Peak Oil is debated - have we already reached it, will it be in 10 years, 20 years? I tend to think we are living through it more or less now. However, I heard a representative from BP speak recently that indicated that, if demand drives the cost of oil up enough, there's enough tar sands and oil shale out there to push peak oil back a long ways. Sure, that's BP talking, and oil shale and tar sands are shit kinds of energy, but it is a facet of the debate.
Peak Coal, on the other hand, is decades or centuries off. The United States has enough coal reserves that we could be energy independent for a few hundred years. China, India, and Russia have lots of reserves, too.
Of course, there are prohibitive problems with becoming an all-coal energy economy for a few hundred years. I advocate that we move away from coal (and oil) as fast as possible. The point is, though, that there's still a lot of coal out there.
Thus this 50% efficiency figure seems to me to only apply to one direction of travel. Overall, if one uses the same amount of energy in both direction then that's only a 25% savings. Not bad perhaps.
I don't know about you, but a 25% gain in efficiency seems pretty good to me. I wouldn't mind being able to get by on 25% less electricity or natural gas at home.
The real question isn't necessarily the efficiency gain in percentage terms, but whether the fuel savings can offset the cost the kite system. No. 6 fuel (which most ships use) is relatively cheap, because it is one refining step above tar. Seriously, it is really nasty stuff, and doesn't burn cleanly at all. A big cargo ship will go through thousands of gallons of it a day, maybe in just hours. If you can use 25% less fuel in a year, that starts to look like hundreds of thousands of gallons of fuel saved per year, which in turn could mean hundreds of thousands of dollars a year in savings.
By and large, the medicine portrayed in House is accurate, even if it is rare and farfetched.
What requires more suspended disbelief than the medicine are these facets of the show:
1) All these interns run their own labs (by hand, no less), do their own surgeries and biopsies, and run CT, MRI and ultrasound scanners all by themselves
2) A narcotic-addicted doctor that displays such insubordination, so thoroughly and arbitrarily abuses his subordinates, and is so blase about sexual harassment, would be allowed to practice in any hospital. There are plenty of assholes doctors, but House goes beyond belief.
It is much like believing that Seattle Grace Hospital has only five surgeons, and innumerable promiscuous interns, who do everything.
Coal is that cheap energy you enjoy. Even if it's not part of your electric plan, you're still using it when shopping for other goods and services that are using it. Unless you plan on replacing it with something as cheep, everyone will feel the pain.
I only ask this. Once the cost of electricity goes through the roof because you were in favor of getting rid of coal; don't bitch about it! If you and your supporters are ok with this ramification, then by all means go for it.
Coal won't be cheap forever. It is artificially low because it doesn't include the price of carbon emissions; neither do our consumer goods. This will change - it in inevitable. Eventually, either in terms of cap-and-trade, carbon capture and sequestration, the cost of coal will go up, as will the cost of gasoline and natural gas. Taxing emissions at, say, $30/ton suddenly makes all kinds of cleaner energy sources viable.
We're not talking about the cost of electricity going through the roof. Carbon capture and sequestration, depending on whose numbers you believe and what technology you use, requires 15%-45% more energy to generate the same amount of electricity. So, throw in the amortized capital cost of the equipment involved, and you are looking at, maybe, a 50% increase in the cost of electricity if you require sequestration.A 50% increase is no small amount, I'll grant, but when you consider that the cost of gasoline in the U.S. has tripled over the last decade, a 50% increase doesn't seem so bad.
Here's another measure. In the U.S., about 1.35 pounds of CO2 are emitted for every kilowatt-hour generated (page 1 of a DOE report here). That works out to 750 kWh/tonCO2. A $30/ton tax on CO2 would increase the cost of a generated kilowatt-hour by $0.04. So, at worst we are talking about a doubling in the cost of generating coal-based electricity. Wind is cost-competitive now, even without such a tax. With the tax, all sorts of other energies become viable.
I am fine with having the cost of my electricity double. It makes generating my own electricity more attractive. More importantly, higher prices encourage conservation, which is sorely needed in the world. The United States, as a matter of policy, can choose to forge a lead in these energy and conservation technologies, or else continue business-as-usual until we have no choice but to adopt them. One path creates a promising new economic sector that we can export to the world, the other forces us to import as greater cost.
But if the two machines had the same circuit diagram, same components, and code, this penalty seems zealous.
