I think the first photo illustrates a design flaw in many offshore wind farms: the wind turbines are arranged on a grid pattern. This means you can see alignments such as the three on the right of the photo. I find these more noticeable that the vague fuzziness on the left part of that photo.
So wind turbines should be placed so they don't form alignments when seen from the shore. For instance one could place them according to a semi-random pattern (imagine a forest). But maybe simply building the grid out of arcs instead of straight lines would be sufficient.
Even if teachers could kick kids out of their classroom, many kids would actually enjoy it. Gee, an hour at the pub, rather than in a boring class! W00t!
It's not because you're kicked out of your classroom that you get to go to the pub. You may end up being stuck in an office with some administrative personnel for the duration of your class instead. That person may also decide to give you some extra hours of detention.
2 birds, 1 very expensive stone. It would probably cost a great deal of money to build tunnels, evacuate out almost all the air, and maintain that low atmosphere. Sure, it might save some energy of running the train, but the money and resources needed to do this would greatly outweigh any benefit.
I agree with you on the difficulty and cost issues with building tunnels with a partial vacuum. But if they are made to run gravity trains then I totally disagree with you when you say there would be no benefit. Gravity trains would provide much faster travel than anything we have now, without even expending much energy in the process.
It's unlikely to happen any time soon if ever unfortunately.
Um, 50 gigawatt hours is about 1.8 * 10^14 joules. That is about 43 kilotons of energy. Now think catastrophic failure.
You seem to think this is a totally untested domain. However we have been doing the same sort of thing with flammable natural gas for decades and I have not heard about any accident. So presumably the underground storage of large amounts of gas is a well tested and understood technology.
Besides you certainly don't need or even want to store your 50 gigawatt hours of energy in just one basket. Instead you'd want multiple baskets either close to production or consumption areas.
Furthermore, the existing power grid in the U.S. is not in any shape for a nation of pure electric vehicles. It simply was not designed for that purpose... hell, we can barely handle all our air conditioners. Fact is, we have neither the generating nor distribution capacity, and such a buildout would be hideously expensive at this point.
<sarcasm> And then there's all those lunatics that ask that we lay pipes in the ground to distribute drinking water! Fact is, we have neither the pumping nor distribution capacity, and such a buildout would be hideously expensive at this point. Who would finance it? The people don't have the money for it. It would have to be the government which means more taxes thus killing our already troubled economy. All that because the lazy bums don't want to go to the nearest well!
</sarcasm>
Sorry, couldn't resist pointing out nations have already successfully tackled daunting engineering challenges long long ago and succeeded despite their inferior knowledge and technology. Maybe our civilization truly is going downhill.
But what's the point of having 700-800 miles on a long trip? Dear god, if you drive 700-800 miles without stopping to rest or eat, please don't do it when I'm on the road!
A lot of people drive long distances.
Yes. And if there is more than one driver there is no need to stop for more than 30 seconds every two hours.
I'd have no problem with a 200 mile range except for the fact that every 200 miles I'd need to stop for 4 hours to recharge, turning that 6 hour 400 mile trip into a 10 hour trip.
That's why we need rapid recharge, not necessarily to full capacity as long as it lets you drive for another two hours. Then this turns your 6 hours trip into a 6 hours 15 minutes one which is not too bad. Even in the worst case where it means you need to recharge twice, it just turns into 6 hours and a half.
There's also the battery leasing and swap option where you'd only need to make one 45 seconds stop to swap the battery.
In that case, they should either work for a salary for a book investment company or run their own company (which again needs investment of some kind). That is how business usually works. Not being able to collect a steady salary is something any upstart entrepreneur without backing has to deal with. There is nothing special about authors there.
There is: without copyright law anyone can make and sell copies as soon as the author has sold (or even shown) his first copy. That's an issue that companies that deal with physical products don't have to worry about... Copyright is needed whenever the value is not in the easy to duplicate physical good, but in the story / image / software it contains.
What, if your partner invests all their hours and money into long-term stocks, you don't get the earnings back from that because they died?
