Parent is spot on with regard to judging Blu-ray based on its technical merits. At least it has *one* merit, and that is capacity; HD-DVD has none. As has been evidenced by the cost of dual-layered (writable) DVDs, per-layer capacity should not be dismissed.
HD-DVD is just as crippled by DRM, and for video, I sincerely hope that they both fail. I will be patiently waiting for the HVD. In the mean time, HD-DVD is far too small of an improvement for the cost (in terms of storage) to even bother.
Look at the red arrows on that diagram; these changes in delta-v can be accomplished with aerobraking, and are effectively free. The return trip is not as nice, but stopping at the moon still makes no sense.
It should be 9.3 + 4.1 + 1.6 km/s, vs 9.3 + 2.5 +.7 +.6 km/s. (Actually, that is not the quickest way to the moon, but the comparison still stands.)
In any case, talking about using the moon "as a jumping-off point to Mars," is a clear attempt at deception.
Wouldn't it take a LOT less energy and time to go directly to mars, rather than stopping off at the moon and having to escape the gravity well of *two* planetary bodies before going to Mars?
Yes, it is absolutely stupid to stop at the moon on the way to mars. Until we have a completely self-sustained presence on the moon, with full manufacturing capabilities, it makes no sense.
I could agree with everything in your post if you replaced C++ with C.
C++ however, is sharp not like a scalpel, but rather a twisted piece of shrapnel. Even when used properly, it is hideous and inflexible. A more dynamic language like Objective C allows for *much* cleaner, more expressive, and far more readable code.
is the last person I want to hear comments from about programming languages.
From the article: "Technology Review: Why is most software so bad?"
Come on Bjarne, be honest. It is at least in part, because most software is written in that awful language you foisted on the world. I think the state of programming today would be vastly more advanced if C++ had given way to Objective C.
They are marketing these nails as superior fasteners that will withstand a high wind environment. However, they are only fasteners, and the rest of the structure is still just as vulnerable to threats such as fire, water, termites, and so forth. For a truly robust, energy efficient, and long-lasting structure, the obvious solution is concrete.
Insulating Concrete Forms are basically like Legos made out of an insulating foam. You stack them together, insert rebar, and fill with concrete. The cost is estimated at 5% more than standard wood frame houses, and are superior in every way.
As the earth warms, storms will continue to become stronger and stronger. "An Inconvenient Truth" goes into more detail, and if you haven't seen it, you really should. In any case, it is about time that we started building more durable structures.
Well, the obvious thing to do, is to line the reactor with things that we want to have more neutrons, and which provide excellent shielding. Uranium, for example. As you say we have a hell of a lot of Uranium, and we may as well make the best of it.
In any case, we should start building Integral Fast Reactorsnow, and a lot of them. We no longer have the luxury of another 50 years of fusion research. The IFR is basically a proven design, and addresses all negative aspects of current nuclear reactors. If you are not familiar with it, please look at it; it seems too good to be true, but isn't. Not only is it incapable of melting down, it can be used to burn (dispose of) most of our current nuclear "waste" and weapons. It is by far the most environmentally responsible option.
The reactor was being actively researched when the Clinton administration killed it. By proven, I mean that they have tested failure conditions, such as stopping the coolant flow. Where other reactors would melt down, this one quietly comes to a stop. The only "disadvantage" is that it uses sodium as a coolant, though this is barely an issue. Sodium is used in industry every day, and simply needs to be handled appropriately.
That said, with Bussard's recent research, and given minimal funding, it is entirely possible that we could have production IEC fusion reactors in ten years. While this would be ideal, the IFR still has a place, and we may as well build a few.
Lastly, your love of the Farnsworth fusor as a power device is odd. Electrostatic conefinement devices cannot achieve the power densities necessary to be a commercial power source (several GW). If you look at current experiments (http://fti.neep.wisc.edu/iec/ftisite1.htm) the applications are many and important, but none are commercial power. I like these devices but mainly because their simplicity allows them to be portable.
While Farnsworth's device is rather impractical, the overall idea is very solid. The thing I find appealing is that this device relies on a central force varying as 1/r^2--electromagnetism--in the same way as gravity works in a star. There is no plasma instability to worry about, and the scaling laws are extremely favorable. Obviously, we can't make use of gravity, but Bussard has found a way to efficiently create a deep electrostatic potential well through magnetic confinement. This much is certain from the field configuration, which is as much a work of art as it science.
