I once had an engineer working for me who could have designed that in no more than 6 weeks. At the very least he would have used PTFE for all the bearings, glass filled nylon for the articulating parts, industrial grade stepper motors and a couple of networked industrial controllers for the program. He would probably have designed a cover made from a single sheet of vacuum formed Makrolon to ensure nobody touched any rotating parts while it was in use, plus some sort of optical scanning system to stop it moving if anything came too close. And there would probably have been change out of $100000.
Engineers today, what do they know? Make it too simple and too cheap and the boss will think anybody can do it.
They will have to run the HDDs outside the oil because they do, in fact, need ventilation. Though perhaps you can get totally sealed HDDs from somewhere by now.
However, the main problem I see is connectors. Existing connectors have been developed to work in air, except for a few exotic types. Watertight connectors are designed to work with wet environment outside and dry electronics inside, not vice versa, but in any case existing technology would require standard connectors to be used entirely submerged in dielectric. Modern connectors have much smaller contact surfaces than they did even ten years ago, and the distance liquid would have to move by capillary action before breaking the contact is quite small. It's hard to see how you could do accelerated life testing for such a system, which means it could be many years before we know whether they are reliable or not.
I recall when doing research involving electronics in Fluorinert we had to make soldered connections in liquid. Contacts that were frequently made and broken could be pressure contacts, but that is quite different from the situation in a server. And if we had known of a cheap substitute for Fluorinert we would have used it. The majority of oils degrade quite interestingly - you wouldn't expect bacteria to live in them but they can and do if the conditions are right.
These guys may have a workable solution to all the problems, but I can't help thinking that technology will make the concept obsolete. How does the performance of an old Fluorinert-cooled Cray stack up against a modern server in flops and GBit/s of IO per watt? (Hint: Don't bet on the Cray.)
Have you considered the electrical power needed to charge a practical vehicle cell in 5 minutes?
Let's assume an average cruising consumption of about 15kw for a small car. At 60mph with a 300 mile range, that's 75kwh. To charge those cells in 5 minutes, assuming an 80% efficiency, will need 75 * 12 * 1.25 =~ 1.1 Megawatts. At 440V, even with a 3-phase charger, that's over 1000 amps. At 11KV it's a more reasonable 100A, but the weight of the inverter gear and the shielded connector in the car is considerable and you are going to spend rather more than 5 minutes padlocking the interlocks and cross checking before and after charge. At 440V the main issue will be the weight of the cables. Three cores of around 400mm cross section each are rather heavy.
It's possible to imagine a world in which fuel stations supply exchange cells, but given the natural nervousness of most drivers when close to empty, it's unlikely to be practical or cost effective.
The model is wrong. You have to imagine a world in which car parks have charging stations that charge at reasonable rates, as do hotels and houses. You will need a general beefing up of the electricity distribution network, and you will need plenty of nuclear, solar and wind energy sources. And people will have to plan maybe a little further ahead than they do at present. Long trips will mandate an overnight stop. Probably a good thing as the only accidents I have ever had were after driving too long in a day.
On that model with a more reasonable 10-hour charge, the necessary charging rate is about 9KW - still a heavy cable, but with a socket about the size and complexity of the sort used for portable machines in factories and for boat shorepower.
Just don't try to use your wind turbine. In our location, to run my small car on its current, fairly low usage cycle, I would need a 6M diameter turbine on a 40M pylon, and I suspect the neighbours would object.
The main benefit of lead acid batteries is that they are cheap to make and easy to recycle. However, they do not have very good energy density. A 110AH lead acid battery weighs about 30kg and cannot be repetitively discharged below about 70% of capacity without a severe reduction in life. At 50% discharge you are down to maybe 100 charge/discharge cycles, go very far below that and you will rapidly destroy the battery. The AH rating is about as meaningful as those "200HP" engines in US cars that turn out to have an SAE rating of 55HP. Effectively it is about a 35AH battery with a total energy delivery of 12V * 35AH = 420WH. The equivalent LiIon batteries would weigh, I guess, around 4kg with packaging. As a result, lead acid batteries are unsuited to any automotive use except those where they can substitute for ballast, such as boats and powered wheelchairs where the batteries help lower the centre of gravity.
