The problem with this is that asteroids are very spread apart in our solar system, moving quickly, and usually also far away. Just getting to asteroids with any sort of heavy equipment capable of processing and refining it into useful metal will require a ridiculous amount of fuel.
Getting it back to earth also very tricky. The US has at great expense designed systems capable of bringing space shuttles and command modules safely from orbit to the ocean or ground. The problem is, these are all expensive and would require either parachutes, retrorockets, or the ability to glide like the shuttle. If it is just allowed to fall ballistically back to earth, a bunch of it will get vaporised, and a great deal of effort will need to be expended to reduce the probability of it landing in an ocean where it would immediately sink, or in a habited area.
It's a nice idea, and it makes sense to do a more in depth study, but I think we are still a very long from that becoming viable.
Electric Circuits 7th Edition, by Nilsson and Riedel, ISBN 0-13-146592-9 was the introductory text used at my university (UC Santa Barbara).
I didn't really go to class much, so most of my learning was straight out of this book. It is very easy to understand, and everything is covered from a basic level. It covers what all of the basic circuit elements are, how to analyze circuits, opamps, and circuits with reactive components, i.e. inductors and capacitors. It does not cover too many other topics, but it is an excellent reference on basic circuit analysis techniques which I still refer to today when I need to refresh my memory on basic circuit techniques. It will help you learn basic techniques very effectively which online resources do not often include, especially not all in one place. I find that it's style of writing and layout is much easier to understand than Horowitz and Hill's The Art of Electronics, which is frequently recommended as a self-study book, but the scope of that book is much different from this one.
For finding out what basic circuits you will find useful, I would honestly just recommend using google, it will help you find much of what you need to know. Find any of the myriad sites that have a list of basic circuits, and just look through them.
You indicated an interest in robotics, and usually most of the work goes into the physical construction, and programming a microcontroller. My books in this area are unfortunately not at my current residence, but you should buy a book on robotics specifically, make sure it covers the physical design and construction. You will also need to choose a microcontroller platform, the two most popular for hobbyists are Atmel and Microchip. The former is IMHO a better solution as it is more flexible and uses an open toolchain. Microchip is easier to get started with, but you are limited because you need to use their proprietary toolchain (or a third party toolchain that may not support all chips properly), and free compilers are usually only shareware, otherwise you have to write in assembly (which is not a bad idea).
For a hobbyist you will want an nice array of parts, you should get a resistor kit with a bunch of values, get a capacitor kit but it doesn't need to be big if you also buy a bunch of 0.1uF ceramic and 10uF electrolytic capacitors which you will probably use a lot of, get some 2N3904/6 transistors (basic NPN and PNP transistors), some MOSFETs that can handle some decent current, a breadboard with wires, and some basic chips like the 555 timer, a decade counter, maybe some logic gates, and some opamps (I'd recommend the LM358 since it can operate with a single power supply voltage).
The atmosphere is not transparent at *any* wavelength that is sufficiently high to be used for transmitting energy. You're looking at 85% or higher losses no matter what you do.
Current power transmission lines deal with I*I*R losses quite effectively by increasing the voltage to lower the current. I think the main problem with transmitting power to the ground with a wire is that:
1) The reason we can't make a space elevator with current tech is that it would be so tall it would collapse from its own weight, and so would a wire.
2)I have a sneaking suspicion that a wire like this would serve as an excellent lightning rod.
3) Even if it's very strong, if it breaks, it will be extremely expensive to replace/fix.
Beaming power in from an orbiting solar satellite is not currently economically feasible.
I see you've been modded Informative, so I'm not sure everybody realizes that the above product is an April Fool's joke that's been around since at least 2007 - click on the Add to Cart button to see their April Fools message.
This has been a public service announcement by Mattski.
