This is why I train new users to look for the domain name at the bottom right of the status bar next to the lock in Firefox, because it's too hard to explain to a beginner how to parse an https URL and the browser takes care of all the tricks in extracting the domain name that you're connecting to.
Well, it's good to worry any time there is a mismatch. It can be easy to fake legitimate looking URL's using UNICODE characters and such.
The whole first part could be the host name: "onlinebanking.capitalone.com/login/" and the domain is actually "tsdk.cn". This would be using the UNICODE symbol for mathematical division that looks like a forward slash. It looks like a capitalone.com domain even though you're going through some scammer site. Marlinspike talked about this exact attack at Blackhat 09.
>And I've got some news for you. It's *all* pointless. The end is the same for everybody. We're all worm food. Doesn't matter if you rage against the machine or oil its gears. In a hundred years, I promise you it won't matter one whit.
At the rate that molecular biology is advancing, aging will likely (or at least possibly) be cured within the lifetime of many people alive today, especially children who can expect to live at least another 80 years. Think about what kind of medical technology we'll have in 80 years. We can already look at the atoms that make our cells work, there is nothing smaller that we need to be able to see. There are just a lot of little parts that will take a while to figure out how they go together. It's amazing what we've figured out already. With improved computers and microscopes, we'll surely make huge progress over the next 80 years. The old saying that everybody dies someday is no longer certain.
But what I think will happen before an aging cure, is a massively more powerful, possibly molecular, computer technology. Super computers are just now reaching power levels comparable to the human brain, so it might not even require a breakthrough new technology to create intelligence that will make Einstein look like an idiot.
Speaking as an author, I do not want my works digitized by Google because it screws me out of the ability to sell digital copies myself.
Well it's lucky for you then that you can just tell Google and they won't make your stuff available.
What's great about this whole thing is that the world was missing out on easy availability of massive amounts of information in tons of old books because it was illegal to scan them and make them available. Getting some law passed to make this stuff available might not have been possible or pretty. So what did Google do? They just broke the law.
But what made it all work out so well was a peculiarity of the legal system called the class action lawsuit. Google could never have done this if they had to settle with every author who ever wrote anything, but in a class action lawsuit every author out there is bound to the settlement, even if they don't like it and didn't even know about it, unless they notified the court before a certain date that they wanted out of the settlement. So without even bothering congress, Google effectively changed the law to make it legal for them to do this copying and distribution, even for books where the copyright holder can't be found. But what makes this actually fairer than many class action lawsuits is that any author can opt out of the arrangement at any time.
Can you tell us: Can you take off by yourself or do you have to have your copilot hold the parafoil off the ground? Can you take off in a moderate cross wind or must you always be able to drive straight up wind to prevent the sail blowing off to the side? Is there a big problem with sail wear and tear from being blown around on the ground?
I think people consider two kinds of market share: revenue market share and unit market share. If you give away your product for free you might dominate unit market share but have zero revenue market share.
Say for example you're using an unsecured wireless access point at an Internet cafe. There can be an attacker five miles away with a high gain antenna listening for someone to log into their bank by a login page that only encrypts the password. When your computer sends out the request for your bank's page, if the hacker's computer is fast enough, it can impersonate the wireless access point and send a version of your bank's login page with the password encryption stripped and the password redirected to whatever computer your attacker wants. When the real server finally responds to your request a few milliseconds later, your computer will think it's a mistaken duplicate and ignore it. This is not a theoretical attack, it has been publicly demonstrated. Your first login attempt may fail as the password is redirected to the attacker, but once your attacker has your password, he can return things to normal so your second login attempt will succeed. You'll just think you mistyped the password on the first try.
A company that sells an exploitation framework doesn't have to have a very good contract. They don't have to go to court to get their money. They just tell their customers to pay and they pay. Because something bad might happen to their computers if they don't pay.
Parent is funny and insightful. But seriously, the idea is that normally when you're being tortured, your options are to betray your friends and fellow heroes or continue to endure the torture. But with Truecrypt, it doesn't matter if you reveal all your hidden volumes. They'll continue to torture you forever or until they think no human could resist. Betraying your friends and giving them your hidden volumes won't reduce the torture. Knowing this increases the chance that you can hold out against the torture.