What if your partner dies after having spent all their money into their startup company? Shit happens. That is why we have social safety nets.
You inherit all his shares into the company so if it succeeds you get the corresponding dividends. I don't see any problem here.
No, we are forced to subsidize the corn-based ethanol producers. There is no choose in this when the money comes from our taxes.
Right but your taxes will subsidize corn ethanol no matter what kind of engine you use so this cannot count as a point against this new engine. I guess paiute's point was more that, from an ecological standpoint, Flex-Fuel engines are no better than regular engines as long as the only choice is corn ethanol. In that view this new engine's only advantage is the 10% reduction in fuel consumption.
You are assuming that ethanol is a green fuel. I'm not so sure about corn-based ethanol. Future technology may change that, but I am uneasy using a subsidized food crop to make fuel for cars.
The grand-parent is not assuming anything, you are the one who missed that since this is a Flex-Fuel engine, you choose whether to subsidize ethanol or not. So if this ever takes off, buy a car with this engine, continue using regular fossil fuel, and enjoy the 10% consumption reduction anyway.
In the end, the information being obtained without a warrant is all information you freely gave to a third party.
Concerning phone calls, technically there is no way of making that phone call without disclosing the phone number you want to call to the operator. So I disagree about your assertion that the information was freely given to it.
Concerning the GPS data, as far as I know there is no way to prevent a GPS-equipped phone from disclosing your location to the operator. I'm not even sure giving such an option to customers would be legal in the US. So again, I have to disagree with the 'freely' part here, though it could be argued that you can still buy a cheap phone with no GPS, and a separate GPS with no communication capability. But erally, what kind of an option is that?
Finally, as was pointed out in another reply, that data is sent to a second-party (the operator with whom you already have a relation), not a third-party (the police with whom you have no relation).
Now don't misunderstand me. You're saying that such is the law and I don't argue with that. I just disagree that the above justifies that you should have no expectation of privacy for this information and thus that the law as it is makes sense.
There's also the concept of freedom of association to consider. Congress can't compel me by force of law to associate with anybody, including a health insurance company.
So the solution is obviously for the federal government to provide health insurance itself, paid for by your taxes. Then you would not have to associate with anyone or anything and since any resident would automatically be covered, the government would not have to ask for any proof that you carry insurance.
Uh, with 8 million requests in a year I'd say it's already very 1984ish.
What does it mean '8 million requests'? The article, if you can call it that, is not clear at all on this point.
For instance, if law enforcement asks to know the location of a person for a 48 hour period, is that one request? Or is that two, one per day? Or 48, one per hour? Or do these requests each correspond to a single GPS coordinate + timestamp? If so at one coordinate per minute the above example would turn into 69120 'requests'.
This reminds me of web server statistics: there's a big difference between files served, pages served, visits, and unique visitors.
Having a car is a choice. The health insurance mandate is a mandate that will be imposed just by virtue of being born on American soil.
Soooooo. You're saying immigrants would not be subject to that law? Or maybe that it's ok if they are because they are not (or should not be) protected by the constitution anyway?
The new rules, issued in September and October, tell officers "screening may not be conducted to detect evidence of crimes unrelated to transportation security"
Does this mean they can no longer go through your computer files?
Generally the 3D technology is only used for "gag" effects in children's and horror movies anyway.
I thought so too, but I had to watch Up in 3D (didn't notice the theater only showed it in 3D until it was too late) and came away pretty impressed. No "gag" effect that I can remember. Instead I had the impression of looking through a window, rather than looking at a poster on a wall.
Seeing as you're sitting calmly at a computer and you still didn't consider turning the damn engine off as a possibility
As soon as you turn of the engine you start losing break assist which is not a good thing when you're going too fast. So the GP got the order right. Shutting the engine off should really be a last resort.
A lot of people seem to believe that hacking an election that uses electronic voting machines is so hard it's the stuff of science fiction.
