Re-Reply: Yes, efficiency is the target, and the collection of heat exchangers and these devices does not sound particularly efficient to me. But then again, peltiers and compressors are also inefficient, so there is a lot of room to improve on them.
The article talks about a temperature difference: The see a 22 F (12.22.. C for sane persons) difference between its energized state and its unenergized state.
So, if it is sitting at room temperature (20C), and you power it up, its temperature raises to 32 C. If you then let it cool down to room temperature and then turn it off, its temperature will cool to 8C.
With heat exchangers to dump heat into it when it is cold, and strip heat off it when it is hot, you could stack these devices to provide whatever differential you needed, at least until the material becomes too hot or cold for the phenomenon to work.
Notes: if the degrees symbles do not show up, you will have to imagine them. And a difference of 22 degrees F is not -5 C.
When electricity is applied, the molecules become highly ordered and the material gives off heat and becomes colder. When the electricity is turned off, the material reverts to its disordered state and absorbs heat.
When a thing is giving off heat, we say it is "hotter": it has a higher temperature. When a thing is absorbing heat, we say it is "colder": it has a lower temperature.
You know, the sort of stuff they showed you in Primary School!!!!
No, it is because using BE (before Christ) or AD (in the year of our lord) is factually incorrect.
Jesus was not born in either 1CE or 1 BCE ( both of these being Ordinal numbers, and there being no 'zero' year) Scriptural evidence points to 2BCE (30 years prior to his baptism in 29CE), Many scholars use Josephus and lunar eclipses to arrive at 4CE, others link the Star of Bethlehem with a comet that appeared in 7(?)CE (ignoring lots of biblical evidence in the process!)
Interesting point: One of the reasons for copyrights (and patents too) is to reduce reliance on trade secrets. Reveal your secrets and get (limited) government protection for them.
Remembering things like that can make patents and copyrights make sense. Not the current implementations, mind you.....
This is interesting. If Ms. mathematician produces a novel-length mathematical model that predicts airflow over North America with unprecedented accuracy, I would like for copyright to exist in that mathematical model. It is a useful science, will be very useful to all humanity when it hits the public domain, and she should become rich on it, as thanks for her useful work.
However, there is no real difference between her model and E=mc^2, or G=Mm/r^2 - just complexity - a continuous scale of complexity, as well as accuracy (remember, E=mc^2 tells us that G=Mm/r^2 is wrong!) - who is to say that this deserves a copyright, but that doesn't?
Just an addendum: You can use the music to "Happy Birthday" - that is a folk tune, and anonymous' copyrights have expired. (Just be sure to credit the music under the name of that forgotten folk tune.)
All that it copyrighted are the words. All 5 of them: "Happy birthday to you... dear _________"
If you create something, you have a choice whether to show somebody else. You have the choice to distribute it, or not to distribute it.
Once you give a copy to somebody else, then, for all intents and purposes, you no longer have any control over it.
Copyright gives you an artificial limited monopoly over distribution - nothing more - simply because this encourages persons to create and distribute works. Once works have been distributed, copyright has done its work. It is then a liability to society.
Copyright's purpose is to increase the amount of works in the public domain. Anything that reduces the flow of works to the public domain (like copyright extensions) is against the purpose of copyright.
(With regard to software - for any protection under copyright, I believe that the source code for the work should have to be released. Otherwise, copyright makes no sense, as the works have very limited use when they hit the public domain.)
No, it means everyone who might ever visit a page that includes a link to your page must have already turned it off. Just how to achieve that is left as an exercise for the reader.
Yes, they are as large as the ship is, and are filled to within a meter or two of the waterline.
I don't know exactly how much nitrogen gas is used, but it can't be too much, because this method is being used.
And there is nothing toxic about nitrogen - it doesn't matter if even a considerable amount leaks into the living quarters - air is 70% of the stuff after all. The danger is if you stepped into a room that is 100% nitrogen (0% oxygen) you do not notice anything is wrong until you collapse unconscious. If you are lucky, you notice that you can't see very well a second or so before that. But standard cabin ventilation will take care of that.
