BTW: Stefan's law has nothing to do with the color of an object. A perfect blackbody has a emissivity of 1 but this has nothing to do with color.
If an object only gets rid of heat only through electromagentic radiation, it's emissivity is one (this is a perfect blackbody), if it gets rid of heat through other means, the emissivity will be something less than one. Color is not relevent . . . radiation of heat is.
Note that for very hot objects, other methods of getting rid of heat can be assumed to be negligible (e.g. stars) and one may assume an emmisivity of one.
Speaking of overlapping channels and consuming large sections of the 2.4 Ghz bandwidth, is there any Ez way to identify what other things may interfere with WiFi on a ceratain channel or channels (e.g. 2.4 Ghz cordless phone, wireless headphones, etc) or is it really just a crapshoot and one has to search for open bandwidth through trial and error?
Uh, it doesn't "feel free" when it costs $20 to download the journal article . . . the link is only to the abstract. The full article is $20 . . . thus the lay person who is not willing to pay $20 for the satisfaction of idle curiousity only has the interpretation of the article by the journalist to depend on . . . and that really doesn't provide enough information to draw independent conclusions or even agree or disagree with the journalist's interpretation of the original study.
At high speeds would the "ripples on their skins" be what may cause the "shrill" (quoted from the article) sounds?
I figure that most of the sounds that you cite are probably somewhat similar to the sounds of a conventional train . . . with the exceptions of power supply hum and perhaps the pitch as a function of speed . . . which leads me to exactly your same question . . . how fast was the mag-lev going with respect to the conventional train?
I think that one must consider who they polled to know if the poll is valid or not . . .
If they polled people living in a city with a lot of commuter trains, then these people might rate the mag-lev more annoying than the conventional trains that they are already accustomed to.
If they polled people living in an area without any trains and the people weren't used to conventional train sounds, perhaps they would rate the sounds of mag-lev's and conventional trains equally annoying or more close to equally annoying than the previous group.
Characterizing the difference between these two group may help identify how much of the results of this poll are due to people not liking the idea or sound of any trains near them and how much of the dislike is specifically due to the sound of mag-lev trains.
Additionally, I think that the results would be significantly different for those that may live in cities that would benefit from mag-lev's and those that live in small towns that high speed mag-levs may pass through without stopping (One may have a more negative opinion about the sound of a mag-lev if the sound does not have any associated benefit for the individual)
Perhaps the most impartial group to sample would be a group in a city with no trains and no plans to get a mag-lev in the future . . . but then who really cares about these people anyway (with respect to the sound of a mag-lev that they will never have to deal with on a regular basis)?
Unfortunately this article, like so many others, draws conclusions from the data without giving the reader enough information to draw his or her own conclusions or even agree or disagree with the author.
I agree . . . I wish there was more of J. Jona Jameson (The editor) in the first movie . . . I honestly think that if he had more screentime, he would have stolen the show.
"PAAAARKERRRR!!!!!!!!!!!!!!"
I remember seeing a documentary several years ago in which the first steam engines were considered scary "fire breathing metal dragons that crawled up the hillside . . . " Many people would not go near them. . .
Edison marched men with lightbulbs on their heads through a parade in New York . . . this scared the willy's out of many people because they associated light with fire and thought that these mens' heads were on fire . . .
As new technology becomes familiar, these things become less disturbing and finally commonplace. I assume that the same would happen with sound from mag-lev's . . .
Anyone know why mag-lev's are noisy? I was one of the people that thought that these trains would be quiet
Apparently they don't record the sound when they show these trains on Discovery Channel or PBS because they're always whisper quiet in the documentaries. . . .
Mach = Speed of Sound, but speed of sound changes depending on air density/pressure (altitude), temperature, and absolute humidity.
When someone says Mach 7, is that at sea level and STP (standard temperature and pressure {1 atm, 25C)) or is that at the altitude and conditions of the air through which the craft is flying (e.g. 30,000 ft, -25C)?
Re:Does fair use widely exist anymore?
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Free Culture
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· Score: 1
What blows my mind is that it is legal for a person making an editorial or a video for teaching a film class to use excerpts from a video tape copy of a film (this is fair uses as long as the clips are short), but if the same film is CSS'ed on a DVD and the DVD is used as the source, it's illegal for the same person to copy this same clip of the same film for the same purpose . . .