Wether this well can be maintained efficiently in the presence of a plasma, is another question. Obviously, its presence will flatten the well, but it has another curious side effect--it compresses the field lines around the point cusps, which improves electron confinement even further. It really is a brilliant configuration. From Bussard's google talk, I am highly inclined to believe that this could become a workable high-gain machine.
A machine of this sort has so many advantages, that it would be ludicrous not to at least follow up on his work. To name a few, it is physically small, very simply, can burn aneutronic p-B11 as fuel, and is dirt cheap. I think it will be a long time before we can put a tokamak into space.
As for the results of current IEC research, they are hardly surprising. If the tokamak were funded at similar levels, I dare not think what it would have to show. I do not mean to disparage the science being done, but comparing these results is as unreasonable as ignoring all other alternative efforts.
In virtually all cases, this minimum recirculating power is substantially larger than the fusion power, so barring the discovery of methods for recirculating the power at exceedingly high efficiencies, reactors employing plasmas not in thermodynamic equilibrium will not be able to produce net power.
As far as I understand, this is exactly what Bussard's Polywell IEC design does: recirculate the electrons at exceedingly high efficiencies. If the fields are conformal to the coils, the electrons will basically never escape. If they leak out one point cusp, they come right back in another. I think this is fairly obvious given the field configuration, and allows it to maintain a deep well with very high efficiency.
It would appear that the "virtually all cases" does not include this one. Perhaps there is some other issue with it, but who knows. It looks like a brilliant design, and at the very least warrants further investigation--far more than any tokamak design, that is for certain. While the tokamak design may almost certainly be made to work, it is highly questionable that it will ever be economical. The physics dictates that that it needs to be an enormous device, there is no way around that.
Any attempts at creating a new standard layout ought to aim for maximum efficiency, not some half-qwerty inspired layout. It should take into account, not only the number of key presses, but the distance between various keys. This may be complicated by balancing one and two handed operation.
One thing is certain though; after you feed your parameters through a genetic algorithm of some sort, you are unlikely to end up with anything resembling a qwerty layout. With a 9x9 keypad, perhaps the possible improvement is small, I don't know. In any case though, the resemblance indicates that they did not design for maximum efficiency, and that is annoying.
Actually, there would be little wear from the uberblocks; there are 128 of them written in sequence every 5 seconds or so. As such, it would take nearly three years of constant use for them to reach their wear limit. Even with no wear leveling, ZFS would be an excellent filesystem for flash.
Furthermore, when blocks inevitably do go bad, ZFS can detect and correct the faulty blocks. At present, this only applies to metadata, though it will be possible to replicate data as well in the future. ZFS uses replicated metadata for pool and filesystem structures, making it nearly impossible to damage an entire filesystem or pool. Even if data blocks are damaged, in addition to maintaining access to all other good data, you will know exactly what has been lost.
While I'm not 100% certain, I don't think most flash uses ECC. Once blocks start going bad, other filesystems will simply fall apart.
The PWRficient family of PPC processors is actually very interesting from a HPC standpoint; it may even be of some use to SGI. These chips are fast, extremely low power, and have a ton of integrated I/O and memory bandwidth. They are the perfect chip for an extremely high density Blue Gene style system. (Among many other things.)
In any case, the demise of the Alpha was truly a shame. As for SGI, I believe that their fate was sealed when they changed their name and logo. To discard such a logo is unforgivable; if they were to restore it though, perhaps they may rise again...
Who needs an unlimited supply of coolant? What is necessary is a modern reactor design like the IFR; if the cooling fails, the reaction stops. Much better than dropping runaway reactors into the sea.
What is with ideas like this, when far superior designs have been around for years?
The absurdity of this patent is mind boggling. All a network does is move data. Voice and video may be encoded as data, but this has absolutely nothing to do with the network.
Why don't I just patent moving web pages over networks. Or, moving mp3s over networks. (Now there's an idea for the RIAA...) Just how obvious does something need to be for the folks at the patent office? Moving DATA over a NETWORK? How novel...