Even if you are incredibly generous with the numbers, the overall efficiency of this system would be very low. 80% Efficiency for the power amplifier in the transmitting satellite would be extremely good, and doesn't take into account all of the other losses that will take place in the satellite, such as generating and amplifying the RF signal and antenna and sidelobe losses. So in other words, 80% would be basically ideal with today's technology (Amplifier efficiency). Now take into account the losses on the ground. Converting that RF power at several GHz back into 60Hz AC is going to cost power, I'm honestly guessing here because I've never looked at any such system, but in power electronics the bigger the change in voltage and/or frequency means worse efficiency, and the RF signal would probably be converted back down to DC then, transmitted over power lines as 60Hz AC. So I'm going to be generous and say we might be able to get 85% at the receiving station.
So we're at 80%(transmit) * 85%(transit) * 85%(receive) = 57.8% efficiency. Almost half of the electrical power collected by the orbiting station is lost before it gets to the power lines.
Now also take into account the fact that satellites are *very* expensive to build and launch, incredibly difficult to perform maintenance on, you have the expense of maintaining the satellite's orbit and software, and the expense of building and manning a ground station. Based on all of these factors I would be very, very surprised if orbiting solar stations are going to be viable options without some major advances. Maybe if we get the whole space elevator thing worked out so satellite launches are cheaper, but I'm not holding my breath.
These devices are useful for people who are too scared or shy to approach people and ask them to hang up. Some people will hang up if you ask them, especially if you are polite. Others will not. And do you know why they will not hang up? It is because they have a right to use their phone on the train and in other public areas, and your needs and desires do not supersede theirs.
I highly doubt that you refuse to go to public areas where people are speaking amongst themselves, so why would a cellphone conversation be so much more aggravating that you would even want one of these? You don't know what you are interrupting, it could be an extremely important conversation, either business or personal, or it could be completely mundane. Either way, you don't have any right, legal or moral, to stop those conversations.
So please, stop being arrogant and laboring under the misconception that your desire for the absence of human voices on public transportation makes it all right to break the law and use one of these devices.
When they turn on the light in the video the brightness ramps up over the course of a second or two. I'm not sure if this is because of a dimming control or just the starting up process, but it seems feasible that it could be operated at reduced power levels with the appropriate control circuitry, though there is no telling if that will cause an efficiency hit until they release more details.
Did you read the article? It says that although the invitation to the group implied solution posting was encouraged, "no one did post a full final solution. It was more the back and forth that you get in any study group."
Trying to prevent this sort of learning from taking place just holds students back. It can be very hard to figure out problem solving methodologies the first time, and the homework is there for students to figure that out. But very few people I know do it all on their own, because even smart people can get stuck and not see the little trick which allows them to solve the problem.
Come test time, if you actually learned the material, which is the point of the homework, then you will probably do well.
Furthermore, the possibility that "these questions generally come from books which are used over and over. So by the third semester these books are going to be pretty well answered on the internet" is not a convincing argument for several reasons. Firstly, as stated, solutions were not posted. Secondly, for popular introductory class textbooks, official solution keys are readily available through Amazon and fellow students. I've made use of them myself, but to help out when I was stuck, not to just copy down answers. Thirdly, most textbooks for this type of introductory class have a very large number of problems available, it would be simple to adjust the assignments while covering the same content. And finally, I detest professors who are too lazy to make their own assignments. In a class this large (at least 147 people), there is a massive amount of money flowing into the university from these students, and yet that professors would take all of their problems from the book and not even change it from term to term is practically negligence. In a class of 25 people, the professor putting in an extra hour of work per week to help the students helps exactly 25 students. In a class of over 150, the benefit is multiplied by at least six times. It frustrates me that so many professors have this opportunity to help so many students, and yet they lazily teach from a textbook. (/rant).
This is ridiculous, very little of the advanced electronics used in the US is actually built in the US. Even when I buy printed circuit boards for my own personal projects, I use a service which has them manufactured overseas, because it's cheaper. When I buy chips like microcontrollers, they are certainly not manufactured in the US. I think the last batch I got shipped from China. Even simple things like resistors and capacitors are typically not made in the US.
