Our launch capability is nowhere near worrying about energy efficiency as a driving factor. While it's true that current rocket launches aren't energy efficient (the vast majority of the fuel is used to lift other fuel, as others have pointed out), that isn't really the problem. The cost of a space launch has very little to do with fuel costs. Fuel costs are petty change to NASA. The cost is in all the manpower and expensive specialized equipment required.
While the deceleration from plowing through the atmosphere is bad, it must be at least an order of magnitude less than the forces from whirling around a 2 km diameter ring at 8 km/s. Just consider that at one instant it's traveling at 8 km/s in one direction and less than half a second later and a couple kilometers distance it's going 8 km/s in the opposite direction on the other side of the ring. For this concept to work the atmosphere had better not bring the launch vehicle to a stop in just a couple kilometers, so the forces must be much smaller.
Solar cells are logical to consider for electric cars, but aren't necessarily cost effective. Remember that we're talking about $9 of electricity for a full charge. Have you thought about how long it will take and how expensive the panel will be to generate that many kilowatt-hours of electricity?
If you can easily plug your car in at night to top off the charge you're not going to bother with the cost of a set of solar cells. But it might be worth doing if you have a short commute, park in the direct sun all day, and can't easily recharge at home. It wouldn't take more than a few square feet of solar cells to meet that demand, I'd think.
I completely agree that some sort of balance will be achieved. My comment about something for nothing was merely to point out that complete avoidance of commercials isn't going to work either. They have to figure out a way to get us to watch enough commercials to make it worth their while to broadcast. Not that ABC's anti skip proposal is the way that is going to work. It remains to be seen what will work, and whether we end up looking back with nostalgia on commercials that were separate from the programs and easily ignorable.
That's a very amoral or cynical view of the situation. I pay DirecTV because they are providing a service I want at a decent price. That service is delivery of a set of digital signals, not the decoding of them. The encryption and decoding is simply a way of enforcing the contract. When I pay at a movie theater it's to see a movie, not just to get past the ticket taker without hassle.
Don't get me wrong. I've had a DVR for years and often enjoy fast forwarding through commercials myself. I don't think this proposed anti ad skipping feature is going to fly. But I also realize that if everyone exercises their right to skip commercials then the current business model is doomed. It seems kind of inevitable that things are going to change, possibly for the worse with product placement, etc.. I'm just saying not to expect networks to continue to provide original content for free with easily skipped ads. I see a lot of attitude here that seems to suggest that we can do what we want and the networks can't do anything but take it and keep delivering the shows we want. But you can't have your cake and eat it too. Expect some changes.
No, you're not the only one. I also receive broadcast TV over the air, but my bendy piece of wire is in the attic. It's digital HDTV I'm capturing, I don't care for the analog stuff. My fancy HDTV box also takes input from another piece of bent metal capturing radio frequencies: this one carefully aimed at a satellite. But I have to pay for the right to decode the satellite signal even though the signal is there whether I want it or not. What do you do with the satellite signals filling your house? Do you do whatever you want with those too?
No, a telethon is commercial without program. I consider all pledge drives to just be variants of commercials, they're trying to sell you on giving money.
You sound like one of those people that says advertising doesn't work on you. Guess what, unless you're a robot advertising works exactly like they expect it to. It builds up brand recognition and then someday when you're actually in the market for life insurance or cookies, even though you weren't when you watched the commercial, you might think of them. The advertised product at least makes the list of ones you've heard of before rather than just another no-name product that you don't trust. If the commercial really did it's job you now have associations at the back of your head between the product and certain intangible good feelings like safety or pleasure.
You may be right. If the business model of commercial supported broadcast television fails due to commercial skipping, then the future may just be product placement and inset ads. Either that or pay-per-view. Original programming isn't free, it has to be paid for somehow.
All the decent television is elsewhere, either on HBO or SciFi or Comedy Central or other channels that were never broadcast through the air to begin with.
I note that two of your three examples run commercials for income. If commercial supported television becomes a broken business model what happens to the SciFi Channel and Comedy Central? Is every channel on cable/satellite to become a $10 a month premium channel?
While I understand why broadcast networks want to protect their advertising revenue, I don't think this is going to fly either. It's too difficult to get ad protection into all DVRs and would create too much consumer backlash.
But since the core of their business model is ad revenue, you have to wonder what's going to happen to broadcast television. Enough consumers switching to DVRs and skipping the commercials regularly could conceivably put them out of business. Then all we'd be left with is PBS, pay per view, and premium channels. I suppose some would call that an improvement, but I'd miss a lot of my favorite network shows.
