only be differentiated from Yugos if they could not use the same road and/or had a different "driver interface". But they all have rubber tires that will run on asphalt, concrete or even smoothed dirt, and they all have a steering wheel and accelerator and brake pedals. The differences are more subtle than that.
Even if the API is the same, differences under the skin can make crucial differences to user preference. Look at the battle between Linux/Samba and NT Server. They both provide SMB services. However, NT has Microsoft's branded-stamp-of-approval, while Linux/Samba has zero licensing costs, better performance on less expensive hardware, better remote administration, and generally higher reliability. Two products, same API, and plenty of differentiation.
The only reason go go around mucking with APIs is to introduce incompatibilities. Unix vendors have finally learned that this just raised the cost of developing for their particular version and cut the number of available applications, leading to their market being restricted. If there were several vendors of Windows and all the applications companies were entirely separate, there would be no incentive for any Windows vendor to make incompatible changes to the API; there would be few or no applications vendors using them. Unless and until the market had shaken out to just one vendor, the API change process would have to be based on consensus or the changes would be ignored. Baby Bills could still differentiate their products by making them faster, smaller or more reliable. Being stuck with M$ products at work, more reliable would be a big hit with me. -- Advertisers: If you attach cookies to your banner ads,
It doesn't necessarily work like that. In the effort to "differentiate" their product in the marketplace they might well decide to build in incompatibilities - so that their customers are tied in the their OS and their apps.
That tactic only works if a single company controls both the OS and apps. If several different companies had rights to the OS (which would make no sense unless the apps were spun off independent of the OS companies), then no OS company could incompatibly extend the OS without wasting their time because the app companies would not follow; by doing so, the app companies would be tying their products to a single supplier's version.
The app companies would have every incentive to stick with the legacy or consensus API's. If this turned out to be some subset which allowed the apps to run on all Windows versions and Linux/WINE, well... wouldn't that be peachy! -- Advertisers: If you attach cookies to your banner ads,
I accidently moderated you down when I meant to mod you up. I think it's that wheel on the MS mouse that screwed it up.
Yes, it's a glitch (feature?) in the way most browsers handle selection boxes. Until you click on something outside the box, cursor up/down movements change selections within the box instead of moving the cursor/screen. "Losing" my arrow up/down keys (and having my selection changed in ways I very much did not intend!) drove me nuts until I found that I could click on some random text outside the box and get back to normal. Clicking on text outside the box after making a selection is now reflex with me.
This works with meta-moderation, too. -- Advertisers: If you attach cookies to your banner ads,
I wish getting hackers to do anything coherent were not like herding cats
How many hackers are actually working on any particular open-source project? A small fraction. Are they coherent? You tell me. It wouldn't take that many hackers to make a difference.
Hackers as a group tend to have plenty of disposable income. If a group of hackers made it a point to oppose Scientology's abusive tactics, they could easily do so via a membership organization similar to the EFF. This organization could provide legal aid to people and ISP's harassed by the CoS, get injunctive relief from ISP shutoffs (the ISP can't be sued for complying with an order of the court), and possibly take a cut of damage awards.
If I recall correctly, several persons have been awarded substantial damages against the CoS but have been unable to recover. Perhaps this organization could file liens against CoS property and sell it to pay the awards. If this property happened to be the RTC's copyrights and trademarks, it would be particularly delicious.
No, I'm not volunteering. I have no talent for organizing, nor any stomach for confrontation. -- Advertisers: If you attach cookies to your banner ads,
If Gates had stayed in college, he'd have been studying for exams instead of stealing Basic and CPM, porting them to the 8088, and landing a one-sided contract with IBM to supply software for IBM PCs.
