A hybrid engine can increase fuel economy but it ALSO can increase horsepower.
Yeah, right. Something with an 8L V8 engine needs more horsepower. How about buying a either frickin' race car (if you want to go fast) or a frickin' semi (if you want to haul stuff) instead of a truck, huh? Also, adding all that stuff also adds _weight_ to the vehicle.
Think of it as putting a second motor into a car.
Why put a second motor into the the car and add a whole additional bunch of points of failure when you can simply put in a bigger engine? It makes no sense.
Someone might do it to make their car faster rather than more efficient.
Someone who's very dumb and has zero clue about engineering. If you all you want is to add horsepower to your car, put a bigger engine in it. It's as simple as that. It's no problem to put a gasoline engine in a car with enough power to turn the tires into puddles of rubber.
I read about an interesting hybrid concept a while ago - it basically eliminated the transmission from the car to save weight. The car would use the (small) gasoline engine to charge the battery and drive the electric motors as long as the car was going below the normal highway crusising speed, and engage a clutch to directly power the wheels with the gasoline engine once the crusing speed was reached. Advantages were the lack of a transmission (= weight and space that can be used for batteries instead) while still being able to power the wheels directly (making use of the efficiency of the gasoline engine when cruising).
Anything based on a computer simulation is based on our arbitrarily incomplete knowledge. To base even the least significant conclusions upon it seems laughably irresponsible and unscientific.
We eagerly await your analytical solution to the n-body-problem. I mean, it's really simple stuff, right?
Until you're finished, we'll have to calculate all those spacecraft trajectories with computer simulations.
very very very hard way to physically clone a CC/DC
Actually, at least in Europe, it's already pretty hard to clone a debit/ATM card well enough that a modern ATM will accept them.
Did you notice the catch? "a modern ATM". That's why criminals only need to clone the magnetic strip (trivial) and get your PIN (also trivial), and then they send the data to their buddies in Eastern Europe to withdraw money using the not-so-modern ATMs used in these countries.
Yeah, and if I had some ham, I could have ham and eggs, if I had some eggs.
Yes, but if you don't have ham, you can't have ham and eggs. And before this invention we didn't have any chance for having ham. Now we just need to find the eggs.
If we had a carbon-neutral power source good enough to reform the CO2 and H2O back into hydrocarbons, we could use it directly, no need to first extract the CO2 from the air.
Really? So where are all those cars and planes running on nuclear power, solar power, geothermal power or hydro power? How do you make plastics out of electricity? I'm curious.
No, no citation is needed. That's laser safety 101 trivia, go and look up the various laser safety classes (or maybe you can consider this to be a citation). Anything that's useful as a weapon is going to be class 4 (in the old or the new system), and even diffuse reflections of class 4 lasers can cause eye damage.
With a laser weapon, you don't worry about wind or many other factors.
Laser weapons powerful enough to damage any target will permanently damage the eyesight of anyone who looks at as much as a non-specular reflection of the beam. So much for collateral damage.
Conventional weapons (bombs, mines, bullets, missiles, etc.) can cause death, permanent paralysis, limb loss, and even blindness. What is the difference, really?
No, conventional weapons cause death if applied correctly - all other results are from incorrect application. They're meant to be deadly, a blinding laser is only meant to maim. Welcome to military logic. It's ok if it's deadly, it's not ok if it isn't.
Unless each person gets to see the printout of their paper votes, then that still could be easily faked.
That's the whole freakin' point. Please, even if you don't vote and never plan to, if you want to discuss how to properly run an elections, you'll need to know some of the basics and what the word "audit trail" entails. It also covers such details as documenting who had the box of ballots in their care, and that they weren't left alone with it, etc.
perhaps they do get to see them, but I hope they don't have physical access to them.
So what if they do? Yes, each person might manipulate their own paper ballot to show something other than what they actually voted for electronically, but apart from getting some upper management types sent to the firing squad, what would they accomplish that way?
Besides, that's already part of having an audit trail.
In fact, even if they did see a pile of paper, what is to stop the government swapping them if they really wanted to?
Audit trail. There's too much work involved in rigging the election _and_ covering all the traces.
Again, I'm not saying they do because it's quite unlikely, but if a government wanted to rig an election I'm sure they could find a way to do it.
