I was looking into this in the early 90s (along with the development of diamond as a semiconductor.) We were in fact interested in very robust front ends for things like telecoms systems, that could survive lightning strike or EMP. Here the issue is not to operate at very high temp., but to survive brief excursions to it. The problem with any form of lightning protection is that the sensitive amplifier must be outside the protected area, or how can it get the signal?
In fact SiC has a long history as a semiconductor. Correct me if I'm wrong but I seem to recall buying the stuff from a company near Niagara Falls (needed the cheap hydro electricity for the manufacturing process.) SiC has been used in the past for making voltage dependent resistors, used for protection against really big surges. One of our test rigs had a large steel cabinet, eight feet long and six feet high, containing a stack of carbide blocks with large copper fins between them, and connected to a chimney and a big extract fan. This object could take (and absorb) repetitive surges of half a megajoule, and was used in the simulation of 11KV systems falling onto or otherwise connecting to telecoms and domestic power lines.
Anyway, nostalgia aside, it's nice to know research has continued and SiC can now be made pure enough (and presumably sufficiently defect-free) to build small scale semiconductors. As a complete aside, although hydrogen may form most of the universe, followed up by helium, we wouldn't be anywhere without the elements of valency 4. Carbon, silicon,germanium...it's a slight paradox that starts have to go nova just so that we can evolve and then make semiconductors. If God exists, she's a geek with a strange sense of humor.
Unfortunately, and much as I appreciate the work of I J Good, his statement about artificial intelligence is not valid. There are several things wrong with it
It assumes that intelligence is well defined, which it is not
It assumes that intelligence is the same thing as creativity, which it is not.
It ignores resource limitations.
Dealing with these points in turn:
Intelligence is not well defined. It is very hard to say how much of what we call "intelligence" is in fact the ability to make many connections between facts stored in a very sophisticated memory architecture. Simply building a machine able to process information very quickly achieves nothing because, without learning and a social context, it does not know what information to acquire and process. In human experience, academically brilliant people often fail because they work on the wrong problems, or without access to necessary knowledge.
Nothing is actually achieved without creativity. We do not know what that is, or to what extent it is a social construct (i.e. it takes a developed society to have the necessary systems in place to translate an idea into a concrete reality.) And this leads onto the third point. It is no good having a highly intelligent, creative machine if its use of resources is such that it cannot replicate in large numbers. It may be that machine intelligence will ultimately replace human intelligence, but it may be that it will simply be too resource hungry. In effect, there may be a threshold of capability needed to solve some problems, and it may be that machine intelligence will run out of energy before it scales sufficiently to solve those problems. A machine society might, in effect, get stuck in the machine 19th century because coal or oil became a limiting resource. (In the same way, the energy and resources needed to be consumed to achieve a first independent space colony may exceed the total energy and resources available on Earth. It may be that a billion years or so of eukaryotic evolution has actually resulted in the optimum balance of intelligence, creativity and resource consumption, and that any attempt to exceed the present capability will tip us into declining resources faster than we can improve matters.
In many ways I hope this is wrong. But the argument that only one superior machine is necessary is, in fact, an inductive step too far. It is assuming that "intelligence" on its own can solve a class of problems which may involve a number of constraints which cannot be avoided - like the Laws of Thermodynamics, or the need for excessive amounts of energy.
I'd say, forget SF in the classroom. And, yes, I was brought up on SF. Most of it seems designed to appeal to the adolescent male mentality. An English teacher can legitimately tell boys it exists, but it doesn't belong in English classes. Or science classes, for that matter.
What I learned in English was to analyse and discuss, for which a language is an essential tool. The best service an English teacher can do for maths and science is to show pupils how language is used to reveal, but also to lie. In my day we learnt a lot of formal grammar, but also the basis of literary structures like simile and metaphor. We also learnt how to identify when someone was trying to mislead us with superficially attractive metaphors that were in fact defective, or by constructing an apparently complete chain of argument that in fact had big holes in it, covered by phrases that invited you to believe that something was obvious (shades of Descartes).
Children who can use a language as a tool of critical thinking are harder to lie to. They are also (in my view) more likely to spot that science and mathematics are in the business of trying to tell the truth. They are thus more resistant to being fooled by religious and political bigots. They are also perhaps more likely to become lawyers, but everything has its downside.
One way to encourage critical thinking, of course, is to give children things like newspaper articles and then get them to work on identifying the sloppy thinking. Unfortunately, in parts of the US, that will most likely get you into trouble.
