so you can't extrude them as wires or like glass fibre
They mix them with silver to make them more ductile. They can be made to be bendable comparable to other large cables, but not bendable like little bitty computer cables. Some of the low temp superconducting materials are also very brittle (Nb3Sn) but people have managed to use them very effectively for high field magnets. At least some HTSC wires are made in much the same way as low temp superconducting wires, where they draw it into a long wire, cut it into shorter lengths, stuff those parallel into a tube, draw it out, rinse, repeat, and end up with a bunch of small conductors so there's a lot of surface area.
Liquid nitrogen conducts electricity
Not appreciably, and gold is an insulator compared to a superconductor-- some of the early low temp superconducting magnets were made using gold as an insulator. Once the material goes superconducting (not just low resistance, but really zero) even a very low resistance path is effectively insulating. It's pretty common to just dunk things directly into LN2 to measure their resistance at 77K.
Conducted heat is proportional to the [(area of the conduction path)/(length of path)]*(Temp gradient along that path)
For a long skinny wire you have heat leaking in through a large area (diameter*length) conduction path that's very short (a few cm from any outer insulation to the inner wire) and with a very large temperature gradient (300K to 77K along that short path). To conduct that heat out you have a small area (a few cm square), a very long length (hundreds of meters or even km) and a very small temperature gradient (maybe 80K or so might be acceptable at the hottest points, and 77K at the bath. Even with a vacuum and many layers reflective insulation to beat radiated heat, you aren't going to make a very long wire superconduct, and it's going to be a pain to maintain. It's a whole lot easier to make hollow cable and run LN2 through it (if you check out the AMSC web site, that's what they do).
The current carrying capacity of HTSC materials is now high enough to be competitive with copper for a lot of applications. If you have a bunch of cables under a city and they're running at capacity and need to be replaced, you can get more capacity in the same space with HTSC cables, and probably save yourself a whole lot of digging.
ELF harms mammalian sea life, then scrap ELF. Besides, tuned wavelength lasers from space and aircraft can communicate (at least in shallower depths) with subs and not have to worry about spreading sound waves around the planet for all to hear
ELF uses radio waves, not sound, and as far as I know, the issue was the electric field being emitted locally at the transmitters (that's a lot of energy)and antennas, not what it does to sea life. The sea life disruption that the navy causes is due to other things (e.g. high powered sonars for mapping the sea floor, small explosions for sound transmission experiments)
At both ends, have a heatsink of superconductor material embedded in liquid nitrogen. As long as any liquid nitrogen remains, the entire wire will be at the temperature of the liquid nitrogen. The only reason you need a heatsink is to spread out the area of contact so you don't boil the liquid nitrogen so fast that large air bubbles form on the surface of the heatsink.
Just cooling the ends isn't likely to work well, but cooling is still not a fatal problem. In a lot of applications, even conventional copper cables need to be cooled--they run oil through a hollow core and put copper on the outside. They have to maintain pumping stations, heat exchangers, etc. to do this anyway. If you replace it with HTSC material you need fewer cables for the same power.
There are also apps in the power grid for superconducting materials besides transmission, and which are easier to get into. Energy storage, for high reliability systems is one, systems to keep different sub-grids in phase at the connections is another.
Depending on the size of the club, the board recording could be a lousy mixed compared to what you're hearing. In a small place a stereo pair above the board (sometimes augmented by the board) can give you a much better mix. A lot of times if you look, the guy at the board is already recording the show with some combination of board and microphones. Bands always want copies of their shows just to hear how they sounded (the sound onstage is usually pretty different from the sound by the mix desk).
More to the point, if the purpose of a concert is to earn money from people actually there listening... how can it be stealing to record this? They never intended to earn money from the recordings anyway.
Bands have always made recordings of live shows and later released them as records (often touched up in the studio-- sometimes really touched up). They don't necessarily record every show, but they'll often do a whole tour and take the best performances. The claim is that if people sell bootlegs then they can't sell the official version (even though most people who would buy bootlegs would buy the official version too-- they buy then because it's the only way to get the recording, not to save a buck.) There are more than a few official "label" recordings that were the result of a fan bringing a cassette recorder to a show (e.g. Velvet Underground Live at Max's Kansas City)
More recently, a lot of bands are recording the live shows and selling CDs of the show right at the end. There are a couple different approaches that people use for this, and there's even been some legal action because Clear Channel seems to think that it owns a patent on doing this (even though the concept isn't new, it's just easier with digital media)
The answer is D, choose any of the other choices and you can fuck yourself in a hurry.
Happened to my girlfriend on the freeway and she chose B. She managed to exit and pull into a parking lot across the street from a gas station (she didn't want to try for the left turn). It helped that she had been racing at (bicycle) track nationals the week before, where doing insane things at high speed and very close to other people is normal (and track bikes don't have brakes...). The repair was about $27, ($2 for the return spring and $25 for labor), and the brakes lasted several more years.