The DVD is digital and has been copy protected so using it as the source would be a violation of the DMCA
Wonder when MS will start bundling search technology in the OS?
Even with the EU ruling against them for bundling Windows Media Player with the OS, they could go ahead and tie in their search engine and it will be years before the appeal of the EU case is completed.
Even though the ruling already happen, with the length of an appeal (7 years according to some estimates), it could be too little too late on search engine bundling . . .
Rockets were an easy (ok, relatively easy) and effective way to compete in the space race. Military rockets were already in existance . . . the first US manned space launches were via Redstone Rockets combined with upper stages of Loki rockets (military technology). Why reinvent the wheel during the space race when you can go for incremental improvement on existing technology faster and easier?
If the USA sat on its hands designing SCRAM/RAM/InsertYourFavoriteSpacecraftPropulsionHe re they would have been on the ground still doing the engineering while Soviets were orbiting the globe in a Space Station.
Now the situation is very different . . . the cold war is over, our cold war technology is becoming old, dated, unreliable and obsolete. We're no longer in a race to the moon, develop reusable spacecraft, InsertYourFavoriteColdWarTechnologyRaceHere.
Fair use = Documentary, satire, or lawyers
on
Free Culture
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· Score: 3, Insightful
My favorite anecdote, if one could be said to stand out, comes from a film maker documenting an opera company. When the camera caught a snippet of the stagehands watching the Simpsons with the sound turned down, the director wanted to add a four-second clip to the movie. Matt Groening said "Yes." The lawyers said it was clearly fair use. But Fox's executives responded with the kind of obscenity that doesn't upset the FCC: pay us $10,000. The clip didn't make the film because the director couldn't afford to go head-to-head with the Fox legal department.
What a sad ancedote that shows how the conglomerates undermine the creativity and quality of new content. It seems that if it's not a research article . . . you better claim you're making an editorial or a satire (two well protected examples of fair use) or you better have a team of lawyers on retainer.
Does fair use widely exist anymore?
on
Free Culture
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· Score: 5, Insightful
I find it tragic that what may have been assumed to be fair use a few decades ago . . . is now still protected by fair use, but now one needs an army of lawyers to protect their fair use claim.
My personal thought is that this is an irrational fear stemming from the popularity of home printers, video editing software, and the internet (all of which weren't easily available 20 years ago); it is now much easier for someone to "fairly use" copyrighted material in their own work. In the opinion of the media conglomerates this "devalues" their intellectual property so rather than allow fair use to proceed legally, they fight it in hopes that most of the little guys will just give up trying or cower in fear of the onslaught of lawyers.
The rise of the political Web also is starting to tilt the demographics of power. The tech-savvy, many of them young, gain a voice and can move masses. Already, groups such as MoveOn are drawing on their supporters not just for money and political support but also for skills in video, networking, and even software design.
As the techonologies of the net become more and more mainstream, one of the big benefits that I see is the leveraging of internet technologies to bring together smaller parties and groups that would otherwise be marginalized. In a two party system where the deck is definately stacked for the mainstream (e.g. minimum poll numbers required to participate in a presidential debate, Minimum precent of votes in the previous prez. election to qualify for matching federal funds, it is illegal in some states to register as anything other than democrat/republican, etc.) The internet is that it can be used to help organize smaller marginalized grassroots campaigns without the need for a huge budget for publicity/marketing.
Whether one agrees or disagrees with the politics of these groups, making it easier for them to get their word out forces may force the two major candidates to take a stance on issues that would rather not talk about (e.g. abortion in 2000 election, deficit during Perot timeframe, etc.). . . and this makes for a healthier political system in general.
The point is, I wonder why things like chipsets are still so closely guarded secrets. Can you people imagine what the world would be like if Intel had made the x86 CPUs with a proprietary, closely-guarded SECRET ISA, that you could only program for if you signed an NDA? If Intel had done that, Linux probably wouldn't even exist!!
Not that surprising really . . . I think that instead of open source "market" one might say open standard.