Quite a lot of research has gone into the lead/peroxide cycle, especially given the constant desire to make them smaller and more reliable. It hasn't been hugely successful. You can have high discharge rates and long life at the expense of much more weight and much higher cost, but the nature of the cycle itself (the production and destruction of large amounts of lead peroxide) makes it hard to design a system that can handle many charge/discharge cycles without very large and heavy storage arrays.
If I hadn't used up mod points, I would assign one. Nowadays people seem to think that they have a right to consequence-free celebrity. Why do they want celebrity? Fame, money, sex. But they don't want to pay the price. They want to be famous on their terms. They want their pictures on hoardings and their blogs quoted in the NYT, but they also want complete privacy.
The consequence of celebrity is, unfortunately, that some people will think they have rights over you. In fact, the ranting of an anonymous psychopathic blogger are probably far less damaging than the stuff that may get written about you in the yellow press. Rupert Murdoch's "news"papers have before now done the photoshop tricks with heads and bodies. British newspapers have faked scenes of politicians standing next to people they would not, in fact, be seen dead standing next to. They routinely misquote people for effect. More people are likely to believe this than something they find on the net - which is exactly what right wing newspaper owners are trying to achieve.
The point about this is that there is a regulatory body called the "Press Complaints Commission". The good newspapers do not need it, the bad ones simply ignore it. It's a sign of how successful the proposals are likely to be.
If you want privacy, do not seek celebrity, even anonymous celebrity on Slashdot. (I routinely create a new identity- it gives me about a year off moderation- and it doesn't hurt, though my current user id has more digits than the first one did.)
it's in something more respectable than the Daily Mail. For the uninitiated US-ers, the Daily Mail is the UK equivalent of those US magazines with articles like 'aliens abducted my sister'. It pretends to be a newspaper but it is woefully, embarrassingly bad and its articles, to put it extremely politely, would mostly not survive the NYT fact-checking process. Assume, therefore, that this story is over-hyped. The US military has a habit of acquiring any potential military application "just in case" it comes good. Unless there is a huge pork barrel project available, that may well be where it stops. No-one else can legally acquire the technology and they can add it on to the annual list of exciting R&D projects to show everybody is earning their pay.
The only thing in the inventor's favour is that the British MOD has a track record of failing to recognise useful inventions (such as RSA encryption, which it had long before R,S and A and ignored) while spending a fortune on torpedoes that don't work, nuclear submarines with no role, tanks with undersized engines, and rifles that don't shoot properly. For long haired left leaning peaceniks like myself half the charm of the MOD is its ability to reduce the risk that we will get involved in a major war by making sure our armed forces are ill equipped to fight one. (that was sarcasm btw). However, my own view is that they regard flying surveillance vehicles as unnecessary. The plan is to cover the entire planet in talking CCTV cameras, which will probably catch speeding motorists as well.
We the British have the best intelligence services in the world. After WW" we spooked you about Communism so you didn't link up with the USSR and gobble up the remains of our empire. For our own devious reasons we put together a dodgy dossier that got the US embroiled in Iraq (Saddam and WMD). We sent out a patrol boat and nearly got you to declare war on Iran but you seem to have spotted that one in time, especially now you start to realise the involvement of Rupert Murdoch (of the Sun and Fox un-News.) Now we're planning to get you to start locking up your own dangerous left-wing middle classes and spending all your R&D dollars on EMP weapons.
No, you can't. You are talking utter nonsense, I'm afraid. First, you have to control all that current. It's no good having a huge knife switch with on and off positions. The arcing will destroy it instantly. You need a lot of control electronics to manage the power to the large brushless motor you will need, and you will need big gears and shafts to handle the torque. This adds weight, and also adds the need for ever more advanced cooling technology.
You also have to accelerate the batteries as well as the rest of the vehicle, and of course the more batteries you have, the greater the mass to be accelerated. In fact, it doesn't take a genius to see that once you reach a certain size the weight of the driver is hardly a factor and any increase in power will scale precisely with increase in mass, and hence acceleration will rapidly asymptote to a nearly constant value.