I just returned from a low speed week out (around 40 miles at about 3mph average.) I have a Euro V compliant Diesel and the boat weighs 11 tonnes. Fuel consumed 15 litres. That is roughly 30 tonne miles per litre (sorry about mixed units) which works out about 140 tonne miles per gallon. This agrees closely with Thornycroft's expected values.
I assume you're trolling, but the core beliefs of Buddhism are considerably less weird than believing that, say, the Universe is about 6000 years old, or that God magically impregnated a woman who gave birth to a human being who was, somehow, also God. The Buddha is not a God, and his teachings are really quite practical. And Buddhists do not really make any supernatural claims. They have beliefs about the way the Universe actually is which may or may not be silly but do at least take into account vast amounts of time and the existence of other worlds.
The Chinese government, on the other hand, believes and brainwashes people into a materialistic religion which is derived from Judaeo-Christianity and substitutes for the war between God and the Devil a war between social classes. Not long ago they were telling children to worship Mao. Currently they are telling people to get rich by doing what corrupt Party officials and businessmen tell them. They are polluting their country to the extent that the WHO estimates three quarters of a million avoidable extra deaths a year. They are constantly threatening free and democratic Taiwan with being annexed. If I lived in China, I could find a lot more things to worry about than the beliefs of a few Buddhists in the mountains.
And in my view insightful rather than funny. Al Gore was a political proponent of the Internet. But the concept of the www (which is just one of the many services running on dat ole Internet)did indeed originate in CERN.
People often suggest on/. that progress on the Internet is driven by the needs of pornographers. But it would be interesting to know how much progress in networking and databases is actually driven by the (huge) data recording and analysis needs of particle physicists. My own interest in operating systems,networks and databases was started by the need to log large amounts of data very fast from lightning strike simulation experiments.
Blind the bastards with science. Submit a load of white papers on things like function point analysis with a covering note explaining that this may be appropriate for measuring productivity in shell scripts. Ask for a really good job tracking and logging system that will cost a fortune to deploy, then estimate the resources required to implement it and feed back an estimate of the lost productivity while it is going in, plus the time to administer it. Find out what is the most expensive and complex server management system you can imagine, and propose it as a long term cost reduction.
Always be helpful and make co-operative proposals. Suggest that users who lose passwords should be docked pay according to the time to fix, thus ensuring that user incompetence is not perceived as an IT cost (I know this isn't *nix admin, but it's part of the general pattern).
Produce impressive graphs showing the tradeoff between increasing the numbers of servers per admin, and the expected downtime, and suggest that increased downtime is a small price to pay for increased server/admin ratio.
I'm sure you can see the picture developing. Every proposal you make to measure productivity needs to look superficially good but have a huge cost and a huge risk. And the best thing is, you don't need to lie. Because that is the nature of reality.
True story. Many years ago I was asked to investigate a shop floor wide downtime monitoring system. As an experiment, we tried paper logging of downtime events to see what the expected traffic would be, what events needed to be handled, probable traffic etc. The paper logging showed that an entire floor of machinery had three quarters of its downtime attributed to a single design fault in the machines. The maintenance people knew this, but were keeping quiet because of all the overtime they were earning. Getting the manufacturer to fix the fault was far cheaper and quicker than putting in the monitoring system. Moral: in parallel find a few really good cost reduction proposals. You are bound to have some if you are any good. Then wave them under the nose of the bean counter in parallel with the other stuff.
The Machine that created Nothing. Read the book, Trurl and Klapaucius turned it off just in time to prevent the total disappearance of the Universe, but left big holes in reality.
Perhaps the universities and technical colleges of America should do a study showing how the sale of CDs (which are after all nothing but a bit of plastic with some dots on it) at high prices represents a loss to the US economy. If CDs were banned, there would be more money available for people to improve their education and vocational skills, thus boosting the US knowledge economy, and making the US more competitive in world markets.
It's obvious that it is more beneficial to pay money to college lecturers and professors (social enablers) than to A&R men, marketing execs and IP lawyers, none of whom produce any tangible benefit to society.
So the conclusion is obvious; this think tank is telling the exact opposite of the truth. The replacement of music sales by the P2P distribution of free music would hugely benefit the US economy. The "loss" due to "piracy" is actually the start of a potential leveraged economic gain.
Latin, inter (between or among) and prehensus, to grasp or to take. To be fair, the French term "entreprise" goes back, in its meaning of a business undertaking, almost to feudal times. But what sort of undertaking in those times consituted business?
The concept of the manufacturing enterprise is largely an artefact of the Industrial Revolution (OK, everybody cites the Arsenal, but it's an exception.)The concept of the enterprise as trade (i.e. middleman) is pretty consistent. (The British Empire in India started from a trading monopoly that accidentally had to go to war to protect its interests.) From the 1300s on, any French person using the term "entreprise" would know exactly what the two root words meant, and clearly had no quarrel with that meaning. j'entre, et alors je prise, je suis entrepreneur.