From what I've heard, Seattle Computer stole CP/M and re-implemented it for the 8086/8, and sold it to Bill as QDOS (Quick and Dirty Operating System). QDOS was label-engineered into MS-DOS 1.0. There were some legal maneuverings between Seattle Computer and Microsoft about royalties, if I recall correctly, but by that time Microsoft had re-written MS-DOS and eliminated all the original code. Bill didn't steal CP/M, he just bought a half-assed OS (no I/O redirection whatsoever, not even CP/M's brain-dead version) which had the same API (right down to "CALL 5"). -- Advertisers: If you attach cookies to your banner ads,
If that's the one that went west-to-east, it wasn't a Leonid (for sure). It was almost certainly a piece of space junk. -- Advertisers: If you attach cookies to your banner ads,
Amplifying a pure sine wave "exactly at the zero crossings" to eliminate sidebands is not possible because the amplification or deamplification cannot happen instantaneously without an infinite amount of power and since the amplitude change would always take some non-zero amount of time, the sine wave will deform over that period. The deformarions show up as other frequencies.
Actually, it's worse than that. You can view any waveform as a collection of pure sinewaves at various frequencies and phases (integral from 0 to infinity of e^(i*omega*t) f(t) dt). The wave you're describing would have a corner, an instantaneous change in slope, there at the zero crossing. (Exactly where, zero crossing or otherwise, doesn't matter.)
But since this is all put together from sinewaves, which are nice and continuous, how the heck do you get a corner? In practice you can't, because it requires frequency components out to infinity (and infinite bandwidth!). But even an approximation of that "corner" requires other frequency components which add during the high-amplitude section, and then they all come together at the "corner" and suddenly they all subtract from the "carrier" for the low-amplitude section. All of these different frequency components mean lots and LOTS of sidebands. You can hear this in Morse code communications; if a keying network isn't set correctly and it cuts the signal off abruptly, you can hear the sidebands (key clicks) far away from the sender's carrier frequency. An over-modulated AM signal that "flat-tops" (clips)or cuts off completely causes broadband "splatter" which can be heard well off the channel too.
The way to limit bandwidth is to vary things smoothly, with no edges or corners. It may not be intuitive, but this is an area where your intuition doesn't get much experience. -- Advertisers: If you attach cookies to your banner ads,
But you need to factor in the cost of living. You can live on $500- a year in China ( in fact most of the people do ). But it won't get you far in the US.
If you could ignore rent, I think you could live on $500. Someone living like Ted Kaszinski, in the woods where all you need is food, water and firewood, could probably make it. Bulk goods like rice and dry beans are pretty darned cheap. You could clear $500 with less than 150 hours at a minimum-wage job.
I've never been near that income level, but people who are that poor qualify for food stamps, don't they? They wouldn't have to worry much about hunger as long as they knew how to manage on inexpensive foods - which is a life skills issue. Youth homelessness has a big dose of that, plus employment restrictions on under-18's. To some the government giveth, and from others (including some of the neediest) the government taketh away their ability to make a living; chalk it up to the law of unintended consequences. -- Advertisers: If you attach cookies to your banner ads,
You might want to come down here to G.Bush Jr's ( alleged) home state o' Texas and take a look the poverty along the border, puts any definition of third world poverty right here in the lower 48...
Been there, though I have not made a point of hanging around the colonias (I don't speak Spanish). Even there, most families have their own vehicles and have electricity, TVs and VCRs. Since you are claiming that the USA is comparable to the third world, tell me where I can go to see families living in squatter villages where dwellings are built from mud brick and junk with corrugated iron roofs and electricity is a dream?
Try Detroit
Tried it. Overall, Benton Harbor is worse. Part of my family is from Detroit, and I've seen first-hand what has happened to the housing stock. But that only happened because it was abandoned; nobody lives there. Oh, parts of St. Paul (MN) are pretty bad too, as long as you're making a list.
The Vietnamese who were lucky enough to get to the US right at the end of the war got here (mostly) as a result of their ties to the US military, state department and the covert ops that were in place during the war.... Later, the boat people....the "common" people of Vietnam arrived, facing hardships unimaginable( think of setting yourself adrift in the south Pacific in an overcrowded boat for a couple of months to understand what desperation and courage are really all about....)