The only way you can really improve this is to either produce batteries and control electronics which can produce more power for a given mass, or improve the efficiency of the drive chain significantly. Modern brushless motors and FET controllers are better than the old systems but there is not a lot more to gain. Battery technology - minimising internal resistance, developing polarisation free chemistry, finding completely reversible cycles that can handle high oxidation rates - is the key to producing high acceleration electrical vehicles.
Unfortunately, such are engineering tradeoffs that long life and high discharge rate rarely go together, and these experimental vehicles seem largely to be about either getting publicity or bragging rights. One thing is certain: factor in the battery manufacture and recycling costs, and they are no solution to global warming. I believe there is a claim that, when total life cost is taken into account, even some small SUVs are actually lower energy impact than a Toyota Prius.
Most of the posts so far just display the general level of ignorance about the remaining primates. They still have basically a medieval world view about the status of human beings. Guys, get with the plot, we've had Copernicus, Galileo, Newton, and we now know we are just one mammalian species on a small planet going round a medium sized star. We are not semi-divine beings essentially different from the other mammals, and the way we treat our relatives tells us something about ourselves.
There are now anthropologists who argue that modern man has been systematically eradicating the other hominids because of our peculiarly aggressive and expansionist nature, and we are now eradicating the other primate species. Is this something to be proud of? We won't even allow chimpanzees, gorillas and orang-utans a quite small range in which to survive. And we have a depressing tendency for one human group to apply this to other human groups. Not long ago - in fact, until now - some white Americans were arguing that black Americans belonged to an inferior species. It's part of a most unpleasant mindset that has given us genocide and species extinctions, and in a world where growing populations cause more competition for food, air, water and energy, it is something we somehow have to combat if we don't want the last World War to look like an Episcopalian convention by comparison with the wars to come.
Admitting that other large primates deserve the same rights we give ourselves in the West - the right not to be killed because somebody wants our land, the right not to be locked up in a featureless room and gawped at - is not only not unreasonable, it's part of rising above the aggressive little monkey in our own brains and improving our own chance of long terms survival.
Nowadays there is a kind of prejudice against exams because men do better at them than women. The move to continuous assessment has caused girls to do better at schools than boys, so it can work both ways. But I came up through the system where the only thing that really mattered was the exam, and I am grateful. I am inherently lazy and will only work if there is a positive outcome at the end, and teacher approval was not a significant positive outcome. In today's world I would probably fail both school and university. On the other hand the present system has benefited my daughters and given them a definite advantage over equally intelligent boys.
I reassure myself by thinking, having read his biography, that in today's world an Alan Turing would probably have failed to get into Cambridge.
The best thing about sudden-death exams is that they virtually eliminate cheating if they are properly run, at least in subjects where thought is needed. And the experience of Cambridge physics practical - walk into a room where there is a joke piece of apparatus never seen before, a short paper describing what is to be measured and a few equations, and have a day to make something of it - that has benefited me the rest of my life. I only recently thought about it when trying to understand why staff going onto client sites nowadays seemed so much less confident and unable to make decisions than my generation. Then I thought back to those practical exams. The new generation is better at solving problems by googling for relevant data and trying to extract the pattern, but we had to try and wing it from scratch. I'm not saying either is necessarily better or worse, but if I was ever trapped on a desert island I know which group I would rather be with.
Just ask somebody who runs a cleaning agency. They will tell you the problem with Dysons is that the HEPA filters block whereupon the engines burn out. Basically Dysons work as advertised - provided they have meticulous attention and are never allowed to get so full that the cyclones stop working properly, whereupon the dust gets in the HEPA filters, and they block very quickly. Unfortunately the average office/home cleaner is not too brilliant at analysing vacuum cleaner problems.
Cleaning agencies like vacuum cleaners from Numatics. They are simple, robust, cheap to repair, the bags are big and cheap. They are not particularly heavy, have plenty of capacity. OK they do not have the design prettiness of Dysons, in fact they look like industrial design.
However, the last time I visited the factory they were at least turning out the cases with a robotised injection moulding machine.
