That was my thought as well. Who's to say that the recorded 45 mph wasn't sampled immediately after the kid hit the brakes after realizing he'd just been lit up by a cop cruiser. What was the kid's speed the previous five minutes? Unless the company can demonstrate that their device reports the maximum speed in the last 30 seconds, the data is pretty useless.
Given the energy density of chemical fuels (whether fossil-derived, renewably sourced from biomass, or synthesized from clean and stationary electricity), the pervasive need for the compact and reliable generation of mechanical and electrical energy, and the fact that electric vehicles are not a panacea for all transportation needs, I do believe that there will be a use for combustion engine makers for a very long time to come.
Here is one source of loss: you can't emit your exhaust gasses at room temperature. At least, you can't emit them at room temperature and also expect them to be able to, ya know, go up the chimney. Flue gasses have to be hot enough to ensure that they draft up the chimney of their own accord, and that takes some useful, though low-quality, heat away with it. The alternative is to lower your flue gas temperature way down to room temperature, but then use an electric fan to vent the gas away. Either way, it takes energy to remove the waste products from the (local) system.
Yes, that was a point I should have made, and which the article does make: that many of the Good Enough products out there are only good enough by a certain criteria; in aggregate it's easy to argue that they are better. If they weren't overall better, then they never would seen widespread adoption.
a competent pilot is very likely to survive a rather large subset of such failures
Ah, there's the catch, though. How many of your average fellows do you think could become a competent pilot?
The other major hitch is that, once in the air, the consequences for mistakes, accidents, and mechanical failures are so much larger than they are for an automobile. While it is true that mistakes, accidents, and mechanical failures in a plane do not have to be fatal, it seems to me that they are probably more likely to result in death or serious injury than for automobiles.
This comment dovetails nicely with a recent article in Wired: how Good Enough is taking over. Call it the MP3 effect - the smaller file size and increased portability of compressed audio won out over fidelity. The sound quality wasn't Great, but considering that you could get your entire collection into your pocket and listen anywhere, anytime meant that it was Good Enough.
Where is the fastest growth in video cameras: the Flip and mobile phones, not pricey 1080p camcorders. Fastest growth in computers: netbooks, not high-powered desktops. Biggest thing in health care: clinics to handle minor ailments, not full-service hospitals. So-so call quality from Skype? No problem. MSWord getting too bloated and expensive by feature creep? Try Google Docs, even if it is slow, requires an internet connection any time you want to do something, and was perpetually in Beta.
I'm not sure I agree with this thesis entirely, but is does make some interesting points.
This is not exactly to say that Good Enough doesn't represent technical progress. Indeed, the ability for Good Enough to be good enough is a testament to technical progress, because that has allowed computer power to become cheap and ubiquitous. In some cases, like the Flip, some might say that creating a simple device that actually does what it is supposed to, simply and easily, is progress compared to a device that tries to do everything, but is a total kludge.
As for your flying car, you'll start seeing it when we have drivers who can safely drive on 3 dimensional roads, and for that, you have to be able to do it safely on 2 dimensional roads first, which can be far, far away...
Not to mention a flying car that can fail safe, so that a mechanical mishap or minor accident doesn't prove invariably fatal from, ya know, falling out of the sky.
There's been plenty of advancement in math since 1906. Advancements in math have driven advancements in technology, and vice versa. A lot of mathematical advancement it has been concentrated in this particularly worthless area called computer science. There's also game theory, which is intricately tied to economics. While not a mathematical theory per se, general relativity didn't come along until 1914, and was as much a breakthrough in applied mathematics as it was a way to describe gravitation. String theory falls into a similar category - it's required tremendous discoveries in mathematics as well as physical concepts. Modern cryptography is based on sophisticated number theory that didn't exist in 1906. Information theory, which is the basis for how we store and transmit data, didn't exist until Claude Shannon laid the groundwork in 1948.
Do I need to go on?
Besides, math isn't the only thing one needs in order to build a fast vehicle. You need pretty advanced materials and the ability to fabricate something useful from them, according to some design that can be planned out and captured along the way. I don't want to denigrate the abilities of designers and machinists of 1906, but today we have fantastically more sophisticated design and fabrication technologies available to us, and more advanced materials to apply them to.
I bet one good catch out of 1000 wouldn't have impressed you quite so much.
Oh, I don't know - it's still pretty freakin' impressive. One in a thousand ain't bad for something as difficult and improbable as that. Kinda like when I manage to knock a 3-point shot in basketball.