A residential broadband connection is the equivalent of an all you can eat buffet. It's a reasonable business model as long as people can be kept from abusing it. If it becomes impossible to enforce they'll just have to go to a metered system where we pay by the byte transfered. I suppose you'll be happy when they replace "unlimited" with "limited only by your bank balance" in their ad copy.
You know, I actually considered making a comment on how you'd have to go with a heavy dual drive laptop to get any more storage (or a slower 5400 RPM drive). But it is a state of the art laptop drive.
The new Dell is not the top of the line, but the upper end of the line for a mid weight laptop.
I'd agree with you there. There are all sorts of tradeoffs to be made on laptops in cost, portability, style, etc.. This Dell is only a reasonable choice if you want gaming oriented mid weight (8.5 lb) laptop and are willing to pay top dollar for it. I've seen the dual hard drive, dual optical, dual GPU SLI laptops, but I wouldn't want to go up to 15 lb to get it. But then some people think that it's ridiculous to go over 4 lb in a laptop and are happy with their 12 inch screen and integrated graphics.
As the other replies here point out, there is no united hardcore gamer profile. In fact, it sounds like you are describing a hardcore system tweaker. Someone who gets their kicks producing the highest FPS figure out of a machine, rather than actually playing the game. It seems to me a true gamer would be spending their time actually gaming rather than trying to figure out how to get another meaningless half percent of performance out of their system.
My wife wants a portable system with plenty of power to play whatever she throws at it over the next couple years. She's considering the M1710 because of it's large screen and the Nvidia 7900 GTX in it. She probably would have gone for a Sager 5720, but I suggested she look for a Core Duo machine rather than one based on the older Pentium M.
The M1710 is available with a 60 to 100GB 7200RPM hard drive. That's as large as you're going to get in a laptop unless you go down to a 5400 RPM drive. You do have to make some sacrifices for portability. But for a gaming rig it's all about the GPU, and the 512MB Nvidia GeForce Go 7900 GTX in Dell's M1710 is just about as good as it gets (outside SLI anyway).
Hey, at least its a 7200 RPM 60GB hard drive, with the option of going up to 100GB. That's state of the art in laptops. There are still new laptops being sold with 5400 RPM 40 GB drives and smaller.
The first hard drive I ever personally bought was 60 MB (and that's not a typo). So I have no problems with a mere 60GB. It seems everything I buy nowadays has a thousand times more storage than something I bought 15 or 20 years ago.
Re:Lenders are liable for ID theft, not victims
on
Combating Identity Theft
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
I told them I wan't signing anything, it wasn't my problem.
Isn't it great how they shift the problem to the consumer by calling it identity theft. They didn't steal your identity, they stole the credit card companies money by fooling them. They should call it credit company bamboozling, but that would make it sound like their problem instead of yours.
Let me lock my credit report down so that it reports only "CREDIT REPORT LOCKED BY OWNER" and identity theft will drop drastically. If you can not apply for new credit under someone's name it makes stealing their identity nearly worthless.
So you lock down your credit report to prevent any more credit card or loans in your name. I assume there would be a method for unlocking the reports when you want to apply for something for real.
The trouble is that the credit thieves would just impersonate you and unlock the reports themselves. So the identity problem is just shifted from the banking institutions to the credit reporting companies. Since it's not their money on the line, they're even less likely to take it seriously.
I think the ISPs are going to have to deal with their own success and open the spigots a bit wider; we *are* paying for our bandwidth, let us get to it.
Yes, you paid for some bandwidth, but you didn't pay enough to support using your broadband connection full open 24*7. Their business model is based on providing an average amount of bandwidth to an average consumer. Sort of like an all you can eat buffet, and no one really expects them to provide food as fast as you can eat it forever. Bandwidth isn't a free resource they are denying you for no good reason. Huge connections to the Internet backbone cost huge money.
ISP are rightly concerned that sources of bandwidth consumption like bittorrent will change the average usage patterns of their consumers. If they have to arrange for larger upstream connections it's going to cost them more to provide the service. And they are going to pass that cost along to the consumer. So it should be your concern too.
If anyone needs me, I'll be on the beach in Cancun spending my startup money, not busy working 16 hour days to get it ready.
No, here's what you do. You build a shielded, sound proofed room with your computer workstation, a nice entertainment center, bar and comfy recliner. Then you seal yourself in the room so no one can tell what you're doing. Either you have the computer turned on and are hard at work programming or you're kicked back doing nothing enjoying yourself. Call it Schrodinger's programmer.
