No, more like "I'm not an actual scientist, and possibly not even a good journalist, so rather than explain what these scientists are really working on, I'll just say 'beams of electricity' to sound all good and technical. My editor won't know the difference any better than me."
TV Broadcasters in the U.S. freed up huge swaths of bandwidth in the 700 MHz range during the switchover to digital TV. This frequency range has a lot of very useful attributes, like being able to penetrate buildings and travel large distances - attributes that are ideal for wireless data transmission. Portions of that bandwidth was subsequently auctioned off for about $20 billion, austensibly to permit the development of new wireless services. The auction concluded a few years ago, and yet I haven't heard anything about anyone developing new wireless infrastructure around it. As far as I know, there isn't even a baseband chipset for it yet. What gives?
If it is every factually determined what little chunk of silicone...brought airplane down it will be studied in depth and hopefully they designers will learn something.
Yes, I hope they will learn that humungous, unrealistic breast implants can be distracting.
You spent all this time researching tablets, and didn't know that the iPad (and iPhone, and iTouch) lacked a user-accessible filesystem?
If you've got all that stuff as PDFs, you could sync those into the native ebook reader, iBooks.
It is not entirely true that you can't share files across apps: your contacts, photos, videos, music, ebooks (including PDFs) are accessible by any app that bothers to use them.
Lastly: you can add a filesystem whenever you want, jailbreaking the iPad is trivial.
Also, you have to take into account the energy required to produce and maintain the panels in the first place.
Can we please lay this tired strawman argument to rest? A solar panel will produce many times more power over its lifetime than it took to produce. Spend a few minutes on Google and see the different numbers from dozens of different sources: they all indicate that, yes, solar panels produce more than they require to produce.
If that isn't enough, consider this very basic argument: if it really took so much energy to produce a solar panel, then you would never be able to recoup the investment, because the price of the energy it offsets would never add up to the original price of the installation. Since the financial payback period of a house-sized PV installation is 5-10 years, you can well believe that the energy payback period is something less than that (a handful of years). Given that a PV installation that goes up today will last 20+ years, you should be satisfied that it'll pay for itself in both ways.
Solar thermal (for electricity generation, not just heating stuff) is really only effective at large scales: tens of megawatts to start with. You aren't going to put that on your roof; even the manicured suburban grasscapes aren't big enough. A several-kilowatt solar thermal installation, sized for a typical home, would be a terribly inefficient beast requiring constant maintenance and tuning. On the other hand, you can pretty much fit all you'll need for your own home on your own roof with photovoltaics. In other words, photovoltaics are much more flexible at small- and medium-sized installations.
It needn't be an either-or situation: I think that lifetime cost-per-energy for both technologies will become grid-competitive, so we should utilize both to the extent possible.
If the laser is 1 MW, as the site claims, and the pulse length is 100 ns, then the pulse energy is about 0.1 J. That's not actually very much, even in a nice focused package. If it's 1 kW, as other commenters claim, then it's 1/1000th that.
For comparison, consider the energy in a typical.22 rifle shell: 180-250 J, or about three orders of magnitude.
So while it'll definitely blind you with a shot to the eye, and would probably leave a nasty burn on your skin everywhere else, a blast from this laser pistol probably won't penetrate your body, and certainly won't kill you.
An interesting test, which I'm bummed that the builder didn't try, was to fire it at a hamburger, steak, or even a chicken bone. I don't think it would do much (see above), but it'd still be interesting to see what it does.
If memory serves, the person who actually invented it may still file for a patent for up to one year after the first public disclosure. Generally, businesses will still try to file a patent before the first public disclosure, but that is largely a strategic decision, not a legal one.
these scans could potentially quickly identify lung cancer early on
Start throwing around the word "potentially" and you can claim just about anything. If we had limitless quantities of helium-3, we could potentially have an inexhaustible supply of fusion power.
Helium-3-contrasted MRI scans of the lungs aren't exactly mainstream, and using it as a screening tool for lung cancer hasn't been demonstrated. Even if helium-3 were as abundant and cheap as air, using MRI scans of entire populations as a screening tool for cancer is simply not effective from a public health perspective, even in the developed world. For the cost of screening even a small segment of the population, we could provide smoking cessation tools to every smoker on the planet and have a much greater reduction in the incidence of lung cancer.
Another key thing that was in AC's favor was that every piece of electrical generating equipment of the day produced AC, and rectifiers of the time were not very good.