This is true. I am aware of many steps the military is taking to reduce energy consumption, improve building and logistics efficiency, etc. It makes great sense for them, because the savings can be astronomical, allowing them to do more with their money (or, heaven forbid, actually reduce their budget).
I just don't think that their primary motivation for doing this particular project is to be environmentally conscious. There are other ways, more proven ways, to produce jet fuel that are sure to be less energy-intensive.
For what it's worth, in the United States there's the Family and Medical Leave Act, which permits a parent (woman or man) to take up to three months off for the birth (or adoption) of a child.
Unfortunately, it's not paid leave, unless your company is uncommonly generous. And because it is unpaid leave, most families cannot afford to take full advantage of it. All it really does is guarantee that you can take the time off and still have a job when you return.
Believe it or not, even this pittance concession to families was incredibly difficult to get passed back in the 90s. I desperately hope for the sort of family benefits common in many European countries. They are expensive, yes, but I feel that the improvement in family unity and child well-being, and the resulting benefit to society, are well worth the investment.
As to your initial point: should women with very small kids be working. Someone else already pointed out that it is not just women that take care of children. I myself took two months off after my wife went back to work. There were times, even after I went back to work, when I questioned whether I should be there. I wasn't bearing the brunt of day-to-day care for my child by that point, but I still had nights of interrupted sleep, unexpected emergencies, and other things that diminished my mental capacity and productivity.
I was puzzled by the article's focus on "carbon-neutral energy". I would have thought the Navy's motivation for doing this was obvious: being able to produce jet fuel from ship-based nuclear reactors, thereby eliminating a logistic difficulty. Sure, a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier has enough power on board to steam across the world ten times over, it's pretty useless as an instrument of war once it runs out of kerosene fuel for the jets. That's why an aircraft carrier is accompanied by a whole flotilla of other ships - fuel tankers being one of the big ones. If you could eliminate a traditional tanker ship with one that makes fuel continuously (or build that capability into the aircraft carrier itself), that would be a tremendous advantage.
One of the nice things about a hybrid power train, particularly the parallel power train Honda uses, is that you can instantly get additional torque on the drive shaft from the electric motor. In the original (unleaded gasoline) Insight, this was used as an acceleration assist to compensate for the small engine. Also, modern diesels tend to be more responsive than their brethren of old.
So, I suspect that it would have reasonable performance, considering that it is a tiny car intended for high mileage, not racing.
He then created a cloned card, and with help from another technology expert, changed all the data on the new card. This included the physical details of the bearer, name, fingerprints and other information.
He then rewrote data on the card, reversing the bearer's status from "not entitled to benefits" to "entitled to benefits".
He then added fresh content that would be visible to any police officer or security official who scanned the card, saying, "I am a terrorist - shoot on sight."
He's not just reading off or copying the information, he's cloning the card, and demonstrating that he can change things in the process. So, using your analogy, the demonstration proves he not only can copy a page of Chinese writing, he can read and understand it, edit it, and print it back out to make it look just like the original.
Oh and if by "threat" you mean they could kill a few thousand, then we are talking at cross terms here -- ANYONE could do that
If they understand a few things about America, then they realize that they really can do damage by killing a few thousand - look at all the idiocy we inflicted upon ourselves after al Qaeda killed a few thousand of us.
And it's not like North Korea needs to do it themselves to gain a strategic advantage from it. It is true they have nukes, but no (conventional) way to deploy them. But our borders and shipping routes are pretty porous, and there are plenty of non-state actors out there that could smuggle a weapon in. A single blast to a major American city would do lots of damage well beyond just the death toll.
Knocking us off the pedestal by overwhelming force is not the only possible or fruitful goal.
How many possible "ate my homework" jokes can we go for here:
"The Kindle ate my homework."
"Jeff Bezos ate my homework."
"If there is hope for my homework, it lies with the proles."
"We have triumphed over the unprincipled dissemination of 1984. The users and readers have been cast out. And the poisonous weeds of note-taking have been consigned to the dustbin of history. Let each and every student rejoice!...We are one Amazon. With one will. One resolve. One cause. Our enemies shall read themselves to death. And we will bury them with their own Kindle! We shall prevail!" [too obscure?]
Nothing is slowed down. Light always goes at the same speed. Guess its name
That is not fully correct. It is true that the speed of light, in a vacuum, is a constant. But, the speed of light through a transparent medium is something less than c. How much light gets slowed down by a medium is frequency-dependent, as described by snell's law, which is how lenses are able to bend light.