Spend $11 on a Ritz single use digital camera that does 1.2 megapixels. Another $5 or some scavenging for an old palm cable to match the camera connector, some downloadable software, a few minutes with a soldering iron and you've got a cheap digital camera that you won't feel bad about smashing on the pavement when it turns out you didn't fasten it as well as you thought you had.
None of these people could develop a fly-swatter, were it not for all the science that was made available to them by these academic institutions. If anything, this is an example of typical corporate power grab, whereby something they have only marginal imput in
You're taking a bit of an extreme view there. You named the schools where they were educated, rather than where they were financially supported when they did their work.
John Bardeen was educated at Princeton, but from what I can find was very much on staff at Bell Labs when the transistor was developed http://www.ieee.org/organizations/history_center/l egacies/bardeen.html
I can't find much about Brattain, but it looks like he stayed in Murray Hill for most of his life.
Shockley was in industry for most of his career: first Bell Labs, then Beckman Instruments
Sure, they were all dependent on public knowledge, but the information they generated also became public. If it weren't for commercial interests and the recognition that they could sell you something made of transistors, you would have put your post on a paper bulletin board with a pin. Commercial interest has been very valuable in teh development of a lot of science and technology.
Beckman instruments, mentioned above, was created when someone asked Arnold Beckman if he could come up with a pH meter. Beckman was an instructor at Caltech, but he probably wouldn't have done it if a friend at the Fruit Growers Ass'n hadn't asked him for a way to measure acidity of juice.
Bednorz and Mueller (of high temp superconductivity) were both IBM Zurich staff. Mueller had spent his whole (long) career there, and Bednorz his post-PhD career up to that point.
Binnig and Rohrer (scanning tunneling microscope) were also career IBM researchers. Once they published that the STM was possible, everyone who wanted one was building their own.
I'll be the first to agree that they all depended on public knowledge to develop their inventions, but I also would point out that all the inventions above really did benefit very substantially from the support of companies that had commercial interest, and that probably none of the inventions above would have seen nearly the development that they did without it.
How many people do you know who go to the beach and start collecting sand when they want a new X GHz computer? Not many, because you can buy them commercially, even though all of the information required to build one is publicly available. If people hadn't seen commercial value in the transistor, everyone would have to build their own whenever they needed them (as is done with much of scientific instrumentation).
Re:transistor development driven by commerce
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Antarctic Telescope?
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Transistors were probably developed with more commercial support than not (it's tough to do the accounting). It did benefit from the prior (academic) discovery/invention of quantum mechanics, but it's possible it would have been transistors could have been discovered anyway. I've known at least one person who argued that you could invent the transistor without quantum mechanics, though it certainly helps. Much (most?) of the subsequent development was driven by the very commercial interests of Bell Labs and TI. Bell Labs was very enlightened, and despite its commercial interests published a great deal of research, and supported a great deal that had no apparent commercial value (discovery of the Cosmic Microwave Background).
Solid state physics continues to be motivated in many areas by commercial interests, but many of them recognize the value in publishing the basic research that leads to the development of useful devices, even if they prefer to keep the details of the devices (i.e. the engineering) themselves secret. Once the cat is out of the bag that something is possible, however, lots of other people will figure out how to do it themselves (either the same way or some other way).
I agree the people are getting pretty nuts about IP (applying for patents on things that are obvious or even already existed, and a lot of software IP is especially silly) but science and commerce have coexisted pretty well for quite a long time (astronomy was supported by the need for accurate navigation), and public funding of science is in part a bet that a reasonable fraction of the discoveries will turn out to be economically valuable. The hard part is that you can't know in advance where that will happen, so we pool our money and get the government to support the stuff that has no apparent immediate economic value (plus it's just cool to know new things).
Personally I think we should provide more support than we do to things that have little apparent economic value, but having worked both sides of the funding street, it's hard to say that commerce doesn't (or shouldn't) play a role.
I'm surprised nobody has mentioned (maybe I didn't read deep enough) that it was just reported in Nature (and linked from/.) that Dome C has exceptional seeing.
That this came up in the press is no surprise-- some reporter put two and two together, and figured this would be good to highlight. Dome C is a good place to put a telescope. It's got great seeing, it's way cheaper than going to space, it's very dry (so you can see more in the IR). It also can only see the southern sky. The particular telescope proposed in the link may or may not be the best option, but it's a start.
It's also worth noting that a Hubble replacement doesn't have to cost nearly as much as Hubble. JWST isn't a replacement so much as a follow on-- it's a very different telescope, with very different capabilities and instruments. Building a "disposable" HST replacement (possibly even sent someplace nice like L2) could (and probably would) cost much less than HST did. Depending on the instrument suite it could be pretty competitive with launching a servicing mission to the aging HST.
