once you hack your phone and can do pretty much whatever you want... what's the point of getting updates from Apple? Hope that they're going to give you something great that the OpenSource community can't? Why not just disable updates to prevent accidental iBricking and then call it a day?
My sentiments exactly. What are the savings in reduction of transportation costs related to distribution and acquisition of information? It's probably unquantifiable; the usage amount seems meaningless without this other half of the equation.
Thank you - I was wondering why nobody mentioned Sea Luanch earlier in the thread. When land-lubber law be at stake take ye affairs to the high seas where no man reigns.
"The only shortcoming for realism at this point is they're still having trouble with destructable and deformable environments."
Another issue I have with visual aspects is that first person perspective games generally don't simulate a natural visual field. For a more realistic environment, the view should be sharp and in focus where the player's FOV is centered, but should gradually become blurrier and less distinct moving away from that point. Those sample screenshots from the article look stupid to me because every portion of the image is as sharp as every other as if they are on the same focal plane. It prevents a proper sense of depth of field.
What can a machine intelligence possibly learn that an organic intelligence could not?
Machine intelligence can use brute force to find answers that humans can not. Hence brute force encryption cracking, or perhaps subtler tasks like gene folding. Possibly more important than what answers machines can come to faster than us is the question of what questions can a machine postulate to itself for resolution? What is the answer to life, the Universe, and everything!?
I figure when AI reaches the point that scientists are hoping for, machine intelligence will very much be a force to be reckoned with.
I've pondered this topic a bit over the years. I still think it's a long shot. Real long.
Consider the film "Batteries Not Included" which featured miniature robotic machines that were able to reproduce. They did so by harvesting raw matierials that they commandeered from their immediate environment, and then put to work their on-board fabrication tools (welding, cutting, fastening, etc.).
That may work for Hollywood, but if you consider the great variety of both materials and tools required to fabricate such a machine starting with only the raw materials (nevermind the effort and tools require to harvest/mine the materials themselves), you end up with an entire factory worth of equipment. That happens to be the reason we have factories. Specific raw materials in one side, specialized fabricated products out the other side. Unless someone is planning to construct a super-smart robot the size of an aircraft carrier with the ability to mine/harvest all the raw materials it needs on its own and assemble them into anything its "heart desires"... it's just not possible to do this in a self-contained fashion.
It would take... a super-smart brain and a swarm of well-equipped mobile minions to pull this off... like corporate America and offshore development, or Skynet and Cyberdyne Systems model T101.
While I can relate to the bulk of your post, I just wanted to touch on one thing you mentioned:
Cable companies charge an average $7.50 monthly lease fee for the box that costs them $300 upfront
Maybe I'm crazy, but after several decades and millions upon millions of cable boxes having been manufactured and distributed, they want us to believe that those things cost more than 40 bucks up front? That's hard to swallow. I work in an industry that requires the assembly of customized electronics equipment and while the prototypes might cost $10,000 or more, the mass produced units are ALWAYS less than a hundred bucks. I have a feeling the cable companies are doing just fine for themselves on that equipment lease fee.
I made that same argument when the U.S. deployed the MOAB in time for the Iraq invasion. The media at that time, too, compared the bomb to a nuclear device. When I saw the FOAB news yesterday I started searching around and discovered the world's smallest nuke, a fission bomb known as the Davy Crockett carrying a "W54 warhead" from the 1960's and guess what: the MOAB and FOAB are bigger explosions. There are some interesting video clips of Davy Crockett detonations courtesy of The History Channel that can be found pretty easily.
Imagine for a moment that you're "the guy in charge" of this botnet and in an unprecedented cooperative gesture all the ISP's of the world adopt this idea and start blocking on port 25 as you suggest... what would you do?
If it were me, I'd adapt. They can't block all the ports, and they can't adapt to custom protocols. Treating the symptoms does not seem like the cure to this disease to me...
Take, for example, the impending release of Joomla 2.0 which is based on MVC architecture and will not only completely negate the value of this book, but will also likely (if it is in keeping with the Mambo developers' release history) completely invalidate any and all current components/extensions requiring everyone start from the ground, up. Again.
Good call... here's some info. Calls out both gravitational heat and left-over planetary formation heat as being in the 5-10% range each with the bulk of heat generated by radioactive decay. Be that as it may, my point above was that drilling holes and tapping that heat energy does not affect the source of that energy.