The shortage of helium-3 is most effectively combated by making more of it here on Earth via the production of tritium. Sure, it takes many years for the decay process to work, but it's a whole hell of a lot cheaper and quicker than building a fucking colony on the Moon.
And despite what you say, there is nothing our modern society depends on that requires helium-3. Helium in general, yes, but not this particular isotope. If, for instance, we could no longer perform lung scans via MRI, it is of no consequence to society as a whole.
Altitude is not the only concern: you need velocity, too. That, actually, is the biggest impediment to getting into orbit. Altitude allows you to get above most of the atmosphere and develop and maintain that great speed without melting. Although it looks like they go straight up, all orbital craft (rockets, the Shuttle, etc.) do a roll maneuver early in flight so that they "fly" nearly horizontal and start developing significant horizontal velocity. It is the horizontal velocity that allows them to get into orbit: tens of thousands of kilometers per second in LEO. If the space shuttle just blasted off and went straight up, it would get to an altitude of many hundreds of miles...then fall straight back down.
Only nine people in this country know what the Constitution really means.
No, only nine people are presently empowered to have the final say on what the Constitution really means. That's not even remotely the same thing. Over the generations those nine people change, and the collective interpretation of the Constitution changes with it. Even within the Supreme Court, there are plenty of disagreements about what it "really means" - hence the large number of 5:4 decisions.
I am very wary of a blanket statement such as yours - it smacks of idolatry. You speak of it as though the Constitution had only one possible correct interpretation: one True Way. Human endeavors don't work that way.
The Constitution is not some mathematical proof that contains a unique truth so complicated and abstruse that only nine people could possibly decipher it. Lots of people know plenty about the Constitution and what it means. Citizens can read the document and investigate precedent; lawyers are trained to do that; some judges and scholars make a career of it. To a certain extent, every judge in every jurisdiction can profess to know the Constitution. Occasionally, lower court judges' interpretation of constitutionality is overturned by higher courts, and that can eventually make its way up to those nine people in the Supreme Court. It is not like every matter relating to the U.S. Constitution ends up in front of the supremes. The fact that only a tiny fraction of cases end up being heard by them is a testament that, in fact, more than nine people know what the Constitution really means.
Even a "known" distance like Sol to Alpha Centari A has a margin of error - 4.365 ± 0.007 ly
And that's one of the beautiful and valuable things about science - that it is able to quantify and bound the error in its measurements / predictions / certainty. Small minded pundits, especially when they want to attack a conclusion produced by science, go on and on about how science can never be certain about anything: it's all just a theory. As though a theory has no value because it has some uncertainty in it! Or because every detail of every intermediate step isn't perfectly quantified. Just because I can't say that Alpha Centauri is exactly 4.365 ly away isn't the same as saying I don't know how far away it is: I can say, with certainty, that it is more than 4.358 ly away and less than 4.372 ly. Even if it is not exact, it's still pretty damn useful and insightful.
It takes all of five seconds: Apple's P/E ratio has been 18-20 for a while now. This morning it's 19.57. It's stock price has risen a lot in the last few years, but it has also been making and selling products like mad, and making huge amounts of profit (not just revenue) in the process.
If we're talking about P/E, let's make some comparisons:
So, in short, there's a wide range of P/E ratios among viable (and profitable) companies. Apple's P/E puts it a bit on the high end, but not wildly so. It is relatively cheap compared to, say, the P/E of the entire S&P 500. P/E is just one contributor that guides whether to buy or sell a stock.
Where you might be able to make an argument is that most of the established companies, particularly those with P/Es at or below AAPL's, pay out dividends, and that's one main way investors make money off them. The yield is typically 1-2% per year, so you'd still be waiting decades to earn back an investment through dividends alone.
Apple doesn't pay a dividend, and never has, so the only way to make money on it is to buy low and sell high. If you'd snagged it years ago, before the introduction of the iPhone, for instance, then sold today, you'll have made a boatload, several times what you put in. And that isn't a Ponzi scheme: you owned a share of a profitable company, and that company grew because it generated new business and made money doing so. The potential for making that money by riding a company's growth is a contributor to P/E. Apple has a good track record of breaking into new business and expanding, so its P/E is a bit higher. Ford is unlikely to capture a brand new and rapidly growing market sector, so its P/E is lower.