I tried three different locks with cylindrical keys:
kryptonite laptop lock-- took about a minute, and I could feel the pins clicking
off brand U-lock ("Barnett")-- springs are stiffer and seems to be a longer key. I spent more than a half hour and couldn't get it open. I don't even know where the real key is for this lock.
Kensington laptop lock-- no luck after about 10 minutes. I'll try again on monday. The pins seem to have better springs on this, too.
I actually haven't followed the "trusted computing" stuff much at all, but I don't think it will ever be possible to copy protect audio. In order to use it you have to transform it into an analog signal that is trivial (and cheap) to redigitize with almost no loss of fidelity. Look at the files that people trade-- they generally are nowhere near CD quality, and in some cases not even FM radio quality, so the tiny loss in the D/A/D conversion won't bother anyone except people who would be likely to just buy the CD quality file anyway. Video signals are more complicated, and depending on the display technology could probably be effectively copy protectable.
All that said, I started playing with computers before there was copy protection, saw the development of some really annoying and cumbersome protection, and have seen it decrease to be relatively benign. If the copy protection makes it annoying or expensive to do what you want with the material, people will react against it, and if they really don't like it, people will always find a way around it.
So if everyone stole television until driving it's supply into oblivion, they wouldn't care, it sucks anyway.
Until cable came along, nobody paid for television-- it was broadcast for free to the consumer, and the price was that you had to sit through ads (or get up and change the channel, until they invented the remote). Even with cable, I suspect that your cable fee doesn't come close to covering the cost of the content that's piped to you-- again it's paid for by ads.
Radio didn't kill record distribution-- it's a way to promote it. Filesharing will ultimately work the same way. It's even possible that distributors will stop bothering to collect money directly from the consumer and find another way to get paid (similar to radio).
Part of the reason that filesharing has become so popular is probably related to radio sucking really badly. The only good radio I can find anymore is college stations on the net. If people can't get samples of a reasonable range of music on the radio, they'll get it on the web, either via net radio or filesharing.
And a fair number of people might stop buying the LA Times because all they wanted was the movie listings for a quarter.
I've been in LA for about 8 years and I don't think I've ever used the Times for movie listings. Usually either the Weekly (old days) or online.
They had ads in the movies at least 20 years ago in Germany. I don't remember if they had them here already. They even had (very subtle) condom ads--once I was sitting there, the condom ad went on, ended, and a couple rows back I heard a girl whisper to her friend a row or two up "What's that, Chocolates?" (sold in similar size and shape packaging).
Re:Files they've just taken and not bought or dele
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Or make it so that when you buy a disc it includes a code that lets you go to the web and...the band will let you ask them a couple questions which they promise to respond to.. Or they will grab their digital camera, take a pic *just for you* and send it.
Even better would be that you dont *hafta* pay, but if you go to their web site and enter the code, you get the ability to pay the band a few dollars directly, for that one time specialty (that way the band gets the money instead of it being filtered through retailer, distributor, label, etc)
Bands that self-promote already do this kind of thing. At least one band with a pretty large following (Einstuerzende Neubauten) has a website with a reasonably active message board, and when you pay your 30 euros or whatever it was, you get access to the parts of the board where the bandmembers will answer questions. Despite being a band with a reputation for strange, noisy music, the members are all pretty nice and do answer questions pretty regularly. You also get access to live video feeds of their rehearsal sessions, archives of the rehearsals, and a CD or DVD (or both depending on how much $$ you want to fork over) sent only to people who paid for that phase of their music (effectively a year or two membership). At live shows the people who support the web site can get camera passes, and they've been nice enough to set aside someplace after the shows where you can hang with the band and other supporters (they play places that hold a few K people, and there are maybe 50 "backstage").
Most indie bands that play small places are fairly accessible, too. They usually have a merch table set up and you can buy their stuff (sometimes at negotiable prices). It's usually run by a friend of the band, or they just sell the stuff at the front of the stage themselves after a show, and you can talk to them a bit. I think most people I know would feel a little weird asking you to just donate a couple bucks online without giving you at least a download, but plenty of indie bands offer complete tracks for free download. They then hope that you'll shell out the $10-15 for the CD, and then come see them when they play your town.
Artists could (and do) create their own labels, often on which they're the only ones signed. It's probably more because Apple doesn't want to deal with collecting music from a zillion labels and sending checks to them.
You haven't lived until you've used an acousticoupler at 110 baud and couldn't laugh at what you were reading because it would get picked up and cause errors (or even drop the connection).
That's really good-I don't think I'd seen it before. I mostly agree, except: - I suspect that fans will spend more money, not less, when there's more (readily available) variety in the music market and the bands are getting paid more directly. The current major labels, however, will make a lot less money.