This just goes to show that everything should be encrypted. Only then can fairness, and the end-end nature of the Internet be restored. As soon as the ISP's can peek at your data, you may as well bend over.
Waste is not an issue, especially with designs like the Integral Fast Reactor. It not only produces much less waste, but that waste is itself much safer. Beyond that, the design is highly efficient, and passively safe. Like the PBR, a meltdown is not possible.
The pebble bed reactor design is actually rather old though, and only solves the safety issue; it is not a sustainable source of energy. The IFR is the obvious solution for our long term energy needs. It is also the best way to curb emissions and pollution, through eliminating coal plants and enabling electric vehicles.
Re:QoS not needed or wanted on the Internet
on
IPv6 Essentials
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· Score: 1
If you have not saturated a connection, then there is no queueing. At that point, the latency is primarily a function of the packet length and the speed of the connection.
Ideally, the purpose of QoS is as you suggest, though it only works on a private network. (In its proper place, it is useful, but that is not on the Internet.) The prioritization that is being done in the name of "QoS" though is a completely different thing. It is merely a method to axe undesirable traffic so that ISPs may continue to oversell their service without increasing capacity.
Re:QoS not needed or wanted on the Internet
on
IPv6 Essentials
·
· Score: 1
QoS does not work on the Internet as you suggest; that would require all network operators to agree on priorities and reserve an enormous amount of bandwidth. At the backbone, the only feasible solution is to provide enough capacity (with no guarantees), and that is how it is done. There is not enough space for queueing, so packets are simply dropped. This is not as bad as it seems though: time sensitive packets account for only a small amount of the traffic, so the probability of them being dropped is actually very small.
Where QoS and queueing often come into play is at the edges, where the links are often shared and saturated. Of course, the resulting queues introduce a huge amount of latency, and this is where prioritization is being done. Still, this is an unfair solution to a problem which does not need to exist. Without overselling the lines, your neighbor could saturate their allotted bandwidth with torrent traffic and it wouldn't have any effect on the latency of your VOIP packets. It is perfectly fair, and produces better results than resorting to discrimination.
In a world where ISPs don't sell non-existant bandwidth, that leaves one case: where you saturate your own connection. In this case, you may want to prioritize traffic, but this is between you and your ISP alone. It should be at the discretion of the customer, and not affect anyone else on the Internet.
That is how to implement QoS so that all end users are happy. All it requires is a bit of fairness, which hopefully any network neutrality legislation will protect. Using "QoS" to prioritize one's traffic over another's, by definition, is going to make someone unhappy.
QoS not needed or wanted on the Internet
on
IPv6 Essentials
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
The summary cites QoS as a motivating feature to adopt IPv6, and this is not a good thing. The very nature of the Internet (as an end to end best effort network) makes it impossible to guarantee any sort of service. As such, the only usage of prioritization is unfairly biasing some network resources at the expense of others. This is a direct affront on network neutrality.
The only place packet prioritization and traffic shaping should take place is on private networks, where QoS can be guaranteed. Services such as VOIP and IPTV would ideally be offered over these ISP local networks at an additional cost. This is not to say that VOIP over the Internet impossible, but it should not have an unfair advantage over other Internet traffic.
The only place where things break down is in the last mile, where ISPs are selling bandwidth that does not exist. In this case, something has to give, and so they must implement unfair prioritization schemes. The obvious solution is to honestly advertise minimum guaranteed rates instead. This makes it possible to prioritize a customers own traffic as the customer wishes without affecting others. (For example, if you want VOIP prioritized to the ISP local VOIP network.)
Of course, such a scheme would still allow different speed grades, and excess capacity to be utilized. It can not be emphasized enough though that prioritization has no place on the Internet itself.
except during long trips, where you must recharge on the way. By focusing on this point, it completely misses the real advantages of that these capacitor based cars.
For day to day usage, you would simply plug the car in at home each night. Existing power distribution is perfectly capable of providing enough power for the typical daily commute.
One other huge advantage seems to have gone unnoticed in the last thread. With a capacitor, you can recover nearly all of the energy during deceleration. This makes city driving immensely more efficient than with current cars.