On the other hand, if it's not something you're willing to get tortured forever for, then maybe you should use a solution which allows you to prove you've given up everything. Also, you might not want to have Truecrypt on you when you go through customs, or they might confiscate your hardware. Getting it back may be more trouble than it's worth.
The ISPs don't care if the IPv4 addresses run out. They like it because then they'll be able to start charging extra for IPv4 and IPv6 addresses whereas they've been just giving them out for free. NAT also cuts their traffic costs because it keeps customers from running servers.
I noticed another comment that makes me think they are not going to launch right away. On their update page for December 29 they say "Whether measured by weight or by cost, the majority of the Falcon 9 being assembled is actual flight hardware." I guess if some of it isn't actual flight hardware then then they're going to have to take it apart and put it back together again before flying.
They've admitted that the first stages have been burning up (or at least getting overcooked). Last I heard Musk said they were trying to come up with a workable heat shielding system. I don't think the Falcon 1 first stages they've launched have had any heat shielding.
There are two problems I can't think of any easy solution for. The first is which end do you put the main shield. The engine is the heavy end of the empty booster so it will tend to come down first. But how would you make a lightweight and strong system to swing a shield into place below the engine? Or do you get the engine out of the way somehow or what? Musk was saying that they're planning to put the shield at the top of the stage and they're thinking about some aerodynamic system to get the lightweight end of the booster to come down first and the heavy end to trail. The second problem is that even if you can shield the end without too much weight, you might have to put heat shielding all the way up the sides as well. You could probably put lighter shielding on the sides but it might still add up to too much weight. It might not take very much heat on the sides to distemper the metal and leave your tanks too weak for a second flight.
I didn't notice that the NASA COTS launches weren't going to be the first. Maybe I misinterpreted what he said. Maybe he was saying the NASA launches would be in the Summer, not the first launch. Wow I also didn't realize that they're planning five Falcon 9 launches this year along with two Falcon 1 launches! They're ramping up quick!
I think they should launch some cheap bulk supplies on the test flight instead of a dummy load. Maybe a large quantity of oxygen for the space station or even just some water or something.
Reusability isn't mentioned on their Falcon 9 page anymore. I originally got excited about SpaceX because I thought reusability would be the breakthrough in space launch we need. But unfortunately Musk said they haven't come up with a way to protect the boosters from reentry yet. They're looking at aerodynamic methods to keep the heat shielded top of the booster coming down first. Some engineers say they're crazy to think they can make them reusable.
But even if they can't get them reusable, I think it would be a great advance if they can just make them 1/4 or even 1/2 the cost. I don't think Musk started SpaceX because he thought it was the best way to make money. He probably did it in part for the fun of it, but I think primarily he's truly driven to make it cheaper. Falcon 1 has proven Musk a capable entrepreneur. I hope so much that he can get Falcon 9 into orbit.
It seems like I heard Musk say a couple months ago that they're thinking they might launch Falcon 9 this summer. I think maybe this whole thing about integrating it by the end of the year and putting vertical on the launch pad are all about meeting certain milestones to get money from their NASA contract. I think they've got to take it down and finish getting everything ready before they launch. They may be waiting on NASA to get a payload together. Notice that the web site gives no suggestion about a launch date. The "launch manifest" has an asterisk that gives the strange definition of "target date" as "Target dates are for vehicle arrival at launch site".
When someone claims a robot can't have a soul I say "Don't tell god he can't give a soul to a robot."
Why can't robots be conscious? Like robots, humans are complicated chemical machines. Theoretically it's possible to build an atom for atom replica of a human. Would god give the replica a soul? If not, how do you know he wouldn't? If the replica had a soul and you removed one atom, would the replica's soul vanish completely? How many atoms in the replica would you have to change before the replica lost its soul?
