You can already get 80 mpg from commercially available passenger cars (VW Lupo 3L 1.0 TDI, Audi A2 1.0 TDI, Smart ForTwo Diesel). The former two are 4 passengers, the latter for two.
With a 100 mpg goal, the competition is aiming rather low. Take one of the above and modify it a bit, and you should be close. Especially if you apply American highway traffic as a scenario (relatively low and constant speed).
100 mpg might sound nice, but it's not a real groundbreaking achievement anymore.
Oh, and the first two cars I mentioned already flopped on the market. While technically superior, they were simply too expensive.
These bible-thumping twits need to get their facts straight before they start spouting off.
Well, for them, God's workday has exactly 24 hours, and the time reference frame is, of course, Earth time.
Just as if God wouldn't have to zip around at 0.9999999c to check up on every corner of creation.
Why haven't they started bashing the theory of relativity yet ? It would make it perfectly possible that, for God, only 6000-something years have passed since the beginning of everything. He'd just have to move really fast. But that should be a rather trivial feat, given the claims of friggin omnipotence.:P
A couple of high school kids aren't going to cause me any concern without a panel of non-government experts duplicating their results.
Non-government experts that might be on the payroll (openly or not so openly) of the company under scrutiny ?
How's an expert that works for the government worse than one who doesn't ? Either he's an expert, or he's a fraudster. Doesn't matter whose payroll he's on.
If I have a legitimate grievance against a corporation, and an estimated 90% chance of prevailing in court, then if I sue I've got a 10% chance of bankruptcy.
As opposed to a 10% chance of near-bankruptcy if you only have to pay your own costs ?
And if your chance of winning is that good, there's usually an appeals process.
Considering everything that is ultimately settled either by litigation or the possibility of litigation, that means that individuals have no effective patents or copyrights, can be discriminated against for any reason (such as race), and have no ability to defend themselves against corporate libel, just for starters.
It also means that individuals and companies can be bled dry by another party that has vastly more resources to spend on legal costs _even if that other party never wins a single lawsuit_.
Why the heck should a party that has been found not guilty or not liable be forced to pay for anything ?
... and that would mean only very very very rich people would ever dare to sue anyone.
That's baloney. I don't know why this is mentioned every time someone suggests America changing to "loser pays".
The system works well in other places. It doesn't stop people from dragging their neighbors to court over garden gnomes, branches that grow across the fence, or the number of allowed barbecues during the summer.
It also prevents the party with more money from bleeding the party with less money dry by slapping them with one lawsuit after the other, but losing each of them.
If I didn't do anything wrong, and the court confirms that, why the heck should I have to pay for anything ? If someone runs a red light and hits my car, it's not my job to pay for the damage to my car either.
(On a side note, I never understood why people who're actually innocent settle, anyway. Yes, I know, a legal victory can be expensive, but if you're not guilty, then shouldn't you be able to recover your expenses when it becomes obvious that there was no actual evidence?)
In the US, I'm afraid the answer to that question is a definite "maybe". If the cost of the settlement is significantly below (chance of recovering your legal expenses) * (expected legal expenses), the settlement might unfortunately be the cheaper choice.
Actually, yes. We should have come up with a better theory of gravity by now.
Newton is pretty good for the 99.9% of the universe that's not close to black holes or similar gravity wells. And the "better theory" (as in: covers more cases and is consistent with Newton where Newton applies) is general relativity.
As for relativity, it only matters if you travel really fast.
Or when you're close to a big gravity well.
Once we figure out how to travel that fast, then we can actually test relativity and other things.
It has already been tested quite extensively. Even some predictions that couldn't be tested when Einstein came up with it. The whole near-lightspeed-spaceship isn't necessary to test general relativity - accelerated particles, gravity lensing and certain oddities in the movements of the planets all require general relativity to be described correctly.
Then again - I don't see any problems with not teaching about the theory of evolution in biology class. I also don't see any problems with teaching creationism in religious education. The problem for me is teaching creationism in biology class as an alternative scientific theory to evolution, which it clearly isn't. Just like the geocentric world view isn't an alternative scientific theory to celestial mechanics, or saying that pi equals three (it's in the bible) is an equal theory to pi being an irrational number that's approximately 3.141592.
but I know that Americans with surely have more toys,
Because they have the need for them. "Oh noes, the next-door-neighbor has a 94" plasma TV and all three current consoles ! Quick, get out the credit card, I need them too ! We must not appear poor !".
