The car's alternator already uses something sort of like this to regulate voltage, it doesn't bother to extract more power at higher RPM because it doesn't need that.
I'll buy it when they produce one... I'd really like to have something quieter than my Honda gas generator, no, I haven't seen one yet. That doesn't mean it's impossible, just not practical in today's industrial framework. I'm not holding my breath waiting for it - I went ahead and bought a practical ICE based generator in the meantime.
Don't know how you would go about verifying these claims, but, these guys claim 800 Watts out at 1/5 gallon of gasoline per hour. If you trust the last link there, a gallon of gasoline contains 36KWh of energy, 1/5 of that is 7.2KWh, giving 11% efficiency if you're getting 800Wh of electricity out while burning 1/5 of a gallon of gas.
Kamen has a pile of Sterling related patents, many centered around more efficient conversion of fuel to mechanical output from the engine. In the past, he has been very cloak and dagger regarding his engine progress (or, at least when I visited DEKA shortly pre-Ginger release, he was). Maybe if you really care, you could approach him and see if he has working models that exceed 11% efficiency.
I develop in Qt for multiple targets. My primary development platform is a Mac, because:
If it works well on the Mac, generally it works well on Windows and Linux, graphic painting performance is slowest on the Mac, by a significant margin
Tools on the Mac (X-Code, command line / gcc, Shark, Activity Monitor) are adequate and pretty easy to use - for true debugging I move over to windows and Visual Studio
If the cross platform.ui looks good on a Mac, it looks good on the other platforms - the reverse is not always true
Generally speaking, if a Qt app is crashing on the Mac, it's something I did wrong in the code - this is not always the case in Windows, especially using MFC, Qt on Windows is a little better
The *nix shell on Mac makes it easier to do things like svn propset and ssh, sure you _can_ do these in Windows, but it's not as straightforward
I already had a Mac for other reasons, and was too lazy to switch (lazy = efficient)
I've never seen the need to install a Windows license on my MacBookPro - for not very much more money, I can just have a cheap Vista box to run my app testing on while I continue developing on the Mac.
So, how did that work out for you, finding answers in ways the prof wasn't teaching, boss wasn't expecting, etc.?
Me, personally, it got me smacked around by about 9/10 "authority figures" that I tried it with. It's a rare individual that doesn't feel threatened by something they don't understand, especially when it makes them feel somehow inferior. I've had the best luck working with doctors who have transcended the post med-school god complex, know that they are secure in their position, and appreciate things that they might use to distinguish them (further) in their field.
That's the necessity as the mother of invention aspect. There are similar thoughts such as: "give a man a good wife and he is happy, give a man a bad wife and he becomes a philosopher."
In addition to pressure and deadlines, you also need resources and some luxury of time - intelligence, knowledge, and usually materials. Early man had pressure and deadlines to get the next meal all the time, he didn't do a lot of invention.
Finance used to be popular... If you think engineering school is a drag, architecture school is much worse, but it's a bit more glamorous.
Whatever she decides to study, she should go ahead and take all the math that her University offers, including an advanced degree or two. Her talent will make it easy, and having the math degrees on paper combined with whatever she studies for fun (drama, education, medicine, polysci, international commerce, whatever) will make her unusually valuable in her field.
Crockett and Tubbs! Seriously, basically noone. I lived down the street from a crackhouse, nice neighborhood except for that one house. Several (like a dozen or so) homeowners would petition the city, the police, the newspaper, and anyone who would listen, and after 15 years of trying the city finally fined the owner for renting 3 units in a single family zoned house. They would arrest people in the house, on a weekly basis at times, for drugs and sometimes prostitution and violent crimes, but nothing really happened. When our car got taken from that neighborhood for a joyride (they busted the window with a brick during a 3am thunderstorm, then popped the steering lock with a screwdriver), the police obligingly recovered it once it was abandoned in a field - didn't notify us for 48 hours while towing/storage fees accrued at $100/day. A lot of people there defend their own homes with guns, it's usually quite effective as a crime deterrent for the whole neighborhood after a home invader is cut in half with a 12 gauge blast.
I lived about two miles from mission control in Taylor Lake Village (Houston) Texas for a couple of years. Women in that neighborhood would commonly make comments like "oh, he'd leave me and the kids before he'd quit that job..." People can really get into the work of space missions, if they have the opportunity.
The million man-years was mostly taken up by the consumers. 4 people in my family, watching 4 2.5 hour movies an average of twice each comes to 80 entertainment consumption hours. Consider the entire world audience, repeat viewings on DVD, etc. and I'd say a million man-years is well within reach.
Yes, PotC gets money in motion, creating jobs, etc., but if that effort were redirected into producing a manned Mars mission, I think we'd have a bit more to show for it - even if a manned Mars mission is a wasteful squandering of resources compared to the current JPL batch of "lean, mean science generating machines."