The key element of humans is carbon. The key elements of a robot might be iron and silicon. What reason is there to believe that iron and silicon atoms are less capable of harboring a soul than carbon atoms?
he says that "Kodak invented the [DPX] standard to be the digital equivalent of film" and "To get all the information of film, you need 1.8K pixels". Then when he's called the fact that 35mm film has more than 2K of resolution across the frame, he denies he said 1.8K is enough to caputure "all" the information. But it is what he said and he didn't even go back and take those comments out. I might forgive such a mistake if he'd gone back and corrected it, but why did he leave it in?
He also tries to say that the other cameras get 42 bits of image information per pixel and that the Red only gets 12 bits. But it would be more comparable to say that the Red gets 48 bits (4 times 12) from the four(assuming they're square?) photosites that the Red has for each pixel of the other cameras. Though 48 to 42 isn't nearly as big an advantage as you would expect from the Red's claimed 4K image.
Unfortunately Red has stooped to dragging the megapixel fraud over from the digital still camera field into the digital cinema field where the other camera makers seem to have been maintaining more honest specifications. I suppose the other camera companies will just have to triple their pixel ratings(not change the actual number of pixels, just say there are three times more) to level the playing field with Red. But I hope they will be honest in their specs that they're counting sub pixels instead of trying to pass off their bayer sub pixels as full color pixels like still camera companies do.
Every country has industr. But when someone refers to industrialized nations they're probably not thinking of countries like Iran and Mexico. A more fair example might be to compare US debt to the other G7 nations. Of the G7 nations, Germany, Japan, France, Italy, and Canada are all higher on the list than the US. The UK is the only G7 country lower on the list than the US. That makes the US look pretty good in comparison. However, two wrongs don't make a right. Maybe the US is just bad while the others are worse. Maybe the other countries are using the US example to justify their debt problem just as the US does to justify its problem, resulting in a vicious circle of spiraling debt.
On the other hand I don't think it's unusual for individuals and businesses to take on debt exceeding their annual income, sometimes a multiple of annual income. In comparison 60 or 70% doesn't seem terribly high.
Calling Iraq a war of aggression is like saying that if there were some robbers holding tellers and customers hostage in a bank and they started killing the hostages, it would be aggression to send the SWAT team in to rescue the hostages from the criminals. Hussein was a murdering thieving criminal committing an ongoing crime against the Iraqi people. Invading Iraq was a legitimate action to rescue victims of a crime and take down the criminals. The US went in and established democracy and put the people back in control of their country so they can run their country the way they want to instead of the way Saddam wanted to. Hopefully the Iraqis can eventually stabilize their country. Then we'll know if Bush was totally mistaken or not.
>if it was Windows or a Mac, adding support for a webcam would be as easy as installing a binary driver blob.
If the manufacturer still supports your hardware under the current version of Windows or Mac. If we can get people to recognize their own self interest and switch to Linux then we won't have these problems with hardware and software.
>The sides would produce less electricity per square inch. But as you pointed out, there are more square inches.
No there wouldn't be more square inches. The comment you originally quoted was referring to the fact that if you have one square meter of solar film and you wrap it around a bunch of cylinders then you will collect less energy than if you spread that square meter out flat and mount it at the best angle to catch the noon sun. You said they turned out to be equivalent(even if that's not what you meant to say), but they're not. Spreading the film out flat gets you much more energy from a given area of film.
>Yes, I refer to energy per surface area of the roof. Space seems to be the limiting factor.
The advantage of tubes over flat panels in capturing energy per area of roof is at best very small and probably non-existent. I'd guess you'd be better off looking for more area to mount flat panels than using tubes, or just use grid power for that tiny bit extra. If grid power isn't readily available then you probably don't have space problems.
>Angle of incidence changing over time of day is far more important than angle changing over seasons
Tubes and flat panels are equivalent as far as changes in efficiency with changes in sun direction over the day are concerned. If flat panels are 57% better at noon then they'll be about 57% better at any other time of day as well.
Much of this analysis would change if for some reason it was cheaper to manufacture a given are of film on the surface of a cylinder than flat, but since the opposite is probably true, it makes the picture even worse for tubes.
