- solar power mass efficiency: I assume a 100%-conversion-efficient solar panel that turns *all* power intersected from the sun into a laser beam. Well, basically, it's somehow a mirror. Indeed, this device already exists, it's a solar sail. A lot of (generally optimistic) calculations have been done around solar-sailing propulsion; with that you need months just to reach escape velocity. I'd bet travel time to Mars would account in years but maybe I'm optimistic. Basically, this is the reason why the (otherwise simple and easy to build) solar sails haven't developed up to now: just no interest. To summarise in our case: because a solar panel delivers at best the power corresponding to the sun solar pressure, don't expect to turn this power to a stronger presure miraculously with a laser.
- nuclear power mass efficiency: There is also a reason why we have quite few nuclear plants turning above. Again it's not unfeasible at all and indeed already flew a couple of time, and dozen years ago, but it is *awfully* less mass-efficient than solar panels in the inner solar system. Basically, it is chosen when sun is too far, like when you go to Saturn with a Cassini spacecraft. On Cassini IIRC you get some 300W from some 100Kg of a reactor. Nasa quite brilliantly manages to run the entire spacecraft with this; go on, plug your laser. This is where you'll get the, what did they say, 30 micronewtons. But maybe less. To summarise: nuclear power is far less mass-efficient than solar panels.
So? Is TFA completely stupid? No.
The *way to present it* is stupid. They felt they needed a sci-fi comparison involving Interrrplanetarry Trrravel.
But they indeed have got a microthruster, very precise, that will be extremely helpful for fine-tuning relative positions on formation-flying spacecrafts.
Formation Flying is TEH application. With it, you can reconstitute a mirror 100 times larger than the Hubble's and it successor's ones, by assembling in flight many smaller (and cheaper) mirrors -this is for instance the purpose of European Space Agency's DARWIN project; you can also create and fly instruments that nobody could dream of before, like 1-km-focal-length telescopes in two separate parts (a definitive need when dealing with X- or gamma-rays).
This optical microthruster may someday be the cornerstone design behind the first X-ray telescope, to get images we never catch on ground (mind you, X-ray are conveniently filtered by the atmosphere to allow life to evolve into Intelligent Design believers). It is a good idea, and it should quickly be compared with the other microthrust devices currently in (early) development, like ion or electron beaming -it deserves a good technical analysis.
Ah, of course, it's less fun than instant tunneling to Mars...
... as are almost all others that are subsidized by another company in most European countries; btw.
Here in France for instance, they always have been locked, with a clausa saying that the user can require unlocking after his (generally two-years) initial contract lock. And you sign this when buying.
I've seen some very good analyses on how this restriction is due to cost, but I'm surprised not to read that all Apple needs to delete any iPhone "mod" is just an update via iTunes, to which it'll be connected as often as your average iPod is. To continue on the iPod example, we can see it somehow can be unlocked by external softwares that partly replace iTunes (e. g. Floola), but on the contrary no alternate reprogramming of the iPod itself has got any success overall. The same will apply to iPhones.
In Europe, this compared to patenting will allow you to use your invention whoever else patents it afterwards (because it is a proof that you independently invented it before them), but it won't let you attack them (in other words, apart from you, they can sue anyone else and practically owh the rights)
On space solar arrays you always get a thin protective cover glass on top of the cells; this to some extent will also protect your fluorescent layer (which anyway may age the way all fluorescent tubes do). Indeed in sizing a solar array you use end-of-life efficiencies (generally way poorer than BOL: a sat lasts more than a dozen years by now); how the fluo layer ages will be of the essence...
Hervé (having been a space system designer for quite a while, some years ago)
http://www.nullwhore.com/sux0r/index.php?c=/0/logi n/ http://sourceforge.net/projects/sux0r/ What I find interesting is, it is one of the verrry rare examples of 'internet 2' service that you can own yourself (instead of registering here or there for more ads or worse). A downside of Sux0r is it seems not having evolved for a couple of years (but still works, possibly that's why:-) I for one am desperately waiting for a *local* RSS agregator which would allow *me* (and not some site's AI) to Bayes-filter my selected feeds. I'm almost sure this will happenn sooner or later.
indeed this process of rinsing with water, then alcohol, then evaporating the alcohol (not specially shaking, not specially cooking either, or not too hot just to accelerate drying) is really the standard in electronic board cleaning.
The only issue you may have is, in general you'll have *non-electronics* parts around your board, e. g. an LCD display whose nifty plastic surface may well crack when in contact with alcohol: this is the main issue to take care of. Alcool is technically said to "reveal constraints" in ordinary plastics, so beware about this...