And because of their demonstrated willingess to put themselves into debt in order to consume.
bigger homes/apartments,
Because land is cheaper (It's a supply and demand thing. Free market stuff. That should come naturally to you guys, right?), because houses are built from wood, plaster and cardboard, and because of rampant sub-prime lending practices. Yep. They have bigger houses, but do they own them, or does the bank own them ?
and are more likely to own a car than Europeans
Because you can't do anything without a car over there. Go shopping ? Drive. Go see a doctor ? Drive. Go see your friends ? Drive. Go to work ? Drive. Get across the street ? Drive (don't you _dare_ to walk, you jaywalking pinko commie liberal!). In the US, you don't have a car only if you really really cannot afford it. In Europe, being able to afford a car isn't a compelling reason to own one.
It's because we have far larger paychecks,
Apparently not big enough if consumer debt is a fairly serious issue.
Two degrees in biomedical engineering-related fields, and reading the associated literature on medical devices.
So what gives you the idea that pacemakers mooch stuff of their recipients ?
Well, then you don't know much about pacemakers.
So you're working for Guidant ? You'd pretty much have to if claim to have such extensive knowledge of pacemaker internals.
Actually, no, it turns out that the body is well equipped to handle the waste products of the fuel it itself uses - unless you thought a machine would magically produce a different waste product than did the body?
There are some perfectly poisonous byproducts of turning sugar into electric energy, depending on how the chemical process works. Methanol would be one option, and I'm sure there's plenty more.
And then there's the issue of creating a biocompatible interface between body fluids and the fuel cell. The inside of the human body is very nasty environment for anything that's not part of that body for one thing - you only have a very small number of materials that can either withstand the immune system's attack or that don't trigger it in the first place.
Once you've done that, you also need to make sure that the device doesn't actually hurt the patient.
Oh, and you'll need to make sure to actually get sufficient amounts of sugar and oxygen into the fuel cell. How are you going to do that without connection to a major blood vessel, and preferably without using mechanical parts ? Plus you want the pacemaker internals to be hermetically sealed from the body.
Indeed, one of the big reasons for the switch to biofuels is how much easier they are to deal with than spent lithium batteries
I don't believe that you do have extensive knowledge about biocompatibility issues. Using a lithium battery that lasts 15-20 years is preferable to coming up with a way to mooch sugar and oxygen off the patient, turn it into electric energy, and dump the waste products back into the patient, without either having your device destroyed by the immune system within less than the life of the lithium battery or harming the patient in the process.
This means that there's no motivation to keep your old telephone modem (As i understand some americans still use). It's both slower and more expensive.
Say that again when your DSL service has been cut off for some weird reason. I keep a USB ISDN adapter in a drawer for when that happens.
India is in 4th place? Ever been to India? A huge percentage of the population have never used anything as technologically advanced as a toilet.
"India" is more than a billion people. Even if half of them don't have access to modern technology, that still leaves more people than the US has citizens. Heck, even one-third of the Indians would still be more than the population of the US.
Enzymatic fuel cells working on sugar are the norm for pacemakers,
Pacemakers use Lithium-Iodide batteries nowadays. I've never heard of any commercially available pacemaker that generates its energy supply by mooching stuff off its recipient. The biocompatibility issues in such a system would be a real killer.
The most important question is if they can actually get these batteries to pump out enough juice to power anything of importance.
Making electricity out of sugar would be a first step towards limitless energy for implanted devices (the other steps would be making sure that the whole process doesn't kill the recipient). Many of those don't need a lot of power (for example pacemakers).
Using an emulator of a legacy machine would be one way.
You could also use evaluation kits for various microcontrollers ('51, ARM, PIC, AVR, whatever suits you best). They have the added bonus that you're running on actual hardware.
You could also try a processor simulator, which comes with many uC/DSP development kits.
Say I would learn 68000 Assembler, would that knowledge be much useful when switching to x86?
Yes, because you have already mastered the concepts behind assembly (registers, processor flags, pointers, etc). A different processor may have different rules, but the concepts stay the same. Some of the rules are the same on many architectures ("If the processor has a zero flag, then counting down in loops is preferable to counting up.", for example). Mnemonics and Opcodes are something you just look up in the documentation.
This is exactly why you should start with the i386.
No no no. Start programming in C on a PC, and then learn assembly on a platform that's completely un-like a PC ('51, anyone ? Six different memory types is fun).
Similarly, I consider myself lucky to have English as a first language -- anything but Russian seems almost boring by comparison.