Thank you for quoting the examples that prove my point, that whatever the poverty in the USA, most people are far and away better-off economically (not to mention politically) than even the average in just about every country in the third world.
Ya sound like a pretty smart individual, but the poverty definition you espouse is right out of the Buchanan playbook.
"Ya" seem to believe that if a person is wrong about one thing, they're wrong about everything. Pat Buchanan is one of my least favorite people and his errors are legion, but to claim that this makes everything he says wrong is just ad-hominem fallacy. You compound your error by grouping someone (me) who happened to say something that Buchanan would agree with, in with the rest of Buchanan's views. That's bound to make you popular; no wonder you hide as an Anonymous Coward.
That $17,000 figure is a fucking wet dream to a lot of WORKING folks just trying to make ends meet.
And it's only $8.50/hour for a 40-hour week. If someone can't do any better than that, do they have any business starting a family, let alone having 2 kids and a non-working spouse? Sure there are people struggling on that, but they usually got into that boat because of a lack of life skills. -- Advertisers: If you attach cookies to your banner ads,
Vary the single wavelength's amplitude (intensity) alone, and it's still single frequency while carrying data too.
I see you never studied for a ham radio license or anything else of the sort.
Varying the intensity of a light source creates "sidebands", the same as it does for RF. These "sidebands" are wavelengths slightly longer and shorter than the "carrier". What you see as an amplitude variation is really the interference of the carrier and the sidebands, as they slip in (high amplitude) and out (low amplitude) of phase over time. If you have a carrier frequency of F and a modulation frequency of M, you'll create sidebands at F+M and F-M. If you have really good filters you can suppress one of the sidebands and still carry all the information, and if you have really good frequency references as well you can ditch the carrier and only bother sending one sideband (you can use the frequency reference at the receiving end to supply the "carrier" for demodulation); this is how SSB radios work.
What does this mean for optical fiber? It limits how close together your "colors" can be based on how fast each one is modulated. The sidebands get farther and farther from the carrier as the modulation gets faster, and if the sidebands start clashing you get crosstalk and data errors. -- Advertisers: If you attach cookies to your banner ads,
You think Bell Labs is going to share this tech with ANYONE?
Yes, I do. Selling the technology is how they make their money; if they kept it to themselves, the next company to get a product out there would lock up the market and eat Bell's lunch. -- Advertisers: If you attach cookies to your banner ads,
What they're probably doing is electrically changing the laser's index of refraction (at very high speed, of course). Doing this changes the effective length of the optical cavity, and thus the lasing frequency. Semiconductor lasers are not spectrally pure in any event, and being able to switch among several of the different resonant modes is one way to do the multi-color trick.
The thing that gets me is that the 1022-wavelength laser and the 160 GB/sec carrier are probably incompatible; the laser almost certainly cannot be modulated anywhere near the 160 Gb/sec rate. Assuming one system can do both is not much different from assuming that because you can get a 20-ton garbage truck, and you can get a Mach 2 SST, that you can make a 20-ton Mach 2 garbage truck. -- Advertisers: If you attach cookies to your banner ads,
Before you get all wet and foamy at the mouth about the record of human rights violations in China, you ought to look in your own back yard....How many children live in poverty in THIS great country, dipshit?
"Poor", in the USA, is defined as an annual income under $17,000 (or so, can't check at the moment) for a family of four.
In case you haven't noticed, $17,000 is a huge amount of money for most of the world. Per-capita annual income in many sub-Saharan countries and the likes of Bangladesh is under $100 per year. That is true, grinding poverty.
In the USA, most people under the official poverty line have televisions. A lot of them have VCR's. Quite a few of them have cars. Almost none of them go hungry except from mis-spending the money they have; this is poverty of life-skills rather than means, and there is no subsidy program which can cure that. There are some people who have to make a choice between buying food or medicine, but just to have the option of buying the medicine at all... that is fabulous wealth by the standards of most of the world.