I think that is the most likely scenario, homo-nextus will likely replace sapiens. Not sure what nextus will look like, probably very similar to us, but different in some unpredictable way that ends up out-competing sapiens.
Or, if you believe Ray Kurzweil, we'll be replaced by our computers.
Well, this is a story about the extinction of humanity. I'm guessing that in 2000 years, PotC won't amount to much other than a few million man-years spent creating and consuming entertainment.
You've never experienced the Miami justice system - car thieves aren't even chased by the cops because the court just kicks them free - the city has to deal with crack houses by fencing them because repeated arrests aren't a deterrent - getting the cops to write tickets for obstructing traffic? Not in the Miami I lived in - the fines are so weak that they don't defray the court costs when the drivers take the tickets to court, even if they do lose. The only tickets I ever saw city cops handing out were for speeding, that at least carries a big fine.
Might actually be easier on the Mars colonists than it was on the American colonists - North American Indians weren't exactly 100% hospitable. Mars colonists will (should) have tremendous backing from the mother country, communication takes hours instead of months, and challenges like solar flares and dust storms are a bit more predictable than treaties forged with a society you don't understand.
I'm not sure that PotC actually creates value, anymore than lowering taxes "creates wealth." A manned expedition to Mars would surely have more valuable tangible spinoffs than action figures and themed clothing....
That's always been in the plan... Hell, they should just loan it out in $7M increments to 100,000 randomly selected people (starting with me), I'm sure we'll repay in full after we've stimulated the economy a bit.
Yep - too bad they chose to take it out on the website, rather than the people abusing the website. Will Canada be making Craigslist responsible for all stolen property fenced in their classifieds next?
Push that up to five nines and you start entering questions of viability. 60,000 individuals spread around the planet might not be able to sustain themselves, especially if they compete for resources with giant North American deer and the new venomous cockroaches of SouthEast Asia.
Spreading out into space will have an even greater effect [than Columbus's voyage to the New World]. It will completely change the future of the human race -- and maybe determine whether we have any future at all.
Latest media coverage says they are as well... the idea of $700bn to the banks was to get the to loosen up a far greater amount of credit to the public. Since that didn't work, I believe the treasury is looking at loaning some of the money directly instead.
The real problem with the Jitneys was that they were using publicly funded infrastructure to run their business. When it was just bus-stops, everyone applauded, but when they made Biscayne Boulevard useless for ordinary cars to travel on, it had to change.
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The car's alternator already uses something sort of like this to regulate voltage, it doesn't bother to extract more power at higher RPM because it doesn't need that.
I'll buy it when they produce one... I'd really like to have something quieter than my Honda gas generator, no, I haven't seen one yet. That doesn't mean it's impossible, just not practical in today's industrial framework. I'm not holding my breath waiting for it - I went ahead and bought a practical ICE based generator in the meantime.
Don't know how you would go about verifying these claims, but, these guys claim 800 Watts out at 1/5 gallon of gasoline per hour. If you trust the last link there, a gallon of gasoline contains 36KWh of energy, 1/5 of that is 7.2KWh, giving 11% efficiency if you're getting 800Wh of electricity out while burning 1/5 of a gallon of gas.
Kamen has a pile of Sterling related patents, many centered around more efficient conversion of fuel to mechanical output from the engine. In the past, he has been very cloak and dagger regarding his engine progress (or, at least when I visited DEKA shortly pre-Ginger release, he was). Maybe if you really care, you could approach him and see if he has working models that exceed 11% efficiency.
I've never seen the need to install a Windows license on my MacBookPro - for not very much more money, I can just have a cheap Vista box to run my app testing on while I continue developing on the Mac.
So, how did that work out for you, finding answers in ways the prof wasn't teaching, boss wasn't expecting, etc.?
Me, personally, it got me smacked around by about 9/10 "authority figures" that I tried it with. It's a rare individual that doesn't feel threatened by something they don't understand, especially when it makes them feel somehow inferior. I've had the best luck working with doctors who have transcended the post med-school god complex, know that they are secure in their position, and appreciate things that they might use to distinguish them (further) in their field.
... a wandering slop of poorly presented and disparate facts.
From my observation, this is an accurate description of the field of Neuroscience in general.
That's the necessity as the mother of invention aspect. There are similar thoughts such as: "give a man a good wife and he is happy, give a man a bad wife and he becomes a philosopher."
In addition to pressure and deadlines, you also need resources and some luxury of time - intelligence, knowledge, and usually materials. Early man had pressure and deadlines to get the next meal all the time, he didn't do a lot of invention.
depends on her personal preferences.