Just a couple thoughts on the topics you and another poster above point out:
"Letting all that heat out" suggests two thoughts to me:
1. "heating up the atmosphere"/"worsening global warming";
By my mind, global warming is not about regulating air temperature, it's about regulating human impact on the natural global processes that already regulate air temperature (among other things). I don't know if you noticed, but as the Earth rotates daily, most of the heat (air temperature) put down on the planet's surface by the sun during the day escapes again at night. The heat is lost through radiation into space, and depending on where you live, the temperature change resulting from this loss can be quite dramatic.
I only mention this because it is apparent to me that the atmosphere is capable of shedding tremendous amounts of energy put into it by the sun during the day hours - unless we can match a significant percentage of the sun's energy striking the surface of half the planet face through the release of geothermal heat from below the surface, then there's no way we're going to be able to affect that balance. I don't believe global warming is impacted by this process unless for the opposite effect: a reduced human impact on climate by taking polluting alternatives of power generation offline.
2. "cooling the planet's interior";
While I don't know enough about planetary science to make a compelling argument on this, I just thought I would point out that the source of the heat from our planet's core is the tremendous inward pressure of the outer layers. Tapping into the heat source to extract energy from it does not remove or in any way reduce the amount of gravitational energy being put into it. I believe it would take more of a heat reduction than humanity is capable of to affect the planet's core temperature to a point where it matters: impact to the planetary magnetic field to the point where it is less effective protection from solar radiation - this is what killed Mars.
... or one of those "Y-something" parks, anyway. I must say though that those of us from the Yosemite side of the world call a 5 acre body of water a "pond". Oh well on both accounts.
... I could see some solid imaginative and practical uses for this. A portable "disk" with mass storage available through mapping the likes of a gmail account, and license info for access to web-based applications that don't need to be stored on the disk itself. Reminds me of the memory card for a PlayStation that stores settings for a game and if you take the settings to another location where the game is also available, you're right back at home; with the web, the "game" (or application) should be available anywhere, so I'd buy that for a dollar. Unfortunately, my Microsoft senses are tingling and my guess would be that it's only going to support the MIcrosoft suite of offerings and that I am not willing to buy.
"From what I understand, "racing the engine" may not be worse than puttering along. Hypermilers use a "pulse and glide" system, and it said that accelerating at an RPM where your engine gives peak torque is more fuel efficient than going the absolute slowest RPM you can. Accelerating then coasting. Then accelerate again."
In recent months I've purchased a hybrid because it actually does save me money every month. (There have been economic debates about hybrids in the past, but it's tough to argue when you get the car used for half the price, have no payments, and low insurance because there's no requirement to go full coverage for a loan agreement, and gas mileage quadruples for a long commute.) I have an interesting commute that takes me through a mountainous highway with a long, windy uphill and downhill section both ways, 75 miles round trip each day.
Now what I have found about this drive in this particular car (it's a Honda Insight, the most fuel efficient hybrid for several differet reasons, despite the marketing claims of Toyota) unlike others that I've done this commute in is that I HAVE to break the speed limit to gain fuel efficiency. It has to do with the torque power curve for the engine. If I am below the sweet spot in RPM's then the engine will require elecric drive assistance to power up the hill - but the electric drive can't sustain that output the whole way up.
If I were to drive the hill in 3rd gear at the speed limit all the way up, the RPM's are around 2500, well below the sweet spot, and the battery is drained within 1-2 miles. At that point I have to FLOOR it WOT (wide open throttle) to get the power out of third gear and the gas engine in order to maintain speed - this gets me down to about 15MPG up the hill.
If I were to drive the hill in 2nd gear at the speed limit all the way up, the RPM's are near redline, well above the sweet spot this time, and there is a risk of overheating, and still only ~15-25MPG. Taking second gear down to the sweet spot puts me at 10-15MPH below the speed limit which is also a traffic hazard on a fast-paced four-lane highway.
So what I do is I ride third gear up to the sweet spot which is 5-10MPH above the legal speed limit (and well in line with the "flow of traffic" for this stretch of road on a daily basis). Cruising the engine in the power band shuts down the electric assist and brings gas mileage up to 40-50MPG uphill - how strange is it that peak performance potential actually maxmizes fuel economy? The car just, plain can't do any better because of gearing and power band.