In your original article you quoted a poster saying:
>I wonder about the cylindrical shape, this would seem to block 50% of the surface area, where the sides and underside would produce less electricity than a flat sheet of the same area.
This poster is assuming that the solar film is covering the surface of the cylinder all the way around and is comparing these tubes to a flat solar panel with equivalent solar film area facing the sun. That would give a flat panel with approximately pi times or about triple the output, not equivalent as your post claims. If you were talking about output per roof area then you were referring to something different than the poster you quoted without mentioning the change in your post. Thus you claimed the Solyndra tubes collected much more energy per square inch of film than they do, even if that wasn't what you meant to claim.
Even if you were referring to energy captured per roof area, you were wrong. A flat panel laid horizontally on the roof would capture more than the Solyndra tubes and their gaps. Although for the flat horizontal panel to capture more than the Solyndra tubes there would have to be no gaps or very little gaps between the flat panels, thus possibly increasing vertical wind loads on the mountings to more expensive levels. I expect it would be rare for the slight(if any) advantage in roof area of the Solyndra tubes to make them more desirable than narrow flat panels set at a reasonable incidence.
If it turns out that manufacturing film is much cheaper in tubes then that may make them a good idea. But I'd guess it's actually a lot cheaper to make the film flat.
Also, if flat panels were made in narrow strips and mounted like the Solyndra tubes, then I think it would be trivial and cheap to make them adjustable for incidence. Whether it would be worth the labor to change the angle a couple times a year is another question. They might also be supplied by the manufacturer in a selection of say five or ten different preset incidence angles at little extra cost to the manufacturer.
I didn't ignore angle of incidence. I assumed flat panels set at the best angle for the sun at noon. If the cells are left at the same angle all year, then that makes the tubes slightly less bad in comparison, but still much worse than flat cells.
As far as the change in angle from morning to noon and then evening, the two systems, cylindrical and flat, are equivalent.
>I wonder about the cylindrical shape, this would seem to block 50% of the surface area, where the sides and underside would produce less electricity than a flat sheet of the same area.
>>It seems counterintuitive, but if you do the calculus, it ends up being equivalent.
Nice try. Are you being paid by Solyndra or something? The stuff about calculus and physics you threw in to make your claims seem more credible is a nice touch.
I'm pretty sure you can't do any better than flat. And a cylinder or half cylinder solar film is much less efficient than flat. The perimeter of a half circle with a diameter of one, is pi/2, or about 1.57. So that means you'll have to buy 57% more solar panel area than you would if you bought flat ones. It's not clear whether the solar film is applied all the way around the tube or just over 180 degrees, but if it's a full 360 then the analysis is even worse. Of course you may get a little energy from the blue sky, but very little compared to direct sun, certainly no where near enough to make up for the extra 57% you could have had with flat cells.
You may also get some energy reflected off the roof. But if you think about it, depending on the relative size of the tubes and the space between them, there will be an angle such that if the sun is below that angle (at noon), no direct sunlight will make it past the tubes to the roof. If the roof is thus in shade, the energy reflected off of it will be insignificant. If the sun is above that angle then you will get some energy from roof reflection, but you'd be much better off just using flat panels in direct sunlight rather than wasting collector area trying to capture such a poor energy source as a partially shaded roof reflection.
There is one aspect of the Solyndra system that I find ingenious. By breaking the panels up into narrow strips with air space between them and mounting them low and horizontal on the roof, the wind loads would probably be dramatically reduced. This may allow a much less expensive installation. But I see no reason to go cylindrical. Square tubes with film on one side or maybe T shaped beams with the film on the top of the T (adjusted to the correct angle to catch the noon sun of course) might work just as well.
Do the kids determine the moves on their own or can they use help from a chess computer? If they can use a chess computer then space has no chance.
By the way the Slashdot poll asks if you'd like to own the space shuttle. That makes me wonder if NASA will sell it when they retire it. I'd think there would be some buyers. A commercial operation might be able to operate it much cheaper than NASA could.
Slashdot Mirror
This is why I train new users to look for the domain name at the bottom right of the status bar next to the lock in Firefox, because it's too hard to explain to a beginner how to parse an https URL and the browser takes care of all the tricks in extracting the domain name that you're connecting to.