However some time ago I came across an article describing how an unknown group hacked the Vodafone-Panafon cell-phone system. To me this hack conclusively proves that these groups have the technical and financial resources necessary to steal an electronic voting election.
Consider:
They tapped the cellphones of Greece's prime minister and over 100 high-ranking dignitaries. All people for whom security is important and who would have noticed if something was amiss.
They hacked into Vodafone's switches: equipment that's rarer and more expensive than voting machines.
They had to hot-patch the software in memory since these switches are almost never rebooted. No such trickery is needed for voting machines.
They also had to ensure their hacks would evade detection and survive the regular software upgrades. In particular these upgrades perform checksums on the running software to ensure the starting point is as expected. But hey had countermeasures to avoid detection by these checksums. Not an issue you have if you hack the voting machines at the right time before the election.
To evade detection they also had to make sure none of their activity would be visible in any of the audit logs.
Yet, they remained undetected for over 6 months and where only detected by chance. In an election your hack only has to remain undetected for one day, then it can wipe itself clean and you've won.
The group who performed this hack was never identified.
These errors wouldn't be tolerated with ATM machines because the public seems to care a lot more if their bank account is fraked with but not so much their vote for some reason...
When an ATM machine makes a mistake they very quickly see the result of it on their bank statement. So yes, they then get upset.
When a voting machine makes a mistake, someone still gets elected with no one the wiser (unless the error was huge like more votes than voters). So since nobody knows the machines made a mistake (or were hacked) nobody cares or is upset.
write a simple app that writes the vote to a flat text file,
Thus writing the votes sequentially. If you independently record the order in which people vote (audio recorder in your pocket), then you can pretty easily know how each of them voted. See, you've failed at preserving voter privacy already. Preserving it requires randomizing the order of the votes in some way, which is not very practical with a flat text file.
pretends to then read the recorded result back to the voter for them to confirm,
Fixed that for you. What's written in the file does not have to match what's recorded in the file and the voter will never be able to prove anything. The software you wrote may not be the one that's used during the elections either. And again it's unlikely you'll be able to prove anything.
and store a hash of the result separately. encrypt all the drives, lock down the hardware in each location with steel boxes and armed guards if needed.
All this protects is the result. You need to prevent tampering of the software and yet make it possible to update it to integrate fixes (unless you claim to be able to produce bug-free software in your first attempt). You also need to make it possible to change the ballot definitions obviously (unless you plan on your system being used only once and then thrown away), and yet prevent non authorized parties (including election employees) from hacking them.
encrypt all the drives,
Encryption is to prevent unauthorized parties from reading the disk. What you really want is signing of all the executable code by a trusted authority so you can detect any tampering. The problem is finding a trusted authority: it obviously cannot be the government in place, not the voting computer manufacturer either, a random bloke taken off the streets? (who picks him?)
Yet another problem is that none of this lets the voter verify the voting machine in front of him has not been hacked on election day.
transport the results out of the voting location with the votes and hash separately and count then use the hash to verify that the count wasn't tampered with in transit etc.
All election officials have to do is prepare matching votes and hashes in advance of the election and substitute them for the real ones during transport, or in the secure storage room to which the public does not have access. Lesson: as soon as something leaves the polling place, and thus escapes the surveillance of the public, you can assume it has been corrupted.
I like this idea. Voting systems corporations claim their solution is accurate and secure, let them put their money where their mouth is and let people try and crack it.
All it will prove is that these machines are hard to hack for outsiders. But the number one threat is that of insiders; mainly the government in place (who has most to lose in an election) and corrupt programmers at the company making the voting computers.
I have two monitor-less servers, one has 2 X 500G drives in it while the other has 4. The one with 4 drives takes about 160 watts of power while the other with 2 takes about 80 watts of power.
All this means is that your two systems are pretty different. A typical 3.5" hard-drive uses less than 10 watts, not anywhere close to the 40 watts your example would seem to imply.
Slashdot Mirror
I think the first photo illustrates a design flaw in many offshore wind farms: the wind turbines are arranged on a grid pattern. This means you can see alignments such as the three on the right of the photo. I find these more noticeable that the vague fuzziness on the left part of that photo.