The Insight gas-electric hybrid is an interesting setup though compared to the Prius. As I have been commuting in this car for several months now and trying to understand just exactly what driving habits result in better or worse mileage, I was surprised to find that the electric power assist has NOTHING to do with typical fuel consumption. I get my best mileage days (70-80MPG) when the power assist never kicks in.
The electric motor kicking in represents a situation where you are demanding more power than the gas engine can deliver. When I floor it, I get electric power. When I lay off, the electric shuts down and recharges under coasting and braking. So I find myself modulating the accellerator to just under the point where the electric will kick in when I need to accelerate, and only push further for a hill or a rapid speed up for a merge or something of the likes. Just having one little lightbulb that lets me know when I'm exceeding optimal power demand is enough to get me to lay off the gas - there's no need to stare at the fuel consumption/MPG numbers themselves because the charge/discharge state of the electrical system tells it all.
For reference for those who are unfamiliar, the Prius uses a very different strategy for the electric: if the Prius is under lower power demand, the electric is used. When you go WOT, the electric shuts down. The Prius can move on electric power only at low speed. The Insight cann
There's no need to "search the web" for mysql references - mysql.com has excellent, comprehensive documentation online, and it is supplemented by commentary of programmers who actually use the stuff every day. It would take me longer to locate and flip through a book than to get the answer from the source especially when I'm already at the keyboard. Another consideration is that the online documentation could be updated where the book is frozen to a specific point in time. I agree that there are uses for certain types of reference books, but this one I'll pass on.
Good stuff. I still think this whole thing is proposterous, but I enjoy the analysis of whether it's even possible, so I postulate the following:
What if instead of rotating wings, the platform was a fixed wing design with a wingspan tremendous enough to:
1) Remain in aloft in a sationary position in the lowest wind speed recorded for the location
2) Reduce the cable length back to 6 miles so that the cable can go straight down instead of in a curved slope
It seems to me that with a sufficiently planned design, the lift created over the stationary wings could easily sustain the 50-100ton hanging load. According to this page, the maximum takeoff weight of a Boeing 747 is 800,000lbs, or 400 tons. If those wings can put that 400 ton aircraft into the sky at 250 MPH, then a similarly sized wing should sustain 50-100 tons in a quarter of that wind speed which is about in line with what you're going to going to expect from the jet stream.
So let's say hypothetically, you have this huge aircraft-sized behemoth "glider" holding its own tether mass with no/few moving parts. Now all we would need to do is outfit the puppy with, say, fore and aft rotors and a central generator to extract power from the same airflow that keeps her afloat.
I'm no expert on fluid dynamics, but it seems at least plausible to me, and potentially more achievable than that helicopter scheme. Plus if there is a problem with the glider version, it could potentially release itself from its tether and land as a normal glider-type aircraft in an appropriately located air strip.
Further, the thing might be launched into position from the very same air strip potentially under battery power using its own generator/props as motor propulsion and carrying its own spooled tether up into the sky with it, lowering the tether for ground connection once it is in position. With a sufficient design it might not even need batteries, and could just remain tethered during flight, spiraling its way upward and carying the tether up with it, drawing power off the grid through the tether itself for motive power, and returning to a state of power generation once in place.
Just exploring ideas... all in all, as I mentioned, I think stationary concepts are going to be more reliable and oceanic deployments definitely solve the "land grab" issues that these wizards were attempting to address by reaching for the sky.
On second thought, if anyone here has the knowledge to calculate the cable size to carry 10MW and can figure the cable weight per meter and multiply by 10,000 of those... to determine how much weight this device must suspend, I think you have to double it because the ground line has to be able to carry the same amount of power. This isn't an issue for terrestrial power plants because they're ON the ground. But something up in the sky will need to be connected to ground to complete the circuit... is this crazy talk?
... what about the power transfer cable? I can't imagine a cable that can carry 10MW of juice over 10KM of distance could possibly considered a lightweight matter. This little helicopter contraption will need to generate power AND have enough energy to remain aloft under the weight of that cable. I think it's an interesting concept, but the solution to all our future power woes? Enh. While we're dreaming big, I'd be more interested in this Energy Island concept being built out.
With such a well-connected machine, it seems like it should be easily capable of general web browsing, but I can't seem to find any mention of it - does anyone know if it has a browser, or is this a big "duh" that they intentionally left out?