Actually liquid sodium has a very long history as an industrial chemical. Oxygen dihydride is a chemical which can corrode almost everything over the long term, and we seem able to cope with it. Sodium handling is very well established; I believe it has been done routinely in the chemical industry - in large volumes - for over 100 years. It has to be kept away from water and oxygen. This isn't rocket science. So does the crankcase of an internal combustion engine, but a lifeboat engine can run up to its midline in seawater. It is also very cheap and can be made in very high purity.
Bismuth is hard to handle and scarce, and, from my own experiments with bismuth alloys years ago, it has horrible flow and wetting properties.
It's amazing what IS handled quite safely in industry - molten glass in multi-tonne quantities, flammable gases, toxic liquids. The trick is to find a technology that works, refine it, and stick to it. Before long people forget there was ever a problem. In my kitchen cupboard I have nearly pure formic acid, sodium hydroxide, chlorine based bleach. And that's just household cleaners.
As has been pointed out repeatedly in the literature, there is a promising route to build sodium cooled breeder reactors whose byproducts do not yield themselves to the production of plutonium, but do lend themselves to electrolytic refining rather than the PUREX route that has been used to support weapons manufacture. It has further been proposed that these reactors actually be used to consume existing high level waste, reducing disposal cost and easing the supply problems. (Unfortunately I can't point to any obvious links, as my information is in dead tree format, but I'm sure they are out there.) The problem seems to be that the advanced countries that have the capability of building such reactors don't have the political will, partly owing to "environmentalists" who seem actually just to be technically ignorant luddites. In fact most of these technologies have been around for years without commercialisation, but now it will take a long time to build reactors - of course it benefits the families of several politicians in the current US administration that oil prices stay high. The sudden push for pork barrel biofuel projects could be associated with the fact that the product utilises the current oil industry infrastructure rather than the boring old electricity supply industry infrastructure. And it does not commit to spending some serious money on scientific and engineering research which could, in the long term, reduce the value of shares in, say, Exxon, very considerably.
If you want to keep your tinfoil hat on, you could argue that there are great similarities between the oil industry and the RIAA. Neither of them want new technology, regardless of what the public want or need.
A possible fix, and relatively cheap insurance, is to buy a new HDD of the correct type at the time you buy the laptop. On the original disk, do all the registration stuff, clean off the corporate malware, patch Windows, Ghost, then just remove the disk (nb don't forget to remove batteries - on the Acer 1500 series, the HDD crate is accessible by removing the battery, which is well thought out.
Now install new HDD and the OS of your choice. If the system fails under warranty, switch hard drives and try rebooting. If it works fine, you know you have an OS problem. If it doesn't, claim under warranty.
Assuming you back up regularly, this is a good insurance strategy. I experienced it the other way when an update to Ubuntu caused an unrecoverable video driver problem and I needed my email back urgently. It took well under an hour to reload the Windows HDD, move the Thunderbird data back from the server, and carry on till a fix was available.
Why do we need all this stuff? (a)Because the country is dominated by the sort of ghastly rightwingers who OWN the Telegraph, the Times, the Sun and the Daily Vile, and as a result pursues policies that make us a target, and (b) because the same rightwingers use their publications to tell us we are under constant threat of street crime and being blown up by extremists, till all the old ladies write to their MPs and demand surveillance of everything at all times. Oh, and (c) because they are always demanding lower taxes (though their interesting commercial arrangements usually means they pay hardly any) so we economise on police, social workers, drug treatment schemes and youth facilities and try to fix the problems by watching people instead.
I never cease to be amazed that a government dominated by technologically illiterate lawyers tries to find a technical fix for every problem. Perhaps I shouldn't be.
Believe it or not,in the 80s we lost an engineer to Akademgorodok. He went there to install some scientific equipment which took far longer than expected. Came back, explained that everything was dirt slow but it was OK, they had paid his salary for the extra period. Then they needed a service visit and he went...and never came back. He had met a very nice Russian woman scientist while over there, and she had persuaded him to take a research job and stay.
The big problem is surely going to be, how the Hell do you turn it into a business model? Because unlike Berkeley or Stanford, as many have pointed out, there is only Mafia out there, not hungry businessmen looking for the Next Big Thing.