The whole point of having an audit trail is making sure that there are enough people involved to that at least one of them can yell bloody murder if anyone wants to mess with the election, and enough documentation to prove that there was something suspicious or outright wrong (e.g. box of ballots was in a room with only one person in it for 30 minutes).
Pratchett has a very similar style of humour to Adams, but IMO his stories are much better.
Compare the earlier Discworld novels to the later ones, and you'll find that the writing style and the storytelling get better and better. Adams was on the same track, but unfortunately never got to write his later novels.
When your votes are electronic for example, what exactly does this 'audit trail' entail?
Printed ballots that can be used for a recount. *sigh* Was that really that hard? And if there's a recount and the number of votes doesn't match, take the upper management of whoever produced the electronic voting system and put them in front of a firing squad. It's really very simple. Or skip the whole "electronic voting" idea altogether. It belongs on the same trash heap as the idea of a paperless office. The voting process needs to be simple enough that you can pick a bunch of average Joes and have them do a re-count, i.e. if it need specialized knowledge about computers, it's too complex.
I think it's absurd that someone should be threatened for voting for one bunch of idiots over another.
Well, news flash, the bunch of idiots you're voting for recruits itself from an even bigger bunch of idiots aka the general population. And bunches of idiots _will_ do absurd things, such as death threats, actually trying to follow through on them, or just vandalize your stuff.
Unless the idiots that they are voting for are Nazis, but even then death threats are a bit much.
For pretty much every political group, there's a bunch of people that thinks they're Satan incarnate and anyone supporting or $DEITY forbid, voting for them needs to die. Need I say more?
When votes are anonymous, you have to admit it isn't exactly very hard to fake elections.
Err... no? If you've got a proper audit trail, it's hard to fake elections, anonymous or not. It's the audit trail that makes elections hard to fake, not the absence of anonymity.
I don't see why voting should be an anonymous thing.
In that case, you've probably never been the victim of death threats (or more), vandalism, discrimination or being sent to the nearest re-education facility for how you voted in the last 30 years? Oh... right. You don't vote. So none of that is a problem for you.
As a non-USian, I might be clueless, but wouldn't it be easier for congress to simply stop said department (an extension of the US government) snooping people's data?
It's not specific for the US - making laws is usually easier than getting rid of them. So, if there's a way to make something that's allowed by law, but which you don't like impractical by saddling it with extra laws, that's usually preferred to repealing the law which allows it in the first place.
will make a plane fall out of the sky or crash into a building.
Since any of these searches are done by _customs_, it doesn't matter what or what not the data on the laptop might do to the plane. It has already landed.
I wonder how practical is graphene capacitor used as a memory storage cell compare to SRAM or DRAM we have today.
Err... you do know that one of the main differences between SRAM and DRAM is that the latter uses a capacitor (and fewer transistors) than the former per memory cell, and therefore requires to be refreshed occasionally (hence "dynamic", as opposed to "static" memory which will keep its contents as long as it is supplied with power)?
I'd say that graphene capacitors are as uninteresting as it gets as far as memory technology goes, sorry.
One football field, of course. They're both units of area. Now, if you were to ask what the surface area of a VW-Beetle-equivalent of graphene is...
Oh, and before I forget, that's going to be a large number in football fields. Use Rhode Islands instead (or, if the number is still too large, Texas').
Because it doesn't have to layers that are insulated against each other?
However, if you're talking about two toiled rolls, soaked in electrolyte, with an insulator between them, rolled up and packaged nicely, then yes, you can use that as a capacitor (we'd all be thrilled about a capacity measurement and some pictures when you try it out, please?).
Ultracapacitors may have proven brilliant usages (especially in transport and electricity storage) but is anyone else nervous about being around that degree of stored energy?
Hate to break it to you, but if you replace the ultracapacitor with a battery of the same volume, or, heaven forbid, the same volume of gasoline, you're looking at even _more_ stored energy, and no one's too worried about that.
I wonder. As far as they know, there was nothing particular in the direction that said particle came from. Might there be any connection to this "event"?
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Yeah, right. Something with an 8L V8 engine needs more horsepower. How about buying a either frickin' race car (if you want to go fast) or a frickin' semi (if you want to haul stuff) instead of a truck, huh? Also, adding all that stuff also adds _weight_ to the vehicle.