>And I've got some news for you. It's *all* pointless. The end is the same for everybody. We're all worm food. Doesn't matter if you rage against the machine or oil its gears. In a hundred years, I promise you it won't matter one whit.
At the rate that molecular biology is advancing, aging will likely (or at least possibly) be cured within the lifetime of many people alive today, especially children who can expect to live at least another 80 years. Think about what kind of medical technology we'll have in 80 years. We can already look at the atoms that make our cells work, there is nothing smaller that we need to be able to see. There are just a lot of little parts that will take a while to figure out how they go together. It's amazing what we've figured out already. With improved computers and microscopes, we'll surely make huge progress over the next 80 years. The old saying that everybody dies someday is no longer certain.
But what I think will happen before an aging cure, is a massively more powerful, possibly molecular, computer technology. Super computers are just now reaching power levels comparable to the human brain, so it might not even require a breakthrough new technology to create intelligence that will make Einstein look like an idiot.
Well it's lucky for you then that you can just tell Google and they won't make your stuff available.
What's great about this whole thing is that the world was missing out on easy availability of massive amounts of information in tons of old books because it was illegal to scan them and make them available. Getting some law passed to make this stuff available might not have been possible or pretty. So what did Google do? They just broke the law.
But what made it all work out so well was a peculiarity of the legal system called the class action lawsuit. Google could never have done this if they had to settle with every author who ever wrote anything, but in a class action lawsuit every author out there is bound to the settlement, even if they don't like it and didn't even know about it, unless they notified the court before a certain date that they wanted out of the settlement. So without even bothering congress, Google effectively changed the law to make it legal for them to do this copying and distribution, even for books where the copyright holder can't be found. But what makes this actually fairer than many class action lawsuits is that any author can opt out of the arrangement at any time.
Can you tell us:
Can you take off by yourself or do you have to have your copilot hold the parafoil off the ground?
Can you take off in a moderate cross wind or must you always be able to drive straight up wind to prevent the sail blowing off to the side?
Is there a big problem with sail wear and tear from being blown around on the ground?
I think people consider two kinds of market share: revenue market share and unit market share. If you give away your product for free you might dominate unit market share but have zero revenue market share.
>as long as the form submits to an HTTPS page, your login credentials are still SSL-encrypted.
No, If any part of a page is not encrypted then an attacker can effectively strip all encryption from the entire page. See this page from a Microsoft Internet Explorer programmer: http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2005/04/20/410240.aspx
and this page about airpwn where attendees at a security conference had the images in their web pages turned upside down.
http://www.informit.com/guides/content.aspx?g=security&seqNum=158
Say for example you're using an unsecured wireless access point at an Internet cafe. There can be an attacker five miles away with a high gain antenna listening for someone to log into their bank by a login page that only encrypts the password. When your computer sends out the request for your bank's page, if the hacker's computer is fast enough, it can impersonate the wireless access point and send a version of your bank's login page with the password encryption stripped and the password redirected to whatever computer your attacker wants. When the real server finally responds to your request a few milliseconds later, your computer will think it's a mistaken duplicate and ignore it. This is not a theoretical attack, it has been publicly demonstrated. Your first login attempt may fail as the password is redirected to the attacker, but once your attacker has your password, he can return things to normal so your second login attempt will succeed. You'll just think you mistyped the password on the first try.
A company that sells an exploitation framework doesn't have to have a very good contract. They don't have to go to court to get their money. They just tell their customers to pay and they pay. Because something bad might happen to their computers if they don't pay.
Parent is funny and insightful. But seriously, the idea is that normally when you're being tortured, your options are to betray your friends and fellow heroes or continue to endure the torture. But with Truecrypt, it doesn't matter if you reveal all your hidden volumes. They'll continue to torture you forever or until they think no human could resist. Betraying your friends and giving them your hidden volumes won't reduce the torture. Knowing this increases the chance that you can hold out against the torture.