The fact that the speed of light through a medium is less than c also allows for some more exotic phenomena, such as Cherenkov radiation, created when a particle's velocity through a medium exceeds that medium's speed of light (but definitely remains less than c).
The other and far more common place to find asshats is uni graduation ceremonies where the photographers charge extortionate amounts just to take one or two pictures.
I recently competed in two triathlons, and had two very different experiences with the photographer hired for each event. The first was a small local outfit who had perhaps two or three people working with her (can't be everywhere at the same time, ya know). She posted the whole collection to smugmug, allowing you to see any or all of the images, even up to the original DSLR's resolution, but makes it relatively difficult to download the images. Smugmug allows the photographer to sell image downloads and prints from the site, and I think allows the photographer to name the terms. We contacted the photographer directly, and got about 40 original, full-size, non-watermarked images for $40, which seemed a reasonable price to us. She only asked that, if we used them in blog or something, that we provide attribution. I count this as a good experience
The second triathlon had contracted with Sportography, which appears to be a sizeable company, possibly with franchises. It was a larger event, and they probably had half a dozen photographers that snapped up thousands of images. Looking over the online proofs, there were some that we really wanted...up until we saw what Sportography wanted to charge us. $20 for a single low-res download (probably a one-time download, too), $40 for one high-res download, or $60 for a CD with the half-dozen or so images that you appear in (assuming you have probably identified them all from the thousands). Needless to say, they received none of our business.
Well, the article said it would reduce fuel consumption by about 16%. If 12,000 = 0.16x, then x, the ship's total consumption in a year, is about 75,000 barrels. A barrel of fuel is 42 gallons. So, overall, we're talking about an annual consumption of 3.15 million gallons of fuel.
Appropriate analogs to such a volume are difficult to convey. It is roughly five olympic-sized swimming pools. Across the entire fleet of destroyers that would get this modification, the annual savings would be on the order of one supertanker's worth of crude.
then that 1ft by 1ft box got $100 dollars in stamps. it typically costs about what, $10 to ship something this size & weight (can be dense) via FedEx at retail
Yes, but in the FedEx case you are just talking about one package to deliver to arbitrary addresses. In the case of a box full of letters, you need to make a couple hundred deliveries. As it is with moving electronic information, the real cost is not in the long haul, but in the last mile. So, yes, I'd be willing to cut the postal service some slack on this.
Have you ever thought why FedEx and UPS don't bother with letter carrying services?
Slashdot Mirror
That was my thought as well. Who's to say that the recorded 45 mph wasn't sampled immediately after the kid hit the brakes after realizing he'd just been lit up by a cop cruiser. What was the kid's speed the previous five minutes? Unless the company can demonstrate that their device reports the maximum speed in the last 30 seconds, the data is pretty useless.
Given the energy density of chemical fuels (whether fossil-derived, renewably sourced from biomass, or synthesized from clean and stationary electricity), the pervasive need for the compact and reliable generation of mechanical and electrical energy, and the fact that electric vehicles are not a panacea for all transportation needs, I do believe that there will be a use for combustion engine makers for a very long time to come.
Here is one source of loss: you can't emit your exhaust gasses at room temperature. At least, you can't emit them at room temperature and also expect them to be able to, ya know, go up the chimney. Flue gasses have to be hot enough to ensure that they draft up the chimney of their own accord, and that takes some useful, though low-quality, heat away with it. The alternative is to lower your flue gas temperature way down to room temperature, but then use an electric fan to vent the gas away. Either way, it takes energy to remove the waste products from the (local) system.
Yes, that was a point I should have made, and which the article does make: that many of the Good Enough products out there are only good enough by a certain criteria; in aggregate it's easy to argue that they are better. If they weren't overall better, then they never would seen widespread adoption.
Ah, there's the catch, though. How many of your average fellows do you think could become a competent pilot?
The other major hitch is that, once in the air, the consequences for mistakes, accidents, and mechanical failures are so much larger than they are for an automobile. While it is true that mistakes, accidents, and mechanical failures in a plane do not have to be fatal, it seems to me that they are probably more likely to result in death or serious injury than for automobiles.
This comment dovetails nicely with a recent article in Wired: how Good Enough is taking over. Call it the MP3 effect - the smaller file size and increased portability of compressed audio won out over fidelity. The sound quality wasn't Great, but considering that you could get your entire collection into your pocket and listen anywhere, anytime meant that it was Good Enough.