Now, if your computer is hooked up to the Zeno effect device described in the article, it should be able to read the results of your work whether you actually did it or not. This should usher in a revolution in work environment for programmers everywhere.
Once you're used to digitally recording TV with a TiVo or other PVR it can be frustrating to move to HDTV since the recording options are very limited. But you missed at least one option in your list. I use a DirecTV HD TiVo recorder. I don't bother to subscribe to DirecTV's HD programming, I just use the box to record terrestrial network broadcast HDTV. I record non network channels like SCIFI and Discovery off the satellite in standard definition. It was an expensive solution, especially when I got it in 2004, but most HD setups end up being costly.
I take it you mean cross range capability. That's a big improvement with wings. Any lift at all gives you the ability to land somewhere to the side of the ground path of your orbit. Capsules can have a little bit of lift if their center of gravity is asymmetric, but it takes a bit more to get good cross range capability. More options on where to land is a good thing.
Lift also allows the reentry to remain above the dense part of the atmosphere a bit longer and bleed off more speed first for a gentler, but more prolonged reentry.
3) Is a collision with an asteroid likely to be elastic? Will the striking object bounce off of the target or embed itself within it? These are very different models as far as where the force goes.
Everyone seems to be assuming this is a trivial exercise because the collision is simple to model. I suspect it is much more complicated than a simple elastic or inelastic collision.
In an elastic collision the energy of the relative velocity of the two bodies rebounds and pushes them apart with the same speed. With an inelastic collision the energy is absorbed by the two bodies (as deformation and heat) and the end up with zero relative velocity. But with the relative velocity involved with orbital collisions, the energy involved tends to vaporize the colliding body and cause a powerful explosion. So rather than a small body rebounding with its original speed you get a large cloud of plasma and debris exploding off the surface of the larger body including a lot of mass that was originally part of the larger body.
So I expect there are a lot of questions to answer about how much mass at what speed would be ejected by the collision with an asteroid. How much of the collision energy would go into accelerating the ejecta and causing a reaction that would move the asteroid and how much would go into heat and radiate away?
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Our launch capability is nowhere near worrying about energy efficiency as a driving factor. While it's true that current rocket launches aren't energy efficient (the vast majority of the fuel is used to lift other fuel, as others have pointed out), that isn't really the problem. The cost of a space launch has very little to do with fuel costs. Fuel costs are petty change to NASA. The cost is in all the manpower and expensive specialized equipment required.
While the deceleration from plowing through the atmosphere is bad, it must be at least an order of magnitude less than the forces from whirling around a 2 km diameter ring at 8 km/s. Just consider that at one instant it's traveling at 8 km/s in one direction and less than half a second later and a couple kilometers distance it's going 8 km/s in the opposite direction on the other side of the ring. For this concept to work the atmosphere had better not bring the launch vehicle to a stop in just a couple kilometers, so the forces must be much smaller.
Solar cells are logical to consider for electric cars, but aren't necessarily cost effective. Remember that we're talking about $9 of electricity for a full charge. Have you thought about how long it will take and how expensive the panel will be to generate that many kilowatt-hours of electricity?
If you can easily plug your car in at night to top off the charge you're not going to bother with the cost of a set of solar cells. But it might be worth doing if you have a short commute, park in the direct sun all day, and can't easily recharge at home. It wouldn't take more than a few square feet of solar cells to meet that demand, I'd think.
I completely agree that some sort of balance will be achieved. My comment about something for nothing was merely to point out that complete avoidance of commercials isn't going to work either. They have to figure out a way to get us to watch enough commercials to make it worth their while to broadcast. Not that ABC's anti skip proposal is the way that is going to work. It remains to be seen what will work, and whether we end up looking back with nostalgia on commercials that were separate from the programs and easily ignorable.
That's a very amoral or cynical view of the situation. I pay DirecTV because they are providing a service I want at a decent price. That service is delivery of a set of digital signals, not the decoding of them. The encryption and decoding is simply a way of enforcing the contract. When I pay at a movie theater it's to see a movie, not just to get past the ticket taker without hassle.