ES&S thought the changes were substantial enough to give the resulting device a new name (A200 instead of A100). Did they give it a new price, too? Plus, they didn't go through the motions to have someone verify that the same code was, in fact, used. Despite their claims, without having an independent tester do that verification, who knows what they flashed on there.
Actually, there are wobbles and other weirdness associated with the motion of the earth through its orbit, such that the sun is not actually at due south at the same time each day. See an explanation of analemma.
Since when is a 2-year payback period a bad thing? That LCD monitor will probably still work fine after five years. Most businesses are thrilled to get 3- to 5-year paybacks on equipment.
I agree with you on junking the old monitor, though. The author didn't mention what he did with it, but I'm guessing it went to the dump or, if we're lucky, a center that will break it down and reprocess it properly. Selling it to someone who would still use it would probably have been better.
Here's one possibility - give up your right to vote in the next election in exchange for a year's NYU tuition. Then, instead of slaving away at some summer job so that you can pay for ramen noodles for the next year, go and work on your campaign of choice. You'll probably be able to do more for your chosen candidate than simply voting for him would.
If you work on a voter advocacy campaign, registering new voters and getting them to the polls on election day, even if you yourself don't vote, aren't you doing more to further democracy? Also getting an education is, I believe, a furtherance of democracy, too.
Sadly, it happened long before text on cell phones was common.
It seemed to start growing quickly out of AOL customers starting circa '94-'95, and sadly hasn't slowed down.
Actually, using abbreviations while typing messages got started even before AOL or the (modern) Internet. Deaf people who use TDDs (a.k.a. TTYs) have been using a number of abbreviations since their introduction in the 60s and 70s.
It is generally accepted that, as a foundation of democracy, government transparency is essential. It is to this end, and for historical posterity, that records of communications within the White House (and Congress, and the Supreme Court) are preserved. The Presidential Records Act has been around for nearly three decades, and it has yet to be overturned on constitutional grounds.
As a clarification: the manner of the preservation isn't specified by law, only that the preservation be done.
As another clarification: the subversion that people (not just Democrats, and not just in the U.S.) accuse Bush of tends towards greater government secrecy and curtailing civil liberties. The subversion people accused Congress of in the wake of Nixon is towards greater government transparency and a weakened Executive. Each citizen must make their own judgement as to which is the greater subversion.
It's not like the government is going to roll in with the National Guard and seize the cables as national property. The United States is not Cuba or Venezuela. "Opening the wires" simply means that cable companies have to allow other people access to use their cables, for the same price they charge themselves internally. The infrastructure still has value, and the company still gets a return on their investment in the form of other companies' access and lease payments. Right now, you can't get access to most cable provider's wires at any price.
People harp on and on about this point, believing that the government is going to let one company use another company's infrastructure for free. But they forget that when AT&T was broken up in the 80s, the same thing was done with the phone lines. Start up telco companies paid the Baby Bells for access to the phone lines. The telco's didn't own the wires - they were paying the same rate that the Baby Bells charged themselves internally - but they were still able to make a profit while undercutting the Bells by offering a better service than the Bell's service at a better rate. It's a decoupling of the provided service from the infrastructure.
This sort of open access - allowing anyone who can pay to have access to the infrastructure - is an essential thing to understand with the upcoming 700 MHz auction.
I suppose there is nothing wrong with the White House being directed to preserve emails, given their past history. However, one would think that the Presidential Records Act would already force them to preserve any email that might have evidentiary value (see the third bullet down on the link).
On the other hand, a Bush Executive Order in late 2001 seems to allow almost anything from the President's or VP's office to be made off limits:
...reflecting military, diplomatic, or national security secrets, Presidential communications, legal advice, legal work, or the deliberative processes of the President and the President's advisers...
Hopefully, this loophole can be closed and tighter retention policies put in place, not just for this case, but for all Presidential Papers. To put the Administration's opacity in perspective, Bush's executive order on this subject superceded one put in place by Reagan, and seeks to undermine a law put in place in response to Nixon.
The biggest thing about Penryn is the move to 45-nm fabrication, and the technological advances that were required to pull it off. IEEE Spectrum has a nice, in-depth (but accessible) article on those advances. High-k dielectrics and new metal gate configurations will be how advanced ICs are produced from now on. It is as large a shift for the fabs as a new chip architecture is for designers.
Nearly all electronic devices (TVs, monitors, computers, etc) are on standby unless they're unplugged.