Think of it as putting a second motor into a car.
Why put a second motor into the the car and add a whole additional bunch of points of failure when you can simply put in a bigger engine? It makes no sense.
Someone might do it to make their car faster rather than more efficient.
Someone who's very dumb and has zero clue about engineering. If you all you want is to add horsepower to your car, put a bigger engine in it. It's as simple as that. It's no problem to put a gasoline engine in a car with enough power to turn the tires into puddles of rubber.
I read about an interesting hybrid concept a while ago - it basically eliminated the transmission from the car to save weight. The car would use the (small) gasoline engine to charge the battery and drive the electric motors as long as the car was going below the normal highway crusising speed, and engage a clutch to directly power the wheels with the gasoline engine once the crusing speed was reached. Advantages were the lack of a transmission (= weight and space that can be used for batteries instead) while still being able to power the wheels directly (making use of the efficiency of the gasoline engine when cruising).
Anything based on a computer simulation is based on our arbitrarily incomplete knowledge. To base even the least significant conclusions upon it seems laughably irresponsible and unscientific.
We eagerly await your analytical solution to the n-body-problem. I mean, it's really simple stuff, right?
Until you're finished, we'll have to calculate all those spacecraft trajectories with computer simulations.
very very very hard way to physically clone a CC/DC
Actually, at least in Europe, it's already pretty hard to clone a debit/ATM card well enough that a modern ATM will accept them.
Did you notice the catch? "a modern ATM". That's why criminals only need to clone the magnetic strip (trivial) and get your PIN (also trivial), and then they send the data to their buddies in Eastern Europe to withdraw money using the not-so-modern ATMs used in these countries.
Yeah, and if I had some ham, I could have ham and eggs, if I had some eggs.
Yes, but if you don't have ham, you can't have ham and eggs. And before this invention we didn't have any chance for having ham. Now we just need to find the eggs.
If we had a carbon-neutral power source good enough to reform the CO2 and H2O back into hydrocarbons, we could use it directly, no need to first extract the CO2 from the air.
Really? So where are all those cars and planes running on nuclear power, solar power, geothermal power or hydro power? How do you make plastics out of electricity? I'm curious.
OK, so you captured all that CO2, you have just converted your problem to CO2 sequestration.
Make some H2 by splitting water and feed both into the Sabatier process, assuming that you have a CO2-neutral power source to power all of this.
No, no citation is needed. That's laser safety 101 trivia, go and look up the various laser safety classes (or maybe you can consider this to be a citation). Anything that's useful as a weapon is going to be class 4 (in the old or the new system), and even diffuse reflections of class 4 lasers can cause eye damage.
Don't we have a device that removes CO2 from the air? I thought they were called "trees."
I hooked a tree up to 100kW, and it added CO2 to the air instead.
Laser weapons powerful enough to damage any target will permanently damage the eyesight of anyone who looks at as much as a non-specular reflection of the beam. So much for collateral damage.
Conventional weapons (bombs, mines, bullets, missiles, etc.) can cause death, permanent paralysis, limb loss, and even blindness. What is the difference, really?
No, conventional weapons cause death if applied correctly - all other results are from incorrect application. They're meant to be deadly, a blinding laser is only meant to maim. Welcome to military logic. It's ok if it's deadly, it's not ok if it isn't.
That's the whole freakin' point. Please, even if you don't vote and never plan to, if you want to discuss how to properly run an elections, you'll need to know some of the basics and what the word "audit trail" entails. It also covers such details as documenting who had the box of ballots in their care, and that they weren't left alone with it, etc.
perhaps they do get to see them, but I hope they don't have physical access to them.
So what if they do? Yes, each person might manipulate their own paper ballot to show something other than what they actually voted for electronically, but apart from getting some upper management types sent to the firing squad, what would they accomplish that way?
Besides, that's already part of having an audit trail.
In fact, even if they did see a pile of paper, what is to stop the government swapping them if they really wanted to?
Audit trail. There's too much work involved in rigging the election _and_ covering all the traces.
Again, I'm not saying they do because it's quite unlikely, but if a government wanted to rig an election I'm sure they could find a way to do it.