So wind turbines should be placed so they don't form alignments when seen from the shore. For instance one could place them according to a semi-random pattern (imagine a forest). But maybe simply building the grid out of arcs instead of straight lines would be sufficient.
...snip...
Source or I call BS.
Concerning "Teachers are not even allowed to fail students", here are three examples:
These don't illustrate parents disrupting class but two of them illustrate parents forcing the school to let their child pass.
Even if teachers could kick kids out of their classroom, many kids would actually enjoy it. Gee, an hour at the pub, rather than in a boring class! W00t!
It's not because you're kicked out of your classroom that you get to go to the pub. You may end up being stuck in an office with some administrative personnel for the duration of your class instead. That person may also decide to give you some extra hours of detention.
2 birds, 1 very expensive stone. It would probably cost a great deal of money to build tunnels, evacuate out almost all the air, and maintain that low atmosphere. Sure, it might save some energy of running the train, but the money and resources needed to do this would greatly outweigh any benefit.
I agree with you on the difficulty and cost issues with building tunnels with a partial vacuum. But if they are made to run gravity trains then I totally disagree with you when you say there would be no benefit. Gravity trains would provide much faster travel than anything we have now, without even expending much energy in the process. It's unlikely to happen any time soon if ever unfortunately.
Um, 50 gigawatt hours is about 1.8 * 10^14 joules. That is about 43 kilotons of energy. Now think catastrophic failure.
You seem to think this is a totally untested domain. However we have been doing the same sort of thing with flammable natural gas for decades and I have not heard about any accident. So presumably the underground storage of large amounts of gas is a well tested and understood technology.
Besides you certainly don't need or even want to store your 50 gigawatt hours of energy in just one basket. Instead you'd want multiple baskets either close to production or consumption areas.
Furthermore, the existing power grid in the U.S. is not in any shape for a nation of pure electric vehicles. It simply was not designed for that purpose ... hell, we can barely handle all our air conditioners. Fact is, we have neither the generating nor distribution capacity, and such a buildout would be hideously expensive at this point.
<sarcasm>
And then there's all those lunatics that ask that we lay pipes in the ground to distribute drinking water! Fact is, we have neither the pumping nor distribution capacity, and such a buildout would be hideously expensive at this point. Who would finance it? The people don't have the money for it. It would have to be the government which means more taxes thus killing our already troubled economy. All that because the lazy bums don't want to go to the nearest well!
</sarcasm>
Sorry, couldn't resist pointing out nations have already successfully tackled daunting engineering challenges long long ago and succeeded despite their inferior knowledge and technology. Maybe our civilization truly is going downhill.
But what's the point of having 700-800 miles on a long trip? Dear god, if you drive 700-800 miles without stopping to rest or eat, please don't do it when I'm on the road!
A lot of people drive long distances.
Yes. And if there is more than one driver there is no need to stop for more than 30 seconds every two hours.
I'd have no problem with a 200 mile range except for the fact that every 200 miles I'd need to stop for 4 hours to recharge, turning that 6 hour 400 mile trip into a 10 hour trip.
That's why we need rapid recharge, not necessarily to full capacity as long as it lets you drive for another two hours. Then this turns your 6 hours trip into a 6 hours 15 minutes one which is not too bad. Even in the worst case where it means you need to recharge twice, it just turns into 6 hours and a half.
There's also the battery leasing and swap option where you'd only need to make one 45 seconds stop to swap the battery.
without copyright law ...
Wait, who was arguing that copyright law shouldn't exist at all?
You were. By arguing that 'There is nothing special about authors there' you were denying any justification for its existence.
An author is more like a long-term investor.
In that case, they should either work for a salary for a book investment company or run their own company (which again needs investment of some kind). That is how business usually works. Not being able to collect a steady salary is something any upstart entrepreneur without backing has to deal with. There is nothing special about authors there.