- She will only need radio and physical media distribution for a few more years. The net can be like a radio with an infinite number of stations, and CD's will be much less common artifacts that are more commonly sold at concerts than at stores. Lots of artists do this, including Einstuerzende Neubauten. They sold numbered copies of the show at the show, with a little picture on the front that the band and crew had taken that morning in front of the venue.
- CD stores will probably disappear, or change very drastically so that they don't really carry large CD stock. Maybe things like T-shirts and merchandise. I think those already exist, and often are called head shops...Mall owners will love it.
Does anybody remember who it was who peed on her record company exec's desk after the label screwed her? I can't figure out the right keywords to google it.
I had the opportunity to be a special awards judge at the Intel Science and Engineering Fair in 03, and had to look at nearly every project (first to sort for relevance for the award, then to rank those). Some of the coolest ones were the in the environmental science category. Typically it was very bright, excited kids doing good research in their local area to monitor things, or find out the impact of particular events or pollutants or problems. In a lot of cases they went as far as working with their local governments to mitigate problems that they investigated (e.g. dock preservatives damaging waterways). Great examples of "Citizen Science".
If you ever get to attend the ISEF, I highly recommend it. It was much more fun than most professional conferences I go to.
Sharecroppers is a pretty good term, but indentured servant almost applies, since many artists end up owing the label money, with their work tied up legally so they can't rerecord it, and sometimes contracts they can't escape from. Most artists don't earn jack from the record label (even fairly big and well known artists). If something gets a lot of airplay (or clubplay, or anything that BMI/ASCAP collect money for), they may get some money from publishing, but even that's iffy for a lot of artists who have a small but steady following. For every Madonna or Britney Spears, the labels have screwed a thousand smaller artists who don't suck, but aren't consistent with the business model of "small range of product, huge distribution".
The reason you're seeing "name" acts like They Might Be Giants (and one of my favorites, http://www.neubauten.org) going it alone is that they weren't making any money being on a record label anyway, and they can find a way to do better by dealing with distribution on their own over the web (or combination web and snailmail). A lot of these bands never had terribly good support from their label anyway, and got to be known through word of mouth/college radio/touring. Over the next few years we can probably expect to see some bands make it big without being on a major. Then they just have to deal with Clear Channel's attempts to control major venues...
(only partially off topic: I know a computer wargame company that also has done extremely well by self publishing after having bad experiences with the big publishers, and then subsequently acting as a very developer friendly boutique publisher for similar games. http://www.battlefront.com)
Here's the obligatory link to Steve Albini's "Problem with Music" article: http://www.negativland.com/albini.html and another to a long (~hour) video clip of him giving a talk and answering questions (http://www.mtsu.edu/~nadam/downloads/Stevealbiniw eb.html). The issue of independent bands and filesharing comes up, and most people he knows don't have much problem with filesharing- they're not getting paid by their distributors anyway.
Certain stainless steels, with special surface processing, work well. Copper gaskets were fine on the fittings (they come out *really* clean after a year exposed to H2). Some of the pumps we use get thrashed every so often (every couple years), but they weren't designed for H2 and the parts are easy to replace. I haven't looked the diffusion rate stuff in a long time, but it was low enough that we could pretty much ignore it in a fairly small closed system that had to run for a couple years. It's non-zero, but the stuff is not gushing out by any means.
Someone up above somewhere commented that H2 is stored outside because the containers all leak. That's not true. It's stored outside because the penalty for a moderate leak in a little space is very high, and it's a very easy safety precaution to keep it outside.
Yeah, my lab experience with hydrogen has been that it's not a big deal to contain. We used to use a very small lecture bottle of hydrogen as the supply for exchange gas in cooling down helium systems. The bottle probably hadn't been filled in the 10 years before I got there, and probably not in the 13 or so years since. Most of the loss has probably been from accidentally putting too much gas into the front side of the regulator before dumping it into the experiment.
I've done a fair bit of plumbing for hydrogen systems (for measuring properties of metal hydrides) and have been able to make quite tight systems for high pressure, high temperature H2. We were actually very carefully accounting for the H2, since we needed to know how much went into and out of the hydrides. The system was full of valves, fittings, and welds. You have to be aware of what hydrogen can do to materials, but if you pick the right materials it's fine.
Dewars for storage of any liquid cryogen generally have vents (and burst disks in case the vacuum goes bad). This isn't because the stuff is hard to contain, but because they aren't made to hold high pressure, and there is always some heat leaking in that evaporates the liquid (increasing the pressure in the dewar if it's not vented). If you were doing power production you would probably plan a way to use this H2 rather than blowing it off.
Hydrogen can also be stored in metal hydrides (quite effectively), which can be less of a pain to deal with than dewars full of liquid.
(As an aside, you can even make containers to seal superfluid helium, which is *way* harder to contain than hydrogen. Helium is a pain in gaseous form, but the superfluid state is an extra big pain.)