We were discussing wrongs, not rights. :)
Don't get me wrong. I've had a DVR for years and often enjoy fast forwarding through commercials myself. I don't think this proposed anti ad skipping feature is going to fly. But I also realize that if everyone exercises their right to skip commercials then the current business model is doomed. It seems kind of inevitable that things are going to change, possibly for the worse with product placement, etc.. I'm just saying not to expect networks to continue to provide original content for free with easily skipped ads. I see a lot of attitude here that seems to suggest that we can do what we want and the networks can't do anything but take it and keep delivering the shows we want. But you can't have your cake and eat it too. Expect some changes.
No, you're not the only one. I also receive broadcast TV over the air, but my bendy piece of wire is in the attic. It's digital HDTV I'm capturing, I don't care for the analog stuff. My fancy HDTV box also takes input from another piece of bent metal capturing radio frequencies: this one carefully aimed at a satellite. But I have to pay for the right to decode the satellite signal even though the signal is there whether I want it or not. What do you do with the satellite signals filling your house? Do you do whatever you want with those too?
No it isn't. It's a telethon.
No, a telethon is commercial without program. I consider all pledge drives to just be variants of commercials, they're trying to sell you on giving money.
You sound like one of those people that says advertising doesn't work on you. Guess what, unless you're a robot advertising works exactly like they expect it to. It builds up brand recognition and then someday when you're actually in the market for life insurance or cookies, even though you weren't when you watched the commercial, you might think of them. The advertised product at least makes the list of ones you've heard of before rather than just another no-name product that you don't trust. If the commercial really did it's job you now have associations at the back of your head between the product and certain intangible good feelings like safety or pleasure.
You may be right. If the business model of commercial supported broadcast television fails due to commercial skipping, then the future may just be product placement and inset ads. Either that or pay-per-view. Original programming isn't free, it has to be paid for somehow.
All the decent television is elsewhere, either on HBO or SciFi or Comedy Central or other channels that were never broadcast through the air to begin with.
I note that two of your three examples run commercials for income. If commercial supported television becomes a broken business model what happens to the SciFi Channel and Comedy Central? Is every channel on cable/satellite to become a $10 a month premium channel?
I'm not even going to get into how making someone watch commercials is wrong.
It's also wrong to expect something for nothing. Free broadcast TV without commercials is something for nothing.
While I understand why broadcast networks want to protect their advertising revenue, I don't think this is going to fly either. It's too difficult to get ad protection into all DVRs and would create too much consumer backlash.
But since the core of their business model is ad revenue, you have to wonder what's going to happen to broadcast television. Enough consumers switching to DVRs and skipping the commercials regularly could conceivably put them out of business. Then all we'd be left with is PBS, pay per view, and premium channels. I suppose some would call that an improvement, but I'd miss a lot of my favorite network shows.
A residential broadband connection is the equivalent of an all you can eat buffet. It's a reasonable business model as long as people can be kept from abusing it. If it becomes impossible to enforce they'll just have to go to a metered system where we pay by the byte transfered. I suppose you'll be happy when they replace "unlimited" with "limited only by your bank balance" in their ad copy.
You know, I actually considered making a comment on how you'd have to go with a heavy dual drive laptop to get any more storage (or a slower 5400 RPM drive). But it is a state of the art laptop drive.
The new Dell is not the top of the line, but the upper end of the line for a mid weight laptop.
I'd agree with you there. There are all sorts of tradeoffs to be made on laptops in cost, portability, style, etc.. This Dell is only a reasonable choice if you want gaming oriented mid weight (8.5 lb) laptop and are willing to pay top dollar for it. I've seen the dual hard drive, dual optical, dual GPU SLI laptops, but I wouldn't want to go up to 15 lb to get it. But then some people think that it's ridiculous to go over 4 lb in a laptop and are happy with their 12 inch screen and integrated graphics.
As the other replies here point out, there is no united hardcore gamer profile. In fact, it sounds like you are describing a hardcore system tweaker. Someone who gets their kicks producing the highest FPS figure out of a machine, rather than actually playing the game. It seems to me a true gamer would be spending their time actually gaming rather than trying to figure out how to get another meaningless half percent of performance out of their system.
My wife wants a portable system with plenty of power to play whatever she throws at it over the next couple years. She's considering the M1710 because of it's large screen and the Nvidia 7900 GTX in it. She probably would have gone for a Sager 5720, but I suggested she look for a Core Duo machine rather than one based on the older Pentium M.
The M1710 is available with a 60 to 100GB 7200RPM hard drive. That's as large as you're going to get in a laptop unless you go down to a 5400 RPM drive. You do have to make some sacrifices for portability. But for a gaming rig it's all about the GPU, and the 512MB Nvidia GeForce Go 7900 GTX in Dell's M1710 is just about as good as it gets (outside SLI anyway).