Given these two points, such cars offer the hope of vastly decreasing both energy consumption and pollution. Even without recharging stations, you could build a very nice hybrid by sticking one of these in the back: http://www.propulsiontech.com/apu.html
This is only part of the story. A gas engine has no means to recover energy lost while braking, so an enormous amount of it is simply wasted.
A capacitor is capable of recovering nearly all of this energy. As such, much less energy will be used than with a gas or battery (only) powered vehicle. City driving, and the typical commute will require very little energy by comparison.
Moreover, the total energy required for such typical daily activities is small enough that you would be able to charge your vehicle at home during the night. The high charge rate which is causing so much concern, is really only necessary for very long trips.
Nothing about net neutrality should limit traffic shaping based on data type. The name "data non-discrimination" makes it sound like it forces ISPs to treat HTML traffic the same way as VOIP traffic, or bittorrent traffic. That is bad ISP policy and bad network design.
No, net neutrality should completely prohibit classifying traffic on the Internet. Shaping traffic will always unfairly advantages someone at the expense of another. Who are you (or they) to say that VOIP is more important than HTML or torrent traffic? The only solution, is to provide enough capacity, so that everything works.
What you are after with shaping, QoS, simply is not possible on the Internet. The only solution is to build private networks, and run time/rate-sensitive data over them instead. Much like some ISPs have private networks for VOIP traffic, such networks will needed for IPTV and such as well.
There is only one remaining problem, and that is that ISPs are selling bandwidth that does not exist--so, something has to give. QoS is not the solution; ISPs should sell connections by minimum guaranteed rate instead. Only then is it even possible to guarantee anything over the last mile. Note, this does not prevent offering different speeds of service, or allowing customers to make use of excess capacity.
If the proposed network neutrality legislation allows for loopholes like you suggest, it will be completely useless. The efficacy of this law, will be inversely proportional to its complexity. Anything more than "all bits are equal on the Internet" will be abused somehow or other.
Same advantage as before, 66% more bits per layer.
Also, TDK have prototypes of six layer 200GB Blu-ray discs; in the future, single layer BD should reach 33GB. Seeing as though dual layer media is still prohibitively expensive, I would much prefer the 33GB or even 25GB discs.
I suspect a lot of people could give a damn about HD formats, and simply want a decent size optical disc. (Personally, I am hoping they both fail miserably, and patiently awaiting the Holographic Versatile Disc.)
Picture quality is a function of two things: codec and bitrate.
H.264 is typically better than VC-1, and Blu-ray can fit ~66% more bits per layer. By any reasonable comparison, Blu-ray will come out on top.
However, if the studios don't take advantage of the medium, and ship the same bits on both discs, the result is obvious. Since they both come with DRM though, that means I will get no picture at all, so it hardly matters.
No doubt, you would have to drop it from past LEO, but there is no need to go all the way out to GEO. It would be a tradeoff between ribbon time, and how much fuel to carry. Even so, the fraction of fuel is very small compared to launching from the ground.
With more and larger ribbons though, the economics will no doubt shift this to the point of irrelevance. Larger ribbons will usually be operated in a single direction with many smaller climbers. With so much overlap, it is not really an issue.
For those who haven't, I would suggest reading "The Space Elevator" by Edwards and Westling. It does a good job addressing the real issues. It should probably be required reading, as the same concerns pop up again and again.
Sure there are obstacles to be overcome, but rarely are they the ones that people are concerned about. Once the ribbon material is developed, the remainder of the project is on about the same scale as any other large civil engineering project.
Outside of transporters, anti-gravity, or magic, this is simply not true. Space Elevators are by far the best (and only) option, and will remain so in the future.
There are two exclusive advantages of the Space Elevator, and nothing else can hope to achieve even a small fraction of its efficiency.
1. With the elevator, you take angular momentum directly from the Earth. Only the potential energy needs to be supplied, which is negligible in comparison.
2. You don't have to take any fuel with you.
Without something to climb, there is simply no way to avoid the violent acceleration necessary, and nearly all of the energy will be spent on moving fuel. This is the primary reason why rocketry has made so little progress in 40 years. It may improve, but chemical rocketry will never be a viable option for any serious manned space activity. Nuclear rockets would make it possible, but progress would be very slow, and at great expense.