Bah. English is simple enough as far as rules go, you just need to learn all the exceptions, the pronunciation of every single word, and the huge vocabulary. Try German if you want a challenge. There's rules for everything.
And stay away from languages that are direct derivatives of Latin (i.e. French, Spanish, Portugese, Italian, etc). They're easy.
Slashdotter parents? Hello???
*raises hand* Yup. My DS (I'll let you puzzle over that one. It's a common acronym on many boards, only the slashdot crowd might be utterly unfamiliar with it) is going to grow up bilingual. And I'll have to get him started with a nice 8-bit home computer once he turns 3. Hehe.
Many new embedded applications (like set top boxes or TV sets) are done (or will be done) with 32bits processors and have a extermly high complexity.
ARM assembly isn't too terribly complex, neither is are the dialects of various DSPs. And if the processor is too complicated for the compiler programmer (i.e. it can do stuff like circular buffers, bit reversed addressing, polynomial evaluation, FIR filtering in hardware), you're back to assembly if you want your program to actually use the processor anywhere near its full potential.
Machine code is just another programming language and is interpreted by the CPU.
No. And that is the difference between machine code and any other language:
There is nothing to interpret. The majority of the CPUs has zero degrees of freedom when executing machine code. Every code sequence will cause the CPU to perform exactly the memory accesses and register manipulations that are specified by that code sequence. A "MOV #0, A" will do one thing while an "XOR A, A" will do another thing, even if their end result may be the same.
If you have CPUs that take several clock cycles per instruction (like a good old '51 12-clocker), then you will even have to know what exactly happens at each of the cycles if you want the CPU to play well with the rest of the hardware.
Why? I create small embedded systems and often C is not an option.
Well, it is an option, but the more expensive one. If you do embedded systems, you're selling hardware and software at the same time. The software is developed once, but the hardware needs to be manufactured for each single unit you sell. If you can shave $.50 off the hardware costs by using assembly (since you can cram the program into the 16 kB version instead of using the 64 kB one), and you're planning on selling a million units, you have a $500k incentive for using assembly. $500k does buy a lot of engineering hours.
There are a LIMITED number of roles for assembly writers in embedded systems,
I think you underestimate the volume of the embedded/uc/DSP market.
Poor design trumps poor coding in terms of performance EVERY TIME.
True. But algorithm design has little to do with the programming language, while coding has little to do with algorithm design.
But writing assembly teaches you Nothing about Ojbect oriented Design.
Writing C++/whatever also doesn't teach you anything about object oriented design. Since the latter is a design concept which, at first, doesn't have a lot to do with the the actual programming language. You can use OO concepts when writing in assembler, and you can produce truly abysmally designed code in Java/C++/whatever.
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With a 100 mpg goal, the competition is aiming rather low. Take one of the above and modify it a bit, and you should be close. Especially if you apply American highway traffic as a scenario (relatively low and constant speed).
100 mpg might sound nice, but it's not a real groundbreaking achievement anymore.
Oh, and the first two cars I mentioned already flopped on the market. While technically superior, they were simply too expensive.
Well, for them, God's workday has exactly 24 hours, and the time reference frame is, of course, Earth time.
Just as if God wouldn't have to zip around at 0.9999999c to check up on every corner of creation.
Why haven't they started bashing the theory of relativity yet ? It would make it perfectly possible that, for God, only 6000-something years have passed since the beginning of everything. He'd just have to move really fast. But that should be a rather trivial feat, given the claims of friggin omnipotence.
Non-government experts that might be on the payroll (openly or not so openly) of the company under scrutiny ?
How's an expert that works for the government worse than one who doesn't ? Either he's an expert, or he's a fraudster. Doesn't matter whose payroll he's on.
Even better - go with an Athlon 64. In most usage scenarios (i.e. the CPU is idle most of the time) it uses even less power than the Core 2 Duo.
If you plan to run the thing at close to 100% CPU load all the time, then the Core 2 Duo is more efficient. But that's a fairly rare scenario.
As opposed to a 10% chance of near-bankruptcy if you only have to pay your own costs ?
And if your chance of winning is that good, there's usually an appeals process.
Considering everything that is ultimately settled either by litigation or the possibility of litigation, that means that individuals have no effective patents or copyrights, can be discriminated against for any reason (such as race), and have no ability to defend themselves against corporate libel, just for starters.
It also means that individuals and companies can be bled dry by another party that has vastly more resources to spend on legal costs _even if that other party never wins a single lawsuit_.
Why the heck should a party that has been found not guilty or not liable be forced to pay for anything ?