Which is why my TV, DVD player, VCR, stereo, cable modem + wireless router, and various charging devices are all plugged into power strips. The microwave is plugged into a switched outlet. It takes all of one second to flick a switch to turn these things on when I actually need them. I did a survey with my kill-a-watt and found that, if all of these were plugged in and on standby, they collectively draw nearly 80 W. That's during every hour of the day and night when I'm not using them. At my local utility rate, that's about $70/year.
No, I haven't any stats. The thing to keep in mind is that the 1000 internal combustion engines (gasoline, diesel, ethanol, whatever) moving 1000 vehicles are together less efficient and produce greater emissions than a single centralized plant providing electric power to move that same 1000 cars. There are economies of scale involved in utility-scale generation that aren't available in small packages.
The internal combustion engine, depending on whose numbers you believe, is something like 25-40% efficient. That is, 25-40% of the chemical potential energy stored in the fuel is converted to mechanical energy for moving the vehicle. A combined cycle power plant, where you burn a gas in a turbines, then use the hot exhaust to also create steam to drive more turbines, can be upwards of 60% efficient. In situations where co-generation is also possible (a rarity, since most homes and buildings aren't powered by utility steam), that efficiency can be raised closer to 70%.
The other benefit, as others have noted, is that it is easier to clean the emissions (i.e., remove particulates, reduce SOx and NOx, remove mercury, etc.) and, eventually, capture the carbon dioxide output, at a single large location than to try and outfit every vehicle with the same equipment.
The last paragraph of the press release explains. The distance chosen was about the distance to the L1 and L2 Lagrangian Points around the Earth. These are candidate locations for the next generation James Webb Space Telescope (also at wikipedia). For that application, high data bandwidth is extremely useful.
Very likely, if something like this were incorporated into the Webb design, it would be augmented with traditional radio for tracking, telemetry, and as a backup to the laser link for bulk data transfer.
Political consultants and focus groups are common tools used by the politically savvy (like presidential candidates) to vet and refine the language of major policy speeches (and even the content of the policy itself). These are people that are paid to help identify the weak points (either the content or the presentation) in the speech and improve it. Focus groups largely are paid a small amount to give you soft impressions: do you agree or disagree, are you excited or bored, etc. Political consultants are paid a lot more to tell you more specific things: change the wording of this sentence, emphasize this point by saying XYZ, don't say this or you'll antagonize so-and-so, etc. This is, in part, how a State of the Union address comes about.
Ideally, the President (not just Bush, any President) would have people on salary whose sole job is to play the devil's advocate. These would NOT just be people who actually agree with you but can argue the other side, but rather people who genuinely believe the other side. Democrats should hire Republicans, and vice versa. One common criticism of the current President is that he surrounds himself with people who all agree with him. To the people they work for, they're royal pains in the ass, but they are of benefit, too.
Now, one might ask why a President should pay someone to disagree with him, when he can surely walk down the street to Congress and get an earful for free. That has merit, too, and it's something that appears to be lacking these days. But there are advantages to having your own nay-sayers in house: it allows you to craft better policy from the start, rather than duking it out in public; you don't tip your hand before you are ready; when you do announce policy, you are prepared for counter-arguments; and, you avoid the appearance of always doing it your way (again, a common criticism of this current President).
These two processes are essentially the same thing - invert the current inside the electric machine and it will brake the vehicle. The only problem is how to do this. If you want to do that in a manner that every single joule finds it way to the battery, breaking torque will decrease as the speed decreases and you will have to apply mechanical brakes in one moment.
With a typical brushed DC motor connected directly to a battery, you would be right - the braking torque provided by drawing current out of the motor will decrease with wheel speed.
However, in a hybrid, there are usually one or two intermediaries between the wheels, electric motor, and battery storage. The intermediaries are the gearbox and power electronics. Both of these intermediaries convert input power to output power: input torque and shaft speed to output torque and shaft speed, input current and voltage to output current and voltage. The efficiency of the conversion varies depending on design and operating conditions, but is theoretically 100%.
With some intelligence built into the powertrain (i.e., computing power, algorithms, control laws), you can adjust the gearbox setting (by shifting gears) and the power electronics (by modulating frequency or duty cycle) such that braking torque can be constant throughout deceleration. The deceleration power in the mechanical and electrical subsystems won't be a constant, though.