Well, I could point out that Polish names regularly get Romanised - most people don't recognise the Kupfernigk in Copernicus - but instead, as a Brit, I'll just apologise for my error and get a Polish guy in to fix my bad spelling in future.
The one where Havelock Vetinari and Sam Vimes turn up at the start of LOTR, and four hundred pages later the Luggage has swallowed the Rings of Power and is just going around looking innocent, Aragorn is the new Watch Captain at Quirm, Sauron is running the Post Office, and Saruman and Gandalf have lectureships at UU.
Frankly, it's amazing that people can continue to turn out standard fantasy following Pratchett's demolition job.
New LOX-fuelled vacuum flask wearing overlords. Let me be the first to write it. However, would it really be wise to use something like this? At least compressed gas involves only relatively straightforward mechanical design, well proven over many generations. Portable cryogenics look like an interesting engineering design too far. If, which is admittedly totally improbable, I were to have to depend on one of these things, I would want to know I was relying on an extremely mature technology.
Actually, I know astronomers call them supernovae. Until recently, they also thought Pluto was a planet. Truth is, like a lot of scientists, astronomers create cod Latin and Greek for historical reasons (Latin was the common language of intellectuals, Greek was the language they used when they really didn't want to be overheard...). Unlike Tycho, they don't use either on a regular basis, and they get it wrong. Correct me if I am wrong, but Tycho called them, correctly, "new stars". The nova is an adjective, which is inflected in Latin but not in English. The noun is stella, a star.
So astronomers can do what they like, but I for one will grit my teeth. I don't have any objection to neologism whatsoever, but trying to make it look like Latin is just pomposity.
"Supernova" is an invented word and the plural is "supernovas". Just like televisions and radios.
In fact, the word is built out of two Latin adjectives, literally it means an "abovenew". Invented words follow this rule, hence the plural of octopus is octopuses, of satellite is satellites, and of millennium is millenniums. The plural of "vertebra" is "vertebrae" because it is an actual Latin word, not an invented modern one.
Incidentally, while pursuing this very pedantic note, "satellites" is correct plural but the singular of the original word is "satelles". And the original word is pronounced sat-ell-it-ees. We are a long way from Latin.
The earliest LaserJets had Canon engines, but HP is no longer exclusively Canon. What HP do provide is printer software (firmware and client), which they are good at, and a supply chain which, while expensive, is effective. They also come up with good specification points and physical designs.This gives them a large corporate market share. But they are NOT a manufacturing company. You'll be suggesting next they make their HP-branded notebooks and PCs.
The entire electronics industry survives on very few actual manufacturers. Samsung OEMs a lot of small printers, so I believe does Lexmark.
This just isn't true at all. Who modded it insightful? Rasterisation is a bottleneck, otherwise why do you think commercial printers need special purpose raster processing engines? Check a few specifications and you will see that processor speeds and memory scale quite fast with page size, emulations and number of colours. There is a reason for that.
The suspicion about this is that it is basically what an Indigo printer does (for those who have managed to avoid working in the print industry so far, Indigo is a full-width A3/11 by 17 inkjet based commercial printer line bought some years back by HP and now sold by them.) The Indigo has singularly failed to conquer the world. It isn't particularly fast for a variety of reasons, it is very expensive indeed (well into 6 digits) and only a few specialist companies seem to want it. It's hard to believe that a company which doesn't have the resources of HP could suddenly produce a half million dollar printer for a few hundred dollars.
The fact is, color lasers are getting remarkably good and really quite cheap for what they do. Here's a free plug for Xerox: their latest generation really is pretty good, even if one A3 model looks somewhat like a rebranded OKI. And the latest generation of their solid ink technology (not suitable for frequent handling but very good for things like POS) really is a knockout. So much so that they are providing samples in their latest promotional pack. HP of course are confused: they don't actually make laser printers, they design inkjets, but DesignJets aren't cheap (which is another reason to be suspicious of the article), their latest high capacity inkjet is not as cheap as you might expect, and the Business Inkjets are kind of OK but not Earth-conquering. If anybody has a world beating low cost inkjet technology it should be HP. Are they worried about eating up their revenues from toner sales, which they get without ever even handling toner? Possibly.