They do, but they are much more careful about it. The days of one biologist saying "Hey, these big Hawaiian toads should clean up that beetle problem pretty good!", throwing a couple in a box and shipping them are (thankfully) gone. But, after an awful lot of testing that no native animals will be seriously harmed, predator animals (usually insects) are regularly used.
I guess this depends on how accurate the BBC cop show "The Bill" is. Strangely, the show tends to support these numbers, while showing how they may be misleading. Very few cases that they portray are actually solved by CCTV footage. But leads gained from examining CCTV are often shown as being crucial to investigations - Putting (or not putting) a person of interest at a certain place, or showing that the statements given were in fact incorrect, leading them to question further. In few of these cases would CCTV evidence actually show up in court.
Of course, the show could be propaganda in the hands of those who want to retain or expand the CCTV network. But in the past "The Bill" has been regarded well by those who are involved in police forces around the world.
Look, this sounds like some kind of rather draconian DRM!
If the GPLONLY code is used to restrict the performance or capability of code that is not released under the GPL, then the GPLONLY code needs to be removed forthwith - I Cannot see how it is compatible with the GPL itself, or with the philosophy of Open Source. Really, isn't "hidden interfaces" what we all hate about Microsoft, and were really annoyed to find in OSX last week??
DRM - Just Say No!!!
In the sort term, the code that checks this flag should be changed to just "return TRUE;", and eventually, all traces of it removed. What were they thinking??
Yes, it has long been known that the sun would expand beyond the present-day orbit of the earth. But this is asking what would happen to the earth's orbit in that time. Would the decaying mass of the sun allow planet earth to escape? That seemed like a likely scenario. The maths presented here suggest that the earth would be caught in the tenious outer atmosphere of the decaying sun, where friction would slow it down and it would be captured.
Still, as others have noted, the Milky Way and Andromeda galaxies will pass through each other in some 2 billion years. Is there a young star with our name on it, calmly stabilising, ready to snatch us away from our then elderly sun? There is also a large cloud of hydrogen heading our way, with a similar timeframe. What is that going to do?
May i just point out that the 'flash point' is the temperature where a the substance will begin combusting in air at a pressure of 1 atmosphere.
The flash point at.000001 atmospheres might just be a little different. There ain't a lot of air at that altitude.
[edit: added another few zeros. I'm guessing]
Because if you go out to see it tomorrow evening, using calculations by the Russian heavens-above site, you will fail to see it as described. What you will see could be interesting. The many pieces could show up as an interesting flare, or nothing will be large enough to reflect enough sunlight to allow you to see it.
Was there a sat in orbit? - Confirmed something in orbit by outside observers
Was this a billion dollar spy sat or just left over junk planned for target practice?
This satellite (which was identified first by the independent satellite observers: I don't think they ever confirmed which bird it was) has been up for years. They announced that they had lost contact with it soon after it was launched years ago - amateur astronomers then id'd it
Was this a known bad launch vehicle just tossed up as a target?
See above: this thing has been orbiting for years
Was this an old sat intentionally moved to this lower orbit to use as a target?
No, see above. The bird's orbit has been slowly degrading since launch, as is usual if it's thrusters aren't keeping it up to speed.
Was it hit by the missile or was this all theater?
We will see. You can bet that those observers are checking it out as we squeal - they will tell us if it is gone. Expect reports of what the debris cloud looks like over the next few days. You can do so yourself, via heavens-above.com (a Russian site!)
Did the sat have a self destruct and the missile mis it by a mile like one of the former tests?
If so, they would probably have triggered it soon after launch. Or would have told nobody about it: they sure needed to tell China what was about before launching an ICBM-like thing into near-space! A silent self-destruct would have gone almost unnoticed, apart from the missing bird.
Was this some show to cover some stranger event such as launching to orbit from sea?
Now you are tinfoil-hatting! Why would they need to?