My understanding is that the main reason the Prius has to use its mechanical brakes at all is that the components in the regenerative powertrain have maximum power ratings. For instance, the batteries have some maximum charging current limit. So the computer has to augment the regenerative braking (which is power-limited) with the mechanical brakes (which don't have that limit in normal usage).
This is why having ultra-capacitors in place of or augmenting the batteries will be so useful - they have almost no current limit, and can absorb the spikes for accelerating and decelerating in stride.
For those interested in hearing Bruce Schneier dispassionately and quite reasonably shred a lot of the "security" measures implemented since 9/11, I suggest reading his book Beyond Fear. The subtitle says it all: thinking sensibly about security in an uncertain world. The book was reviewed on Slashdot not long ago.
The book takes a very general approach to security, analyzing it with the most basic categorizations, while using very clear real-life examples to illustrate. The final chapters deal specifically with security against terrorism, particularly since 9/11. His conclusion is that, from a security standpoint, most of the measures put in place - additional airport scrutiny, massive centralized databases looking for suspicious patterns, the move towards national ID cards, etc. - are largely ineffective as security measures. The massive trade-off of decreased privacy and liberty coupled with enormous cost for these measures make them especially unreasonable. In short, the widespread perceived risk and culture of fear it has fostered has made our response to the new terroristic threat wildly out-of-proportion with the actual risk.
It's mostly preaching to the choir here at Slashdot, but I think this book should be as widely read as possible.
Indeed, much more than 6 million. If it were 6 million, out of a few hundred million cellphones in the U.S., that would hardly represent a hegemony. On the other hand, if ever cellphone in the U.S. from Verizon, Sprint, and T-Mobile were to move to the google platform, that would represent a serious force. It would still probably not be a hegemony, not without Cingular (sorry, AT&T), but a serious force nonetheless.
This is hypothetical, of course, since it is unrealistic to think that ever phone from those three carriers would port over - the cell manufacturers wouldn't allow it.
For the bold and motivated thief, walking in and then out with a laptop is easy. Just look like you are supposed to be there. Slipping it into a briefcase helps with the illusion.
On the other hand, someone waltzed off with a 24" LCD monitor from the desk of a co-worker not long ago. His office was the furthest in from the door, so someone needed to be particularly bold to go all the way in, disconnect the monitor, and walk back out. No one saw him either, which is impressive considering the size of the load he was carrying. It's a lot harder to look and act natural about carrying a large monitor than a laptop.
For what it's worth, if you know some people who could go in on it with you, there's the 5-license family pack for $199, or only $40/person. There's just one copy of the media, but there's nothing stopping you from duplicating it so you each have a copy.
This is true of the single-license, too. There isn't anything like license validation, activation, or genuine advantage in OS X, so I guess there isn't anything preventing you from pirating the hell out of one single licensed copy; the extra price you pay in the family pack is for piece of mind (if you have an objection to outright piracy), and four extra "proof of purchase" coupons (whatever that's worth).
The article is referring to Nitric Oxide - NO -- not Nitrous Oxide - N2O
Quite right. The difference is pretty important.
Nitric Oxide is used to improve perfusion in people on respirators. It is particularly useful in premature babies in the NICU, whose lungs are not as well developed and have difficulty absorbing enough oxygen and can suffer from pulmonary hypertension. In general, NO relaxes the smooth muscle in arteries, making it a vasodilator. It is rapidly absorbed and deactivated by hemoglobin, so it's effects are generally confined to the lungs (i.e., they're not systemic). So, while the research may be biased by a company that wants to sell something, there is at least some science behind it.
Nitrous Oxide is laughing gas, an anesthetic. It can also cause various psychological effects. It isn't metabolized quickly in the body, such that a person breathing it in can also breathe it out. In small doses it can cause euphoria. In higher doses it can cause various psychoses and death through hypoxia.
Slashdot Mirror
Peak Oil is debated - have we already reached it, will it be in 10 years, 20 years? I tend to think we are living through it more or less now. However, I heard a representative from BP speak recently that indicated that, if demand drives the cost of oil up enough, there's enough tar sands and oil shale out there to push peak oil back a long ways. Sure, that's BP talking, and oil shale and tar sands are shit kinds of energy, but it is a facet of the debate.
Peak Coal, on the other hand, is decades or centuries off. The United States has enough coal reserves that we could be energy independent for a few hundred years. China, India, and Russia have lots of reserves, too.