If only I had mod points today - I'd mark you up sky high. It's one of the things that always irks me about most science reporting in the popular media: the inability to tell apart key concepts like "power", "energy", and "voltage." Fox News isn't alone in this realm of ignorance - they just happen to have it elevated to high art. No wonder most adherents to Fox News don't understand our upcoming resource and climate crisis: they've been fed incoherent babble like this.
The prize itself has never been billed as a way to make money. This is nothing new. The prize is there to spur innovation, and is very effective at that: probably 10x-100x the purse amount is spent by the competitors. None of the X-Prizes have paid out anywhere close to the costs the winner has put into it, and obviously nothing to the losers. The same was true with the DARPA Grand Challenge. The same was true with Orteig Prize won by Charles Lindbergh. There are plenty of reasons one would want to participate anyway, even if you lose money in the process.
By 2015, oil executives and analysts say, the new fields could yield as much as 2 million barrels of oil a day
Wow, a whole 2 million barrels per day! Compare that to the 20+ million barrels the US goes through each day, and the worldwide demand of over 80 (90 by the 2015 date). I'm sure that this remarkably destructive and inconsequential band-aid will allow us all to sleep well at night knowing our cars will start in the morning.
Offshore wind has a number of advantages over rural farmland. The wind is stronger and more consistent, which permits higher utilization and more regular power. The towers can also be taller, where the stronger and more consistent winds are. The turbines can be larger, which tend to have better conversion efficiency and, again, more consistency. Offshore puts the power production much closer to where it is consumed: a couple of miles offshore from the eastern seaboard is better than nearly over 1000 miles from Dakota to New York. All in all, you make much better use of your capital dollars by producing more power for longer periods of time. The main downside is that to service the equipment you need a boat, rather than just a utility truck. The other downside is that the wet, salty environment is traditionally awful for mechanical systems, but that can be alleviated with good design and proper maintenance.
If you RTFA, it doesn't claim anywhere that "Free Staters" are behind this initiative. Nor does it even mention the Free State Project.
Even within New Hampshire, you hardly ever hear about the Free State project. They were completely inconsequential in the recent election, even though the statehouse ended up packed with small-government Republicans. About the only thing anyone's heard from them lately were some ornery demonstrations to legalize marijuana.
Slashdot Mirror
No, more like "I'm not an actual scientist, and possibly not even a good journalist, so rather than explain what these scientists are really working on, I'll just say 'beams of electricity' to sound all good and technical. My editor won't know the difference any better than me."
Those pictures are obvious fakes: everyone knows Peter Jackson only ever wears shorts!
TV Broadcasters in the U.S. freed up huge swaths of bandwidth in the 700 MHz range during the switchover to digital TV. This frequency range has a lot of very useful attributes, like being able to penetrate buildings and travel large distances - attributes that are ideal for wireless data transmission. Portions of that bandwidth was subsequently auctioned off for about $20 billion, austensibly to permit the development of new wireless services. The auction concluded a few years ago, and yet I haven't heard anything about anyone developing new wireless infrastructure around it. As far as I know, there isn't even a baseband chipset for it yet. What gives?
Yes, I hope they will learn that humungous, unrealistic breast implants can be distracting.
Or did you mean silicon?
Unlike those poor bastards riding in the car I'm driving at the time.
You spent all this time researching tablets, and didn't know that the iPad (and iPhone, and iTouch) lacked a user-accessible filesystem?
If you've got all that stuff as PDFs, you could sync those into the native ebook reader, iBooks.
It is not entirely true that you can't share files across apps: your contacts, photos, videos, music, ebooks (including PDFs) are accessible by any app that bothers to use them.
Lastly: you can add a filesystem whenever you want, jailbreaking the iPad is trivial.
Can we please lay this tired strawman argument to rest? A solar panel will produce many times more power over its lifetime than it took to produce. Spend a few minutes on Google and see the different numbers from dozens of different sources: they all indicate that, yes, solar panels produce more than they require to produce.
If that isn't enough, consider this very basic argument: if it really took so much energy to produce a solar panel, then you would never be able to recoup the investment, because the price of the energy it offsets would never add up to the original price of the installation. Since the financial payback period of a house-sized PV installation is 5-10 years, you can well believe that the energy payback period is something less than that (a handful of years). Given that a PV installation that goes up today will last 20+ years, you should be satisfied that it'll pay for itself in both ways.