I'm also a little wary of your comment about this suspicious component that has no use. Maybe I'm wrong because you've given no details, but you have given not details to make me think that this situation is anything but overreaction. It sounds like you are meeting with people like managers, not engineers. A good electrical engineer should be able to examine it and figure out why it is there, and it wouldn't have this incredibly vague label of "apparently had no function". It has a function, unless the engineers changed the design and forgot about it, or left it there as an easter egg. Hobbyists have reverse engineered the complicated digital hardware and software which keeps you from booting your own OS on Playstations and Xbox's, unless this device is really that complex I think it wouldn't be so hard to figure out.
With a manager, maybe somebody on his staff made a comment about not knowing why it was there, and so this manager decided to call meetings to discuss this foreign threat without having any truly credible reason to believe a threat was present. I do not think that this is a "valid issue" as you state, merely that bureaucrats think that it is a valid issue. It still matters, but there is a big difference.
American companies will not become more cautious. The minute a major manufacturer decides to build their products in the US, their costs are going to go way up, and that means that competitors will be able to undercut their prices simply by continuing to have their products built overseas. Then the altruistic corporation which was trying to preserve American jobs will go out of business, and they'll all lose their jobs.
Enforcing higher rates for people who introduce risk-factors into their lives is a very tricky endeavor.
For example, I am a smoker, but I average less than 10 cigarettes smoked per month. Do I pay the same premium that a pack a day smoker does? Or will we all have to constantly fill out questionnaires about personal things like how many cigarettes we smoked in the past month? Do we tax food in restaurants based on how unhealthy it is and give the money to health insurers, or will people have to keep a log of their eating habits so they can pay the appropriate obesity-risk surcharge?
Even if we try to develop a system where people pay proportional to health factors under their control, it would be essentially impossible to make a fair system, and even harder to make a system where people couldn't hide things like unhealthy eating and smoking.
9 Megajoules may be a lot of energy to release in one fast pulse, but it doesn't actually require all that much time or power to charge.
Naval ships have big powerful engines or reactors that are capable of putting out a lot of power. If a measly 100kW (a tiny amount of total energy, equivalent to a 134 horsepower engine) has been budgeted to charge it up between shots, it will take 90 seconds to charge, this is a while, but the power was small. Suppose they increase it by an order of magnitude to 1MW (a carrier can easily generate this, though it may be expensive to design the charging system), then it only takes 9 seconds.
There are a number of other tricks they can use to speed up firing time, such as storing lots of standby energy in battery or fuel cell banks, ready to be drawn quickly to charge up the rail gun. Batteries and fuel cells can't discharge fast enough to fire a rail gun, but they store more energy than capacitors, so they can charge the bank multiple times without increasing the load on the ship's generators at all.
I'm not sure I see the problem here, it is just a matter of proper power engineering. Since this will probably be replacing some of the standard munitions, generation capacity can be increased.
In a way it would be better for the common file sharing to be treated as a thief. They would likely pay a small fine in court, maybe get probation or community service, and be on their way. If they were a repeat offender or an existing criminal record, then maybe they'd get a short jail sentence. There is no way that they would be fined a whopping $144,000.
I have thought about doing this too, because in my small college town a lot of independent businesses do this. But I also sympathize with the businesses, because if credit card transaction fees are motivating them to add these (disallowed) fees and minimum purchases, then maybe the problem is that the transactions cost too much.
As long as their fees are not unreasonable, it may be better for me personally for more businesses to accept credit cards with a fee or minimum purchase, than not accept credit cards at all. That way, I can pay with cash most of the time, but if I find myself short, I can spend a little extra to be able to use my card.
That's not to say that they should be including these fees, but it's understandable if nothing else.
Actually it isn't necessarily the case that CPU's get more energy-efficient. As the spacing between transistors decreases, and the thickness of the MOSFET gate oxides also decrease, leakage current between and inside transistors increases.
There are some tricks to alleviate this, such as etching trenches between transistors and filling them with an insulator, like SiN.
I could show you how to juggle, then hand you 3 balls and tell you to juggle them. A small number of people might quickly be able to learn to juggle with this teaching method in a reasonable amount of time. Most would keep fumbling the balls time and time again, and it would take a very long time to learn to juggle with this teaching method.