In fact, it's what "entrepreneur" means. That's a word whose original meaning is not so muchy lost as deliberately concealed. An entrepreneur is someone who tries to insert himself in a flow - of cash, a commodity or other resource - and then act as the gatekeeper, thus making money. Because it means "taker in the middle".
The recording industry themselves are entrepreneurs, and now they realise that the software companies are not just another mechanism to enforce their intermediation, but an attempt to introduce a new, and harder to evade, middleman.
All entrepreneurs seek to enforce their control, either legally or through other means (such as owning the channels of distribution, or by monopoly patents.)
Entrepreneurs have a part to play when a resource does not have a market, but they find it very hard to lie down and die when the market is established. We don't yet know who will win this battle for control over the electronic music market, but improved search engines and technology availability could disintermediate the market in a different way - e.g. by sites aggregating direct sales by many small bands, cooperatively owned.
I've never heard it called that before. Either something is missing in translation, or we should be told a bit more about what the Royal Society is like nowadays. After all, it was founded by Charles II, and he was pretty good at something that sounded a bit like skewing the local female population.
A normal galactic collision is like compact cars smashing together?
Yes, because obviously when a couple of small cars collide it takes place over a few hundred thousand light years and lasts for a million years or so (the warranty on the airbag may be voided).
And this one is like trucks smashing together?
I am now firmly of the view that astronomers:
Ought to be made to read Douglas Adams on how big the Universe is
Ought to get taught about valid and invalid metaphors and similes at school
Ought to stop whoring for research budget by trying to attract the mass media and dumbing down reality.
How about "This in no way whatsoever resembles any kind of collision you have ever witnessed on Earth, it dwarfs your imagination, and by the way any kind of anthropocentric comparison should have been buried with Galileo?"
After the Metropolitan Police in the UK kept us all so much safer by shooting an innocent Brazilian electrician seven times in the head while he sat in an Underground train, then claimed that they shot him while he was jumping over a barrier to escape them, wearing a nonexistent padded jacket to conceal a bomb, a journalist made the mistake of exposing this. He was promptly subjected to police harrassment, including having his girlfriend locked up without charge with no access to food or water, and given a blanket infected with lice.
However, there is a difference between the US and the UK. The last time the Met became really corrupt, the Hertfordshire Police Force was called in to investigate them. (Disclaimer: Guess where I grew up.) Even so, it happened, and a significant number of Met officers were exposed. This is one example of why separate and independent police forces with local rather that national accoujntability are such a good idea.
The problem is, who will investigate the FBI? That seems to be the fundamental weakness of the US system. In the UK, MI5 and MI6 have no powers of arrest. They have to get in regular police to arrest suspects. Although clunky, this provides a check and balance. If the FBI is corrupted or ordered by the Administration to do corrupt things, who is to stop them?
Forget the big brewers, they are just marketing organisations. Eventually the product will consist of yellow dye and bio-ethanol, and by then the "consumer" won't even notice. The real research is done in small breweries and micro-breweries. Just get yourself an MSc or PhD in microbiology first.
Nowadays the thing I ask myself is "will this job be of any value if civilisation collapses?" If you work in a call centre or IT, be very afraid...but if you can fix a broken irrigation pump or generator, build a house from traditional materials, grow food or brew beer, you probably have a future. Why beer? Well, apart from the likely demand for the product qua beer, earlier societies produced "small beer" (i.e. low strength) for general consumption because the brewing process killed fecal and soil bacteria, and the alcohol then kept the product sterile. In a society without clean drinking water, and no sewers, beer was what stood between you and dysentery.
The Carnot cycle efficiency is limited by (Th-Tc)/(Th), so a perfect heat engine discharging to absolute zero can in theory achieve unit efficiency, not 0.5 as you suggest. Given that the ambient air temp is around 300K, a 10K gain means a theoretical maximum efficiency of only 3%. In fact it will never even reach the thermal loss of a practical engine and will never move. The idea of using a heat pump to increase the temperature difference of the working fluid is an interesting one at first sight, but very subject to diminishing returns. I'm not sure and I can't be bothered to revisit the calculations, but I believe the thermal gain of the heat pump is always less than the incremental efficiency of the prime mover, so you go precisely nowhere. Perhaps someone who paid a bit more attention in thermodynamics than I did will remind us.