Even the "poor" among us are rich, both by world and historical standards. I think it's very ironic that your wonderful perspective-enhancing experience in Vietnam, and the news about people fleeing the government and poverty in that land for the opportunity of ours over twenty years later, has somehow all been lost on you. -- Advertisers: If you attach cookies to your banner ads,
1.The most powerful nuclear devices yet invented are fusion-based; they get the majority of their energy by assembling atoms of helium from isotopes of hydrogen.
Are you sure? I thought that most of the yield from large thermonuclear devices (fission-fusion-fission) came from the fission of the U238 jacket in the fusion stage.
We may both be right: energy and explosive yield are not the same. A neutron fleeing the scene at high speed doesn't add to the "bang" of the bomb, though it can be an anti-personnel mechanism (e.g "neutron bomb"). A large proportion of the energy of the explosive power of a fission-fusion-fission bomb does come from fission of U-238 under the bombardment of the fusion neutrons, but this is at least partly a conversion of the neutron energy to fission-fragment energy. I do not have figures for the fission energy of U-238 under high-energy neutron bombardment.
BTW, I mis-stated a number above. The fission energy of U-235 (under thermal neutron bombardment) is 194 MeV. U-233 is 191 MeV, Pu-239 is 201 MeV according to the CRC. -- Advertisers: If you attach cookies to your banner ads,
Seriously. There was a "Science Fact" article in Analog, oh, maybe 10 years ago which proposed the construction of enormous convection towers along the Carribean and Atlantic coast. The mechanism of these towers would support a stable upward flow of hot, humid ocean-surface air through the dry inversion layer which normally invades and chokes off such flows; it's the instability of small convective flows which allows heat to build up until really large phenomena, namely tropical storms and hurricanes, bleed it off. By removing some of this heat energy, the power available to feed incoming storms (such as Hurricane Floyd) would be diminished, reducing storm damage.
These towers would essentially contain permanent thunderstorms. I haven't re-done the author's numbers, but he claimed that the mass-flow rate of such a tower would conservatively be in the thousands of tons per second, and the air leaving the tower would be moving at upwards of 200 MPH. He calculated such things as the fresh water yield of the "rain" inside the tower and the hydropower available from letting it fall down pipes, but the real yield is the airflow itself. I calculated the power available from the moving air, and with (what seemed to me to be) reasonable assumptions about efficiency I got the number of 22 GIGAWATTS. From one tower.
For reference, the total nameplate generating capacity of the generators in the USA is a mere 754 GW, according to the Department of Energy. This means that 40 of these towers, arrayed along our coasts or around the Carribean, could replace every watt from every generator currently feeding the US electrical grid... and then some. They'd also make a hell of a lot of fresh water, and cool off the surface waters somewhat (a boon for heat-stressed coral reefs).
There's a lot more ocean out there than just our coasts, and it's all getting warmer. Tapping energy off it would not only replace fossil fuels directly, it would also do some global-warming abatement by dumping heat above some 8 miles of atmosphere where it has an easier time escaping. I think we could do a lot worse than checking this out in detail again, and if it would work, pushing it like hell. -- Advertisers: If you attach cookies to your banner ads,
Slashdot Mirror
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A Stinger won't guide to a bumblebee, not because the bumblebee is so small, but because it's barely warmer than the air. Stingers are infrared-guided missiles, not radar. If you heated the bumblebee up to red heat, you could probably hit it with a Stinger.
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On the other hand, the fact that this technology can only detect the disturbance in the air opens possibilities. Decoys look just the same as real aircraft to the turbulence detectors, and if they're cheaper than AA missiles you can make it too expensive to shoot at things. Another possibility is transmitter technology which can fake the signature of turbulence trails, causing the enemy to "see" aircraft which aren't there. As long as you make them overlook the ones that are there, it doesn't matter much does it?
This also has counter-counter-offensive possibilities for cruise missiles. Cruise missiles are hard to see because they're so small and fly low, but the effects they have on broadcast-band radiation can be seen nonetheless. On the other hand, using the same radiation signatures any aircraft scrambled to intercept the missile can be detected by the offense and the missile signalled to evade them. Missiles (or decoys) which get shot down mark the locations of AA guns which can be avoided by the rest. It's all one big game of one-upmanship, and since the USA already has a system like this proposed for air traffic control (talk about civilian conversion of military technologies!), you can bet that our side has some way to deal with the military issues already under development.