They made a show of this for a reason!!!
Yes, that is probably true. This failing satellite was a heaven-sent (groan) opportunity to do a satellite kill of their own without spreading a cloud of debris in the already crowded NEO, and with a good cover story. But the cover story was real - plots by amateurs showed reentry late February, early march.
DRM is about Alice/Bob/Eve cryptography where Bob and Eve are the same person. All DRM tries to work by hiding the Implementation - Universally, it fails. Open source is about revealing the implementation.
It's worse than that on their 3G wireless: Depending on how much you pay, it's between 1.5 and.5 cents per Kilobyte. $15,000 / Mb For the Loss. Oh, my latest bill just recommended that I connect my phone to my notebook as a modem. Just in time for Windows to update to IE7, with my luck!
As an Australian who recently cam through a major cyclone (Larry), I too am surprised to learn that Americans were installing mobile phone sites _without_ backup power. If anyone is complaining about the cost to retrofit, then go complain to the person who installed the site without it in the first place!! (Oh, that was you too? Poor little idiot.) There was major problems with the telephone systems. The landline systems had 24 hour battery backups, but beyond that, they had to rely on workers delivering gen sets to recharge the batteries. Delivery of these was made difficult by flooding in many cases. There were some cellphone sites out, and, with the large amount of relief work going on, the remaining ones were often congested. (CDMA and GSM were working then). All told, though, everything was done very well by all concerned. No doubt lessons were learned, but, well, lets go deliver a good, solid larting to anyone who decided _not_ to provide backup power to all telecoms stuff!
Slashdot Mirror
Re-Reply: Yes, efficiency is the target, and the collection of heat exchangers and these devices does not sound particularly efficient to me. But then again, peltiers and compressors are also inefficient, so there is a lot of room to improve on them.
The article talks about a temperature difference: The see a 22 F (12.22.. C for sane persons) difference between its energized state and its unenergized state.
So, if it is sitting at room temperature (20C), and you power it up, its temperature raises to 32 C. If you then let it cool down to room temperature and then turn it off, its temperature will cool to 8C.
With heat exchangers to dump heat into it when it is cold, and strip heat off it when it is hot, you could stack these devices to provide whatever differential you needed, at least until the material becomes too hot or cold for the phenomenon to work.
Notes: if the degrees symbles do not show up, you will have to imagine them. And a difference of 22 degrees F is not -5 C.
It is anti vaporware: it is refrigeration without vapors!! No more e-vapor-ators!
When a thing is giving off heat, we say it is "hotter": it has a higher temperature. When a thing is absorbing heat, we say it is "colder": it has a lower temperature.
You know, the sort of stuff they showed you in Primary School!!!!
Stupid chip-packet doctoratates.
No, it is because using BE (before Christ) or AD (in the year of our lord) is factually incorrect.
Jesus was not born in either 1CE or 1 BCE ( both of these being Ordinal numbers, and there being no 'zero' year) Scriptural evidence points to 2BCE (30 years prior to his baptism in 29CE), Many scholars use Josephus and lunar eclipses to arrive at 4CE, others link the Star of Bethlehem with a comet that appeared in 7(?)CE (ignoring lots of biblical evidence in the process!)
Interesting point: One of the reasons for copyrights (and patents too) is to reduce reliance on trade secrets. Reveal your secrets and get (limited) government protection for them.
Remembering things like that can make patents and copyrights make sense. Not the current implementations, mind you.....
(I'm commenting a bit much in this discussion)
This is interesting. If Ms. mathematician produces a novel-length mathematical model that predicts airflow over North America with unprecedented accuracy, I would like for copyright to exist in that mathematical model. It is a useful science, will be very useful to all humanity when it hits the public domain, and she should become rich on it, as thanks for her useful work.
However, there is no real difference between her model and E=mc^2, or G=Mm/r^2 - just complexity - a continuous scale of complexity, as well as accuracy (remember, E=mc^2 tells us that G=Mm/r^2 is wrong!) - who is to say that this deserves a copyright, but that doesn't?