In fact the only real answer is to find a source of sufficiently high grade (i.e. high temperature) waste heat, and use it as directly as possible. After all, that's how conventional power stations all work. You do not need an alloy with particularly good thermal conductivity, you need one with good hot strength. And you really do not want a Stirling engine. Conventional steam technology does the trick as soon as the high temperature region is sufficiently over 100C, and the seals have been under development successfully since the 18th Century. You can in theory make a not terribly efficient heat engine as soon as your heat source has a high enough temperature to get some pressure out of low boiling fluids like diethyl ether, but although it's amusing in a lab demo I suspect that reasons of cost, solubility in practical lubricants, and general health hazard make this a bad route to go down.
Sorry, but I really felt the need to respond to this. British newspapers like to make out that judges are ignorant because it plays to the prejudices of their readers. In fact, the judge had to ask the question because both sides were talking about "websites" but without any definition, and (as any fool on/. knows) websites can be many different things. Judges are not allowed to intervene and tell the court what things are, they have to get the information into the trial record by asking questions.
In the same way a judge was once ridiculed for asking "Who are the Beatles", but it was necessary because again they were being talked about in a trial, but anybody subsequently reading the trial report would not get a clue what "Beatles" were. Because of the way the British legal system works, on case law and precedent, judges have to assume that a judgement may be brought up many years in the future - when, say, the word "website" will be long gone but the thing itself still exists.
Incidentally, in that case the question did show that the lawyers on both sides were themselves unclear what they were talking about - not unusual in these cases.
Now over three years old and so out of warranty. The original HDD with XP still runs, but I also have a 5400 rpm HDD with Ubuntu which works just fine. The only thing wrong with it is that I have worn the lettering off several keys, and worn the feet off (replaced with some handy self adhesive closed cell foam to ensure that the vents were kept open.) We all have anecdotal evidence.
Meanwhile, with the 3 year warranty on Acers so cheap, why did you only pay for 1?
I have also found that Acer AMD64 desktops run Ubuntu 7.04 just fine, thank you. Everything works out of the box. When I tried to downsize one to W2000 (for testing purposes) I had trouble getting the motherboard drivers that were just installed automatically by Ubuntu.
I started my R&D career in a company which probably knew more about the use of aluminium for automotive use than anybody else in the world at the time. During the first Middle East oil crisis the economists looked at the prospects for energy saving by a switch to Al for engines and other parts and concluded that the US economy could not afford a change in the necessary timescale. The reason is quite simple. There is actually so much steel in the world that the US (and much of Europe) is basically self sufficient in steel. We do not really need to make very much more. However, a widespread conversion to aluminium would involve refining huge amounts of the metal from ore. The energy used to make Al is many times greater than for steel, because (put simply) aluminium is a trivalent and high energy atom which is extracted by an inefficient electrolytic process, while steel is made from a less energetic transition metal using a very efficient thermal process.
So, while you are correct in that aluminium can be recycled, a widespread conversion would involve making an awful lot of it.
There is a subsidiary issue, unfortunately. It is very easy to convert steel from one alloy to another, e.g. recycled mild steel can be used as the basis for inox, but a small quantity of inox in a steel melt will not harm the resulting alloy. However, there are many aluminium alloys which vary in content for specific purposes (copper in aircraft alloys, magnesium in many car parts.) Recycling of aluminium requires a lot of metallurgical intervention to get the desired resulting alloy. Other than the pure Al used in cans, there is currently no recycling scheme to distinguish alloys. With steel, this is not really an issue. Aluminium alloys can contain copper, magnesium, zinc etc., and contamination of an alloy with the wrong metal will affect the ability to heat treat it, corrosion resistance etc. So while it is possible to, say, recycle cans into auto wheels or aircraft, it is not possible to recycle auto wheels into cans. Recycling aluminium is NOT trivial.
Believe me, I have sat in on very heated exchanges between aluminium and steel metallurgists - two of them once came close to blows in a meeting with Government representatives present - on this precise issue.
"Dust to dust" is a common term in the assessment of environmental impact, whether it be cars, nuclear power plants or even plastic bags. It takes in all the costs of extraction, processing, and ultimately scrapping and making harmless or recycling.
The "Dust to dust" study of various cars done a few years back pointed out - and they were right - that if you compared a Hummer used by a tradesman and hence worked for its entire useful life of perhaps 300000 miles, to the cost of operating a succession of Priuses for 300000 miles, the total energy cost of the Hummer was less. That isn't stupid. The Hummer is made almost entirely of cheap steel which will be nearly 100% recycled. The Prius uses expensive (energetically speaking) aluminum and nickel, which also have high clearup costs. Over 300000 miles it will need a number of those batteries and perhaps an entire replacement car or two. The excess costs of manufacture, extraction and disposal actually outweigh the operating fuel cost savings. In reality most Hummers are being bought by urbanites and will therefore never achieve the mileage, but then I suspect the same goes for many Prius.