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This may be just fine for Slashdot, which explicitly says it is News for nerds and not a discussion forum. But as a model for a cyber community, it leaves much to be desired.
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What is obvious is that Intel has a problem with chip theft and they would like to be able to recover stolen property. Being able to prove that a given CPU was in fact stolen on such-and-such a date from this plant / truck / warehouse is essential to having a case. This is one absolutely legit use of the PSN. (What isn't legit is the ease of turning it back on after it has been turned off, which appears to be aimed at letting the computer "rat out" its owner and allow Intel to sniff documents or the Internet for traces of stolen chips. That much was done badly.)
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Your final point about the Athlon is very good; it may point out opportunities to profit from buying AMD if Intel doesn't cave.
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I got a chuckle out of "Vice-president aluminium Gore". Especially because the symbols for chemical elements are international; they don't need translation!
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"Valve" is another term for vacuum tube.
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Even if the API is the same, differences under the skin can make crucial differences to user preference. Look at the battle between Linux/Samba and NT Server. They both provide SMB services. However, NT has Microsoft's branded-stamp-of-approval, while Linux/Samba has zero licensing costs, better performance on less expensive hardware, better remote administration, and generally higher reliability. Two products, same API, and plenty of differentiation.
The only reason go go around mucking with APIs is to introduce incompatibilities. Unix vendors have finally learned that this just raised the cost of developing for their particular version and cut the number of available applications, leading to their market being restricted. If there were several vendors of Windows and all the applications companies were entirely separate, there would be no incentive for any Windows vendor to make incompatible changes to the API; there would be few or no applications vendors using them. Unless and until the market had shaken out to just one vendor, the API change process would have to be based on consensus or the changes would be ignored. Baby Bills could still differentiate their products by making them faster, smaller or more reliable. Being stuck with M$ products at work, more reliable would be a big hit with me.
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The app companies would have every incentive to stick with the legacy or consensus API's. If this turned out to be some subset which allowed the apps to run on all Windows versions and Linux/WINE, well... wouldn't that be peachy!
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This works with meta-moderation, too.
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Hackers as a group tend to have plenty of disposable income. If a group of hackers made it a point to oppose Scientology's abusive tactics, they could easily do so via a membership organization similar to the EFF. This organization could provide legal aid to people and ISP's harassed by the CoS, get injunctive relief from ISP shutoffs (the ISP can't be sued for complying with an order of the court), and possibly take a cut of damage awards.
If I recall correctly, several persons have been awarded substantial damages against the CoS but have been unable to recover. Perhaps this organization could file liens against CoS property and sell it to pay the awards. If this property happened to be the RTC's copyrights and trademarks, it would be particularly delicious.
No, I'm not volunteering. I have no talent for organizing, nor any stomach for confrontation.
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Since when does the existence of worse make the merely bad unworthy of comment?
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If that's the one that went west-to-east, it wasn't a Leonid (for sure). It was almost certainly a piece of space junk.
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But since this is all put together from sinewaves, which are nice and continuous, how the heck do you get a corner? In practice you can't, because it requires frequency components out to infinity (and infinite bandwidth!). But even an approximation of that "corner" requires other frequency components which add during the high-amplitude section, and then they all come together at the "corner" and suddenly they all subtract from the "carrier" for the low-amplitude section. All of these different frequency components mean lots and LOTS of sidebands. You can hear this in Morse code communications; if a keying network isn't set correctly and it cuts the signal off abruptly, you can hear the sidebands (key clicks) far away from the sender's carrier frequency. An over-modulated AM signal that "flat-tops" (clips)or cuts off completely causes broadband "splatter" which can be heard well off the channel too.
The way to limit bandwidth is to vary things smoothly, with no edges or corners. It may not be intuitive, but this is an area where your intuition doesn't get much experience.