On the other hand, if it's not something you're willing to get tortured forever for, then maybe you should use a solution which allows you to prove you've given up everything. Also, you might not want to have Truecrypt on you when you go through customs, or they might confiscate your hardware. Getting it back may be more trouble than it's worth.
I think what was meant was that of all the addresses in use .027% are IPv6 addresses and the other 99.973% are IPv4.
The ISPs don't care if the IPv4 addresses run out. They like it because then they'll be able to start charging extra for IPv4 and IPv6 addresses whereas they've been just giving them out for free. NAT also cuts their traffic costs because it keeps customers from running servers.
I noticed another comment that makes me think they are not going to launch right away. On their update page for December 29 they say "Whether measured by weight or by cost, the majority of the Falcon 9 being assembled is actual flight hardware." I guess if some of it isn't actual flight hardware then then they're going to have to take it apart and put it back together again before flying.
They've admitted that the first stages have been burning up (or at least getting overcooked). Last I heard Musk said they were trying to come up with a workable heat shielding system. I don't think the Falcon 1 first stages they've launched have had any heat shielding.
There are two problems I can't think of any easy solution for. The first is which end do you put the main shield. The engine is the heavy end of the empty booster so it will tend to come down first. But how would you make a lightweight and strong system to swing a shield into place below the engine? Or do you get the engine out of the way somehow or what? Musk was saying that they're planning to put the shield at the top of the stage and they're thinking about some aerodynamic system to get the lightweight end of the booster to come down first and the heavy end to trail. The second problem is that even if you can shield the end without too much weight, you might have to put heat shielding all the way up the sides as well. You could probably put lighter shielding on the sides but it might still add up to too much weight. It might not take very much heat on the sides to distemper the metal and leave your tanks too weak for a second flight.
I didn't notice that the NASA COTS launches weren't going to be the first. Maybe I misinterpreted what he said. Maybe he was saying the NASA launches would be in the Summer, not the first launch. Wow I also didn't realize that they're planning five Falcon 9 launches this year along with two Falcon 1 launches! They're ramping up quick!
I think they should launch some cheap bulk supplies on the test flight instead of a dummy load. Maybe a large quantity of oxygen for the space station or even just some water or something.
Reusability isn't mentioned on their Falcon 9 page anymore. I originally got excited about SpaceX because I thought reusability would be the breakthrough in space launch we need. But unfortunately Musk said they haven't come up with a way to protect the boosters from reentry yet. They're looking at aerodynamic methods to keep the heat shielded top of the booster coming down first. Some engineers say they're crazy to think they can make them reusable.
But even if they can't get them reusable, I think it would be a great advance if they can just make them 1/4 or even 1/2 the cost. I don't think Musk started SpaceX because he thought it was the best way to make money. He probably did it in part for the fun of it, but I think primarily he's truly driven to make it cheaper. Falcon 1 has proven Musk a capable entrepreneur. I hope so much that he can get Falcon 9 into orbit.
It seems like I heard Musk say a couple months ago that they're thinking they might launch Falcon 9 this summer. I think maybe this whole thing about integrating it by the end of the year and putting vertical on the launch pad are all about meeting certain milestones to get money from their NASA contract. I think they've got to take it down and finish getting everything ready before they launch. They may be waiting on NASA to get a payload together. Notice that the web site gives no suggestion about a launch date. The "launch manifest" has an asterisk that gives the strange definition of "target date" as "Target dates are for vehicle arrival at launch site".
When someone claims a robot can't have a soul I say "Don't tell god he can't give a soul to a robot."
Why can't robots be conscious? Like robots, humans are complicated chemical machines. Theoretically it's possible to build an atom for atom replica of a human. Would god give the replica a soul? If not, how do you know he wouldn't? If the replica had a soul and you removed one atom, would the replica's soul vanish completely? How many atoms in the replica would you have to change before the replica lost its soul?
The key element of humans is carbon. The key elements of a robot might be iron and silicon. What reason is there to believe that iron and silicon atoms are less capable of harboring a soul than carbon atoms?