The study was in some ways counter-intuitive but its conclusions seemed to me to be valid. They were, basically, that the excess costs of going electric currently outweigh the benefits. It's better to make simple, reliable vehicles out of mostly steel and then run them till they wear out. Works for trains, works for ships, works for trucks, why not cars?
The Audi/VW 1.8L gasoline engine is a thoroughly German piece of engineering that should be good for over 200000 miles. You cannot compare them to a 1.3 litre lightweight engine driving a car (the Prius) which also weighs 1.3 tonnes. However, you need to bear in mind that a modern engine has to stay within emission limits that carburettor engines never achieve even when new. A modern engine will therefore be scrapped when it can no longer legally be driven, and that will be long before it wears out. It will happen when oil gets down the valve guides and past the rings, and blowby pushes too much oil mist into the intake. This happens much faster to gasoline engines than to Diesels, which have high torque and so produce power at lower RPM and hence have lower wear. (A big problem in the US is that emission limits are deliberately set to discriminate against Diesels. In Europe, this doesn't apply. Hence the US passion for hybrids)
The Prius does better than your 5l/100km in terms of grammes CO2 per kilometre because gasoline is less dense than derv. But yes, I totally agree it is a solution in search of a problem. The idea of using ultra high compression Diesels with urea to remove NOx is already being commercialised by both VW and Mercedes.
Mind you, accept my prejudice. Both my boat engine and my car engine were designed by a company with a certain 3-pointed star logo.
Actually the gas mileage of a typical turbodiesel isn't as good as a Prius, especially when you take the additional fuel weight into account. Mine does 121g versus 109 for a Prius. The big benefit is the dust to dust cost, since Diesels are mainly made from iron and this is quite cheap. However, diesel-electric hybrids do have some real potential benefits. I live in a very hilly area and regenerative braking would give big fuel savings and reduce brake wear. Also, the additional torque of the electric motor would reduce the number of gears required from 6 down to about 4.
Diesels use less fuel on idle than gas engines because they do not need to increase the fuel strength to compensate for small combustion volumes, but the fuel used in traffic is not negligible, probably around 0.5l/hour for a small engine.
The estimate of 120000 miles for the life of a Prius came from the people who did the entire dust to dust survey of vehicle costs. It has a lightweight gas engine, and lightweight is the enemy of durability in gas engines. If you make a solid, durable gas engine, you might just as well make it a Diesel instead because the cost will be little different. Of course you can make a gasoline engine that will do 250000 miles or more - Mercedes used to do it routinely and the engines on mid range Fords will do 200k plus - but the Prius engine isn't a Mercedes V8. And, assuming you are writing from the US, many American auto engines used to be vastly overspecified so that in reality they were running on very light load almost all the time. This is a recipe for long life with gasoline (but not Diesel), but results in excessive fuel consumption.
It is an interesting subject because it is all about tradeoffs, just like software design, and many of the tradeoffs are similar. Developing an understanding of the engine thermal cycles as an R&D engineer has proven, in my case, applicable to many other problems encountered in other fields. After all, in the end everything in the Universe runs on thermodynamics, so we might as well try to understand it.
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In fact SiC has a long history as a semiconductor. Correct me if I'm wrong but I seem to recall buying the stuff from a company near Niagara Falls (needed the cheap hydro electricity for the manufacturing process.) SiC has been used in the past for making voltage dependent resistors, used for protection against really big surges. One of our test rigs had a large steel cabinet, eight feet long and six feet high, containing a stack of carbide blocks with large copper fins between them, and connected to a chimney and a big extract fan. This object could take (and absorb) repetitive surges of half a megajoule, and was used in the simulation of 11KV systems falling onto or otherwise connecting to telecoms and domestic power lines.
Anyway, nostalgia aside, it's nice to know research has continued and SiC can now be made pure enough (and presumably sufficiently defect-free) to build small scale semiconductors. As a complete aside, although hydrogen may form most of the universe, followed up by helium, we wouldn't be anywhere without the elements of valency 4. Carbon, silicon,germanium...it's a slight paradox that starts have to go nova just so that we can evolve and then make semiconductors. If God exists, she's a geek with a strange sense of humor.
- It assumes that intelligence is well defined, which it is not
- It assumes that intelligence is the same thing as creativity, which it is not.
- It ignores resource limitations.