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I've never been near that income level, but people who are that poor qualify for food stamps, don't they? They wouldn't have to worry much about hunger as long as they knew how to manage on inexpensive foods - which is a life skills issue. Youth homelessness has a big dose of that, plus employment restrictions on under-18's. To some the government giveth, and from others (including some of the neediest) the government taketh away their ability to make a living; chalk it up to the law of unintended consequences.
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Varying the intensity of a light source creates "sidebands", the same as it does for RF. These "sidebands" are wavelengths slightly longer and shorter than the "carrier". What you see as an amplitude variation is really the interference of the carrier and the sidebands, as they slip in (high amplitude) and out (low amplitude) of phase over time. If you have a carrier frequency of F and a modulation frequency of M, you'll create sidebands at F+M and F-M. If you have really good filters you can suppress one of the sidebands and still carry all the information, and if you have really good frequency references as well you can ditch the carrier and only bother sending one sideband (you can use the frequency reference at the receiving end to supply the "carrier" for demodulation); this is how SSB radios work.
What does this mean for optical fiber? It limits how close together your "colors" can be based on how fast each one is modulated. The sidebands get farther and farther from the carrier as the modulation gets faster, and if the sidebands start clashing you get crosstalk and data errors.
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The thing that gets me is that the 1022-wavelength laser and the 160 GB/sec carrier are probably incompatible; the laser almost certainly cannot be modulated anywhere near the 160 Gb/sec rate. Assuming one system can do both is not much different from assuming that because you can get a 20-ton garbage truck, and you can get a Mach 2 SST, that you can make a 20-ton Mach 2 garbage truck.
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You know, I'm really glad I set my threshold to -1, because that was pretty funny.
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In case you haven't noticed, $17,000 is a huge amount of money for most of the world. Per-capita annual income in many sub-Saharan countries and the likes of Bangladesh is under $100 per year. That is true, grinding poverty.
In the USA, most people under the official poverty line have televisions. A lot of them have VCR's. Quite a few of them have cars. Almost none of them go hungry except from mis-spending the money they have; this is poverty of life-skills rather than means, and there is no subsidy program which can cure that. There are some people who have to make a choice between buying food or medicine, but just to have the option of buying the medicine at all... that is fabulous wealth by the standards of most of the world.
Even the "poor" among us are rich, both by world and historical standards. I think it's very ironic that your wonderful perspective-enhancing experience in Vietnam, and the news about people fleeing the government and poverty in that land for the opportunity of ours over twenty years later, has somehow all been lost on you.
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BTW, I mis-stated a number above. The fission energy of U-235 (under thermal neutron bombardment) is 194 MeV. U-233 is 191 MeV, Pu-239 is 201 MeV according to the CRC.
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These towers would essentially contain permanent thunderstorms. I haven't re-done the author's numbers, but he claimed that the mass-flow rate of such a tower would conservatively be in the thousands of tons per second, and the air leaving the tower would be moving at upwards of 200 MPH. He calculated such things as the fresh water yield of the "rain" inside the tower and the hydropower available from letting it fall down pipes, but the real yield is the airflow itself. I calculated the power available from the moving air, and with (what seemed to me to be) reasonable assumptions about efficiency I got the number of 22 GIGAWATTS. From one tower.
For reference, the total nameplate generating capacity of the generators in the USA is a mere 754 GW, according to the Department of Energy. This means that 40 of these towers, arrayed along our coasts or around the Carribean, could replace every watt from every generator currently feeding the US electrical grid... and then some. They'd also make a hell of a lot of fresh water, and cool off the surface waters somewhat (a boon for heat-stressed coral reefs).
There's a lot more ocean out there than just our coasts, and it's all getting warmer. Tapping energy off it would not only replace fossil fuels directly, it would also do some global-warming abatement by dumping heat above some 8 miles of atmosphere where it has an easier time escaping. I think we could do a lot worse than checking this out in detail again, and if it would work, pushing it like hell.
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