Slashdot Mirror
Engineers today, what do they know? Make it too simple and too cheap and the boss will think anybody can do it.
However, the main problem I see is connectors. Existing connectors have been developed to work in air, except for a few exotic types. Watertight connectors are designed to work with wet environment outside and dry electronics inside, not vice versa, but in any case existing technology would require standard connectors to be used entirely submerged in dielectric. Modern connectors have much smaller contact surfaces than they did even ten years ago, and the distance liquid would have to move by capillary action before breaking the contact is quite small. It's hard to see how you could do accelerated life testing for such a system, which means it could be many years before we know whether they are reliable or not.
I recall when doing research involving electronics in Fluorinert we had to make soldered connections in liquid. Contacts that were frequently made and broken could be pressure contacts, but that is quite different from the situation in a server. And if we had known of a cheap substitute for Fluorinert we would have used it. The majority of oils degrade quite interestingly - you wouldn't expect bacteria to live in them but they can and do if the conditions are right.
These guys may have a workable solution to all the problems, but I can't help thinking that technology will make the concept obsolete. How does the performance of an old Fluorinert-cooled Cray stack up against a modern server in flops and GBit/s of IO per watt? (Hint: Don't bet on the Cray.)
Let's assume an average cruising consumption of about 15kw for a small car. At 60mph with a 300 mile range, that's 75kwh. To charge those cells in 5 minutes, assuming an 80% efficiency, will need 75 * 12 * 1.25 =~ 1.1 Megawatts. At 440V, even with a 3-phase charger, that's over 1000 amps. At 11KV it's a more reasonable 100A, but the weight of the inverter gear and the shielded connector in the car is considerable and you are going to spend rather more than 5 minutes padlocking the interlocks and cross checking before and after charge. At 440V the main issue will be the weight of the cables. Three cores of around 400mm cross section each are rather heavy.
It's possible to imagine a world in which fuel stations supply exchange cells, but given the natural nervousness of most drivers when close to empty, it's unlikely to be practical or cost effective.
The model is wrong. You have to imagine a world in which car parks have charging stations that charge at reasonable rates, as do hotels and houses. You will need a general beefing up of the electricity distribution network, and you will need plenty of nuclear, solar and wind energy sources. And people will have to plan maybe a little further ahead than they do at present. Long trips will mandate an overnight stop. Probably a good thing as the only accidents I have ever had were after driving too long in a day.
On that model with a more reasonable 10-hour charge, the necessary charging rate is about 9KW - still a heavy cable, but with a socket about the size and complexity of the sort used for portable machines in factories and for boat shorepower.
Just don't try to use your wind turbine. In our location, to run my small car on its current, fairly low usage cycle, I would need a 6M diameter turbine on a 40M pylon, and I suspect the neighbours would object.
Effectively it is about a 35AH battery with a total energy delivery of 12V * 35AH = 420WH. The equivalent LiIon batteries would weigh, I guess, around 4kg with packaging. As a result, lead acid batteries are unsuited to any automotive use except those where they can substitute for ballast, such as boats and powered wheelchairs where the batteries help lower the centre of gravity.
Quite a lot of research has gone into the lead/peroxide cycle, especially given the constant desire to make them smaller and more reliable. It hasn't been hugely successful. You can have high discharge rates and long life at the expense of much more weight and much higher cost, but the nature of the cycle itself (the production and destruction of large amounts of lead peroxide) makes it hard to design a system that can handle many charge/discharge cycles without very large and heavy storage arrays.
The consequence of celebrity is, unfortunately, that some people will think they have rights over you. In fact, the ranting of an anonymous psychopathic blogger are probably far less damaging than the stuff that may get written about you in the yellow press. Rupert Murdoch's "news"papers have before now done the photoshop tricks with heads and bodies. British newspapers have faked scenes of politicians standing next to people they would not, in fact, be seen dead standing next to. They routinely misquote people for effect. More people are likely to believe this than something they find on the net - which is exactly what right wing newspaper owners are trying to achieve.