Solar thermal (for electricity generation, not just heating stuff) is really only effective at large scales: tens of megawatts to start with. You aren't going to put that on your roof; even the manicured suburban grasscapes aren't big enough. A several-kilowatt solar thermal installation, sized for a typical home, would be a terribly inefficient beast requiring constant maintenance and tuning. On the other hand, you can pretty much fit all you'll need for your own home on your own roof with photovoltaics. In other words, photovoltaics are much more flexible at small- and medium-sized installations.
It needn't be an either-or situation: I think that lifetime cost-per-energy for both technologies will become grid-competitive, so we should utilize both to the extent possible.
Ha, I get my light from burning $100 bills!
If the laser is 1 MW, as the site claims, and the pulse length is 100 ns, then the pulse energy is about 0.1 J. That's not actually very much, even in a nice focused package. If it's 1 kW, as other commenters claim, then it's 1/1000th that. For comparison, consider the energy in a typical .22 rifle shell: 180-250 J, or about three orders of magnitude.
So while it'll definitely blind you with a shot to the eye, and would probably leave a nasty burn on your skin everywhere else, a blast from this laser pistol probably won't penetrate your body, and certainly won't kill you.
An interesting test, which I'm bummed that the builder didn't try, was to fire it at a hamburger, steak, or even a chicken bone. I don't think it would do much (see above), but it'd still be interesting to see what it does.
If memory serves, the person who actually invented it may still file for a patent for up to one year after the first public disclosure. Generally, businesses will still try to file a patent before the first public disclosure, but that is largely a strategic decision, not a legal one.
Start throwing around the word "potentially" and you can claim just about anything. If we had limitless quantities of helium-3, we could potentially have an inexhaustible supply of fusion power.
Helium-3-contrasted MRI scans of the lungs aren't exactly mainstream, and using it as a screening tool for lung cancer hasn't been demonstrated. Even if helium-3 were as abundant and cheap as air, using MRI scans of entire populations as a screening tool for cancer is simply not effective from a public health perspective, even in the developed world. For the cost of screening even a small segment of the population, we could provide smoking cessation tools to every smoker on the planet and have a much greater reduction in the incidence of lung cancer.
Another key thing that was in AC's favor was that every piece of electrical generating equipment of the day produced AC, and rectifiers of the time were not very good.
The shortage of helium-3 is most effectively combated by making more of it here on Earth via the production of tritium. Sure, it takes many years for the decay process to work, but it's a whole hell of a lot cheaper and quicker than building a fucking colony on the Moon.
And despite what you say, there is nothing our modern society depends on that requires helium-3. Helium in general, yes, but not this particular isotope. If, for instance, we could no longer perform lung scans via MRI, it is of no consequence to society as a whole.
Altitude is not the only concern: you need velocity, too. That, actually, is the biggest impediment to getting into orbit. Altitude allows you to get above most of the atmosphere and develop and maintain that great speed without melting. Although it looks like they go straight up, all orbital craft (rockets, the Shuttle, etc.) do a roll maneuver early in flight so that they "fly" nearly horizontal and start developing significant horizontal velocity. It is the horizontal velocity that allows them to get into orbit: tens of thousands of kilometers per second in LEO. If the space shuttle just blasted off and went straight up, it would get to an altitude of many hundreds of miles...then fall straight back down.
Bah! "Copied" is more like. And, in copying it, ran into the same problems that plagued the shuttle design.
No, only nine people are presently empowered to have the final say on what the Constitution really means. That's not even remotely the same thing. Over the generations those nine people change, and the collective interpretation of the Constitution changes with it. Even within the Supreme Court, there are plenty of disagreements about what it "really means" - hence the large number of 5:4 decisions.
I am very wary of a blanket statement such as yours - it smacks of idolatry. You speak of it as though the Constitution had only one possible correct interpretation: one True Way. Human endeavors don't work that way.
The Constitution is not some mathematical proof that contains a unique truth so complicated and abstruse that only nine people could possibly decipher it. Lots of people know plenty about the Constitution and what it means. Citizens can read the document and investigate precedent; lawyers are trained to do that; some judges and scholars make a career of it. To a certain extent, every judge in every jurisdiction can profess to know the Constitution. Occasionally, lower court judges' interpretation of constitutionality is overturned by higher courts, and that can eventually make its way up to those nine people in the Supreme Court. It is not like every matter relating to the U.S. Constitution ends up in front of the supremes. The fact that only a tiny fraction of cases end up being heard by them is a testament that, in fact, more than nine people know what the Constitution really means.