There is: without copyright law anyone can make and sell copies as soon as the author has sold (or even shown) his first copy. That's an issue that companies that deal with physical products don't have to worry about... Copyright is needed whenever the value is not in the easy to duplicate physical good, but in the story / image / software it contains.
What, if your partner invests all their hours and money into long-term stocks, you don't get the earnings back from that because they died?
What if your partner dies after having spent all their money into their startup company? Shit happens. That is why we have social safety nets.
You inherit all his shares into the company so if it succeeds you get the corresponding dividends. I don't see any problem here.
No, we are forced to subsidize the corn-based ethanol producers. There is no choose in this when the money comes from our taxes.
Right but your taxes will subsidize corn ethanol no matter what kind of engine you use so this cannot count as a point against this new engine. I guess paiute's point was more that, from an ecological standpoint, Flex-Fuel engines are no better than regular engines as long as the only choice is corn ethanol. In that view this new engine's only advantage is the 10% reduction in fuel consumption.
You are assuming that ethanol is a green fuel. I'm not so sure about corn-based ethanol. Future technology may change that, but I am uneasy using a subsidized food crop to make fuel for cars.
The grand-parent is not assuming anything, you are the one who missed that since this is a Flex-Fuel engine, you choose whether to subsidize ethanol or not. So if this ever takes off, buy a car with this engine, continue using regular fossil fuel, and enjoy the 10% consumption reduction anyway.
Likewise people who invade a country without permission also have rights, but nevertheless still deserve to be deported.
Oh, so foreigner == invader? Read my post again. I di not mention illegal immigrants, you're the one who made that assumption...
In the end, the information being obtained without a warrant is all information you freely gave to a third party.
Concerning phone calls, technically there is no way of making that phone call without disclosing the phone number you want to call to the operator. So I disagree about your assertion that the information was freely given to it.
Concerning the GPS data, as far as I know there is no way to prevent a GPS-equipped phone from disclosing your location to the operator. I'm not even sure giving such an option to customers would be legal in the US. So again, I have to disagree with the 'freely' part here, though it could be argued that you can still buy a cheap phone with no GPS, and a separate GPS with no communication capability. But erally, what kind of an option is that?
Finally, as was pointed out in another reply, that data is sent to a second-party (the operator with whom you already have a relation), not a third-party (the police with whom you have no relation).
Now don't misunderstand me. You're saying that such is the law and I don't argue with that. I just disagree that the above justifies that you should have no expectation of privacy for this information and thus that the law as it is makes sense.
There's also the concept of freedom of association to consider. Congress can't compel me by force of law to associate with anybody, including a health insurance company.
So the solution is obviously for the federal government to provide health insurance itself, paid for by your taxes. Then you would not have to associate with anyone or anything and since any resident would automatically be covered, the government would not have to ask for any proof that you carry insurance.
Uh, with 8 million requests in a year I'd say it's already very 1984ish.
What does it mean '8 million requests'? The article, if you can call it that, is not clear at all on this point.
For instance, if law enforcement asks to know the location of a person for a 48 hour period, is that one request? Or is that two, one per day? Or 48, one per hour? Or do these requests each correspond to a single GPS coordinate + timestamp? If so at one coordinate per minute the above example would turn into 69120 'requests'.
This reminds me of web server statistics: there's a big difference between files served, pages served, visits, and unique visitors.
Having a car is a choice. The health insurance mandate is a mandate that will be imposed just by virtue of being born on American soil.
Soooooo. You're saying immigrants would not be subject to that law? Or maybe that it's ok if they are because they are not (or should not be) protected by the constitution anyway?
The new rules, issued in September and October, tell officers "screening may not be conducted to detect evidence of crimes unrelated to transportation security"
Does this mean they can no longer go through your computer files?
Generally the 3D technology is only used for "gag" effects in children's and horror movies anyway.
I thought so too, but I had to watch Up in 3D (didn't notice the theater only showed it in 3D until it was too late) and came away pretty impressed. No "gag" effect that I can remember. Instead I had the impression of looking through a window, rather than looking at a poster on a wall.