Where is the fastest growth in video cameras: the Flip and mobile phones, not pricey 1080p camcorders. Fastest growth in computers: netbooks, not high-powered desktops. Biggest thing in health care: clinics to handle minor ailments, not full-service hospitals. So-so call quality from Skype? No problem. MSWord getting too bloated and expensive by feature creep? Try Google Docs, even if it is slow, requires an internet connection any time you want to do something, and was perpetually in Beta.
I'm not sure I agree with this thesis entirely, but is does make some interesting points.
This is not exactly to say that Good Enough doesn't represent technical progress. Indeed, the ability for Good Enough to be good enough is a testament to technical progress, because that has allowed computer power to become cheap and ubiquitous. In some cases, like the Flip, some might say that creating a simple device that actually does what it is supposed to, simply and easily, is progress compared to a device that tries to do everything, but is a total kludge.
Not to mention a flying car that can fail safe, so that a mechanical mishap or minor accident doesn't prove invariably fatal from, ya know, falling out of the sky.
You're all missing the point!
.
The point is...
-------------->
Right there.
There's been plenty of advancement in math since 1906. Advancements in math have driven advancements in technology, and vice versa. A lot of mathematical advancement it has been concentrated in this particularly worthless area called computer science. There's also game theory, which is intricately tied to economics. While not a mathematical theory per se, general relativity didn't come along until 1914, and was as much a breakthrough in applied mathematics as it was a way to describe gravitation. String theory falls into a similar category - it's required tremendous discoveries in mathematics as well as physical concepts. Modern cryptography is based on sophisticated number theory that didn't exist in 1906. Information theory, which is the basis for how we store and transmit data, didn't exist until Claude Shannon laid the groundwork in 1948.
Do I need to go on?
Besides, math isn't the only thing one needs in order to build a fast vehicle. You need pretty advanced materials and the ability to fabricate something useful from them, according to some design that can be planned out and captured along the way. I don't want to denigrate the abilities of designers and machinists of 1906, but today we have fantastically more sophisticated design and fabrication technologies available to us, and more advanced materials to apply them to.
Yeah, the neatest trick I've seen a robot pull off since Bishop's knife trick in Aliens.
Oh, I don't know - it's still pretty freakin' impressive. One in a thousand ain't bad for something as difficult and improbable as that. Kinda like when I manage to knock a 3-point shot in basketball.
This is true. I am aware of many steps the military is taking to reduce energy consumption, improve building and logistics efficiency, etc. It makes great sense for them, because the savings can be astronomical, allowing them to do more with their money (or, heaven forbid, actually reduce their budget).
I just don't think that their primary motivation for doing this particular project is to be environmentally conscious. There are other ways, more proven ways, to produce jet fuel that are sure to be less energy-intensive.
For what it's worth, in the United States there's the Family and Medical Leave Act, which permits a parent (woman or man) to take up to three months off for the birth (or adoption) of a child.
Unfortunately, it's not paid leave, unless your company is uncommonly generous. And because it is unpaid leave, most families cannot afford to take full advantage of it. All it really does is guarantee that you can take the time off and still have a job when you return.
Believe it or not, even this pittance concession to families was incredibly difficult to get passed back in the 90s. I desperately hope for the sort of family benefits common in many European countries. They are expensive, yes, but I feel that the improvement in family unity and child well-being, and the resulting benefit to society, are well worth the investment.
As to your initial point: should women with very small kids be working. Someone else already pointed out that it is not just women that take care of children. I myself took two months off after my wife went back to work. There were times, even after I went back to work, when I questioned whether I should be there. I wasn't bearing the brunt of day-to-day care for my child by that point, but I still had nights of interrupted sleep, unexpected emergencies, and other things that diminished my mental capacity and productivity.
I was puzzled by the article's focus on "carbon-neutral energy". I would have thought the Navy's motivation for doing this was obvious: being able to produce jet fuel from ship-based nuclear reactors, thereby eliminating a logistic difficulty. Sure, a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier has enough power on board to steam across the world ten times over, it's pretty useless as an instrument of war once it runs out of kerosene fuel for the jets. That's why an aircraft carrier is accompanied by a whole flotilla of other ships - fuel tankers being one of the big ones. If you could eliminate a traditional tanker ship with one that makes fuel continuously (or build that capability into the aircraft carrier itself), that would be a tremendous advantage.