I for one am keeping iTunes on my mac only for buying songs, otherwise I use Floola on both the mac and office PC, with the same iPod. Floola GUI is compact, simple, and quite feature-packed though, and most of all it doesn't lock your iPod on a single machine. You can also listen complete tunes from the ipod through the PC or mac loudspeakers.
This is just to mention, on my Wordpress (free) installation there is a (free) plugin named Akismet that apparently is a very efficient collaborative filter service to remove comment filling attempts by bots.
I really don't know how it works, but it works perfectly well.
Every now and then I log into my site and check the suspicious, "on hold" attempts: 100% are bot-generated... H.
The example given in TFA reminds me of a contemporary poem book I recently bought, because I had read online a couple of good poems by the same author.
When back home I discovered what was puzzling me: the editor had the original idea of cutting many verses in half or even three parts, which gave a curious impression of a different rythm, while I couldn't but think that wasn't in the original idea of the poet...
My experience on the 'cell' example was moreover very clear as concerns reading speed: I believe the sliced text reads much slower -OTOH, I think such a mental scansion when reading may allow to better retain the sentences.
I may be too dual-minded there, but I for one prefer keeping this method for poems anyway:-)
The best I know -for trust, not reliability- are cooperative webhosts; alas they often only provide PHP/mySQL but not root access. I'm still searching a cooperative virtual hosting...
gosh, I wanted to mod you up, and thanks to this %%%% of 53-button-multiple-roller-mouse I suddenly sent an 'offtopic' before even understanding what I was doing:( And with the careful handling of mod points by/. I cannot even come back to re-mod:(( Now what if I post a comment there, will it "undo" the mod?
We had this here in Europe a couple of years ago, under the pressure of junk makers. There were very hot debates, petitions etc. which appeared entierely useless:(
Good luck! If you resist I promiss I switch to US chocolate;-) (FWIW, the worst junk makers here, and at the origin of the move, were UK manufacturers)
On all laptop macintoshes there are now always webcams on the screens, and go figure there are already maybe 5 or 6 such utilities, taking regular snapshots of the mugger and sending them silently back somewhere... I agree this still sounds stupid, but just because there is a LED aside the cam:-(
OMG, here in Europe I always enter/. on RSS (so with no tags indicated): honestly, this morning when half aspleep I understood someone had mathematically determined than US is to dominate everyone forever...
A dozen years ago, when the earliest french speedtrain was deployed between Paris and Lyons (some 500Km away) the french airlines that provided the equivalent transportation just had to close their slots on this destination, because they almost were just abandoned in a matter of months.
Today, even though the TGV train cannot highspeed in some areas (because its rails still have to be adapted: smoother bends etc.), a 800-km travel takes you almost the same time rail/air unless you happen to live in front of the airport.
There are not a lot of things a french can be proud of nowadays given our present government, but TGVs are one of them, all the more in the perspective of costlier fuel and pollution...
read the end of the article. MS proposes licences @ $250000 for very precisely these products... Out of all solid-state media makers if just a couple have already paid, it's a million-dollar-worth patent...
Such a theory results in you being able to get pictures of the same star environments at different places but at different ages (because of the speed of light) so in fact you may not be able to recognize this. Indeed you could recognize it when observing the stars around a "window" frame, because in this area, you'll indeed get images of the same "frame" at two different places in the sky, with stars of the same age. If you manage to match two such "frame" zones in the sky, then you have proven the theory. This is, in a simplified way, how the supporters of these theories proceed. The problem is, to detect the frames one must (a) be sure of their shape (why regular ones, why not circular windows, etc.) and (b) having selected one shape and size, scan the entire deep sky with it trying to match two zones -this activity requires more precise deep sky catalogs that we have (necessitating e. g. results from ESA's future Herschel/Planck satellites) and a computing time now evaluated in centuries IIRC.
I use a macintosh, and SpamSieve as a spam filter, that just some months ago was 99.x like POPfile was, to the point I felt embarrassed (you know, "POPfile is open source, not yours, etc.")
Now, the image-spam impact on SpamSieve has only lowered its accuracy from 99.5 to 98.8%, which means the guy behind must have added plenty of other criteria:-)
(these figures for only 300 spams a day, but on various accounts, and with as an extra constraint the fact I download only the first 5K of any mail before screening it)
Slashdot Mirror
- solar power mass efficiency: I assume a 100%-conversion-efficient solar panel that turns *all* power intersected from the sun into a laser beam. Well, basically, it's somehow a mirror. Indeed, this device already exists, it's a solar sail.
A lot of (generally optimistic) calculations have been done around solar-sailing propulsion; with that you need months just to reach escape velocity. I'd bet travel time to Mars would account in years but maybe I'm optimistic.