Who is this rcjohnso.com? Some shill for the other camera manufacturers? In his page at
http://rcjohnso.com/REDFACTS.html
he says that "Kodak invented the [DPX] standard to be the digital equivalent of film" and "To get all the information of film, you need 1.8K pixels". Then when he's called the fact that 35mm film has more than 2K of resolution across the frame, he denies he said 1.8K is enough to caputure "all" the information. But it is what he said and he didn't even go back and take those comments out. I might forgive such a mistake if he'd gone back and corrected it, but why did he leave it in?
He also tries to say that the other cameras get 42 bits of image information per pixel and that the Red only gets 12 bits. But it would be more comparable to say that the Red gets 48 bits (4 times 12) from the four(assuming they're square?) photosites that the Red has for each pixel of the other cameras. Though 48 to 42 isn't nearly as big an advantage as you would expect from the Red's claimed 4K image.
Unfortunately Red has stooped to dragging the megapixel fraud over from the digital still camera field into the digital cinema field where the other camera makers seem to have been maintaining more honest specifications. I suppose the other camera companies will just have to triple their pixel ratings(not change the actual number of pixels, just say there are three times more) to level the playing field with Red. But I hope they will be honest in their specs that they're counting sub pixels instead of trying to pass off their bayer sub pixels as full color pixels like still camera companies do.
Every country has industr. But when someone refers to industrialized nations they're probably not thinking of countries like Iran and Mexico. A more fair example might be to compare US debt to the other G7 nations. Of the G7 nations, Germany, Japan, France, Italy, and Canada are all higher on the list than the US. The UK is the only G7 country lower on the list than the US. That makes the US look pretty good in comparison. However, two wrongs don't make a right. Maybe the US is just bad while the others are worse. Maybe the other countries are using the US example to justify their debt problem just as the US does to justify its problem, resulting in a vicious circle of spiraling debt.
On the other hand I don't think it's unusual for individuals and businesses to take on debt exceeding their annual income, sometimes a multiple of annual income. In comparison 60 or 70% doesn't seem terribly high.
Calling Iraq a war of aggression is like saying that if there were some robbers holding tellers and customers hostage in a bank and they started killing the hostages, it would be aggression to send the SWAT team in to rescue the hostages from the criminals. Hussein was a murdering thieving criminal committing an ongoing crime against the Iraqi people. Invading Iraq was a legitimate action to rescue victims of a crime and take down the criminals. The US went in and established democracy and put the people back in control of their country so they can run their country the way they want to instead of the way Saddam wanted to. Hopefully the Iraqis can eventually stabilize their country. Then we'll know if Bush was totally mistaken or not.
You're still way off. This could go back and forth for a long time and I don't have that much time to spend on this, so I'm going to leave it here.
>if it was Windows or a Mac, adding support for a webcam would be as easy as installing a binary driver blob.
If the manufacturer still supports your hardware under the current version of Windows or Mac. If we can get people to recognize their own self interest and switch to Linux then we won't have these problems with hardware and software.
>The sides would produce less electricity per square inch. But as you pointed out, there are more square inches.
No there wouldn't be more square inches. The comment you originally quoted was referring to the fact that if you have one square meter of solar film and you wrap it around a bunch of cylinders then you will collect less energy than if you spread that square meter out flat and mount it at the best angle to catch the noon sun. You said they turned out to be equivalent(even if that's not what you meant to say), but they're not. Spreading the film out flat gets you much more energy from a given area of film.
>Yes, I refer to energy per surface area of the roof. Space seems to be the limiting factor.
The advantage of tubes over flat panels in capturing energy per area of roof is at best very small and probably non-existent. I'd guess you'd be better off looking for more area to mount flat panels than using tubes, or just use grid power for that tiny bit extra. If grid power isn't readily available then you probably don't have space problems.
>Angle of incidence changing over time of day is far more important than angle changing over seasons
Tubes and flat panels are equivalent as far as changes in efficiency with changes in sun direction over the day are concerned. If flat panels are 57% better at noon then they'll be about 57% better at any other time of day as well.
Much of this analysis would change if for some reason it was cheaper to manufacture a given are of film on the surface of a cylinder than flat, but since the opposite is probably true, it makes the picture even worse for tubes.