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so you can't extrude them as wires or like glass fibre
They mix them with silver to make them more ductile. They can be made to be bendable comparable to other large cables, but not bendable like little bitty computer cables. Some of the low temp superconducting materials are also very brittle (Nb3Sn) but people have managed to use them very effectively for high field magnets. At least some HTSC wires are made in much the same way as low temp superconducting wires, where they draw it into a long wire, cut it into shorter lengths, stuff those parallel into a tube, draw it out, rinse, repeat, and end up with a bunch of small conductors so there's a lot of surface area.
Liquid nitrogen conducts electricity
Not appreciably, and gold is an insulator compared to a superconductor-- some of the early low temp superconducting magnets were made using gold as an insulator. Once the material goes superconducting (not just low resistance, but really zero) even a very low resistance path is effectively insulating. It's pretty common to just dunk things directly into LN2 to measure their resistance at 77K.
Conducted heat is proportional to the [(area of the conduction path)/(length of path)]*(Temp gradient along that path)
For a long skinny wire you have heat leaking in through a large area (diameter*length) conduction path that's very short (a few cm from any outer insulation to the inner wire) and with a very large temperature gradient (300K to 77K along that short path). To conduct that heat out you have a small area (a few cm square), a very long length (hundreds of meters or even km) and a very small temperature gradient (maybe 80K or so might be acceptable at the hottest points, and 77K at the bath. Even with a vacuum and many layers reflective insulation to beat radiated heat, you aren't going to make a very long wire superconduct, and it's going to be a pain to maintain. It's a whole lot easier to make hollow cable and run LN2 through it (if you check out the AMSC web site, that's what they do).
The current carrying capacity of HTSC materials is now high enough to be competitive with copper for a lot of applications. If you have a bunch of cables under a city and they're running at capacity and need to be replaced, you can get more capacity in the same space with HTSC cables, and probably save yourself a whole lot of digging.
ELF harms mammalian sea life, then scrap ELF. Besides, tuned wavelength lasers from space and aircraft can communicate (at least in shallower depths) with subs and not have to worry about spreading sound waves around the planet for all to hear
ELF uses radio waves, not sound, and as far as I know, the issue was the electric field being emitted locally at the transmitters (that's a lot of energy)and antennas, not what it does to sea life. The sea life disruption that the navy causes is due to other things (e.g. high powered sonars for mapping the sea floor, small explosions for sound transmission experiments)
At both ends, have a heatsink of superconductor material embedded in liquid nitrogen. As long as any liquid nitrogen remains, the entire wire will be at the temperature of the liquid nitrogen. The only reason you need a heatsink is to spread out the area of contact so you don't boil the liquid nitrogen so fast that large air bubbles form on the surface of the heatsink.
Just cooling the ends isn't likely to work well, but cooling is still not a fatal problem. In a lot of applications, even conventional copper cables need to be cooled--they run oil through a hollow core and put copper on the outside. They have to maintain pumping stations, heat exchangers, etc. to do this anyway. If you replace it with HTSC material you need fewer cables for the same power.
There are also apps in the power grid for superconducting materials besides transmission, and which are easier to get into. Energy storage, for high reliability systems is one, systems to keep different sub-grids in phase at the connections is another.
Depending on the size of the club, the board recording could be a lousy mixed compared to what you're hearing. In a small place a stereo pair above the board (sometimes augmented by the board) can give you a much better mix. A lot of times if you look, the guy at the board is already recording the show with some combination of board and microphones. Bands always want copies of their shows just to hear how they sounded (the sound onstage is usually pretty different from the sound by the mix desk).
More to the point, if the purpose of a concert is to earn money from people actually there listening... how can it be stealing to record this? They never intended to earn money from the recordings anyway.
Bands have always made recordings of live shows and later released them as records (often touched up in the studio-- sometimes really touched up). They don't necessarily record every show, but they'll often do a whole tour and take the best performances. The claim is that if people sell bootlegs then they can't sell the official version (even though most people who would buy bootlegs would buy the official version too-- they buy then because it's the only way to get the recording, not to save a buck.) There are more than a few official "label" recordings that were the result of a fan bringing a cassette recorder to a show (e.g. Velvet Underground Live at Max's Kansas City)
More recently, a lot of bands are recording the live shows and selling CDs of the show right at the end. There are a couple different approaches that people use for this, and there's even been some legal action because Clear Channel seems to think that it owns a patent on doing this (even though the concept isn't new, it's just easier with digital media)
The answer is D, choose any of the other choices and you can fuck yourself in a hurry.
Happened to my girlfriend on the freeway and she chose B. She managed to exit and pull into a parking lot across the street from a gas station (she didn't want to try for the left turn). It helped that she had been racing at (bicycle) track nationals the week before, where doing insane things at high speed and very close to other people is normal (and track bikes don't have brakes...). The repair was about $27, ($2 for the return spring and $25 for labor), and the brakes lasted several more years.