Basically, this is the reason why the (otherwise simple and easy to build) solar sails haven't developed up to now: just no interest.
To summarise in our case: because a solar panel delivers at best the power corresponding to the sun solar pressure, don't expect to turn this power to a stronger presure miraculously with a laser.
- nuclear power mass efficiency: There is also a reason why we have quite few nuclear plants turning above. Again it's not unfeasible at all and indeed already flew a couple of time, and dozen years ago, but it is *awfully* less mass-efficient than solar panels in the inner solar system. Basically, it is chosen when sun is too far, like when you go to Saturn with a Cassini spacecraft. On Cassini IIRC you get some 300W from some 100Kg of a reactor. Nasa quite brilliantly manages to run the entire spacecraft with this; go on, plug your laser. This is where you'll get the, what did they say, 30 micronewtons. But maybe less.
To summarise: nuclear power is far less mass-efficient than solar panels.
So? Is TFA completely stupid?
No.
The *way to present it* is stupid. They felt they needed a sci-fi comparison involving Interrrplanetarry Trrravel.
But they indeed have got a microthruster, very precise, that will be extremely helpful for fine-tuning relative positions on formation-flying spacecrafts.
Formation Flying is TEH application.
With it, you can reconstitute a mirror 100 times larger than the Hubble's and it successor's ones, by assembling in flight many smaller (and cheaper) mirrors -this is for instance the purpose of European Space Agency's DARWIN project; you can also create and fly instruments that nobody could dream of before, like 1-km-focal-length telescopes in two separate parts (a definitive need when dealing with X- or gamma-rays).
This optical microthruster may someday be the cornerstone design behind the first X-ray telescope, to get images we never catch on ground (mind you, X-ray are conveniently filtered by the atmosphere to allow life to evolve into Intelligent Design believers).
It is a good idea, and it should quickly be compared with the other microthrust devices currently in (early) development, like ion or electron beaming -it deserves a good technical analysis.
Ah, of course, it's less fun than instant tunneling to Mars...
... as are almost all others that are subsidized by another company in most European countries; btw.
Here in France for instance, they always have been locked, with a clausa saying that the user can require unlocking after his (generally two-years) initial contract lock. And you sign this when buying.
I've seen some very good analyses on how this restriction is due to cost, but I'm surprised not to read that all Apple needs to delete any iPhone "mod" is just an update via iTunes, to which it'll be connected as often as your average iPod is.
To continue on the iPod example, we can see it somehow can be unlocked by external softwares that partly replace iTunes (e. g. Floola), but on the contrary no alternate reprogramming of the iPod itself has got any success overall. The same will apply to iPhones.
In Europe, this compared to patenting will allow you to use your invention whoever else patents it afterwards (because it is a proof that you independently invented it before them), but it won't let you attack them (in other words, apart from you, they can sue anyone else and practically owh the rights)
On space solar arrays you always get a thin protective cover glass on top of the cells; this to some extent will also protect your fluorescent layer (which anyway may age the way all fluorescent tubes do).
Indeed in sizing a solar array you use end-of-life efficiencies (generally way poorer than BOL: a sat lasts more than a dozen years by now); how the fluo layer ages will be of the essence...
Hervé (having been a space system designer for quite a while, some years ago)
http://www.nullwhore.com/sux0r/index.php?c=/0/logi n/ :-)
http://sourceforge.net/projects/sux0r/
What I find interesting is, it is one of the verrry rare examples of 'internet 2' service that you can own yourself (instead of registering here or there for more ads or worse).
A downside of Sux0r is it seems not having evolved for a couple of years (but still works, possibly that's why
I for one am desperately waiting for a *local* RSS agregator which would allow *me* (and not some site's AI) to Bayes-filter my selected feeds. I'm almost sure this will happenn sooner or later.
Wine does this but from an emulation point of view, it's not virtualisation I think...
indeed this process of rinsing with water, then alcohol, then evaporating the alcohol (not specially shaking, not specially cooking either, or not too hot just to accelerate drying) is really the standard in electronic board cleaning.
The only issue you may have is, in general you'll have *non-electronics* parts around your board, e. g. an LCD display whose nifty plastic surface may well crack when in contact with alcohol: this is the main issue to take care of.
Alcool is technically said to "reveal constraints" in ordinary plastics, so beware about this...
on OSXhints:t /~3/124520516/article.php
http://feeds.macosxhints.com/~r/macosxhints/recen
at least it looks, from the couple of maps I visited (I'm not used to Weather Channel being european)
I for one am keeping iTunes on my mac only for buying songs, otherwise I use Floola on both the mac and office PC, with the same iPod.
Floola GUI is compact, simple, and quite feature-packed though, and most of all it doesn't lock your iPod on a single machine.