IBM's PC was an open standard and that's a large part of the reason why it dominated the market . . .
It's similar to the VHS VCR. Betamax had better quality but VHS was an open standard, Betamax disappeared as the market became dominated by VHS VCR's. Sony (the creator of Betamax) gave up and joined the VHS crowd. Similar arguments against closed standards can be made against zip drives and microchannel and a host of other things. (Note that zip licensed their technology to others . . . but at that point it was too little to late, the CD rom crushed them from a storage capacity side and they never became mainstream enough to replace the floppy)
It took years for competitors to copy the PC, and now, perhaps the BIOS will soon be commoditized much to the chagrin of the closed standard folks. To stay ahead of the game we may see the BIOS companies try to put more general features (good) in their BIOS's or partner with an 800 pound gorilla (like Microsoft) and try to tie future releases and features of their BIOS to a Microsoft operating system (bad).
If the technology can be copied or duplicated with "relative" ease (relative = an amount of effort less than the potential upside) it probably doesn't make sense to create a closed standard . . . unless you're an 800 pound gorilla (Microsoft) . . . and even then, you have to stand on your toes (Linux-piranha).
You would need longer tubes to the condensor (heat exchanger in the back of the frig) and additional refrigerant to fill the tubes. And it would take a professional to install it.
If you ever wanted to move the frig it would be a pain.
The frig would steal heat from your house and send it outside everytime you opened the door (not good in a climate with cold outdoors).
You would have to keep the outdoor condensor relatively clean.
You may need a refrigerant pump depending on your specific installation.
It's just not done and you should be penalized for thinking outside the box.
Longer answer: If the cost is the same for a M$ system and a Linux system, the economic value of Linux will be at least to some part exploited by the hardware vendor. Perhaps with shrinking margins in the hardware business this is at least some of the appeal of Linux systems to hardware vendors. I have no idea whether Linux systems are normally cheaper than their Windows counterparts, but I think that it is interesting to determine where along the hardware system value chain the economic value of Linux is exploited.
This is not to say that having Linux preinstalled on systems is not a great thing, but there is certainly an economy to doing this . . .
If the same system is available with MS-Windows or Linux, will the Linux system be cheaper (No M$ License fee)?
My cynical bet is that the systems will cost the same . . .
This thing is sooo long, if it doesn't have anything to do with mutated humans in tights saving the world from utter destruction . ..please let me know so I don't waste my time.
Actually, my parents (Duke power customer in NC) used to have a small box installed on their heat pump. It allowed Duke power to turn off their AC for (if I remember right) about 5-10 minutes. I'm not sure how Duke power sent a signal to the box, but they essentially used these boxes to creat a roving 5-10 minute air conditioner blackout (I assume that they turn off hundreds or thousands of customers at a time) during times of peak loading. My parents get a small monthly ($2(?)) rate credit for this. I'm not sure that this is still in use (This black box was installed in the 1980's) or if it was part of a pilot program, but it sounds a lot like the idea that you suggest.
I see what you mean about operational fault . . . I agree that the larger scale blackout was an unmitigated fault that should not have happened. I assume the people that analyzed the system never considered this potential failure mode and did not address it . . . . hence ridiculous, costly, and unecessary blackouts in regions that one would have expected to be unaffected.
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If an object only gets rid of heat only through electromagentic radiation, it's emissivity is one (this is a perfect blackbody), if it gets rid of heat through other means, the emissivity will be something less than one. Color is not relevent . . . radiation of heat is.
Note that for very hot objects, other methods of getting rid of heat can be assumed to be negligible (e.g. stars) and one may assume an emmisivity of one.
Speaking of overlapping channels and consuming large sections of the 2.4 Ghz bandwidth, is there any Ez way to identify what other things may interfere with WiFi on a ceratain channel or channels (e.g. 2.4 Ghz cordless phone, wireless headphones, etc) or is it really just a crapshoot and one has to search for open bandwidth through trial and error?
Are 1,6, and 11 the only channels that don't overlap?
Kapton is a polyamide film duPont product that's been around for some 30 years . . .
I wonder if its the same metalized film used in some automobile window heat shields (or might that be metalized biaxially oriented nylon film)?