Just an addendum: You can use the music to "Happy Birthday" - that is a folk tune, and anonymous' copyrights have expired. (Just be sure to credit the music under the name of that forgotten folk tune.)
All that it copyrighted are the words. All 5 of them:
"Happy birthday to you... dear _________"
How ingenious.
If you create something, you have a choice whether to show somebody else. You have the choice to distribute it, or not to distribute it.
Once you give a copy to somebody else, then, for all intents and purposes, you no longer have any control over it.
Copyright gives you an artificial limited monopoly over distribution - nothing more - simply because this encourages persons to create and distribute works. Once works have been distributed, copyright has done its work. It is then a liability to society.
Copyright's purpose is to increase the amount of works in the public domain. Anything that reduces the flow of works to the public domain (like copyright extensions) is against the purpose of copyright.
(With regard to software - for any protection under copyright, I believe that the source code for the work should have to be released. Otherwise, copyright makes no sense, as the works have very limited use when they hit the public domain.)
No, it means everyone who might ever visit a page that includes a link to your page must have already turned it off. Just how to achieve that is left as an exercise for the reader.
Yes, they are as large as the ship is, and are filled to within a meter or two of the waterline.
I don't know exactly how much nitrogen gas is used, but it can't be too much, because this method is being used.
And there is nothing toxic about nitrogen - it doesn't matter if even a considerable amount leaks into the living quarters - air is 70% of the stuff after all. The danger is if you stepped into a room that is 100% nitrogen (0% oxygen) you do not notice anything is wrong until you collapse unconscious. If you are lucky, you notice that you can't see very well a second or so before that.
But standard cabin ventilation will take care of that.
Another way that has been suggested is to bubble pure nitrogen through the ballast water.
It purges the water of oxygen, killing any marine life. It also has the benefit of stopping corrosion.
It does have the downside of making the ships hull an instant death (asphyxiation) hazard.
It was imported to feed on the native "cane beetles" causing issues in the sugar plantations.
As the other comments stated, it was not a success.
They do, but they are much more careful about it. The days of one biologist saying "Hey, these big Hawaiian toads should clean up that beetle problem pretty good!", throwing a couple in a box and shipping them are (thankfully) gone.
But, after an awful lot of testing that no native animals will be seriously harmed, predator animals (usually insects) are regularly used.
I guess this depends on how accurate the BBC cop show "The Bill" is.
Strangely, the show tends to support these numbers, while showing how they may be misleading.
Very few cases that they portray are actually solved by CCTV footage. But leads gained from examining CCTV are often shown as being crucial to investigations - Putting (or not putting) a person of interest at a certain place, or showing that the statements given were in fact incorrect, leading them to question further. In few of these cases would CCTV evidence actually show up in court.
Of course, the show could be propaganda in the hands of those who want to retain or expand the CCTV network. But in the past "The Bill" has been regarded well by those who are involved in police forces around the world.
Ah, but what will happen to the gold standard when someone works out that we can make more gold by fusing iron and iodine?
Look, this sounds like some kind of rather draconian DRM!
If the GPLONLY code is used to restrict the performance or capability of code that is not released under the GPL, then the GPLONLY code needs to be removed forthwith - I Cannot see how it is compatible with the GPL itself, or with the philosophy of Open Source. Really, isn't "hidden interfaces" what we all hate about Microsoft, and were really annoyed to find in OSX last week??
DRM - Just Say No!!!
In the sort term, the code that checks this flag should be changed to just "return TRUE;", and eventually, all traces of it removed. What were they thinking??
Yes, it has long been known that the sun would expand beyond the present-day orbit of the earth. But this is asking what would happen to the earth's orbit in that time. Would the decaying mass of the sun allow planet earth to escape? That seemed like a likely scenario. The maths presented here suggest that the earth would be caught in the tenious outer atmosphere of the decaying sun, where friction would slow it down and it would be captured.