I first heard of the MDI air car a couple years ago. I recall at the time their mention that one of the development challenges was a tank design that can hold a sufficient quantity of compressed air to achieve desired performance and range yet be safe enough for deployment on a passenger vehicle.
Earlier in this discussion, someone posed a question about exploding air tanks. While an air tank explosion is not a fiery one, it is still a powerful one. Ever seen what a car looks like after a nitrous oxide tank explodes from over pressure caused by heating within the cabin? If you are Google impaired, I'll save you the burden: it'll literally blow the rear end of ANY vehicle to pieces. And that happens at around 900-1000PSI, a mere fraction of the tank pressure that is required for the MDI air car which is disclosed as 300 bar, over 4300 PSI.
From their FAQ:
300 bars of compressed air stored on board the vehicle, Is this dangerous for the passengers?
Compressed air tanks have already been proven safe by one of our partners EADS(AIRBUS). This company's reputation in the aeronautical field is unprecedented, given the reliability of its tanks. What's more, the compressed air does not present any risk of explosion. Countless test have been carried out in the most extreme conditions (gun shoots, resistance to fire...) to guarantee passenger safety in every possible condition. The high pressure tanks have been developed using a similar technology to those used in natural gas vehicles and by firefighters. All are produced with carbon fiber over plastic.
The tanks that MDI puts in its vehicles are similar to those already in use in natural gas busses in Germany and other countries.
From another site, "A conventional high-pressure natural gas tank operates at 3600 pounds per square inch (psi)."
The MDI tank goes 700PSI over the natural gas tanks that they compare their own tank performance to. I'm sure there's plenty of good research in there and I'm all for thinking out of the box, but for a lousy 200km (125 miles) per charge..? All anyone will ever be able to do for the air car is marginally increase tank capacity for a slight improvement in performance or range and with greater potential for destructive explosions. My money is on improvements in electron storage for electric vehicles which have much greater potential for the future of transportation.
Perhaps you can clarify something that I haven't seen mentioned yet (?)
I believe that there are three things that can happen when radiation encounters an object:
a) Reflect
b) Absorb
c) Pass through
In the case of "solar power", it strikes me that there is another application aside from PhotoVoltaic that could benefit from lower reflectivity, and that is solar thermal. I would think that surfaces designed to absorb solar thermal energy, such as solar water heaters, or solar concentrating power systems, that reduced reflectivity would mean greater absorbtion of solar thermal energy, and thus improved overall solar thermal efficiency...
Could something like this be used as a low-cost concrete alternative structural building material in 3rd world locations where chemical concrete mixes might not be affordable...?
All it takes is a toddler with the idea that "releasing the parking brake would be fun" to cause a problem. But paranoia will not make the world "safe" for children. The world, and Universe on whole, is a hostile place and parents need to come to grips with that and, as a previous poster mentioned, take responsibility for teaching common sense themselves. I say down with the easily offended.
Slashdot Mirror
once you hack your phone and can do pretty much whatever you want... what's the point of getting updates from Apple? Hope that they're going to give you something great that the OpenSource community can't? Why not just disable updates to prevent accidental iBricking and then call it a day?
That deserves a chuckle. No mod points for me though. :)
My sentiments exactly. What are the savings in reduction of transportation costs related to distribution and acquisition of information? It's probably unquantifiable; the usage amount seems meaningless without this other half of the equation.
Thank you - I was wondering why nobody mentioned Sea Luanch earlier in the thread. When land-lubber law be at stake take ye affairs to the high seas where no man reigns.
"The only shortcoming for realism at this point is they're still having trouble with destructable and deformable environments."
Another issue I have with visual aspects is that first person perspective games generally don't simulate a natural visual field. For a more realistic environment, the view should be sharp and in focus where the player's FOV is centered, but should gradually become blurrier and less distinct moving away from that point. Those sample screenshots from the article look stupid to me because every portion of the image is as sharp as every other as if they are on the same focal plane. It prevents a proper sense of depth of field.
What can a machine intelligence possibly learn that an organic intelligence could not?
Machine intelligence can use brute force to find answers that humans can not. Hence brute force encryption cracking, or perhaps subtler tasks like gene folding. Possibly more important than what answers machines can come to faster than us is the question of what questions can a machine postulate to itself for resolution? What is the answer to life, the Universe, and everything!?
I figure when AI reaches the point that scientists are hoping for, machine intelligence will very much be a force to be reckoned with.