Spend $11 on a Ritz single use digital camera that does 1.2 megapixels. Another $5 or some scavenging for an old palm cable to match the camera connector, some downloadable software, a few minutes with a soldering iron and you've got a cheap digital camera that you won't feel bad about smashing on the pavement when it turns out you didn't fasten it as well as you thought you had.
None of these people could develop a fly-swatter, were it not for all the science that was made available to them by these academic institutions. If anything, this is an example of typical corporate power grab, whereby something they have only marginal imput in
l egacies/bardeen.html
You're taking a bit of an extreme view there. You named the schools where they were educated, rather than where they were financially supported when they did their work.
John Bardeen was educated at Princeton, but from what I can find was very much on staff at Bell Labs when the transistor was developed http://www.ieee.org/organizations/history_center/
I can't find much about Brattain, but it looks like he stayed in Murray Hill for most of his life.
Shockley was in industry for most of his career: first Bell Labs, then Beckman Instruments
Sure, they were all dependent on public knowledge, but the information they generated also became public. If it weren't for commercial interests and the recognition that they could sell you something made of transistors, you would have put your post on a paper bulletin board with a pin. Commercial interest has been very valuable in teh development of a lot of science and technology.
Beckman instruments, mentioned above, was created when someone asked Arnold Beckman if he could come up with a pH meter. Beckman was an instructor at Caltech, but he probably wouldn't have done it if a friend at the Fruit Growers Ass'n hadn't asked him for a way to measure acidity of juice.
Bednorz and Mueller (of high temp superconductivity) were both IBM Zurich staff. Mueller had spent his whole (long) career there, and Bednorz his post-PhD career up to that point.
Binnig and Rohrer (scanning tunneling microscope) were also career IBM researchers. Once they published that the STM was possible, everyone who wanted one was building their own.
I'll be the first to agree that they all depended on public knowledge to develop their inventions, but I also would point out that all the inventions above really did benefit very substantially from the support of companies that had commercial interest, and that probably none of the inventions above would have seen nearly the development that they did without it.
How many people do you know who go to the beach and start collecting sand when they want a new X GHz computer? Not many, because you can buy them commercially, even though all of the information required to build one is publicly available. If people hadn't seen commercial value in the transistor, everyone would have to build their own whenever they needed them (as is done with much of scientific instrumentation).
Transistors were probably developed with more commercial support than not (it's tough to do the accounting). It did benefit from the prior (academic) discovery/invention of quantum mechanics, but it's possible it would have been transistors could have been discovered anyway. I've known at least one person who argued that you could invent the transistor without quantum mechanics, though it certainly helps. Much (most?) of the subsequent development was driven by the very commercial interests of Bell Labs and TI. Bell Labs was very enlightened, and despite its commercial interests published a great deal of research, and supported a great deal that had no apparent commercial value (discovery of the Cosmic Microwave Background).
Solid state physics continues to be motivated in many areas by commercial interests, but many of them recognize the value in publishing the basic research that leads to the development of useful devices, even if they prefer to keep the details of the devices (i.e. the engineering) themselves secret. Once the cat is out of the bag that something is possible, however, lots of other people will figure out how to do it themselves (either the same way or some other way).
I agree the people are getting pretty nuts about IP (applying for patents on things that are obvious or even already existed, and a lot of software IP is especially silly) but science and commerce have coexisted pretty well for quite a long time (astronomy was supported by the need for accurate navigation), and public funding of science is in part a bet that a reasonable fraction of the discoveries will turn out to be economically valuable. The hard part is that you can't know in advance where that will happen, so we pool our money and get the government to support the stuff that has no apparent immediate economic value (plus it's just cool to know new things).
Personally I think we should provide more support than we do to things that have little apparent economic value, but having worked both sides of the funding street, it's hard to say that commerce doesn't (or shouldn't) play a role.
I'm surprised nobody has mentioned (maybe I didn't read deep enough) that it was just reported in Nature (and linked from /.) that Dome C has exceptional seeing.
That this came up in the press is no surprise-- some reporter put two and two together, and figured this would be good to highlight. Dome C is a good place to put a telescope. It's got great seeing, it's way cheaper than going to space, it's very dry (so you can see more in the IR). It also can only see the southern sky. The particular telescope proposed in the link may or may not be the best option, but it's a start.
It's also worth noting that a Hubble replacement doesn't have to cost nearly as much as Hubble. JWST isn't a replacement so much as a follow on-- it's a very different telescope, with very different capabilities and instruments. Building a "disposable" HST replacement (possibly even sent someplace nice like L2) could (and probably would) cost much less than HST did. Depending on the instrument suite it could be pretty competitive with launching a servicing mission to the aging HST.
Same one showed up in Physics Toady this month, too.