Or, I could teach the fundamental motions necesary to be able to juggle a bit at a time, building up until in a couple of hours, you are juggling 3 balls just fine.
And yes, I have taught people how to juggle before.
This analogy could be made for many types of learning, not just juggling.
That is why Yoggie also offers the Gatekeeper, which does exactly what you want.
The new device was created because a USB interface is less cumbersome and less expensive, while still offering a similar feature set and only somewhat reduced security.
Digital computers do not depend on the magnitude of the current, but on its abssence or presence.
What you have just described is in fact a measure of magnitude of current, where a current above a certain threshold produces an output voltage high enough to be considered a 1, and a current below another threshold produces an output voltage corresponding to a 0. This is how early digital electronics worked.
But in modern CMOS digital circuits, 1's and 0's are represented by voltage levels, not current magnitudes, nor current's absence or presence. When the output of a digital circuit is changing, some current will flow out of or into it until the voltage level reaches whatever thresholds have been set for 1's and 0's. The current is actually charging or discharging the intrinsic capacitances of whatever circuits are connected to it. The more current each digital circuit is capable of sourcing or sinking, the faster the output voltage will be able to change between a 1 and 0, or vice versa, and the faster the total clock frequency can be.
I'm not sure you understand what PVD is and why they would use it to make currency.
A physical vapour deposition process is simply used to deposit a thin layer of a certain material on top of another material. In the context of the Canadian currency, they are depositing a thin uniform layer of something, probably a very durable metal or alloy, on their dies so that with this special coating they will last longer while stamping out coins.
The only difference between these PVD dies and chrome coated dies is that the PVD dies should last longer. The coins from a PVD die might be marginally smoother, but the difference would only be that there are fewer features to pick up on a microscope.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem with this is that asteroids are very spread apart in our solar system, moving quickly, and usually also far away. Just getting to asteroids with any sort of heavy equipment capable of processing and refining it into useful metal will require a ridiculous amount of fuel.
Getting it back to earth also very tricky. The US has at great expense designed systems capable of bringing space shuttles and command modules safely from orbit to the ocean or ground. The problem is, these are all expensive and would require either parachutes, retrorockets, or the ability to glide like the shuttle. If it is just allowed to fall ballistically back to earth, a bunch of it will get vaporised, and a great deal of effort will need to be expended to reduce the probability of it landing in an ocean where it would immediately sink, or in a habited area.
It's a nice idea, and it makes sense to do a more in depth study, but I think we are still a very long from that becoming viable.
Electric Circuits 7th Edition, by Nilsson and Riedel, ISBN 0-13-146592-9 was the introductory text used at my university (UC Santa Barbara).
I didn't really go to class much, so most of my learning was straight out of this book. It is very easy to understand, and everything is covered from a basic level. It covers what all of the basic circuit elements are, how to analyze circuits, opamps, and circuits with reactive components, i.e. inductors and capacitors. It does not cover too many other topics, but it is an excellent reference on basic circuit analysis techniques which I still refer to today when I need to refresh my memory on basic circuit techniques. It will help you learn basic techniques very effectively which online resources do not often include, especially not all in one place. I find that it's style of writing and layout is much easier to understand than Horowitz and Hill's The Art of Electronics, which is frequently recommended as a self-study book, but the scope of that book is much different from this one.
For finding out what basic circuits you will find useful, I would honestly just recommend using google, it will help you find much of what you need to know. Find any of the myriad sites that have a list of basic circuits, and just look through them.
You indicated an interest in robotics, and usually most of the work goes into the physical construction, and programming a microcontroller. My books in this area are unfortunately not at my current residence, but you should buy a book on robotics specifically, make sure it covers the physical design and construction. You will also need to choose a microcontroller platform, the two most popular for hobbyists are Atmel and Microchip. The former is IMHO a better solution as it is more flexible and uses an open toolchain. Microchip is easier to get started with, but you are limited because you need to use their proprietary toolchain (or a third party toolchain that may not support all chips properly), and free compilers are usually only shareware, otherwise you have to write in assembly (which is not a bad idea).