Of course, there are prohibitive problems with becoming an all-coal energy economy for a few hundred years. I advocate that we move away from coal (and oil) as fast as possible. The point is, though, that there's still a lot of coal out there.
The real question isn't necessarily the efficiency gain in percentage terms, but whether the fuel savings can offset the cost the kite system. No. 6 fuel (which most ships use) is relatively cheap, because it is one refining step above tar. Seriously, it is really nasty stuff, and doesn't burn cleanly at all. A big cargo ship will go through thousands of gallons of it a day, maybe in just hours. If you can use 25% less fuel in a year, that starts to look like hundreds of thousands of gallons of fuel saved per year, which in turn could mean hundreds of thousands of dollars a year in savings.
By and large, the medicine portrayed in House is accurate, even if it is rare and farfetched.
What requires more suspended disbelief than the medicine are these facets of the show:
1) All these interns run their own labs (by hand, no less), do their own surgeries and biopsies, and run CT, MRI and ultrasound scanners all by themselves
2) A narcotic-addicted doctor that displays such insubordination, so thoroughly and arbitrarily abuses his subordinates, and is so blase about sexual harassment, would be allowed to practice in any hospital. There are plenty of assholes doctors, but House goes beyond belief.
It is much like believing that Seattle Grace Hospital has only five surgeons, and innumerable promiscuous interns, who do everything.
We're not talking about the cost of electricity going through the roof. Carbon capture and sequestration, depending on whose numbers you believe and what technology you use, requires 15%-45% more energy to generate the same amount of electricity. So, throw in the amortized capital cost of the equipment involved, and you are looking at, maybe, a 50% increase in the cost of electricity if you require sequestration.A 50% increase is no small amount, I'll grant, but when you consider that the cost of gasoline in the U.S. has tripled over the last decade, a 50% increase doesn't seem so bad.
Here's another measure. In the U.S., about 1.35 pounds of CO2 are emitted for every kilowatt-hour generated (page 1 of a DOE report here). That works out to 750 kWh/tonCO2. A $30/ton tax on CO2 would increase the cost of a generated kilowatt-hour by $0.04. So, at worst we are talking about a doubling in the cost of generating coal-based electricity. Wind is cost-competitive now, even without such a tax. With the tax, all sorts of other energies become viable. I am fine with having the cost of my electricity double. It makes generating my own electricity more attractive. More importantly, higher prices encourage conservation, which is sorely needed in the world. The United States, as a matter of policy, can choose to forge a lead in these energy and conservation technologies, or else continue business-as-usual until we have no choice but to adopt them. One path creates a promising new economic sector that we can export to the world, the other forces us to import as greater cost.
Actually, there are wobbles and other weirdness associated with the motion of the earth through its orbit, such that the sun is not actually at due south at the same time each day. See an explanation of analemma.
Since when is a 2-year payback period a bad thing? That LCD monitor will probably still work fine after five years. Most businesses are thrilled to get 3- to 5-year paybacks on equipment.
I agree with you on junking the old monitor, though. The author didn't mention what he did with it, but I'm guessing it went to the dump or, if we're lucky, a center that will break it down and reprocess it properly. Selling it to someone who would still use it would probably have been better.
Here's one possibility - give up your right to vote in the next election in exchange for a year's NYU tuition. Then, instead of slaving away at some summer job so that you can pay for ramen noodles for the next year, go and work on your campaign of choice. You'll probably be able to do more for your chosen candidate than simply voting for him would.
If you work on a voter advocacy campaign, registering new voters and getting them to the polls on election day, even if you yourself don't vote, aren't you doing more to further democracy? Also getting an education is, I believe, a furtherance of democracy, too.
It is generally accepted that, as a foundation of democracy, government transparency is essential. It is to this end, and for historical posterity, that records of communications within the White House (and Congress, and the Supreme Court) are preserved. The Presidential Records Act has been around for nearly three decades, and it has yet to be overturned on constitutional grounds.
As a clarification: the manner of the preservation isn't specified by law, only that the preservation be done.
As another clarification: the subversion that people (not just Democrats, and not just in the U.S.) accuse Bush of tends towards greater government secrecy and curtailing civil liberties. The subversion people accused Congress of in the wake of Nixon is towards greater government transparency and a weakened Executive. Each citizen must make their own judgement as to which is the greater subversion.