I tried three different locks with cylindrical keys:
kryptonite laptop lock-- took about a minute, and I could feel the pins clicking
off brand U-lock ("Barnett")-- springs are stiffer and seems to be a longer key. I spent more than a half hour and couldn't get it open. I don't even know where the real key is for this lock.
Kensington laptop lock-- no luck after about 10 minutes. I'll try again on monday. The pins seem to have better springs on this, too.
I actually haven't followed the "trusted computing" stuff much at all, but I don't think it will ever be possible to copy protect audio. In order to use it you have to transform it into an analog signal that is trivial (and cheap) to redigitize with almost no loss of fidelity. Look at the files that people trade-- they generally are nowhere near CD quality, and in some cases not even FM radio quality, so the tiny loss in the D/A/D conversion won't bother anyone except people who would be likely to just buy the CD quality file anyway. Video signals are more complicated, and depending on the display technology could probably be effectively copy protectable.
All that said, I started playing with computers before there was copy protection, saw the development of some really annoying and cumbersome protection, and have seen it decrease to be relatively benign. If the copy protection makes it annoying or expensive to do what you want with the material, people will react against it, and if they really don't like it, people will always find a way around it.
So if everyone stole television until driving it's supply into oblivion, they wouldn't care, it sucks anyway.
Until cable came along, nobody paid for television-- it was broadcast for free to the consumer, and the price was that you had to sit through ads (or get up and change the channel, until they invented the remote). Even with cable, I suspect that your cable fee doesn't come close to covering the cost of the content that's piped to you-- again it's paid for by ads.
Radio didn't kill record distribution-- it's a way to promote it. Filesharing will ultimately work the same way. It's even possible that distributors will stop bothering to collect money directly from the consumer and find another way to get paid (similar to radio).
Part of the reason that filesharing has become so popular is probably related to radio sucking really badly. The only good radio I can find anymore is college stations on the net. If people can't get samples of a reasonable range of music on the radio, they'll get it on the web, either via net radio or filesharing.
And a fair number of people might stop buying the LA Times because all they wanted was the movie listings for a quarter.
I've been in LA for about 8 years and I don't think I've ever used the Times for movie listings. Usually either the Weekly (old days) or online.
They had ads in the movies at least 20 years ago in Germany. I don't remember if they had them here already. They even had (very subtle) condom ads--once I was sitting there, the condom ad went on, ended, and a couple rows back I heard a girl whisper to her friend a row or two up "What's that, Chocolates?" (sold in similar size and shape packaging).
Or make it so that when you buy a disc it includes a code that lets you go to the web and...the band will let you ask them a couple questions which they promise to respond to.. Or they will grab their digital camera, take a pic *just for you* and send it.
Even better would be that you dont *hafta* pay, but if you go to their web site and enter the code, you get the ability to pay the band a few dollars directly, for that one time specialty (that way the band gets the money instead of it being filtered through retailer, distributor, label, etc)
Bands that self-promote already do this kind of thing. At least one band with a pretty large following (Einstuerzende Neubauten) has a website with a reasonably active message board, and when you pay your 30 euros or whatever it was, you get access to the parts of the board where the bandmembers will answer questions. Despite being a band with a reputation for strange, noisy music, the members are all pretty nice and do answer questions pretty regularly. You also get access to live video feeds of their rehearsal sessions, archives of the rehearsals, and a CD or DVD (or both depending on how much $$ you want to fork over) sent only to people who paid for that phase of their music (effectively a year or two membership). At live shows the people who support the web site can get camera passes, and they've been nice enough to set aside someplace after the shows where you can hang with the band and other supporters (they play places that hold a few K people, and there are maybe 50 "backstage").
Most indie bands that play small places are fairly accessible, too. They usually have a merch table set up and you can buy their stuff (sometimes at negotiable prices). It's usually run by a friend of the band, or they just sell the stuff at the front of the stage themselves after a show, and you can talk to them a bit. I think most people I know would feel a little weird asking you to just donate a couple bucks online without giving you at least a download, but plenty of indie bands offer complete tracks for free download. They then hope that you'll shell out the $10-15 for the CD, and then come see them when they play your town.
Artists could (and do) create their own labels, often on which they're the only ones signed. It's probably more because Apple doesn't want to deal with collecting music from a zillion labels and sending checks to them.
My first Modem was a wierd 4800 baud deal
You haven't lived until you've used an acousticoupler at 110 baud and couldn't laugh at what you were reading because it would get picked up and cause errors (or even drop the connection).
Found it! Inger Lorre, from the Nymphs
s ht ml
http://www.worldwildtribe.com/ingerlorre/index.
That's really good-I don't think I'd seen it before. I mostly agree, except:
- I suspect that fans will spend more money, not less, when there's more (readily available) variety in the music market and the bands are getting paid more directly. The current major labels, however, will make a lot less money.