Dealing with these points in turn:Intelligence is not well defined. It is very hard to say how much of what we call "intelligence" is in fact the ability to make many connections between facts stored in a very sophisticated memory architecture. Simply building a machine able to process information very quickly achieves nothing because, without learning and a social context, it does not know what information to acquire and process. In human experience, academically brilliant people often fail because they work on the wrong problems, or without access to necessary knowledge.
Nothing is actually achieved without creativity. We do not know what that is, or to what extent it is a social construct (i.e. it takes a developed society to have the necessary systems in place to translate an idea into a concrete reality.) And this leads onto the third point. It is no good having a highly intelligent, creative machine if its use of resources is such that it cannot replicate in large numbers. It may be that machine intelligence will ultimately replace human intelligence, but it may be that it will simply be too resource hungry. In effect, there may be a threshold of capability needed to solve some problems, and it may be that machine intelligence will run out of energy before it scales sufficiently to solve those problems. A machine society might, in effect, get stuck in the machine 19th century because coal or oil became a limiting resource. (In the same way, the energy and resources needed to be consumed to achieve a first independent space colony may exceed the total energy and resources available on Earth. It may be that a billion years or so of eukaryotic evolution has actually resulted in the optimum balance of intelligence, creativity and resource consumption, and that any attempt to exceed the present capability will tip us into declining resources faster than we can improve matters.
In many ways I hope this is wrong. But the argument that only one superior machine is necessary is, in fact, an inductive step too far. It is assuming that "intelligence" on its own can solve a class of problems which may involve a number of constraints which cannot be avoided - like the Laws of Thermodynamics, or the need for excessive amounts of energy.
What I learned in English was to analyse and discuss, for which a language is an essential tool. The best service an English teacher can do for maths and science is to show pupils how language is used to reveal, but also to lie. In my day we learnt a lot of formal grammar, but also the basis of literary structures like simile and metaphor. We also learnt how to identify when someone was trying to mislead us with superficially attractive metaphors that were in fact defective, or by constructing an apparently complete chain of argument that in fact had big holes in it, covered by phrases that invited you to believe that something was obvious (shades of Descartes).
Children who can use a language as a tool of critical thinking are harder to lie to. They are also (in my view) more likely to spot that science and mathematics are in the business of trying to tell the truth. They are thus more resistant to being fooled by religious and political bigots. They are also perhaps more likely to become lawyers, but everything has its downside.
One way to encourage critical thinking, of course, is to give children things like newspaper articles and then get them to work on identifying the sloppy thinking. Unfortunately, in parts of the US, that will most likely get you into trouble.
Roughly what displacement are you writing about?
The second verse is really excellent, the last line is almost perfect. This is the best Whitman parody I've read in years. Pity I have no mod points.
I assume you're trolling, but the core beliefs of Buddhism are considerably less weird than believing that, say, the Universe is about 6000 years old, or that God magically impregnated a woman who gave birth to a human being who was, somehow, also God. The Buddha is not a God, and his teachings are really quite practical. And Buddhists do not really make any supernatural claims. They have beliefs about the way the Universe actually is which may or may not be silly but do at least take into account vast amounts of time and the existence of other worlds.
The Chinese government, on the other hand, believes and brainwashes people into a materialistic religion which is derived from Judaeo-Christianity and substitutes for the war between God and the Devil a war between social classes. Not long ago they were telling children to worship Mao. Currently they are telling people to get rich by doing what corrupt Party officials and businessmen tell them. They are polluting their country to the extent that the WHO estimates three quarters of a million avoidable extra deaths a year. They are constantly threatening free and democratic Taiwan with being annexed. If I lived in China, I could find a lot more things to worry about than the beliefs of a few Buddhists in the mountains.
People often suggest on /. that progress on the Internet is driven by the needs of pornographers. But it would be interesting to know how much progress in networking and databases is actually driven by the (huge) data recording and analysis needs of particle physicists. My own interest in operating systems,networks and databases was started by the need to log large amounts of data very fast from lightning strike simulation experiments.
Always be helpful and make co-operative proposals. Suggest that users who lose passwords should be docked pay according to the time to fix, thus ensuring that user incompetence is not perceived as an IT cost (I know this isn't *nix admin, but it's part of the general pattern).
Produce impressive graphs showing the tradeoff between increasing the numbers of servers per admin, and the expected downtime, and suggest that increased downtime is a small price to pay for increased server/admin ratio.
I'm sure you can see the picture developing. Every proposal you make to measure productivity needs to look superficially good but have a huge cost and a huge risk. And the best thing is, you don't need to lie. Because that is the nature of reality.