The fact of the matter is that, if Space Elevators can't be made to work, we are going to be stuck on Earth for a very long time. Outside of a narrow scope of research, the current manned space program is a complete dead end.
What could we do instead? How about putting an elevator on the moon: this is something we could conceivably do today, with the materials at hand. While a conventional elevator is not possible, the Moon is in a tidally locked orbit, opening up another possibility: a ribbon from the Moon, out past the L1 point. There are probably issues with this, but it would no doubt be more valuable than the antics proposed by our brilliant administration.
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Parent is spot on with regard to judging Blu-ray based on its technical merits. At least it has *one* merit, and that is capacity; HD-DVD has none. As has been evidenced by the cost of dual-layered (writable) DVDs, per-layer capacity should not be dismissed.
HD-DVD is just as crippled by DRM, and for video, I sincerely hope that they both fail. I will be patiently waiting for the HVD. In the mean time, HD-DVD is far too small of an improvement for the cost (in terms of storage) to even bother.
Look at the red arrows on that diagram; these changes in delta-v can be accomplished with aerobraking, and are effectively free. The return trip is not as nice, but stopping at the moon still makes no sense.
.7 + .6 km/s. (Actually, that is not the quickest way to the moon, but the comparison still stands.)
It should be 9.3 + 4.1 + 1.6 km/s, vs 9.3 + 2.5 +
In any case, talking about using the moon "as a jumping-off point to Mars," is a clear attempt at deception.
Yes, it is absolutely stupid to stop at the moon on the way to mars. Until we have a completely self-sustained presence on the moon, with full manufacturing capabilities, it makes no sense.
In fact, it takes *more* energy to get to the moon than to mars. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delta-v#Delta-v.27s_
I could agree with everything in your post if you replaced C++ with C.
C++ however, is sharp not like a scalpel, but rather a twisted piece of shrapnel. Even when used properly, it is hideous and inflexible. A more dynamic language like Objective C allows for *much* cleaner, more expressive, and far more readable code.
is the last person I want to hear comments from about programming languages.
From the article: "Technology Review: Why is most software so bad?"
Come on Bjarne, be honest. It is at least in part, because most software is written in that awful language you foisted on the world. I think the state of programming today would be vastly more advanced if C++ had given way to Objective C.
They are marketing these nails as superior fasteners that will withstand a high wind environment. However, they are only fasteners, and the rest of the structure is still just as vulnerable to threats such as fire, water, termites, and so forth. For a truly robust, energy efficient, and long-lasting structure, the obvious solution is concrete.
Insulating Concrete Forms are basically like Legos made out of an insulating foam. You stack them together, insert rebar, and fill with concrete. The cost is estimated at 5% more than standard wood frame houses, and are superior in every way.
As the earth warms, storms will continue to become stronger and stronger. "An Inconvenient Truth" goes into more detail, and if you haven't seen it, you really should. In any case, it is about time that we started building more durable structures.
Well, the obvious thing to do, is to line the reactor with things that we want to have more neutrons, and which provide excellent shielding. Uranium, for example. As you say we have a hell of a lot of Uranium, and we may as well make the best of it.
In any case, we should start building Integral Fast Reactors now, and a lot of them. We no longer have the luxury of another 50 years of fusion research. The IFR is basically a proven design, and addresses all negative aspects of current nuclear reactors. If you are not familiar with it, please look at it; it seems too good to be true, but isn't. Not only is it incapable of melting down, it can be used to burn (dispose of) most of our current nuclear "waste" and weapons. It is by far the most environmentally responsible option.
The reactor was being actively researched when the Clinton administration killed it. By proven, I mean that they have tested failure conditions, such as stopping the coolant flow. Where other reactors would melt down, this one quietly comes to a stop. The only "disadvantage" is that it uses sodium as a coolant, though this is barely an issue. Sodium is used in industry every day, and simply needs to be handled appropriately.
That said, with Bussard's recent research, and given minimal funding, it is entirely possible that we could have production IEC fusion reactors in ten years. While this would be ideal, the IFR still has a place, and we may as well build a few.