It's not like the government is going to roll in with the National Guard and seize the cables as national property. The United States is not Cuba or Venezuela. "Opening the wires" simply means that cable companies have to allow other people access to use their cables, for the same price they charge themselves internally. The infrastructure still has value, and the company still gets a return on their investment in the form of other companies' access and lease payments. Right now, you can't get access to most cable provider's wires at any price.
People harp on and on about this point, believing that the government is going to let one company use another company's infrastructure for free. But they forget that when AT&T was broken up in the 80s, the same thing was done with the phone lines. Start up telco companies paid the Baby Bells for access to the phone lines. The telco's didn't own the wires - they were paying the same rate that the Baby Bells charged themselves internally - but they were still able to make a profit while undercutting the Bells by offering a better service than the Bell's service at a better rate. It's a decoupling of the provided service from the infrastructure.
This sort of open access - allowing anyone who can pay to have access to the infrastructure - is an essential thing to understand with the upcoming 700 MHz auction.
On the other hand, a Bush Executive Order in late 2001 seems to allow almost anything from the President's or VP's office to be made off limits: Hopefully, this loophole can be closed and tighter retention policies put in place, not just for this case, but for all Presidential Papers. To put the Administration's opacity in perspective, Bush's executive order on this subject superceded one put in place by Reagan, and seeks to undermine a law put in place in response to Nixon.
The biggest thing about Penryn is the move to 45-nm fabrication, and the technological advances that were required to pull it off. IEEE Spectrum has a nice, in-depth (but accessible) article on those advances. High-k dielectrics and new metal gate configurations will be how advanced ICs are produced from now on. It is as large a shift for the fabs as a new chip architecture is for designers.
No, I haven't any stats. The thing to keep in mind is that the 1000 internal combustion engines (gasoline, diesel, ethanol, whatever) moving 1000 vehicles are together less efficient and produce greater emissions than a single centralized plant providing electric power to move that same 1000 cars. There are economies of scale involved in utility-scale generation that aren't available in small packages.
The internal combustion engine, depending on whose numbers you believe, is something like 25-40% efficient. That is, 25-40% of the chemical potential energy stored in the fuel is converted to mechanical energy for moving the vehicle. A combined cycle power plant, where you burn a gas in a turbines, then use the hot exhaust to also create steam to drive more turbines, can be upwards of 60% efficient. In situations where co-generation is also possible (a rarity, since most homes and buildings aren't powered by utility steam), that efficiency can be raised closer to 70%.
The other benefit, as others have noted, is that it is easier to clean the emissions (i.e., remove particulates, reduce SOx and NOx, remove mercury, etc.) and, eventually, capture the carbon dioxide output, at a single large location than to try and outfit every vehicle with the same equipment.
The last paragraph of the press release explains. The distance chosen was about the distance to the L1 and L2 Lagrangian Points around the Earth. These are candidate locations for the next generation James Webb Space Telescope (also at wikipedia). For that application, high data bandwidth is extremely useful.
Very likely, if something like this were incorporated into the Webb design, it would be augmented with traditional radio for tracking, telemetry, and as a backup to the laser link for bulk data transfer.
Political consultants and focus groups are common tools used by the politically savvy (like presidential candidates) to vet and refine the language of major policy speeches (and even the content of the policy itself). These are people that are paid to help identify the weak points (either the content or the presentation) in the speech and improve it. Focus groups largely are paid a small amount to give you soft impressions: do you agree or disagree, are you excited or bored, etc. Political consultants are paid a lot more to tell you more specific things: change the wording of this sentence, emphasize this point by saying XYZ, don't say this or you'll antagonize so-and-so, etc. This is, in part, how a State of the Union address comes about.
Ideally, the President (not just Bush, any President) would have people on salary whose sole job is to play the devil's advocate. These would NOT just be people who actually agree with you but can argue the other side, but rather people who genuinely believe the other side. Democrats should hire Republicans, and vice versa. One common criticism of the current President is that he surrounds himself with people who all agree with him. To the people they work for, they're royal pains in the ass, but they are of benefit, too.
Now, one might ask why a President should pay someone to disagree with him, when he can surely walk down the street to Congress and get an earful for free. That has merit, too, and it's something that appears to be lacking these days. But there are advantages to having your own nay-sayers in house: it allows you to craft better policy from the start, rather than duking it out in public; you don't tip your hand before you are ready; when you do announce policy, you are prepared for counter-arguments; and, you avoid the appearance of always doing it your way (again, a common criticism of this current President).