True story. Many years ago I was asked to investigate a shop floor wide downtime monitoring system. As an experiment, we tried paper logging of downtime events to see what the expected traffic would be, what events needed to be handled, probable traffic etc. The paper logging showed that an entire floor of machinery had three quarters of its downtime attributed to a single design fault in the machines. The maintenance people knew this, but were keeping quiet because of all the overtime they were earning. Getting the manufacturer to fix the fault was far cheaper and quicker than putting in the monitoring system. Moral: in parallel find a few really good cost reduction proposals. You are bound to have some if you are any good. Then wave them under the nose of the bean counter in parallel with the other stuff.
The Machine that created Nothing. Read the book, Trurl and Klapaucius turned it off just in time to prevent the total disappearance of the Universe, but left big holes in reality.
It's obvious that it is more beneficial to pay money to college lecturers and professors (social enablers) than to A&R men, marketing execs and IP lawyers, none of whom produce any tangible benefit to society.
So the conclusion is obvious; this think tank is telling the exact opposite of the truth. The replacement of music sales by the P2P distribution of free music would hugely benefit the US economy. The "loss" due to "piracy" is actually the start of a potential leveraged economic gain.
More enlightening.
The concept of the manufacturing enterprise is largely an artefact of the Industrial Revolution (OK, everybody cites the Arsenal, but it's an exception.)The concept of the enterprise as trade (i.e. middleman) is pretty consistent. (The British Empire in India started from a trading monopoly that accidentally had to go to war to protect its interests.) From the 1300s on, any French person using the term "entreprise" would know exactly what the two root words meant, and clearly had no quarrel with that meaning. j'entre, et alors je prise, je suis entrepreneur.
The recording industry themselves are entrepreneurs, and now they realise that the software companies are not just another mechanism to enforce their intermediation, but an attempt to introduce a new, and harder to evade, middleman.
All entrepreneurs seek to enforce their control, either legally or through other means (such as owning the channels of distribution, or by monopoly patents.)
Entrepreneurs have a part to play when a resource does not have a market, but they find it very hard to lie down and die when the market is established. We don't yet know who will win this battle for control over the electronic music market, but improved search engines and technology availability could disintermediate the market in a different way - e.g. by sites aggregating direct sales by many small bands, cooperatively owned.
I've never heard it called that before. Either something is missing in translation, or we should be told a bit more about what the Royal Society is like nowadays. After all, it was founded by Charles II, and he was pretty good at something that sounded a bit like skewing the local female population.
Yes, because obviously when a couple of small cars collide it takes place over a few hundred thousand light years and lasts for a million years or so (the warranty on the airbag may be voided).
And this one is like trucks smashing together?
I am now firmly of the view that astronomers:
How about "This in no way whatsoever resembles any kind of collision you have ever witnessed on Earth, it dwarfs your imagination, and by the way any kind of anthropocentric comparison should have been buried with Galileo?"
However, there is a difference between the US and the UK. The last time the Met became really corrupt, the Hertfordshire Police Force was called in to investigate them. (Disclaimer: Guess where I grew up.) Even so, it happened, and a significant number of Met officers were exposed. This is one example of why separate and independent police forces with local rather that national accoujntability are such a good idea.
The problem is, who will investigate the FBI? That seems to be the fundamental weakness of the US system. In the UK, MI5 and MI6 have no powers of arrest. They have to get in regular police to arrest suspects. Although clunky, this provides a check and balance. If the FBI is corrupted or ordered by the Administration to do corrupt things, who is to stop them?
Nowadays the thing I ask myself is "will this job be of any value if civilisation collapses?" If you work in a call centre or IT, be very afraid...but if you can fix a broken irrigation pump or generator, build a house from traditional materials, grow food or brew beer, you probably have a future. Why beer? Well, apart from the likely demand for the product qua beer, earlier societies produced "small beer" (i.e. low strength) for general consumption because the brewing process killed fecal and soil bacteria, and the alcohol then kept the product sterile. In a society without clean drinking water, and no sewers, beer was what stood between you and dysentery.
In fact the only real answer is to find a source of sufficiently high grade (i.e. high temperature) waste heat, and use it as directly as possible. After all, that's how conventional power stations all work. You do not need an alloy with particularly good thermal conductivity, you need one with good hot strength. And you really do not want a Stirling engine. Conventional steam technology does the trick as soon as the high temperature region is sufficiently over 100C, and the seals have been under development successfully since the 18th Century. You can in theory make a not terribly efficient heat engine as soon as your heat source has a high enough temperature to get some pressure out of low boiling fluids like diethyl ether, but although it's amusing in a lab demo I suspect that reasons of cost, solubility in practical lubricants, and general health hazard make this a bad route to go down.