Uh, it doesn't "feel free" when it costs $20 to download the journal article . . . the link is only to the abstract. The full article is $20 . . . thus the lay person who is not willing to pay $20 for the satisfaction of idle curiousity only has the interpretation of the article by the journalist to depend on . . . and that really doesn't provide enough information to draw independent conclusions or even agree or disagree with the journalist's interpretation of the original study.
I figure that most of the sounds that you cite are probably somewhat similar to the sounds of a conventional train . . . with the exceptions of power supply hum and perhaps the pitch as a function of speed . . . which leads me to exactly your same question . . . how fast was the mag-lev going with respect to the conventional train?
If they polled people living in a city with a lot of commuter trains, then these people might rate the mag-lev more annoying than the conventional trains that they are already accustomed to.
If they polled people living in an area without any trains and the people weren't used to conventional train sounds, perhaps they would rate the sounds of mag-lev's and conventional trains equally annoying or more close to equally annoying than the previous group.
Characterizing the difference between these two group may help identify how much of the results of this poll are due to people not liking the idea or sound of any trains near them and how much of the dislike is specifically due to the sound of mag-lev trains.
Additionally, I think that the results would be significantly different for those that may live in cities that would benefit from mag-lev's and those that live in small towns that high speed mag-levs may pass through without stopping (One may have a more negative opinion about the sound of a mag-lev if the sound does not have any associated benefit for the individual)
Perhaps the most impartial group to sample would be a group in a city with no trains and no plans to get a mag-lev in the future . . . but then who really cares about these people anyway (with respect to the sound of a mag-lev that they will never have to deal with on a regular basis)?
Unfortunately this article, like so many others, draws conclusions from the data without giving the reader enough information to draw his or her own conclusions or even agree or disagree with the author.
I agree . . . I wish there was more of J. Jona Jameson (The editor) in the first movie . . . I honestly think that if he had more screentime, he would have stolen the show. "PAAAARKERRRR!!!!!!!!!!!!!!"
Edison marched men with lightbulbs on their heads through a parade in New York . . . this scared the willy's out of many people because they associated light with fire and thought that these mens' heads were on fire . . .
As new technology becomes familiar, these things become less disturbing and finally commonplace. I assume that the same would happen with sound from mag-lev's . . .
Anyone know why mag-lev's are noisy? I was one of the people that thought that these trains would be quiet Apparently they don't record the sound when they show these trains on Discovery Channel or PBS because they're always whisper quiet in the documentaries. . . .
If I buy a lot of Twinkies, will someone use this information against me when I try to buy life insurance?
If I buy a lot of cough syrup, is some doctor going to call me, or is the DEA going to knock on my door?
If I buy 50 copies of catcher in the rye and a semi-automatic rifle, are the men in black going to take me away?
Granted, some of this can be tracked now, but if we make this easier, do I need to think about what message I'm sending before I buy anything?
Mach = Speed of Sound, but speed of sound changes depending on air density/pressure (altitude), temperature, and absolute humidity.
When someone says Mach 7, is that at sea level and STP (standard temperature and pressure {1 atm, 25C)) or is that at the altitude and conditions of the air through which the craft is flying (e.g. 30,000 ft, -25C)?
The DVD is digital and has been copy protected so using it as the source would be a violation of the DMCA
Even with the EU ruling against them for bundling Windows Media Player with the OS, they could go ahead and tie in their search engine and it will be years before the appeal of the EU case is completed.
Even though the ruling already happen, with the length of an appeal (7 years according to some estimates), it could be too little too late on search engine bundling . . .
Rockets were an easy (ok, relatively easy) and effective way to compete in the space race. Military rockets were already in existance . . . the first US manned space launches were via Redstone Rockets combined with upper stages of Loki rockets (military technology). Why reinvent the wheel during the space race when you can go for incremental improvement on existing technology faster and easier?
If the USA sat on its hands designing SCRAM/RAM/InsertYourFavoriteSpacecraftPropulsionHe re they would have been on the ground still doing the engineering while Soviets were orbiting the globe in a Space Station.