And that's one of the beautiful and valuable things about science - that it is able to quantify and bound the error in its measurements / predictions / certainty. Small minded pundits, especially when they want to attack a conclusion produced by science, go on and on about how science can never be certain about anything: it's all just a theory. As though a theory has no value because it has some uncertainty in it! Or because every detail of every intermediate step isn't perfectly quantified. Just because I can't say that Alpha Centauri is exactly 4.365 ly away isn't the same as saying I don't know how far away it is: I can say, with certainty, that it is more than 4.358 ly away and less than 4.372 ly. Even if it is not exact, it's still pretty damn useful and insightful.
It takes all of five seconds: Apple's P/E ratio has been 18-20 for a while now. This morning it's 19.57. It's stock price has risen a lot in the last few years, but it has also been making and selling products like mad, and making huge amounts of profit (not just revenue) in the process.
If we're talking about P/E, let's make some comparisons:
Ford 9.42
MS 11.47
Acer 13.18
IBM 14.24
Medtronic 14.25
Pfizer 18.74
Google 23.96
Verizon 40.67
Netflix 79.48
So, in short, there's a wide range of P/E ratios among viable (and profitable) companies. Apple's P/E puts it a bit on the high end, but not wildly so. It is relatively cheap compared to, say, the P/E of the entire S&P 500. P/E is just one contributor that guides whether to buy or sell a stock.
Where you might be able to make an argument is that most of the established companies, particularly those with P/Es at or below AAPL's, pay out dividends, and that's one main way investors make money off them. The yield is typically 1-2% per year, so you'd still be waiting decades to earn back an investment through dividends alone.
Apple doesn't pay a dividend, and never has, so the only way to make money on it is to buy low and sell high. If you'd snagged it years ago, before the introduction of the iPhone, for instance, then sold today, you'll have made a boatload, several times what you put in. And that isn't a Ponzi scheme: you owned a share of a profitable company, and that company grew because it generated new business and made money doing so. The potential for making that money by riding a company's growth is a contributor to P/E. Apple has a good track record of breaking into new business and expanding, so its P/E is a bit higher. Ford is unlikely to capture a brand new and rapidly growing market sector, so its P/E is lower.
The new connection tech is called Light Peak. The summary has it right; the title has it wrong.
If only I had mod points today - I'd mark you up sky high. It's one of the things that always irks me about most science reporting in the popular media: the inability to tell apart key concepts like "power", "energy", and "voltage." Fox News isn't alone in this realm of ignorance - they just happen to have it elevated to high art. No wonder most adherents to Fox News don't understand our upcoming resource and climate crisis: they've been fed incoherent babble like this.
The prize itself has never been billed as a way to make money. This is nothing new. The prize is there to spur innovation, and is very effective at that: probably 10x-100x the purse amount is spent by the competitors. None of the X-Prizes have paid out anywhere close to the costs the winner has put into it, and obviously nothing to the losers. The same was true with the DARPA Grand Challenge. The same was true with Orteig Prize won by Charles Lindbergh. There are plenty of reasons one would want to participate anyway, even if you lose money in the process.
Wow, a whole 2 million barrels per day! Compare that to the 20+ million barrels the US goes through each day, and the worldwide demand of over 80 (90 by the 2015 date). I'm sure that this remarkably destructive and inconsequential band-aid will allow us all to sleep well at night knowing our cars will start in the morning.
Offshore wind has a number of advantages over rural farmland. The wind is stronger and more consistent, which permits higher utilization and more regular power. The towers can also be taller, where the stronger and more consistent winds are. The turbines can be larger, which tend to have better conversion efficiency and, again, more consistency. Offshore puts the power production much closer to where it is consumed: a couple of miles offshore from the eastern seaboard is better than nearly over 1000 miles from Dakota to New York. All in all, you make much better use of your capital dollars by producing more power for longer periods of time. The main downside is that to service the equipment you need a boat, rather than just a utility truck. The other downside is that the wet, salty environment is traditionally awful for mechanical systems, but that can be alleviated with good design and proper maintenance.
Even within New Hampshire, you hardly ever hear about the Free State project. They were completely inconsequential in the recent election, even though the statehouse ended up packed with small-government Republicans. About the only thing anyone's heard from them lately were some ornery demonstrations to legalize marijuana.