The point about this is that there is a regulatory body called the "Press Complaints Commission". The good newspapers do not need it, the bad ones simply ignore it. It's a sign of how successful the proposals are likely to be.
If you want privacy, do not seek celebrity, even anonymous celebrity on Slashdot. (I routinely create a new identity- it gives me about a year off moderation- and it doesn't hurt, though my current user id has more digits than the first one did.)
The only thing in the inventor's favour is that the British MOD has a track record of failing to recognise useful inventions (such as RSA encryption, which it had long before R,S and A and ignored) while spending a fortune on torpedoes that don't work, nuclear submarines with no role, tanks with undersized engines, and rifles that don't shoot properly. For long haired left leaning peaceniks like myself half the charm of the MOD is its ability to reduce the risk that we will get involved in a major war by making sure our armed forces are ill equipped to fight one. (that was sarcasm btw). However, my own view is that they regard flying surveillance vehicles as unnecessary. The plan is to cover the entire planet in talking CCTV cameras, which will probably catch speeding motorists as well.
We'll have our revenge for 1776 yet.
love, the MOD
You also have to accelerate the batteries as well as the rest of the vehicle, and of course the more batteries you have, the greater the mass to be accelerated. In fact, it doesn't take a genius to see that once you reach a certain size the weight of the driver is hardly a factor and any increase in power will scale precisely with increase in mass, and hence acceleration will rapidly asymptote to a nearly constant value.
The only way you can really improve this is to either produce batteries and control electronics which can produce more power for a given mass, or improve the efficiency of the drive chain significantly. Modern brushless motors and FET controllers are better than the old systems but there is not a lot more to gain. Battery technology - minimising internal resistance, developing polarisation free chemistry, finding completely reversible cycles that can handle high oxidation rates - is the key to producing high acceleration electrical vehicles.
Unfortunately, such are engineering tradeoffs that long life and high discharge rate rarely go together, and these experimental vehicles seem largely to be about either getting publicity or bragging rights. One thing is certain: factor in the battery manufacture and recycling costs, and they are no solution to global warming. I believe there is a claim that, when total life cost is taken into account, even some small SUVs are actually lower energy impact than a Toyota Prius.
There are now anthropologists who argue that modern man has been systematically eradicating the other hominids because of our peculiarly aggressive and expansionist nature, and we are now eradicating the other primate species. Is this something to be proud of? We won't even allow chimpanzees, gorillas and orang-utans a quite small range in which to survive. And we have a depressing tendency for one human group to apply this to other human groups. Not long ago - in fact, until now - some white Americans were arguing that black Americans belonged to an inferior species. It's part of a most unpleasant mindset that has given us genocide and species extinctions, and in a world where growing populations cause more competition for food, air, water and energy, it is something we somehow have to combat if we don't want the last World War to look like an Episcopalian convention by comparison with the wars to come.
Admitting that other large primates deserve the same rights we give ourselves in the West - the right not to be killed because somebody wants our land, the right not to be locked up in a featureless room and gawped at - is not only not unreasonable, it's part of rising above the aggressive little monkey in our own brains and improving our own chance of long terms survival.
I reassure myself by thinking, having read his biography, that in today's world an Alan Turing would probably have failed to get into Cambridge.
The best thing about sudden-death exams is that they virtually eliminate cheating if they are properly run, at least in subjects where thought is needed. And the experience of Cambridge physics practical - walk into a room where there is a joke piece of apparatus never seen before, a short paper describing what is to be measured and a few equations, and have a day to make something of it - that has benefited me the rest of my life. I only recently thought about it when trying to understand why staff going onto client sites nowadays seemed so much less confident and unable to make decisions than my generation. Then I thought back to those practical exams. The new generation is better at solving problems by googling for relevant data and trying to extract the pattern, but we had to try and wing it from scratch. I'm not saying either is necessarily better or worse, but if I was ever trapped on a desert island I know which group I would rather be with.
Cleaning agencies like vacuum cleaners from Numatics. They are simple, robust, cheap to repair, the bags are big and cheap. They are not particularly heavy, have plenty of capacity. OK they do not have the design prettiness of Dysons, in fact they look like industrial design.