I've pondered this topic a bit over the years. I still think it's a long shot. Real long.
Consider the film "Batteries Not Included" which featured miniature robotic machines that were able to reproduce. They did so by harvesting raw matierials that they commandeered from their immediate environment, and then put to work their on-board fabrication tools (welding, cutting, fastening, etc.).
That may work for Hollywood, but if you consider the great variety of both materials and tools required to fabricate such a machine starting with only the raw materials (nevermind the effort and tools require to harvest/mine the materials themselves), you end up with an entire factory worth of equipment. That happens to be the reason we have factories. Specific raw materials in one side, specialized fabricated products out the other side. Unless someone is planning to construct a super-smart robot the size of an aircraft carrier with the ability to mine/harvest all the raw materials it needs on its own and assemble them into anything its "heart desires"... it's just not possible to do this in a self-contained fashion.
It would take... a super-smart brain and a swarm of well-equipped mobile minions to pull this off... like corporate America and offshore development, or Skynet and Cyberdyne Systems model T101.
While I can relate to the bulk of your post, I just wanted to touch on one thing you mentioned:
Cable companies charge an average $7.50 monthly lease fee for the box that costs them $300 upfront
Maybe I'm crazy, but after several decades and millions upon millions of cable boxes having been manufactured and distributed, they want us to believe that those things cost more than 40 bucks up front? That's hard to swallow. I work in an industry that requires the assembly of customized electronics equipment and while the prototypes might cost $10,000 or more, the mass produced units are ALWAYS less than a hundred bucks. I have a feeling the cable companies are doing just fine for themselves on that equipment lease fee.
I made that same argument when the U.S. deployed the MOAB in time for the Iraq invasion. The media at that time, too, compared the bomb to a nuclear device. When I saw the FOAB news yesterday I started searching around and discovered the world's smallest nuke, a fission bomb known as the Davy Crockett carrying a "W54 warhead" from the 1960's and guess what: the MOAB and FOAB are bigger explosions. There are some interesting video clips of Davy Crockett detonations courtesy of The History Channel that can be found pretty easily.
Imagine for a moment that you're "the guy in charge" of this botnet and in an unprecedented cooperative gesture all the ISP's of the world adopt this idea and start blocking on port 25 as you suggest... what would you do?
If it were me, I'd adapt. They can't block all the ports, and they can't adapt to custom protocols. Treating the symptoms does not seem like the cure to this disease to me...
Take, for example, the impending release of Joomla 2.0 which is based on MVC architecture and will not only completely negate the value of this book, but will also likely (if it is in keeping with the Mambo developers' release history) completely invalidate any and all current components/extensions requiring everyone start from the ground, up. Again.
Good call... here's some info. Calls out both gravitational heat and left-over planetary formation heat as being in the 5-10% range each with the bulk of heat generated by radioactive decay. Be that as it may, my point above was that drilling holes and tapping that heat energy does not affect the source of that energy.
"Letting all that heat out" suggests two thoughts to me:
1. "heating up the atmosphere"/"worsening global warming";
- By my mind, global warming is not about regulating air temperature, it's about regulating human impact on the natural global processes that already regulate air temperature (among other things). I don't know if you noticed, but as the Earth rotates daily, most of the heat (air temperature) put down on the planet's surface by the sun during the day escapes again at night. The heat is lost through radiation into space, and depending on where you live, the temperature change resulting from this loss can be quite dramatic.
2. "cooling the planet's interior";I only mention this because it is apparent to me that the atmosphere is capable of shedding tremendous amounts of energy put into it by the sun during the day hours - unless we can match a significant percentage of the sun's energy striking the surface of half the planet face through the release of geothermal heat from below the surface, then there's no way we're going to be able to affect that balance. I don't believe global warming is impacted by this process unless for the opposite effect: a reduced human impact on climate by taking polluting alternatives of power generation offline.
... or one of those "Y-something" parks, anyway. I must say though that those of us from the Yosemite side of the world call a 5 acre body of water a "pond". Oh well on both accounts.
... I could see some solid imaginative and practical uses for this. A portable "disk" with mass storage available through mapping the likes of a gmail account, and license info for access to web-based applications that don't need to be stored on the disk itself. Reminds me of the memory card for a PlayStation that stores settings for a game and if you take the settings to another location where the game is also available, you're right back at home; with the web, the "game" (or application) should be available anywhere, so I'd buy that for a dollar. Unfortunately, my Microsoft senses are tingling and my guess would be that it's only going to support the MIcrosoft suite of offerings and that I am not willing to buy.