That's baloney. I don't know why this is mentioned every time someone suggests America changing to "loser pays".
The system works well in other places. It doesn't stop people from dragging their neighbors to court over garden gnomes, branches that grow across the fence, or the number of allowed barbecues during the summer.
It also prevents the party with more money from bleeding the party with less money dry by slapping them with one lawsuit after the other, but losing each of them.
If I didn't do anything wrong, and the court confirms that, why the heck should I have to pay for anything ? If someone runs a red light and hits my car, it's not my job to pay for the damage to my car either.
That should be: "Copies of the works are sitting ..."
The profit being derived isn't from a re-sale of copyrighted work,
The profit is being derived by using and storing a copy of a copyrighted work.
In the US, I'm afraid the answer to that question is a definite "maybe". If the cost of the settlement is significantly below (chance of recovering your legal expenses) * (expected legal expenses), the settlement might unfortunately be the cheaper choice.
Newton is pretty good for the 99.9% of the universe that's not close to black holes or similar gravity wells. And the "better theory" (as in: covers more cases and is consistent with Newton where Newton applies) is general relativity.
As for relativity, it only matters if you travel really fast.
Or when you're close to a big gravity well.
Once we figure out how to travel that fast, then we can actually test relativity and other things.
It has already been tested quite extensively. Even some predictions that couldn't be tested when Einstein came up with it. The whole near-lightspeed-spaceship isn't necessary to test general relativity - accelerated particles, gravity lensing and certain oddities in the movements of the planets all require general relativity to be described correctly.
Then again - I don't see any problems with not teaching about the theory of evolution in biology class. I also don't see any problems with teaching creationism in religious education. The problem for me is teaching creationism in biology class as an alternative scientific theory to evolution, which it clearly isn't. Just like the geocentric world view isn't an alternative scientific theory to celestial mechanics, or saying that pi equals three (it's in the bible) is an equal theory to pi being an irrational number that's approximately 3.141592.
Hm, wasn't there an interesting ruling about eminent domain not too long ago ?
Would you say the same thing about Newton's theory of gravity, or the theory of relativity ?
"Hey, don't push it on me, I don't like it."
Because they have the need for them. "Oh noes, the next-door-neighbor has a 94" plasma TV and all three current consoles ! Quick, get out the credit card, I need them too ! We must not appear poor !".
And because of their demonstrated willingess to put themselves into debt in order to consume.
bigger homes/apartments,
Because land is cheaper (It's a supply and demand thing. Free market stuff. That should come naturally to you guys, right?), because houses are built from wood, plaster and cardboard, and because of rampant sub-prime lending practices. Yep. They have bigger houses, but do they own them, or does the bank own them ?
and are more likely to own a car than Europeans
Because you can't do anything without a car over there. Go shopping ? Drive. Go see a doctor ? Drive. Go see your friends ? Drive. Go to work ? Drive. Get across the street ? Drive (don't you _dare_ to walk, you jaywalking pinko commie liberal!). In the US, you don't have a car only if you really really cannot afford it. In Europe, being able to afford a car isn't a compelling reason to own one.
It's because we have far larger paychecks,
Apparently not big enough if consumer debt is a fairly serious issue.
Two degrees in biomedical engineering-related fields, and reading the associated literature on medical devices.
So what gives you the idea that pacemakers mooch stuff of their recipients ?
Well, then you don't know much about pacemakers.
So you're working for Guidant ? You'd pretty much have to if claim to have such extensive knowledge of pacemaker internals.
Actually, no, it turns out that the body is well equipped to handle the waste products of the fuel it itself uses - unless you thought a machine would magically produce a different waste product than did the body?
There are some perfectly poisonous byproducts of turning sugar into electric energy, depending on how the chemical process works. Methanol would be one option, and I'm sure there's plenty more.
And then there's the issue of creating a biocompatible interface between body fluids and the fuel cell. The inside of the human body is very nasty environment for anything that's not part of that body for one thing - you only have a very small number of materials that can either withstand the immune system's attack or that don't trigger it in the first place.
Once you've done that, you also need to make sure that the device doesn't actually hurt the patient.
Oh, and you'll need to make sure to actually get sufficient amounts of sugar and oxygen into the fuel cell. How are you going to do that without connection to a major blood vessel, and preferably without using mechanical parts ? Plus you want the pacemaker internals to be hermetically sealed from the body.