One of the nice things about a hybrid power train, particularly the parallel power train Honda uses, is that you can instantly get additional torque on the drive shaft from the electric motor. In the original (unleaded gasoline) Insight, this was used as an acceleration assist to compensate for the small engine. Also, modern diesels tend to be more responsive than their brethren of old.
So, I suspect that it would have reasonable performance, considering that it is a tiny car intended for high mileage, not racing.
No way, man! We all know that 2012 is going to be the best science fiction movie of the year!
(I do, of course, emphasize the fiction.)
You mean, after freezing and shattering it with liquid nitrogen?
Not covert any more.
He's not just reading off or copying the information, he's cloning the card, and demonstrating that he can change things in the process. So, using your analogy, the demonstration proves he not only can copy a page of Chinese writing, he can read and understand it, edit it, and print it back out to make it look just like the original.
If they understand a few things about America, then they realize that they really can do damage by killing a few thousand - look at all the idiocy we inflicted upon ourselves after al Qaeda killed a few thousand of us.
And it's not like North Korea needs to do it themselves to gain a strategic advantage from it. It is true they have nukes, but no (conventional) way to deploy them. But our borders and shipping routes are pretty porous, and there are plenty of non-state actors out there that could smuggle a weapon in. A single blast to a major American city would do lots of damage well beyond just the death toll.
Knocking us off the pedestal by overwhelming force is not the only possible or fruitful goal.
How many possible "ate my homework" jokes can we go for here:
"The Kindle ate my homework."
"Jeff Bezos ate my homework."
"If there is hope for my homework, it lies with the proles."
"We have triumphed over the unprincipled dissemination of 1984. The users and readers have been cast out. And the poisonous weeds of note-taking have been consigned to the dustbin of history. Let each and every student rejoice!...We are one Amazon. With one will. One resolve. One cause. Our enemies shall read themselves to death. And we will bury them with their own Kindle! We shall prevail!" [too obscure?]
come on an chime in!
That is not fully correct. It is true that the speed of light, in a vacuum, is a constant. But, the speed of light through a transparent medium is something less than c. How much light gets slowed down by a medium is frequency-dependent, as described by snell's law, which is how lenses are able to bend light.
The fact that the speed of light through a medium is less than c also allows for some more exotic phenomena, such as Cherenkov radiation, created when a particle's velocity through a medium exceeds that medium's speed of light (but definitely remains less than c).
I recently competed in two triathlons, and had two very different experiences with the photographer hired for each event. The first was a small local outfit who had perhaps two or three people working with her (can't be everywhere at the same time, ya know). She posted the whole collection to smugmug, allowing you to see any or all of the images, even up to the original DSLR's resolution, but makes it relatively difficult to download the images. Smugmug allows the photographer to sell image downloads and prints from the site, and I think allows the photographer to name the terms. We contacted the photographer directly, and got about 40 original, full-size, non-watermarked images for $40, which seemed a reasonable price to us. She only asked that, if we used them in blog or something, that we provide attribution. I count this as a good experience
The second triathlon had contracted with Sportography, which appears to be a sizeable company, possibly with franchises. It was a larger event, and they probably had half a dozen photographers that snapped up thousands of images. Looking over the online proofs, there were some that we really wanted...up until we saw what Sportography wanted to charge us. $20 for a single low-res download (probably a one-time download, too), $40 for one high-res download, or $60 for a CD with the half-dozen or so images that you appear in (assuming you have probably identified them all from the thousands). Needless to say, they received none of our business.
Well, the article said it would reduce fuel consumption by about 16%. If 12,000 = 0.16x, then x, the ship's total consumption in a year, is about 75,000 barrels. A barrel of fuel is 42 gallons. So, overall, we're talking about an annual consumption of 3.15 million gallons of fuel.
Appropriate analogs to such a volume are difficult to convey. It is roughly five olympic-sized swimming pools. Across the entire fleet of destroyers that would get this modification, the annual savings would be on the order of one supertanker's worth of crude.
Yes, but in the FedEx case you are just talking about one package to deliver to arbitrary addresses. In the case of a box full of letters, you need to make a couple hundred deliveries. As it is with moving electronic information, the real cost is not in the long haul, but in the last mile. So, yes, I'd be willing to cut the postal service some slack on this.
Have you ever thought why FedEx and UPS don't bother with letter carrying services?