For a hobbyist you will want an nice array of parts, you should get a resistor kit with a bunch of values, get a capacitor kit but it doesn't need to be big if you also buy a bunch of 0.1uF ceramic and 10uF electrolytic capacitors which you will probably use a lot of, get some 2N3904/6 transistors (basic NPN and PNP transistors), some MOSFETs that can handle some decent current, a breadboard with wires, and some basic chips like the 555 timer, a decade counter, maybe some logic gates, and some opamps (I'd recommend the LM358 since it can operate with a single power supply voltage).
The atmosphere is not transparent at *any* wavelength that is sufficiently high to be used for transmitting energy. You're looking at 85% or higher losses no matter what you do.
Higher up in the comments I do a brief analysis: http://hardware.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=535122&cid=23208524 where I conclude that from the satellite to AC power you'd be lucky to get 57.8% efficiency.
Current power transmission lines deal with I*I*R losses quite effectively by increasing the voltage to lower the current. I think the main problem with transmitting power to the ground with a wire is that: 1) The reason we can't make a space elevator with current tech is that it would be so tall it would collapse from its own weight, and so would a wire. 2)I have a sneaking suspicion that a wire like this would serve as an excellent lightning rod. 3) Even if it's very strong, if it breaks, it will be extremely expensive to replace/fix.
Beaming power in from an orbiting solar satellite is not currently economically feasible.
I see you've been modded Informative, so I'm not sure everybody realizes that the above product is an April Fool's joke that's been around since at least 2007 - click on the Add to Cart button to see their April Fools message.
This has been a public service announcement by Mattski.
Even if you are incredibly generous with the numbers, the overall efficiency of this system would be very low. 80% Efficiency for the power amplifier in the transmitting satellite would be extremely good, and doesn't take into account all of the other losses that will take place in the satellite, such as generating and amplifying the RF signal and antenna and sidelobe losses. So in other words, 80% would be basically ideal with today's technology (Amplifier efficiency). Now take into account the losses on the ground. Converting that RF power at several GHz back into 60Hz AC is going to cost power, I'm honestly guessing here because I've never looked at any such system, but in power electronics the bigger the change in voltage and/or frequency means worse efficiency, and the RF signal would probably be converted back down to DC then, transmitted over power lines as 60Hz AC. So I'm going to be generous and say we might be able to get 85% at the receiving station.
So we're at 80%(transmit) * 85%(transit) * 85%(receive) = 57.8% efficiency. Almost half of the electrical power collected by the orbiting station is lost before it gets to the power lines.
Now also take into account the fact that satellites are *very* expensive to build and launch, incredibly difficult to perform maintenance on, you have the expense of maintaining the satellite's orbit and software, and the expense of building and manning a ground station. Based on all of these factors I would be very, very surprised if orbiting solar stations are going to be viable options without some major advances. Maybe if we get the whole space elevator thing worked out so satellite launches are cheaper, but I'm not holding my breath.
These devices are useful for people who are too scared or shy to approach people and ask them to hang up. Some people will hang up if you ask them, especially if you are polite. Others will not. And do you know why they will not hang up? It is because they have a right to use their phone on the train and in other public areas, and your needs and desires do not supersede theirs.
I highly doubt that you refuse to go to public areas where people are speaking amongst themselves, so why would a cellphone conversation be so much more aggravating that you would even want one of these? You don't know what you are interrupting, it could be an extremely important conversation, either business or personal, or it could be completely mundane. Either way, you don't have any right, legal or moral, to stop those conversations.
So please, stop being arrogant and laboring under the misconception that your desire for the absence of human voices on public transportation makes it all right to break the law and use one of these devices.
When they turn on the light in the video the brightness ramps up over the course of a second or two. I'm not sure if this is because of a dimming control or just the starting up process, but it seems feasible that it could be operated at reduced power levels with the appropriate control circuitry, though there is no telling if that will cause an efficiency hit until they release more details.