"From what I understand, "racing the engine" may not be worse than puttering along. Hypermilers use a "pulse and glide" system, and it said that accelerating at an RPM where your engine gives peak torque is more fuel efficient than going the absolute slowest RPM you can. Accelerating then coasting. Then accelerate again."
In recent months I've purchased a hybrid because it actually does save me money every month. (There have been economic debates about hybrids in the past, but it's tough to argue when you get the car used for half the price, have no payments, and low insurance because there's no requirement to go full coverage for a loan agreement, and gas mileage quadruples for a long commute.) I have an interesting commute that takes me through a mountainous highway with a long, windy uphill and downhill section both ways, 75 miles round trip each day.
Now what I have found about this drive in this particular car (it's a Honda Insight, the most fuel efficient hybrid for several differet reasons, despite the marketing claims of Toyota) unlike others that I've done this commute in is that I HAVE to break the speed limit to gain fuel efficiency. It has to do with the torque power curve for the engine. If I am below the sweet spot in RPM's then the engine will require elecric drive assistance to power up the hill - but the electric drive can't sustain that output the whole way up.
If I were to drive the hill in 3rd gear at the speed limit all the way up, the RPM's are around 2500, well below the sweet spot, and the battery is drained within 1-2 miles. At that point I have to FLOOR it WOT (wide open throttle) to get the power out of third gear and the gas engine in order to maintain speed - this gets me down to about 15MPG up the hill.
If I were to drive the hill in 2nd gear at the speed limit all the way up, the RPM's are near redline, well above the sweet spot this time, and there is a risk of overheating, and still only ~15-25MPG. Taking second gear down to the sweet spot puts me at 10-15MPH below the speed limit which is also a traffic hazard on a fast-paced four-lane highway.
So what I do is I ride third gear up to the sweet spot which is 5-10MPH above the legal speed limit (and well in line with the "flow of traffic" for this stretch of road on a daily basis). Cruising the engine in the power band shuts down the electric assist and brings gas mileage up to 40-50MPG uphill - how strange is it that peak performance potential actually maxmizes fuel economy? The car just, plain can't do any better because of gearing and power band.
The Insight gas-electric hybrid is an interesting setup though compared to the Prius. As I have been commuting in this car for several months now and trying to understand just exactly what driving habits result in better or worse mileage, I was surprised to find that the electric power assist has NOTHING to do with typical fuel consumption. I get my best mileage days (70-80MPG) when the power assist never kicks in.
The electric motor kicking in represents a situation where you are demanding more power than the gas engine can deliver. When I floor it, I get electric power. When I lay off, the electric shuts down and recharges under coasting and braking. So I find myself modulating the accellerator to just under the point where the electric will kick in when I need to accelerate, and only push further for a hill or a rapid speed up for a merge or something of the likes. Just having one little lightbulb that lets me know when I'm exceeding optimal power demand is enough to get me to lay off the gas - there's no need to stare at the fuel consumption/MPG numbers themselves because the charge/discharge state of the electrical system tells it all.
For reference for those who are unfamiliar, the Prius uses a very different strategy for the electric: if the Prius is under lower power demand, the electric is used. When you go WOT, the electric shuts down. The Prius can move on electric power only at low speed. The Insight cann
There's no need to "search the web" for mysql references - mysql.com has excellent, comprehensive documentation online, and it is supplemented by commentary of programmers who actually use the stuff every day. It would take me longer to locate and flip through a book than to get the answer from the source especially when I'm already at the keyboard. Another consideration is that the online documentation could be updated where the book is frozen to a specific point in time. I agree that there are uses for certain types of reference books, but this one I'll pass on.
Good stuff. I still think this whole thing is proposterous, but I enjoy the analysis of whether it's even possible, so I postulate the following:
What if instead of rotating wings, the platform was a fixed wing design with a wingspan tremendous enough to:
1) Remain in aloft in a sationary position in the lowest wind speed recorded for the location
2) Reduce the cable length back to 6 miles so that the cable can go straight down instead of in a curved slope
It seems to me that with a sufficiently planned design, the lift created over the stationary wings could easily sustain the 50-100ton hanging load. According to this page, the maximum takeoff weight of a Boeing 747 is 800,000lbs, or 400 tons. If those wings can put that 400 ton aircraft into the sky at 250 MPH, then a similarly sized wing should sustain 50-100 tons in a quarter of that wind speed which is about in line with what you're going to going to expect from the jet stream.