Indeed, one of the big reasons for the switch to biofuels is how much easier they are to deal with than spent lithium batteries
I don't believe that you do have extensive knowledge about biocompatibility issues. Using a lithium battery that lasts 15-20 years is preferable to coming up with a way to mooch sugar and oxygen off the patient, turn it into electric energy, and dump the waste products back into the patient, without either having your device destroyed by the immune system within less than the life of the lithium battery or harming the patient in the process.
References, please. Or I'm not buying.
Say that again when your DSL service has been cut off for some weird reason. I keep a USB ISDN adapter in a drawer for when that happens.
"India" is more than a billion people. Even if half of them don't have access to modern technology, that still leaves more people than the US has citizens. Heck, even one-third of the Indians would still be more than the population of the US.
Same goes for China.
It's more like saying "the main byproduct of burning gasoline is water".
Pacemakers use Lithium-Iodide batteries nowadays. I've never heard of any commercially available pacemaker that generates its energy supply by mooching stuff off its recipient. The biocompatibility issues in such a system would be a real killer.
Making electricity out of sugar would be a first step towards limitless energy for implanted devices (the other steps would be making sure that the whole process doesn't kill the recipient). Many of those don't need a lot of power (for example pacemakers).
It's hygroscopic. Of course, if the batteries can deal with that, that's cool.
Many different ways.
Using an emulator of a legacy machine would be one way. You could also use evaluation kits for various microcontrollers ('51, ARM, PIC, AVR, whatever suits you best). They have the added bonus that you're running on actual hardware. You could also try a processor simulator, which comes with many uC/DSP development kits.
Say I would learn 68000 Assembler, would that knowledge be much useful when switching to x86?
Yes, because you have already mastered the concepts behind assembly (registers, processor flags, pointers, etc). A different processor may have different rules, but the concepts stay the same. Some of the rules are the same on many architectures ("If the processor has a zero flag, then counting down in loops is preferable to counting up.", for example). Mnemonics and Opcodes are something you just look up in the documentation.
No no no. Start programming in C on a PC, and then learn assembly on a platform that's completely un-like a PC ('51, anyone ? Six different memory types is fun).
Similarly, I consider myself lucky to have English as a first language -- anything but Russian seems almost boring by comparison.
Bah. English is simple enough as far as rules go, you just need to learn all the exceptions, the pronunciation of every single word, and the huge vocabulary. Try German if you want a challenge. There's rules for everything.
And stay away from languages that are direct derivatives of Latin (i.e. French, Spanish, Portugese, Italian, etc). They're easy. Slashdotter parents? Hello???
*raises hand* Yup. My DS (I'll let you puzzle over that one. It's a common acronym on many boards, only the slashdot crowd might be utterly unfamiliar with it) is going to grow up bilingual. And I'll have to get him started with a nice 8-bit home computer once he turns 3. Hehe.
ARM assembly isn't too terribly complex, neither is are the dialects of various DSPs. And if the processor is too complicated for the compiler programmer (i.e. it can do stuff like circular buffers, bit reversed addressing, polynomial evaluation, FIR filtering in hardware), you're back to assembly if you want your program to actually use the processor anywhere near its full potential.
No. And that is the difference between machine code and any other language:
There is nothing to interpret.
The majority of the CPUs has zero degrees of freedom when executing machine code. Every code sequence will cause the CPU to perform exactly the memory accesses and register manipulations that are specified by that code sequence. A "MOV #0, A" will do one thing while an "XOR A, A" will do another thing, even if their end result may be the same.
If you have CPUs that take several clock cycles per instruction (like a good old '51 12-clocker), then you will even have to know what exactly happens at each of the cycles if you want the CPU to play well with the rest of the hardware.
Well, it is an option, but the more expensive one. If you do embedded systems, you're selling hardware and software at the same time. The software is developed once, but the hardware needs to be manufactured for each single unit you sell. If you can shave $.50 off the hardware costs by using assembly (since you can cram the program into the 16 kB version instead of using the 64 kB one), and you're planning on selling a million units, you have a $500k incentive for using assembly. $500k does buy a lot of engineering hours.
I think you underestimate the volume of the embedded/uc/DSP market.
Poor design trumps poor coding in terms of performance EVERY TIME.
True. But algorithm design has little to do with the programming language, while coding has little to do with algorithm design.
But writing assembly teaches you Nothing about Ojbect oriented Design.
Writing C++/whatever also doesn't teach you anything about object oriented design. Since the latter is a design concept which, at first, doesn't have a lot to do with the the actual programming language. You can use OO concepts when writing in assembler, and you can produce truly abysmally designed code in Java/C++/whatever.