Hey, at least its a 7200 RPM 60GB hard drive, with the option of going up to 100GB. That's state of the art in laptops. There are still new laptops being sold with 5400 RPM 40 GB drives and smaller.
The first hard drive I ever personally bought was 60 MB (and that's not a typo). So I have no problems with a mere 60GB. It seems everything I buy nowadays has a thousand times more storage than something I bought 15 or 20 years ago.
I told them I wan't signing anything, it wasn't my problem.
Isn't it great how they shift the problem to the consumer by calling it identity theft. They didn't steal your identity, they stole the credit card companies money by fooling them. They should call it credit company bamboozling, but that would make it sound like their problem instead of yours.
Let me lock my credit report down so that it reports only "CREDIT REPORT LOCKED BY OWNER" and identity theft will drop drastically. If you can not apply for new credit under someone's name it makes stealing their identity nearly worthless.
So you lock down your credit report to prevent any more credit card or loans in your name. I assume there would be a method for unlocking the reports when you want to apply for something for real.
The trouble is that the credit thieves would just impersonate you and unlock the reports themselves. So the identity problem is just shifted from the banking institutions to the credit reporting companies. Since it's not their money on the line, they're even less likely to take it seriously.
I think the ISPs are going to have to deal with their own success and open the spigots a bit wider; we *are* paying for our bandwidth, let us get to it.
Yes, you paid for some bandwidth, but you didn't pay enough to support using your broadband connection full open 24*7. Their business model is based on providing an average amount of bandwidth to an average consumer. Sort of like an all you can eat buffet, and no one really expects them to provide food as fast as you can eat it forever. Bandwidth isn't a free resource they are denying you for no good reason. Huge connections to the Internet backbone cost huge money.
ISP are rightly concerned that sources of bandwidth consumption like bittorrent will change the average usage patterns of their consumers. If they have to arrange for larger upstream connections it's going to cost them more to provide the service. And they are going to pass that cost along to the consumer. So it should be your concern too.
No, here's what you do. You build a shielded, sound proofed room with your computer workstation, a nice entertainment center, bar and comfy recliner. Then you seal yourself in the room so no one can tell what you're doing. Either you have the computer turned on and are hard at work programming or you're kicked back doing nothing enjoying yourself. Call it Schrodinger's programmer.
Now, if your computer is hooked up to the Zeno effect device described in the article, it should be able to read the results of your work whether you actually did it or not. This should usher in a revolution in work environment for programmers everywhere.
Once you're used to digitally recording TV with a TiVo or other PVR it can be frustrating to move to HDTV since the recording options are very limited. But you missed at least one option in your list. I use a DirecTV HD TiVo recorder. I don't bother to subscribe to DirecTV's HD programming, I just use the box to record terrestrial network broadcast HDTV. I record non network channels like SCIFI and Discovery off the satellite in standard definition. It was an expensive solution, especially when I got it in 2004, but most HD setups end up being costly.
3. The ability to control the flight.
I take it you mean cross range capability. That's a big improvement with wings. Any lift at all gives you the ability to land somewhere to the side of the ground path of your orbit. Capsules can have a little bit of lift if their center of gravity is asymmetric, but it takes a bit more to get good cross range capability. More options on where to land is a good thing.
Lift also allows the reentry to remain above the dense part of the atmosphere a bit longer and bleed off more speed first for a gentler, but more prolonged reentry.
3) Is a collision with an asteroid likely to be elastic? Will the striking object bounce off of the target or embed itself within it? These are very different models as far as where the force goes.
Everyone seems to be assuming this is a trivial exercise because the collision is simple to model. I suspect it is much more complicated than a simple elastic or inelastic collision.
In an elastic collision the energy of the relative velocity of the two bodies rebounds and pushes them apart with the same speed. With an inelastic collision the energy is absorbed by the two bodies (as deformation and heat) and the end up with zero relative velocity. But with the relative velocity involved with orbital collisions, the energy involved tends to vaporize the colliding body and cause a powerful explosion. So rather than a small body rebounding with its original speed you get a large cloud of plasma and debris exploding off the surface of the larger body including a lot of mass that was originally part of the larger body.
So I expect there are a lot of questions to answer about how much mass at what speed would be ejected by the collision with an asteroid. How much of the collision energy would go into accelerating the ejecta and causing a reaction that would move the asteroid and how much would go into heat and radiate away?