Finance used to be popular... If you think engineering school is a drag, architecture school is much worse, but it's a bit more glamorous.
Whatever she decides to study, she should go ahead and take all the math that her University offers, including an advanced degree or two. Her talent will make it easy, and having the math degrees on paper combined with whatever she studies for fun (drama, education, medicine, polysci, international commerce, whatever) will make her unusually valuable in her field.
Crockett and Tubbs! Seriously, basically noone. I lived down the street from a crackhouse, nice neighborhood except for that one house. Several (like a dozen or so) homeowners would petition the city, the police, the newspaper, and anyone who would listen, and after 15 years of trying the city finally fined the owner for renting 3 units in a single family zoned house. They would arrest people in the house, on a weekly basis at times, for drugs and sometimes prostitution and violent crimes, but nothing really happened. When our car got taken from that neighborhood for a joyride (they busted the window with a brick during a 3am thunderstorm, then popped the steering lock with a screwdriver), the police obligingly recovered it once it was abandoned in a field - didn't notify us for 48 hours while towing/storage fees accrued at $100/day. A lot of people there defend their own homes with guns, it's usually quite effective as a crime deterrent for the whole neighborhood after a home invader is cut in half with a 12 gauge blast.
I lived about two miles from mission control in Taylor Lake Village (Houston) Texas for a couple of years. Women in that neighborhood would commonly make comments like "oh, he'd leave me and the kids before he'd quit that job..." People can really get into the work of space missions, if they have the opportunity.
The million man-years was mostly taken up by the consumers. 4 people in my family, watching 4 2.5 hour movies an average of twice each comes to 80 entertainment consumption hours. Consider the entire world audience, repeat viewings on DVD, etc. and I'd say a million man-years is well within reach.
Yes, PotC gets money in motion, creating jobs, etc., but if that effort were redirected into producing a manned Mars mission, I think we'd have a bit more to show for it - even if a manned Mars mission is a wasteful squandering of resources compared to the current JPL batch of "lean, mean science generating machines."
remember, the neanderthals became extinct.
I think that is the most likely scenario, homo-nextus will likely replace sapiens. Not sure what nextus will look like, probably very similar to us, but different in some unpredictable way that ends up out-competing sapiens.
Or, if you believe Ray Kurzweil, we'll be replaced by our computers.
Damn, I thought Craigslist was doing the cops a favor, making it easy to hook up with (catch, of course I mean catch) the prostitutes.
Well, this is a story about the extinction of humanity. I'm guessing that in 2000 years, PotC won't amount to much other than a few million man-years spent creating and consuming entertainment.
You've never experienced the Miami justice system - car thieves aren't even chased by the cops because the court just kicks them free - the city has to deal with crack houses by fencing them because repeated arrests aren't a deterrent - getting the cops to write tickets for obstructing traffic? Not in the Miami I lived in - the fines are so weak that they don't defray the court costs when the drivers take the tickets to court, even if they do lose. The only tickets I ever saw city cops handing out were for speeding, that at least carries a big fine.
Might actually be easier on the Mars colonists than it was on the American colonists - North American Indians weren't exactly 100% hospitable. Mars colonists will (should) have tremendous backing from the mother country, communication takes hours instead of months, and challenges like solar flares and dust storms are a bit more predictable than treaties forged with a society you don't understand.
I'm not sure that PotC actually creates value, anymore than lowering taxes "creates wealth." A manned expedition to Mars would surely have more valuable tangible spinoffs than action figures and themed clothing....
That's always been in the plan... Hell, they should just loan it out in $7M increments to 100,000 randomly selected people (starting with me), I'm sure we'll repay in full after we've stimulated the economy a bit.
Yep - too bad they chose to take it out on the website, rather than the people abusing the website. Will Canada be making Craigslist responsible for all stolen property fenced in their classifieds next?
These movements have been around for millenia - predictably, they die out quickly.
Push that up to five nines and you start entering questions of viability. 60,000 individuals spread around the planet might not be able to sustain themselves, especially if they compete for resources with giant North American deer and the new venomous cockroaches of SouthEast Asia.
Well, you know, we have these forest fires because we haven't been cutting down the trees....
Spreading out into space will have an even greater effect [than Columbus's voyage to the New World]. It will completely change the future of the human race -- and maybe determine whether we have any future at all.
-- Stephen Hawking
Latest media coverage says they are as well... the idea of $700bn to the banks was to get the to loosen up a far greater amount of credit to the public. Since that didn't work, I believe the treasury is looking at loaning some of the money directly instead.
The real problem with the Jitneys was that they were using publicly funded infrastructure to run their business. When it was just bus-stops, everyone applauded, but when they made Biscayne Boulevard useless for ordinary cars to travel on, it had to change.