In your original article you quoted a poster saying:
>I wonder about the cylindrical shape, this would seem to block 50% of the surface area, where the sides and underside would produce less electricity than a flat sheet of the same area.
This poster is assuming that the solar film is covering the surface of the cylinder all the way around and is comparing these tubes to a flat solar panel with equivalent solar film area facing the sun. That would give a flat panel with approximately pi times or about triple the output, not equivalent as your post claims. If you were talking about output per roof area then you were referring to something different than the poster you quoted without mentioning the change in your post. Thus you claimed the Solyndra tubes collected much more energy per square inch of film than they do, even if that wasn't what you meant to claim.
Even if you were referring to energy captured per roof area, you were wrong. A flat panel laid horizontally on the roof would capture more than the Solyndra tubes and their gaps. Although for the flat horizontal panel to capture more than the Solyndra tubes there would have to be no gaps or very little gaps between the flat panels, thus possibly increasing vertical wind loads on the mountings to more expensive levels. I expect it would be rare for the slight(if any) advantage in roof area of the Solyndra tubes to make them more desirable than narrow flat panels set at a reasonable incidence.
If it turns out that manufacturing film is much cheaper in tubes then that may make them a good idea. But I'd guess it's actually a lot cheaper to make the film flat.
Also, if flat panels were made in narrow strips and mounted like the Solyndra tubes, then I think it would be trivial and cheap to make them adjustable for incidence. Whether it would be worth the labor to change the angle a couple times a year is another question. They might also be supplied by the manufacturer in a selection of say five or ten different preset incidence angles at little extra cost to the manufacturer.
I didn't ignore angle of incidence. I assumed flat panels set at the best angle for the sun at noon. If the cells are left at the same angle all year, then that makes the tubes slightly less bad in comparison, but still much worse than flat cells.
As far as the change in angle from morning to noon and then evening, the two systems, cylindrical and flat, are equivalent.
>I wonder about the cylindrical shape, this would seem to block 50% of the surface area, where the sides and underside would produce less electricity than a flat sheet of the same area.
>>It seems counterintuitive, but if you do the calculus, it ends up being equivalent.
Nice try. Are you being paid by Solyndra or something? The stuff about calculus and physics you threw in to make your claims seem more credible is a nice touch.
I'm pretty sure you can't do any better than flat. And a cylinder or half cylinder solar film is much less efficient than flat. The perimeter of a half circle with a diameter of one, is pi/2, or about 1.57. So that means you'll have to buy 57% more solar panel area than you would if you bought flat ones. It's not clear whether the solar film is applied all the way around the tube or just over 180 degrees, but if it's a full 360 then the analysis is even worse. Of course you may get a little energy from the blue sky, but very little compared to direct sun, certainly no where near enough to make up for the extra 57% you could have had with flat cells.
You may also get some energy reflected off the roof. But if you think about it, depending on the relative size of the tubes and the space between them, there will be an angle such that if the sun is below that angle (at noon), no direct sunlight will make it past the tubes to the roof. If the roof is thus in shade, the energy reflected off of it will be insignificant. If the sun is above that angle then you will get some energy from roof reflection, but you'd be much better off just using flat panels in direct sunlight rather than wasting collector area trying to capture such a poor energy source as a partially shaded roof reflection.
There is one aspect of the Solyndra system that I find ingenious. By breaking the panels up into narrow strips with air space between them and mounting them low and horizontal on the roof, the wind loads would probably be dramatically reduced. This may allow a much less expensive installation. But I see no reason to go cylindrical. Square tubes with film on one side or maybe T shaped beams with the film on the top of the T (adjusted to the correct angle to catch the noon sun of course) might work just as well.
Do the kids determine the moves on their own or can they use help from a chess computer? If they can use a chess computer then space has no chance.
By the way the Slashdot poll asks if you'd like to own the space shuttle. That makes me wonder if NASA will sell it when they retire it. I'd think there would be some buyers. A commercial operation might be able to operate it much cheaper than NASA could.