Did you read the article? It says that although the invitation to the group implied solution posting was encouraged, "no one did post a full final solution. It was more the back and forth that you get in any study group."
Trying to prevent this sort of learning from taking place just holds students back. It can be very hard to figure out problem solving methodologies the first time, and the homework is there for students to figure that out. But very few people I know do it all on their own, because even smart people can get stuck and not see the little trick which allows them to solve the problem.
Come test time, if you actually learned the material, which is the point of the homework, then you will probably do well.
Furthermore, the possibility that "these questions generally come from books which are used over and over. So by the third semester these books are going to be pretty well answered on the internet" is not a convincing argument for several reasons. Firstly, as stated, solutions were not posted. Secondly, for popular introductory class textbooks, official solution keys are readily available through Amazon and fellow students. I've made use of them myself, but to help out when I was stuck, not to just copy down answers. Thirdly, most textbooks for this type of introductory class have a very large number of problems available, it would be simple to adjust the assignments while covering the same content. And finally, I detest professors who are too lazy to make their own assignments. In a class this large (at least 147 people), there is a massive amount of money flowing into the university from these students, and yet that professors would take all of their problems from the book and not even change it from term to term is practically negligence. In a class of 25 people, the professor putting in an extra hour of work per week to help the students helps exactly 25 students. In a class of over 150, the benefit is multiplied by at least six times. It frustrates me that so many professors have this opportunity to help so many students, and yet they lazily teach from a textbook. (/rant).
This is ridiculous, very little of the advanced electronics used in the US is actually built in the US. Even when I buy printed circuit boards for my own personal projects, I use a service which has them manufactured overseas, because it's cheaper. When I buy chips like microcontrollers, they are certainly not manufactured in the US. I think the last batch I got shipped from China. Even simple things like resistors and capacitors are typically not made in the US.
I'm also a little wary of your comment about this suspicious component that has no use. Maybe I'm wrong because you've given no details, but you have given not details to make me think that this situation is anything but overreaction. It sounds like you are meeting with people like managers, not engineers. A good electrical engineer should be able to examine it and figure out why it is there, and it wouldn't have this incredibly vague label of "apparently had no function". It has a function, unless the engineers changed the design and forgot about it, or left it there as an easter egg. Hobbyists have reverse engineered the complicated digital hardware and software which keeps you from booting your own OS on Playstations and Xbox's, unless this device is really that complex I think it wouldn't be so hard to figure out.
With a manager, maybe somebody on his staff made a comment about not knowing why it was there, and so this manager decided to call meetings to discuss this foreign threat without having any truly credible reason to believe a threat was present. I do not think that this is a "valid issue" as you state, merely that bureaucrats think that it is a valid issue. It still matters, but there is a big difference.
American companies will not become more cautious. The minute a major manufacturer decides to build their products in the US, their costs are going to go way up, and that means that competitors will be able to undercut their prices simply by continuing to have their products built overseas. Then the altruistic corporation which was trying to preserve American jobs will go out of business, and they'll all lose their jobs.
Enforcing higher rates for people who introduce risk-factors into their lives is a very tricky endeavor.
For example, I am a smoker, but I average less than 10 cigarettes smoked per month. Do I pay the same premium that a pack a day smoker does? Or will we all have to constantly fill out questionnaires about personal things like how many cigarettes we smoked in the past month? Do we tax food in restaurants based on how unhealthy it is and give the money to health insurers, or will people have to keep a log of their eating habits so they can pay the appropriate obesity-risk surcharge?
Even if we try to develop a system where people pay proportional to health factors under their control, it would be essentially impossible to make a fair system, and even harder to make a system where people couldn't hide things like unhealthy eating and smoking.
9 Megajoules may be a lot of energy to release in one fast pulse, but it doesn't actually require all that much time or power to charge.