The whole point of having an audit trail is making sure that there are enough people involved to that at least one of them can yell bloody murder if anyone wants to mess with the election, and enough documentation to prove that there was something suspicious or outright wrong (e.g. box of ballots was in a room with only one person in it for 30 minutes).
Compare the earlier Discworld novels to the later ones, and you'll find that the writing style and the storytelling get better and better. Adams was on the same track, but unfortunately never got to write his later novels.
Oh ... and improbability drives are plausible? Reincarnation? Technical devices outlasting the universe several times over?
Why again are you measuring Colfers books by hard sci-fi standards but don't do so for HHGG? Neither of the two is intended to be hard sci-fi.
Is that about the practical ability to perform full cavity searches?
In fact--why would anyone consider asking ANYONE BESIDES Terry?
How many books by Colfer have you read so far? For me, they're the books of choice if there's no new Discworld novel available.
Printed ballots that can be used for a recount. *sigh* Was that really that hard? And if there's a recount and the number of votes doesn't match, take the upper management of whoever produced the electronic voting system and put them in front of a firing squad. It's really very simple. Or skip the whole "electronic voting" idea altogether. It belongs on the same trash heap as the idea of a paperless office. The voting process needs to be simple enough that you can pick a bunch of average Joes and have them do a re-count, i.e. if it need specialized knowledge about computers, it's too complex.
I think it's absurd that someone should be threatened for voting for one bunch of idiots over another.
Well, news flash, the bunch of idiots you're voting for recruits itself from an even bigger bunch of idiots aka the general population. And bunches of idiots _will_ do absurd things, such as death threats, actually trying to follow through on them, or just vandalize your stuff.
Unless the idiots that they are voting for are Nazis, but even then death threats are a bit much.
For pretty much every political group, there's a bunch of people that thinks they're Satan incarnate and anyone supporting or $DEITY forbid, voting for them needs to die. Need I say more?
Err ... no? If you've got a proper audit trail, it's hard to fake elections, anonymous or not. It's the audit trail that makes elections hard to fake, not the absence of anonymity.
I don't see why voting should be an anonymous thing.
In that case, you've probably never been the victim of death threats (or more), vandalism, discrimination or being sent to the nearest re-education facility for how you voted in the last 30 years? Oh ... right. You don't vote. So none of that is a problem for you.
It's not specific for the US - making laws is usually easier than getting rid of them. So, if there's a way to make something that's allowed by law, but which you don't like impractical by saddling it with extra laws, that's usually preferred to repealing the law which allows it in the first place.
will make a plane fall out of the sky or crash into a building.
Since any of these searches are done by _customs_, it doesn't matter what or what not the data on the laptop might do to the plane. It has already landed.
I wonder how practical is graphene capacitor used as a memory storage cell compare to SRAM or DRAM we have today.
Err ... you do know that one of the main differences between SRAM and DRAM is that the latter uses a capacitor (and fewer transistors) than the former per memory cell, and therefore requires to be refreshed occasionally (hence "dynamic", as opposed to "static" memory which will keep its contents as long as it is supplied with power)?
I'd say that graphene capacitors are as uninteresting as it gets as far as memory technology goes, sorry.
It's capacity is largely based on the surface area of internal parts.
It's also largely based on the inverse of the distance between internal parts. And this distance also decreases when you make things thinner.
Thin is huge for capacitors,
Yep, it's huge^2, even, since you're increasing surface area and reducing the distance if you make the internal structures thinner.
Oh, and before I forget, that's going to be a large number in football fields. Use Rhode Islands instead (or, if the number is still too large, Texas').
Because it doesn't have to layers that are insulated against each other?
However, if you're talking about two toiled rolls, soaked in electrolyte, with an insulator between them, rolled up and packaged nicely, then yes, you can use that as a capacitor (we'd all be thrilled about a capacity measurement and some pictures when you try it out, please?).
Hate to break it to you, but if you replace the ultracapacitor with a battery of the same volume, or, heaven forbid, the same volume of gasoline, you're looking at even _more_ stored energy, and no one's too worried about that.
If 1 gram of graphene has the surface area of a football field, what's the surface area of a football field of graphene?
One football field, of course. They're both units of area. Now, if you were to ask what the surface area of a VW-Beetle-equivalent of graphene is ...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oh-My-God_Particle