While Farnsworth's device is rather impractical, the overall idea is very solid. The thing I find appealing is that this device relies on a central force varying as 1/r^2--electromagnetism--in the same way as gravity works in a star. There is no plasma instability to worry about, and the scaling laws are extremely favorable. Obviously, we can't make use of gravity, but Bussard has found a way to efficiently create a deep electrostatic potential well through magnetic confinement. This much is certain from the field configuration, which is as much a work of art as it science.
Wether this well can be maintained efficiently in the presence of a plasma, is another question. Obviously, its presence will flatten the well, but it has another curious side effect--it compresses the field lines around the point cusps, which improves electron confinement even further. It really is a brilliant configuration. From Bussard's google talk, I am highly inclined to believe that this could become a workable high-gain machine.
A machine of this sort has so many advantages, that it would be ludicrous not to at least follow up on his work. To name a few, it is physically small, very simply, can burn aneutronic p-B11 as fuel, and is dirt cheap. I think it will be a long time before we can put a tokamak into space.
As for the results of current IEC research, they are hardly surprising. If the tokamak were funded at similar levels, I dare not think what it would have to show. I do not mean to disparage the science being done, but comparing these results is as unreasonable as ignoring all other alternative efforts.
As far as I understand, this is exactly what Bussard's Polywell IEC design does: recirculate the electrons at exceedingly high efficiencies. If the fields are conformal to the coils, the electrons will basically never escape. If they leak out one point cusp, they come right back in another. I think this is fairly obvious given the field configuration, and allows it to maintain a deep well with very high efficiency.
It would appear that the "virtually all cases" does not include this one. Perhaps there is some other issue with it, but who knows. It looks like a brilliant design, and at the very least warrants further investigation--far more than any tokamak design, that is for certain. While the tokamak design may almost certainly be made to work, it is highly questionable that it will ever be economical. The physics dictates that that it needs to be an enormous device, there is no way around that.
Any attempts at creating a new standard layout ought to aim for maximum efficiency, not some half-qwerty inspired layout. It should take into account, not only the number of key presses, but the distance between various keys. This may be complicated by balancing one and two handed operation.
One thing is certain though; after you feed your parameters through a genetic algorithm of some sort, you are unlikely to end up with anything resembling a qwerty layout. With a 9x9 keypad, perhaps the
possible improvement is small, I don't know. In any case though, the resemblance indicates that they did not design for maximum efficiency, and that is annoying.
Actually, there would be little wear from the uberblocks; there are 128 of them written in sequence every 5 seconds or so. As such, it would take nearly three years of constant use for them to reach their wear limit. Even with no wear leveling, ZFS would be an excellent filesystem for flash.
Furthermore, when blocks inevitably do go bad, ZFS can detect and correct the faulty blocks. At present, this only applies to metadata, though it will be possible to replicate data as well in the future. ZFS uses replicated metadata for pool and filesystem structures, making it nearly impossible to damage an entire filesystem or pool. Even if data blocks are damaged, in addition to maintaining access to all other good data, you will know exactly what has been lost.
While I'm not 100% certain, I don't think most flash uses ECC. Once blocks start going bad, other filesystems will simply fall apart.
Such as the lead chip designer for the Alpha, Dan Dobberpuhl. A few others are also listed at http://www.pasemi.com/about/team.html
The PWRficient family of PPC processors is actually very interesting from a HPC standpoint; it may even be of some use to SGI. These chips are fast, extremely low power, and have a ton of integrated I/O and memory bandwidth. They are the perfect chip for an extremely high density Blue Gene style system. (Among many other things.)
In any case, the demise of the Alpha was truly a shame. As for SGI, I believe that their fate was sealed when they changed their name and logo. To discard such a logo is unforgivable; if they were to restore it though, perhaps they may rise again...
What is with ideas like this, when far superior designs have been around for years?
The absurdity of this patent is mind boggling. All a network does is move data. Voice and video may be encoded as data, but this has absolutely nothing to do with the network.
Why don't I just patent moving web pages over networks. Or, moving mp3s over networks. (Now there's an idea for the RIAA...) Just how obvious does something need to be for the folks at the patent office? Moving DATA over a NETWORK? How novel...
This just goes to show that everything should be encrypted. Only then can fairness, and the end-end nature of the Internet be restored. As soon as the ISP's can peek at your data, you may as well bend over.