- She will only need radio and physical media distribution for a few more years. The net can be like a radio with an infinite number of stations, and CD's will be much less common artifacts that are more commonly sold at concerts than at stores. Lots of artists do this, including Einstuerzende Neubauten. They sold numbered copies of the show at the show, with a little picture on the front that the band and crew had taken that morning in front of the venue.
- CD stores will probably disappear, or change very drastically so that they don't really carry large CD stock. Maybe things like T-shirts and merchandise. I think those already exist, and often are called head shops...Mall owners will love it.
Does anybody remember who it was who peed on her record company exec's desk after the label screwed her? I can't figure out the right keywords to google it.
I had the opportunity to be a special awards judge at the Intel Science and Engineering Fair in 03, and had to look at nearly every project (first to sort for relevance for the award, then to rank those). Some of the coolest ones were the in the environmental science category. Typically it was very bright, excited kids doing good research in their local area to monitor things, or find out the impact of particular events or pollutants or problems. In a lot of cases they went as far as working with their local governments to mitigate problems that they investigated (e.g. dock preservatives damaging waterways). Great examples of "Citizen Science".
If you ever get to attend the ISEF, I highly recommend it. It was much more fun than most professional conferences I go to.
Sharecroppers is a pretty good term, but indentured servant almost applies, since many artists end up owing the label money, with their work tied up legally so they can't rerecord it, and sometimes contracts they can't escape from. Most artists don't earn jack from the record label (even fairly big and well known artists). If something gets a lot of airplay (or clubplay, or anything that BMI/ASCAP collect money for), they may get some money from publishing, but even that's iffy for a lot of artists who have a small but steady following. For every Madonna or Britney Spears, the labels have screwed a thousand smaller artists who don't suck, but aren't consistent with the business model of "small range of product, huge distribution".
w eb.html). The issue of independent bands and filesharing comes up, and most people he knows don't have much problem with filesharing- they're not getting paid by their distributors anyway.
The reason you're seeing "name" acts like They Might Be Giants (and one of my favorites, http://www.neubauten.org) going it alone is that they weren't making any money being on a record label anyway, and they can find a way to do better by dealing with distribution on their own over the web (or combination web and snailmail). A lot of these bands never had terribly good support from their label anyway, and got to be known through word of mouth/college radio/touring. Over the next few years we can probably expect to see some bands make it big without being on a major. Then they just have to deal with Clear Channel's attempts to control major venues...
(only partially off topic: I know a computer wargame company that also has done extremely well by self publishing after having bad experiences with the big publishers, and then subsequently acting as a very developer friendly boutique publisher for similar games. http://www.battlefront.com)
Here's the obligatory link to Steve Albini's "Problem with Music" article: http://www.negativland.com/albini.html
and another to a long (~hour) video clip of him giving a talk and answering questions (http://www.mtsu.edu/~nadam/downloads/Stevealbini
Certain stainless steels, with special surface processing, work well. Copper gaskets were fine on the fittings (they come out *really* clean after a year exposed to H2). Some of the pumps we use get thrashed every so often (every couple years), but they weren't designed for H2 and the parts are easy to replace. I haven't looked the diffusion rate stuff in a long time, but it was low enough that we could pretty much ignore it in a fairly small closed system that had to run for a couple years. It's non-zero, but the stuff is not gushing out by any means.
Someone up above somewhere commented that H2 is stored outside because the containers all leak. That's not true. It's stored outside because the penalty for a moderate leak in a little space is very high, and it's a very easy safety precaution to keep it outside.
Yeah, my lab experience with hydrogen has been that it's not a big deal to contain. We used to use a very small lecture bottle of hydrogen as the supply for exchange gas in cooling down helium systems. The bottle probably hadn't been filled in the 10 years before I got there, and probably not in the 13 or so years since. Most of the loss has probably been from accidentally putting too much gas into the front side of the regulator before dumping it into the experiment.
I've done a fair bit of plumbing for hydrogen systems (for measuring properties of metal hydrides) and have been able to make quite tight systems for high pressure, high temperature H2. We were actually very carefully accounting for the H2, since we needed to know how much went into and out of the hydrides. The system was full of valves, fittings, and welds. You have to be aware of what hydrogen can do to materials, but if you pick the right materials it's fine.
Dewars for storage of any liquid cryogen generally have vents (and burst disks in case the vacuum goes bad). This isn't because the stuff is hard to contain, but because they aren't made to hold high pressure, and there is always some heat leaking in that evaporates the liquid (increasing the pressure in the dewar if it's not vented). If you were doing power production you would probably plan a way to use this H2 rather than blowing it off.
Hydrogen can also be stored in metal hydrides (quite effectively), which can be less of a pain to deal with than dewars full of liquid.
(As an aside, you can even make containers to seal superfluid helium, which is *way* harder to contain than hydrogen. Helium is a pain in gaseous form, but the superfluid state is an extra big pain.)