So let's say hypothetically, you have this huge aircraft-sized behemoth "glider" holding its own tether mass with no/few moving parts. Now all we would need to do is outfit the puppy with, say, fore and aft rotors and a central generator to extract power from the same airflow that keeps her afloat.
I'm no expert on fluid dynamics, but it seems at least plausible to me, and potentially more achievable than that helicopter scheme. Plus if there is a problem with the glider version, it could potentially release itself from its tether and land as a normal glider-type aircraft in an appropriately located air strip.
Further, the thing might be launched into position from the very same air strip potentially under battery power using its own generator/props as motor propulsion and carrying its own spooled tether up into the sky with it, lowering the tether for ground connection once it is in position. With a sufficient design it might not even need batteries, and could just remain tethered during flight, spiraling its way upward and carying the tether up with it, drawing power off the grid through the tether itself for motive power, and returning to a state of power generation once in place.
Just exploring ideas... all in all, as I mentioned, I think stationary concepts are going to be more reliable and oceanic deployments definitely solve the "land grab" issues that these wizards were attempting to address by reaching for the sky.
On second thought, if anyone here has the knowledge to calculate the cable size to carry 10MW and can figure the cable weight per meter and multiply by 10,000 of those... to determine how much weight this device must suspend, I think you have to double it because the ground line has to be able to carry the same amount of power. This isn't an issue for terrestrial power plants because they're ON the ground. But something up in the sky will need to be connected to ground to complete the circuit... is this crazy talk?
... what about the power transfer cable? I can't imagine a cable that can carry 10MW of juice over 10KM of distance could possibly considered a lightweight matter. This little helicopter contraption will need to generate power AND have enough energy to remain aloft under the weight of that cable. I think it's an interesting concept, but the solution to all our future power woes? Enh. While we're dreaming big, I'd be more interested in this Energy Island concept being built out.
With such a well-connected machine, it seems like it should be easily capable of general web browsing, but I can't seem to find any mention of it - does anyone know if it has a browser, or is this a big "duh" that they intentionally left out?
Earlier in this discussion, someone posed a question about exploding air tanks. While an air tank explosion is not a fiery one, it is still a powerful one. Ever seen what a car looks like after a nitrous oxide tank explodes from over pressure caused by heating within the cabin? If you are Google impaired, I'll save you the burden: it'll literally blow the rear end of ANY vehicle to pieces. And that happens at around 900-1000PSI, a mere fraction of the tank pressure that is required for the MDI air car which is disclosed as 300 bar, over 4300 PSI.
From their FAQ:
From another site, "A conventional high-pressure natural gas tank operates at 3600 pounds per square inch (psi)."
The MDI tank goes 700PSI over the natural gas tanks that they compare their own tank performance to. I'm sure there's plenty of good research in there and I'm all for thinking out of the box, but for a lousy 200km (125 miles) per charge..? All anyone will ever be able to do for the air car is marginally increase tank capacity for a slight improvement in performance or range and with greater potential for destructive explosions. My money is on improvements in electron storage for electric vehicles which have much greater potential for the future of transportation.
Perhaps you can clarify something that I haven't seen mentioned yet (?)
...
I believe that there are three things that can happen when radiation encounters an object:
a) Reflect
b) Absorb
c) Pass through
In the case of "solar power", it strikes me that there is another application aside from PhotoVoltaic that could benefit from lower reflectivity, and that is solar thermal. I would think that surfaces designed to absorb solar thermal energy, such as solar water heaters, or solar concentrating power systems, that reduced reflectivity would mean greater absorbtion of solar thermal energy, and thus improved overall solar thermal efficiency
Could something like this be used as a low-cost concrete alternative structural building material in 3rd world locations where chemical concrete mixes might not be affordable...?
All it takes is a toddler with the idea that "releasing the parking brake would be fun" to cause a problem. But paranoia will not make the world "safe" for children. The world, and Universe on whole, is a hostile place and parents need to come to grips with that and, as a previous poster mentioned, take responsibility for teaching common sense themselves. I say down with the easily offended.