Seeing as you're sitting calmly at a computer and you still didn't consider turning the damn engine off as a possibility
As soon as you turn of the engine you start losing break assist which is not a good thing when you're going too fast. So the GP got the order right. Shutting the engine off should really be a last resort.
A lot of people seem to believe that hacking an election that uses electronic voting machines is so hard it's the stuff of science fiction.
However some time ago I came across an article describing how an unknown group hacked the Vodafone-Panafon cell-phone system. To me this hack conclusively proves that these groups have the technical and financial resources necessary to steal an electronic voting election.
Consider:
These errors wouldn't be tolerated with ATM machines because the public seems to care a lot more if their bank account is fraked with but not so much their vote for some reason...
When an ATM machine makes a mistake they very quickly see the result of it on their bank statement. So yes, they then get upset.
When a voting machine makes a mistake, someone still gets elected with no one the wiser (unless the error was huge like more votes than voters). So since nobody knows the machines made a mistake (or were hacked) nobody cares or is upset.
write a simple app that writes the vote to a flat text file,
Thus writing the votes sequentially. If you independently record the order in which people vote (audio recorder in your pocket), then you can pretty easily know how each of them voted. See, you've failed at preserving voter privacy already. Preserving it requires randomizing the order of the votes in some way, which is not very practical with a flat text file.
pretends to then read the recorded result back to the voter for them to confirm,
Fixed that for you. What's written in the file does not have to match what's recorded in the file and the voter will never be able to prove anything. The software you wrote may not be the one that's used during the elections either. And again it's unlikely you'll be able to prove anything.
and store a hash of the result separately. encrypt all the drives, lock down the hardware in each location with steel boxes and armed guards if needed.
All this protects is the result. You need to prevent tampering of the software and yet make it possible to update it to integrate fixes (unless you claim to be able to produce bug-free software in your first attempt). You also need to make it possible to change the ballot definitions obviously (unless you plan on your system being used only once and then thrown away), and yet prevent non authorized parties (including election employees) from hacking them.
encrypt all the drives,
Encryption is to prevent unauthorized parties from reading the disk. What you really want is signing of all the executable code by a trusted authority so you can detect any tampering. The problem is finding a trusted authority: it obviously cannot be the government in place, not the voting computer manufacturer either, a random bloke taken off the streets? (who picks him?)
Yet another problem is that none of this lets the voter verify the voting machine in front of him has not been hacked on election day.
transport the results out of the voting location with the votes and hash separately and count then use the hash to verify that the count wasn't tampered with in transit etc.
All election officials have to do is prepare matching votes and hashes in advance of the election and substitute them for the real ones during transport, or in the secure storage room to which the public does not have access. Lesson: as soon as something leaves the polling place, and thus escapes the surveillance of the public, you can assume it has been corrupted.
I like this idea. Voting systems corporations claim their solution is accurate and secure, let them put their money where their mouth is and let people try and crack it.
All it will prove is that these machines are hard to hack for outsiders. But the number one threat is that of insiders; mainly the government in place (who has most to lose in an election) and corrupt programmers at the company making the voting computers.
Also, the mac mini draws 110 watts http://store.apple.com/us/browse/home/shop_mac/family/mac_mini?aid=AIC-NAUS-K2-BUYNOW-MACMINI-DESIGN&cp=BUYNOW-MACMINI-DESIGN
Here's the consumption data for my Mac Mini which has a 1.83GHz Core 2 Duo and 1GB of RAM (measurements taken with a Voltcraft Energy Monitor 3000):
So as you can see the full load power consumption is nowhere near the 110W you quote.
I have two monitor-less servers, one has 2 X 500G drives in it while the other has 4. The one with 4 drives takes about 160 watts of power while the other with 2 takes about 80 watts of power.
All this means is that your two systems are pretty different. A typical 3.5" hard-drive uses less than 10 watts, not anywhere close to the 40 watts your example would seem to imply.