However, the last time I visited the factory they were at least turning out the cases with a robotised injection moulding machine.
Bismuth is hard to handle and scarce, and, from my own experiments with bismuth alloys years ago, it has horrible flow and wetting properties.
It's amazing what IS handled quite safely in industry - molten glass in multi-tonne quantities, flammable gases, toxic liquids. The trick is to find a technology that works, refine it, and stick to it. Before long people forget there was ever a problem. In my kitchen cupboard I have nearly pure formic acid, sodium hydroxide, chlorine based bleach. And that's just household cleaners.
If you want to keep your tinfoil hat on, you could argue that there are great similarities between the oil industry and the RIAA. Neither of them want new technology, regardless of what the public want or need.
Now install new HDD and the OS of your choice. If the system fails under warranty, switch hard drives and try rebooting. If it works fine, you know you have an OS problem. If it doesn't, claim under warranty.
Assuming you back up regularly, this is a good insurance strategy. I experienced it the other way when an update to Ubuntu caused an unrecoverable video driver problem and I needed my email back urgently. It took well under an hour to reload the Windows HDD, move the Thunderbird data back from the server, and carry on till a fix was available.
I never cease to be amazed that a government dominated by technologically illiterate lawyers tries to find a technical fix for every problem. Perhaps I shouldn't be.
The big problem is surely going to be, how the Hell do you turn it into a business model? Because unlike Berkeley or Stanford, as many have pointed out, there is only Mafia out there, not hungry businessmen looking for the Next Big Thing.
Well, I could point out that Polish names regularly get Romanised - most people don't recognise the Kupfernigk in Copernicus - but instead, as a Brit, I'll just apologise for my error and get a Polish guy in to fix my bad spelling in future.
Frankly, it's amazing that people can continue to turn out standard fantasy following Pratchett's demolition job.
here
However, many of us believe that the current lot are living on Stanislaus Lem's Solaris already.
New LOX-fuelled vacuum flask wearing overlords. Let me be the first to write it. However, would it really be wise to use something like this? At least compressed gas involves only relatively straightforward mechanical design, well proven over many generations. Portable cryogenics look like an interesting engineering design too far. If, which is admittedly totally improbable, I were to have to depend on one of these things, I would want to know I was relying on an extremely mature technology.
So astronomers can do what they like, but I for one will grit my teeth. I don't have any objection to neologism whatsoever, but trying to make it look like Latin is just pomposity.
In fact, the word is built out of two Latin adjectives, literally it means an "abovenew". Invented words follow this rule, hence the plural of octopus is octopuses, of satellite is satellites, and of millennium is millenniums. The plural of "vertebra" is "vertebrae" because it is an actual Latin word, not an invented modern one.
Incidentally, while pursuing this very pedantic note, "satellites" is correct plural but the singular of the original word is "satelles". And the original word is pronounced sat-ell-it-ees. We are a long way from Latin.
The entire electronics industry survives on very few actual manufacturers. Samsung OEMs a lot of small printers, so I believe does Lexmark.
This just isn't true at all. Who modded it insightful? Rasterisation is a bottleneck, otherwise why do you think commercial printers need special purpose raster processing engines? Check a few specifications and you will see that processor speeds and memory scale quite fast with page size, emulations and number of colours. There is a reason for that.
The fact is, color lasers are getting remarkably good and really quite cheap for what they do. Here's a free plug for Xerox: their latest generation really is pretty good, even if one A3 model looks somewhat like a rebranded OKI. And the latest generation of their solid ink technology (not suitable for frequent handling but very good for things like POS) really is a knockout. So much so that they are providing samples in their latest promotional pack. HP of course are confused: they don't actually make laser printers, they design inkjets, but DesignJets aren't cheap (which is another reason to be suspicious of the article), their latest high capacity inkjet is not as cheap as you might expect, and the Business Inkjets are kind of OK but not Earth-conquering. If anybody has a world beating low cost inkjet technology it should be HP. Are they worried about eating up their revenues from toner sales, which they get without ever even handling toner? Possibly.