Still, as others have noted, the Milky Way and Andromeda galaxies will pass through each other in some 2 billion years. Is there a young star with our name on it, calmly stabilising, ready to snatch us away from our then elderly sun? There is also a large cloud of hydrogen heading our way, with a similar timeframe. What is that going to do?
Time will tell.
May i just point out that the 'flash point' is the temperature where a the substance will begin combusting in air at a pressure of 1 atmosphere. The flash point at .000001 atmospheres might just be a little different. There ain't a lot of air at that altitude.
[edit: added another few zeros. I'm guessing]
Because if you go out to see it tomorrow evening, using calculations by the Russian heavens-above site, you will fail to see it as described.
What you will see could be interesting. The many pieces could show up as an interesting flare, or nothing will be large enough to reflect enough sunlight to allow you to see it.
[tin foil hat = on]
So what lies were told?
Was there a sat in orbit? - Confirmed something in orbit by outside observers
Was this a billion dollar spy sat or just left over junk planned for target practice?
This satellite (which was identified first by the independent satellite observers: I don't think they ever confirmed which bird it was) has been up for years. They announced that they had lost contact with it soon after it was launched years ago - amateur astronomers then id'd it
Was this a known bad launch vehicle just tossed up as a target?
See above: this thing has been orbiting for years
Was this an old sat intentionally moved to this lower orbit to use as a target?
No, see above. The bird's orbit has been slowly degrading since launch, as is usual if it's thrusters aren't keeping it up to speed.
Was it hit by the missile or was this all theater?
We will see. You can bet that those observers are checking it out as we squeal - they will tell us if it is gone. Expect reports of what the debris cloud looks like over the next few days. You can do so yourself, via heavens-above.com (a Russian site!)
Did the sat have a self destruct and the missile mis it by a mile like one of the former tests?
If so, they would probably have triggered it soon after launch. Or would have told nobody about it: they sure needed to tell China what was about before launching an ICBM-like thing into near-space! A silent self-destruct would have gone almost unnoticed, apart from the missing bird.
Was this some show to cover some stranger event such as launching to orbit from sea?
Now you are tinfoil-hatting! Why would they need to?
They made a show of this for a reason!!!
Yes, that is probably true. This failing satellite was a heaven-sent (groan) opportunity to do a satellite kill of their own without spreading a cloud of debris in the already crowded NEO, and with a good cover story. But the cover story was real - plots by amateurs showed reentry late February, early march.
[tin foil hat = off] Sure???
You need to go find out what DRM is.
DRM is about Alice/Bob/Eve cryptography where Bob and Eve are the same person. All DRM tries to work by hiding the Implementation - Universally, it fails.
Open source is about revealing the implementation.
OpenDRM. Just say Huh?!
It's worse than that on their 3G wireless: Depending on how much you pay, it's between 1.5 and .5 cents per Kilobyte. $15,000 / Mb For the Loss. Oh, my latest bill just recommended that I connect my phone to my notebook as a modem. Just in time for Windows to update to IE7, with my luck!
As an Australian who recently cam through a major cyclone (Larry), I too am surprised to learn that Americans were installing mobile phone sites _without_ backup power. If anyone is complaining about the cost to retrofit, then go complain to the person who installed the site without it in the first place!! (Oh, that was you too? Poor little idiot.)
There was major problems with the telephone systems. The landline systems had 24 hour battery backups, but beyond that, they had to rely on workers delivering gen sets to recharge the batteries. Delivery of these was made difficult by flooding in many cases.
There were some cellphone sites out, and, with the large amount of relief work going on, the remaining ones were often congested. (CDMA and GSM were working then).
All told, though, everything was done very well by all concerned. No doubt lessons were learned, but, well, lets go deliver a good, solid larting to anyone who decided _not_ to provide backup power to all telecoms stuff!
http://www.olpcnews.com/hardware/keyboard/olpc_patent_infringement_scam.html I like how the Nigerian patent office has an @yahoo email address!! Prepare for things to start getting wierd.