In the same way a judge was once ridiculed for asking "Who are the Beatles", but it was necessary because again they were being talked about in a trial, but anybody subsequently reading the trial report would not get a clue what "Beatles" were. Because of the way the British legal system works, on case law and precedent, judges have to assume that a judgement may be brought up many years in the future - when, say, the word "website" will be long gone but the thing itself still exists.
Incidentally, in that case the question did show that the lawyers on both sides were themselves unclear what they were talking about - not unusual in these cases.
But a lot of people may not get it.
Meanwhile, with the 3 year warranty on Acers so cheap, why did you only pay for 1?
I have also found that Acer AMD64 desktops run Ubuntu 7.04 just fine, thank you. Everything works out of the box. When I tried to downsize one to W2000 (for testing purposes) I had trouble getting the motherboard drivers that were just installed automatically by Ubuntu.
So, while you are correct in that aluminium can be recycled, a widespread conversion would involve making an awful lot of it.
There is a subsidiary issue, unfortunately. It is very easy to convert steel from one alloy to another, e.g. recycled mild steel can be used as the basis for inox, but a small quantity of inox in a steel melt will not harm the resulting alloy. However, there are many aluminium alloys which vary in content for specific purposes (copper in aircraft alloys, magnesium in many car parts.) Recycling of aluminium requires a lot of metallurgical intervention to get the desired resulting alloy. Other than the pure Al used in cans, there is currently no recycling scheme to distinguish alloys. With steel, this is not really an issue. Aluminium alloys can contain copper, magnesium, zinc etc., and contamination of an alloy with the wrong metal will affect the ability to heat treat it, corrosion resistance etc. So while it is possible to, say, recycle cans into auto wheels or aircraft, it is not possible to recycle auto wheels into cans. Recycling aluminium is NOT trivial.
Believe me, I have sat in on very heated exchanges between aluminium and steel metallurgists - two of them once came close to blows in a meeting with Government representatives present - on this precise issue.
The "Dust to dust" study of various cars done a few years back pointed out - and they were right - that if you compared a Hummer used by a tradesman and hence worked for its entire useful life of perhaps 300000 miles, to the cost of operating a succession of Priuses for 300000 miles, the total energy cost of the Hummer was less. That isn't stupid. The Hummer is made almost entirely of cheap steel which will be nearly 100% recycled. The Prius uses expensive (energetically speaking) aluminum and nickel, which also have high clearup costs. Over 300000 miles it will need a number of those batteries and perhaps an entire replacement car or two. The excess costs of manufacture, extraction and disposal actually outweigh the operating fuel cost savings. In reality most Hummers are being bought by urbanites and will therefore never achieve the mileage, but then I suspect the same goes for many Prius.
The study was in some ways counter-intuitive but its conclusions seemed to me to be valid. They were, basically, that the excess costs of going electric currently outweigh the benefits. It's better to make simple, reliable vehicles out of mostly steel and then run them till they wear out. Works for trains, works for ships, works for trucks, why not cars?
The Prius does better than your 5l/100km in terms of grammes CO2 per kilometre because gasoline is less dense than derv. But yes, I totally agree it is a solution in search of a problem. The idea of using ultra high compression Diesels with urea to remove NOx is already being commercialised by both VW and Mercedes.
Mind you, accept my prejudice. Both my boat engine and my car engine were designed by a company with a certain 3-pointed star logo.
Diesels use less fuel on idle than gas engines because they do not need to increase the fuel strength to compensate for small combustion volumes, but the fuel used in traffic is not negligible, probably around 0.5l/hour for a small engine.
The estimate of 120000 miles for the life of a Prius came from the people who did the entire dust to dust survey of vehicle costs. It has a lightweight gas engine, and lightweight is the enemy of durability in gas engines. If you make a solid, durable gas engine, you might just as well make it a Diesel instead because the cost will be little different. Of course you can make a gasoline engine that will do 250000 miles or more - Mercedes used to do it routinely and the engines on mid range Fords will do 200k plus - but the Prius engine isn't a Mercedes V8. And, assuming you are writing from the US, many American auto engines used to be vastly overspecified so that in reality they were running on very light load almost all the time. This is a recipe for long life with gasoline (but not Diesel), but results in excessive fuel consumption.
It is an interesting subject because it is all about tradeoffs, just like software design, and many of the tradeoffs are similar. Developing an understanding of the engine thermal cycles as an R&D engineer has proven, in my case, applicable to many other problems encountered in other fields. After all, in the end everything in the Universe runs on thermodynamics, so we might as well try to understand it.