You can also listen complete tunes from the ipod through the PC or mac loudspeakers.
http://www.floola.com/modules/wiwimod/
True, same here.
All my webmailers show unread mails in bold, with safari/XP I just don't read these texts!
This is just to mention, on my Wordpress (free) installation there is a (free) plugin named Akismet that apparently is a very efficient collaborative filter service to remove comment filling attempts by bots.
I really don't know how it works, but it works perfectly well.
Every now and then I log into my site and check the suspicious, "on hold" attempts: 100% are bot-generated...
H.
The example given in TFA reminds me of a contemporary poem book I recently bought, because I had read online a couple of good poems by the same author. When back home I discovered what was puzzling me: the editor had the original idea of cutting many verses in half or even three parts, which gave a curious impression of a different rythm, while I couldn't but think that wasn't in the original idea of the poet...
:-)
My experience on the 'cell' example was moreover very clear as concerns reading speed: I believe the sliced text reads much slower -OTOH, I think such a mental scansion when reading may allow to better retain the sentences.
I may be too dual-minded there, but I for one prefer keeping this method for poems anyway
in case it helps, the equivalent of Trillian for macintosh is Adium -and I fully agree with the previous post :-)
The best I know -for trust, not reliability- are cooperative webhosts; alas they often only provide PHP/mySQL but not root access. I'm still searching a cooperative virtual hosting...
Hervé
gosh, I wanted to mod you up, and thanks to this %%%% of 53-button-multiple-roller-mouse I suddenly sent an 'offtopic' before even understanding what I was doing :( /. I cannot even come back to re-mod :((
And with the careful handling of mod points by
Now what if I post a comment there, will it "undo" the mod?
We had this here in Europe a couple of years ago, under the pressure of junk makers. :(
;-)
There were very hot debates, petitions etc. which appeared entierely useless
Good luck!
If you resist I promiss I switch to US chocolate
(FWIW, the worst junk makers here, and at the origin of the move, were UK manufacturers)
On all laptop macintoshes there are now always webcams on the screens, and go figure there are already maybe 5 or 6 such utilities, taking regular snapshots of the mugger and sending them silently back somewhere... :-(
o ver
I agree this still sounds stupid, but just because there is a LED aside the cam
see for instance: http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/20425/underc
The icon itself says it all...
People in Finland aren't activists or shills.
;-)
(...)
People in the US on the whole simply don't care as much.
Given what's silently happening in future DVD formats, I'm wondering what Chinese users are going to prefer
OMG, here in Europe I always enter /. on RSS (so with no tags indicated): honestly, this morning when half aspleep I understood someone had mathematically determined than US is to dominate everyone forever...
A dozen years ago, when the earliest french speedtrain was deployed between Paris and Lyons (some 500Km away) the french airlines that provided the equivalent transportation just had to close their slots on this destination, because they almost were just abandoned in a matter of months.
Today, even though the TGV train cannot highspeed in some areas (because its rails still have to be adapted: smoother bends etc.), a 800-km travel takes you almost the same time rail/air unless you happen to live in front of the airport.
There are not a lot of things a french can be proud of nowadays given our present government, but TGVs are one of them, all the more in the perspective of costlier fuel and pollution...
read the end of the article. MS proposes licences @ $250000 for very precisely these products...
Out of all solid-state media makers if just a couple have already paid, it's a million-dollar-worth patent...
Such a theory results in you being able to get pictures of the same star environments at different places but at different ages (because of the speed of light) so in fact you may not be able to recognize this.
Indeed you could recognize it when observing the stars around a "window" frame, because in this area, you'll indeed get images of the same "frame" at two different places in the sky, with stars of the same age.
If you manage to match two such "frame" zones in the sky, then you have proven the theory. This is, in a simplified way, how the supporters of these theories proceed.
The problem is, to detect the frames one must (a) be sure of their shape (why regular ones, why not circular windows, etc.) and (b) having selected one shape and size, scan the entire deep sky with it trying to match two zones -this activity requires more precise deep sky catalogs that we have (necessitating e. g. results from ESA's future Herschel/Planck satellites) and a computing time now evaluated in centuries IIRC.
In other words: nice unverifyable theory.
I use a macintosh, and SpamSieve as a spam filter, that just some months ago was 99.x like POPfile was, to the point I felt embarrassed (you know, "POPfile is open source, not yours, etc.")
:-)
Now, the image-spam impact on SpamSieve has only lowered its accuracy from 99.5 to 98.8%, which means the guy behind must have added plenty of other criteria
(these figures for only 300 spams a day, but on various accounts, and with as an extra constraint the fact I download only the first 5K of any mail before screening it)