Now the situation is very different . . . the cold war is over, our cold war technology is becoming old, dated, unreliable and obsolete. We're no longer in a race to the moon, develop reusable spacecraft, InsertYourFavoriteColdWarTechnologyRaceHere.
What a sad ancedote that shows how the conglomerates undermine the creativity and quality of new content. It seems that if it's not a research article . . . you better claim you're making an editorial or a satire (two well protected examples of fair use) or you better have a team of lawyers on retainer.
My personal thought is that this is an irrational fear stemming from the popularity of home printers, video editing software, and the internet (all of which weren't easily available 20 years ago); it is now much easier for someone to "fairly use" copyrighted material in their own work. In the opinion of the media conglomerates this "devalues" their intellectual property so rather than allow fair use to proceed legally, they fight it in hopes that most of the little guys will just give up trying or cower in fear of the onslaught of lawyers.
Oops . . .you're absolutely right . . . I should have said "from the consumer market"
As the techonologies of the net become more and more mainstream, one of the big benefits that I see is the leveraging of internet technologies to bring together smaller parties and groups that would otherwise be marginalized. In a two party system where the deck is definately stacked for the mainstream (e.g. minimum poll numbers required to participate in a presidential debate, Minimum precent of votes in the previous prez. election to qualify for matching federal funds, it is illegal in some states to register as anything other than democrat/republican, etc.) The internet is that it can be used to help organize smaller marginalized grassroots campaigns without the need for a huge budget for publicity/marketing.
Whether one agrees or disagrees with the politics of these groups, making it easier for them to get their word out forces may force the two major candidates to take a stance on issues that would rather not talk about (e.g. abortion in 2000 election, deficit during Perot timeframe, etc.). . . and this makes for a healthier political system in general.
Not that surprising really . . . I think that instead of open source "market" one might say open standard.
IBM's PC was an open standard and that's a large part of the reason why it dominated the market . . .
It's similar to the VHS VCR. Betamax had better quality but VHS was an open standard, Betamax disappeared as the market became dominated by VHS VCR's. Sony (the creator of Betamax) gave up and joined the VHS crowd. Similar arguments against closed standards can be made against zip drives and microchannel and a host of other things. (Note that zip licensed their technology to others . . . but at that point it was too little to late, the CD rom crushed them from a storage capacity side and they never became mainstream enough to replace the floppy)
It took years for competitors to copy the PC, and now, perhaps the BIOS will soon be commoditized much to the chagrin of the closed standard folks. To stay ahead of the game we may see the BIOS companies try to put more general features (good) in their BIOS's or partner with an 800 pound gorilla (like Microsoft) and try to tie future releases and features of their BIOS to a Microsoft operating system (bad). If the technology can be copied or duplicated with "relative" ease (relative = an amount of effort less than the potential upside) it probably doesn't make sense to create a closed standard . . . unless you're an 800 pound gorilla (Microsoft) . . . and even then, you have to stand on your toes (Linux-piranha).
If you ever wanted to move the frig it would be a pain.
The frig would steal heat from your house and send it outside everytime you opened the door (not good in a climate with cold outdoors).
You would have to keep the outdoor condensor relatively clean.
You may need a refrigerant pump depending on your specific installation.
It's just not done and you should be penalized for thinking outside the box.
Longer answer: If the cost is the same for a M$ system and a Linux system, the economic value of Linux will be at least to some part exploited by the hardware vendor. Perhaps with shrinking margins in the hardware business this is at least some of the appeal of Linux systems to hardware vendors. I have no idea whether Linux systems are normally cheaper than their Windows counterparts, but I think that it is interesting to determine where along the hardware system value chain the economic value of Linux is exploited.
This is not to say that having Linux preinstalled on systems is not a great thing, but there is certainly an economy to doing this . . .
If the same system is available with MS-Windows or Linux, will the Linux system be cheaper (No M$ License fee)? My cynical bet is that the systems will cost the same . . .
And Lasers . . . its gotta have lasers. . .
I see what you mean about operational fault . . . I agree that the larger scale blackout was an unmitigated fault that should not have happened. I assume the people that analyzed the system never considered this potential failure mode and did not address it . . . . hence ridiculous, costly, and unecessary blackouts in regions that one would have expected to be unaffected.