Waste is not an issue, especially with designs like the Integral Fast Reactor. It not only produces much less waste, but that waste is itself much safer. Beyond that, the design is highly efficient, and passively safe. Like the PBR, a meltdown is not possible.
The pebble bed reactor design is actually rather old though, and only solves the safety issue; it is not a sustainable source of energy. The IFR is the obvious solution for our long term energy needs. It is also the best way to curb emissions and pollution, through eliminating coal plants and enabling electric vehicles.
If you have not saturated a connection, then there is no queueing. At that point, the latency is primarily a function of the packet length and the speed of the connection.
Ideally, the purpose of QoS is as you suggest, though it only works on a private network. (In its proper place, it is useful, but that is not on the Internet.) The prioritization that is being done in the name of "QoS" though is a completely different thing. It is merely a method to axe undesirable traffic so that ISPs may continue to oversell their service without increasing capacity.
QoS does not work on the Internet as you suggest; that would require all network operators to agree on priorities and reserve an enormous amount of bandwidth. At the backbone, the only feasible solution is to provide enough capacity (with no guarantees), and that is how it is done. There is not enough space for queueing, so packets are simply dropped. This is not as bad as it seems though: time sensitive packets account for only a small amount of the traffic, so the probability of them being dropped is actually very small.
Where QoS and queueing often come into play is at the edges, where the links are often shared and saturated. Of course, the resulting queues introduce a huge amount of latency, and this is where prioritization is being done. Still, this is an unfair solution to a problem which does not need to exist. Without overselling the lines, your neighbor could saturate their allotted bandwidth with torrent traffic and it wouldn't have any effect on the latency of your VOIP packets. It is perfectly fair, and produces better results than resorting to discrimination.
In a world where ISPs don't sell non-existant bandwidth, that leaves one case: where you saturate your own connection. In this case, you may want to prioritize traffic, but this is between you and your ISP alone. It should be at the discretion of the customer, and not affect anyone else on the Internet.
That is how to implement QoS so that all end users are happy. All it requires is a bit of fairness, which hopefully any network neutrality legislation will protect. Using "QoS" to prioritize one's traffic over another's, by definition, is going to make someone unhappy.
The summary cites QoS as a motivating feature to adopt IPv6, and this is not a good thing. The very nature of the Internet (as an end to end best effort network) makes it impossible to guarantee any sort of service. As such, the only usage of prioritization is unfairly biasing some network resources at the expense of others. This is a direct affront on network neutrality.
The only place packet prioritization and traffic shaping should take place is on private networks, where QoS can be guaranteed. Services such as VOIP and IPTV would ideally be offered over these ISP local networks at an additional cost. This is not to say that VOIP over the Internet impossible, but it should not have an unfair advantage over other Internet traffic.
The only place where things break down is in the last mile, where ISPs are selling bandwidth that does not exist. In this case, something has to give, and so they must implement unfair prioritization schemes. The obvious solution is to honestly advertise minimum guaranteed rates instead. This makes it possible to prioritize a customers own traffic as the customer wishes without affecting others. (For example, if you want VOIP prioritized to the ISP local VOIP network.)
Of course, such a scheme would still allow different speed grades, and excess capacity to be utilized. It can not be emphasized enough though that prioritization has no place on the Internet itself.
except during long trips, where you must recharge on the way. By focusing on this point, it completely misses the real advantages of that these capacitor based cars.
For day to day usage, you would simply plug the car in at home each night. Existing power distribution is perfectly capable of providing enough power for the typical daily commute.
One other huge advantage seems to have gone unnoticed in the last thread. With a capacitor, you can recover nearly all of the energy during deceleration. This makes city driving immensely more efficient than with current cars.
Given these two points, such cars offer the hope of vastly decreasing both energy consumption and pollution. Even without recharging stations, you could build a very nice hybrid by sticking one of these in the back: http://www.propulsiontech.com/apu.html
This is only part of the story. A gas engine has no means to recover energy lost while braking, so an enormous amount of it is simply wasted.
A capacitor is capable of recovering nearly all of this energy. As such, much less energy will be used than with a gas or battery (only) powered vehicle. City driving, and the typical commute will require very little energy by comparison.