However, in a hybrid, there are usually one or two intermediaries between the wheels, electric motor, and battery storage. The intermediaries are the gearbox and power electronics. Both of these intermediaries convert input power to output power: input torque and shaft speed to output torque and shaft speed, input current and voltage to output current and voltage. The efficiency of the conversion varies depending on design and operating conditions, but is theoretically 100%.
With some intelligence built into the powertrain (i.e., computing power, algorithms, control laws), you can adjust the gearbox setting (by shifting gears) and the power electronics (by modulating frequency or duty cycle) such that braking torque can be constant throughout deceleration. The deceleration power in the mechanical and electrical subsystems won't be a constant, though.
My understanding is that the main reason the Prius has to use its mechanical brakes at all is that the components in the regenerative powertrain have maximum power ratings. For instance, the batteries have some maximum charging current limit. So the computer has to augment the regenerative braking (which is power-limited) with the mechanical brakes (which don't have that limit in normal usage).
This is why having ultra-capacitors in place of or augmenting the batteries will be so useful - they have almost no current limit, and can absorb the spikes for accelerating and decelerating in stride.
For those interested in hearing Bruce Schneier dispassionately and quite reasonably shred a lot of the "security" measures implemented since 9/11, I suggest reading his book Beyond Fear. The subtitle says it all: thinking sensibly about security in an uncertain world. The book was reviewed on Slashdot not long ago.
The book takes a very general approach to security, analyzing it with the most basic categorizations, while using very clear real-life examples to illustrate. The final chapters deal specifically with security against terrorism, particularly since 9/11. His conclusion is that, from a security standpoint, most of the measures put in place - additional airport scrutiny, massive centralized databases looking for suspicious patterns, the move towards national ID cards, etc. - are largely ineffective as security measures. The massive trade-off of decreased privacy and liberty coupled with enormous cost for these measures make them especially unreasonable. In short, the widespread perceived risk and culture of fear it has fostered has made our response to the new terroristic threat wildly out-of-proportion with the actual risk.
It's mostly preaching to the choir here at Slashdot, but I think this book should be as widely read as possible.
Indeed, much more than 6 million. If it were 6 million, out of a few hundred million cellphones in the U.S., that would hardly represent a hegemony. On the other hand, if ever cellphone in the U.S. from Verizon, Sprint, and T-Mobile were to move to the google platform, that would represent a serious force. It would still probably not be a hegemony, not without Cingular (sorry, AT&T), but a serious force nonetheless.
This is hypothetical, of course, since it is unrealistic to think that ever phone from those three carriers would port over - the cell manufacturers wouldn't allow it.
For the bold and motivated thief, walking in and then out with a laptop is easy. Just look like you are supposed to be there. Slipping it into a briefcase helps with the illusion.
On the other hand, someone waltzed off with a 24" LCD monitor from the desk of a co-worker not long ago. His office was the furthest in from the door, so someone needed to be particularly bold to go all the way in, disconnect the monitor, and walk back out. No one saw him either, which is impressive considering the size of the load he was carrying. It's a lot harder to look and act natural about carrying a large monitor than a laptop.
IBM isn't the only folks working on this. IEEE Spectrum this month has a description of a competing 60 GHz technology.
For what it's worth, if you know some people who could go in on it with you, there's the 5-license family pack for $199, or only $40/person. There's just one copy of the media, but there's nothing stopping you from duplicating it so you each have a copy.
This is true of the single-license, too. There isn't anything like license validation, activation, or genuine advantage in OS X, so I guess there isn't anything preventing you from pirating the hell out of one single licensed copy; the extra price you pay in the family pack is for piece of mind (if you have an objection to outright piracy), and four extra "proof of purchase" coupons (whatever that's worth).
Nitric Oxide is used to improve perfusion in people on respirators. It is particularly useful in premature babies in the NICU, whose lungs are not as well developed and have difficulty absorbing enough oxygen and can suffer from pulmonary hypertension. In general, NO relaxes the smooth muscle in arteries, making it a vasodilator. It is rapidly absorbed and deactivated by hemoglobin, so it's effects are generally confined to the lungs (i.e., they're not systemic). So, while the research may be biased by a company that wants to sell something, there is at least some science behind it.
Nitrous Oxide is laughing gas, an anesthetic. It can also cause various psychological effects. It isn't metabolized quickly in the body, such that a person breathing it in can also breathe it out. In small doses it can cause euphoria. In higher doses it can cause various psychoses and death through hypoxia.