Naval ships have big powerful engines or reactors that are capable of putting out a lot of power. If a measly 100kW (a tiny amount of total energy, equivalent to a 134 horsepower engine) has been budgeted to charge it up between shots, it will take 90 seconds to charge, this is a while, but the power was small. Suppose they increase it by an order of magnitude to 1MW (a carrier can easily generate this, though it may be expensive to design the charging system), then it only takes 9 seconds.
There are a number of other tricks they can use to speed up firing time, such as storing lots of standby energy in battery or fuel cell banks, ready to be drawn quickly to charge up the rail gun. Batteries and fuel cells can't discharge fast enough to fire a rail gun, but they store more energy than capacitors, so they can charge the bank multiple times without increasing the load on the ship's generators at all.
I'm not sure I see the problem here, it is just a matter of proper power engineering. Since this will probably be replacing some of the standard munitions, generation capacity can be increased.
Don't assume malice, where ignorance will suffice.
In a way it would be better for the common file sharing to be treated as a thief. They would likely pay a small fine in court, maybe get probation or community service, and be on their way. If they were a repeat offender or an existing criminal record, then maybe they'd get a short jail sentence. There is no way that they would be fined a whopping $144,000.
I use the same combination on my luggage!
I have thought about doing this too, because in my small college town a lot of independent businesses do this. But I also sympathize with the businesses, because if credit card transaction fees are motivating them to add these (disallowed) fees and minimum purchases, then maybe the problem is that the transactions cost too much.
As long as their fees are not unreasonable, it may be better for me personally for more businesses to accept credit cards with a fee or minimum purchase, than not accept credit cards at all. That way, I can pay with cash most of the time, but if I find myself short, I can spend a little extra to be able to use my card.
That's not to say that they should be including these fees, but it's understandable if nothing else.
Well said sir, well said. I only hope the people who disagree with this point of view read your post.
On that topic, how do we pronounce copper nanotubes, i.e. CuNT?
It's a parody of a line from TFA. I don't have mod points else I'd fix it myself.
Actually, it's been tried: One Small Step For Mail.
For the reasons you would expect, it didn't catch on.
Actually it isn't necessarily the case that CPU's get more energy-efficient. As the spacing between transistors decreases, and the thickness of the MOSFET gate oxides also decrease, leakage current between and inside transistors increases. There are some tricks to alleviate this, such as etching trenches between transistors and filling them with an insulator, like SiN.
It's like learning to juggle.
I could show you how to juggle, then hand you 3 balls and tell you to juggle them. A small number of people might quickly be able to learn to juggle with this teaching method in a reasonable amount of time. Most would keep fumbling the balls time and time again, and it would take a very long time to learn to juggle with this teaching method.
Or, I could teach the fundamental motions necesary to be able to juggle a bit at a time, building up until in a couple of hours, you are juggling 3 balls just fine.
And yes, I have taught people how to juggle before.
This analogy could be made for many types of learning, not just juggling.
That is why Yoggie also offers the Gatekeeper, which does exactly what you want.
The new device was created because a USB interface is less cumbersome and less expensive, while still offering a similar feature set and only somewhat reduced security.
But in modern CMOS digital circuits, 1's and 0's are represented by voltage levels, not current magnitudes, nor current's absence or presence. When the output of a digital circuit is changing, some current will flow out of or into it until the voltage level reaches whatever thresholds have been set for 1's and 0's. The current is actually charging or discharging the intrinsic capacitances of whatever circuits are connected to it. The more current each digital circuit is capable of sourcing or sinking, the faster the output voltage will be able to change between a 1 and 0, or vice versa, and the faster the total clock frequency can be.
I'm not sure you understand what PVD is and why they would use it to make currency.
A physical vapour deposition process is simply used to deposit a thin layer of a certain material on top of another material. In the context of the Canadian currency, they are depositing a thin uniform layer of something, probably a very durable metal or alloy, on their dies so that with this special coating they will last longer while stamping out coins.
The only difference between these PVD dies and chrome coated dies is that the PVD dies should last longer. The coins from a PVD die might be marginally smoother, but the difference would only be that there are fewer features to pick up on a microscope.