Moreover, the total energy required for such typical daily activities is small enough that you would be able to charge your vehicle at home during the night. The high charge rate which is causing so much concern, is really only necessary for very long trips.
Nothing about net neutrality should limit traffic shaping based on data type. The name "data non-discrimination" makes it sound like it forces ISPs to treat HTML traffic the same way as VOIP traffic, or bittorrent traffic. That is bad ISP policy and bad network design.
No, net neutrality should completely prohibit classifying traffic on the Internet. Shaping traffic will always unfairly advantages someone at the expense of another. Who are you (or they) to say that VOIP is more important than HTML or torrent traffic? The only solution, is to provide enough capacity, so that everything works.
What you are after with shaping, QoS, simply is not possible on the Internet. The only solution is to build private networks, and run time/rate-sensitive data over them instead. Much like some ISPs have private networks for VOIP traffic, such networks will needed for IPTV and such as well.
There is only one remaining problem, and that is that ISPs are selling bandwidth that does not exist--so, something has to give. QoS is not the solution; ISPs should sell connections by minimum guaranteed rate instead. Only then is it even possible to guarantee anything over the last mile. Note, this does not prevent offering different speeds of service, or allowing customers to make use of excess capacity.
If the proposed network neutrality legislation allows for loopholes like you suggest, it will be completely useless. The efficacy of this law, will be inversely proportional to its complexity. Anything more than "all bits are equal on the Internet" will be abused somehow or other.
Same advantage as before, 66% more bits per layer.
Also, TDK have prototypes of six layer 200GB Blu-ray discs; in the future, single layer BD should reach 33GB. Seeing as though dual layer media is still prohibitively expensive, I would much prefer the 33GB or even 25GB discs.
I suspect a lot of people could give a damn about HD formats, and simply want a decent size optical disc. (Personally, I am hoping they both fail miserably, and patiently awaiting the Holographic Versatile Disc.)
Picture quality is a function of two things: codec and bitrate.
H.264 is typically better than VC-1, and Blu-ray can fit ~66% more bits per layer. By any reasonable comparison, Blu-ray will come out on top.
However, if the studios don't take advantage of the medium, and ship the same bits on both discs, the result is obvious. Since they both come with DRM though, that means I will get no picture at all, so it hardly matters.
No doubt, you would have to drop it from past LEO, but there is no need to go all the way out to GEO. It would be a tradeoff between ribbon time, and how much fuel to carry. Even so, the fraction of fuel is very small compared to launching from the ground.
With more and larger ribbons though, the economics will no doubt shift this to the point of irrelevance. Larger ribbons will usually be operated in a single direction with many smaller climbers. With so much overlap, it is not really an issue.
For those who haven't, I would suggest reading "The Space Elevator" by Edwards and Westling. It does a good job addressing the real issues. It should probably be required reading, as the same concerns pop up again and again.
Sure there are obstacles to be overcome, but rarely are they the ones that people are concerned about. Once the ribbon material is developed, the remainder of the project is on about the same scale as any other large civil engineering project.
Outside of transporters, anti-gravity, or magic, this is simply not true. Space Elevators are by far the best (and only) option, and will remain so in the future.
There are two exclusive advantages of the Space Elevator, and nothing else can hope to achieve even a small fraction of its efficiency.
1. With the elevator, you take angular momentum directly from the Earth. Only the potential energy needs to be supplied, which is negligible in comparison.
2. You don't have to take any fuel with you.
Without something to climb, there is simply no way to avoid the violent acceleration necessary, and nearly all of the energy will be spent on moving fuel. This is the primary reason why rocketry has made so little progress in 40 years. It may improve, but chemical rocketry will never be a viable option for any serious manned space activity. Nuclear rockets would make it possible, but progress would be very slow, and at great expense.
The fact of the matter is that, if Space Elevators can't be made to work, we are going to be stuck on Earth for a very long time. Outside of a narrow scope of research, the current manned space program is a complete dead end.
What could we do instead? How about putting an elevator on the moon: this is something we could conceivably do today, with the materials at hand. While a conventional elevator is not possible, the Moon is in a tidally locked orbit, opening up another possibility: a ribbon from the Moon, out past the L1 point. There are probably issues with this, but it would no doubt be more valuable than the antics proposed by our brilliant administration.