And, most notably, because fuel cells run on hydrogen, and you can't buy that at a gas station. Hydrogen is very difficult to store, because it has very low density and a high leak rate in most tanks.
In fact, fuel cells can run on other materials, e.g., methane, but this is typically done by the simple trick of using a reformer to produce hydrogen from the methane, and running that hydrogen in a fuel cell. And this can be difficult if the source of the methane is less than extremely pure; in that a lot of common impurities can poison either the catalyst or the reformer.
So, without a good means of storing hydrogen, it's not at all clear that advances in fuel cell technology are terribly useful.
The solar panels were designed to generate power from illumination either on the front or the back (although they are not as efficient when back-illuminated.) This allows the panels to gain a bit of power from albedo illumination (i.e., light reflected from the Earth). So turning them backside to the sun wouldn't stop them from generating power.
I definitely recommend reading the guidelines. There's a lot of stuff in there.
Yes, and I suggest reading the FAQ, too:
"Q: Will the source code be available to the public?
A: No. The EAC will make all information available to the public consistent with Federal law. The EAC is prohibited under the Trade Secrets Act (18 U.S.C. 1905) from making the source code information available to the public.
This is a bad idea. A much better idea is this: "No voting machine shall be certified unless the vendor makes the source code available for public inspection." This is fully in compliance with 18 U.S.C. 1905: any company has the right to keep their code proprietary. However, if they do so, they should not be allowed to have their machines used in public elections.
Voting should be secret. Vote counting should never be secret.
"the report finds that our education system actually produces more science and engineering graduates than the market demands.'"
Reading the link, the article states that 150,000 jobs in science and engineering are added annually, not including those created by people retiring or leaving a profession, and 435,000 people graduate with degrees in science and engineering. From this he concludes "nearly two-thirds" fo the graduates take jobs in fields other than science and engineering.
This is idiotic. If he ignores openings from retirees, deaths, and people leaving the field, his isn't actually counting all the jobs. This calculation is essentially worthless. Given that this trivial calculation is misleading to the extent of being wrong, it's hard to credit much of the rest of what was said.
"I have thought that perhaps natural evolution had already long ago derived the most efficient ways of recovering energy to drive its organisms."
Nope. Photosynthesis typically runs at about 1-2% energy conversion efficiency; the best plants ever are about 4%. The best solar cells are now hitting 40%.
On the other hand, photosynthesis isn't just about energy conversion-- plants also synthesize sugars.
Well, from what we know there ought to be some electrostatic effects going on... but all the clearing events we've seen so far look like they've been wind events. (Not necessarily dust devils-- some of the clearing events have occurred at night. And we see them on Opportunity, where we haven't seen actual dust devils.) Many of the images--e.g., this one show clear wind tails on the shadow post of the cal target and elsewhere.
For terrestrial use, thin-film PV has to be both cheap and also durable-- the Earth envrionment is pretty corrosive. There are a couple of thin film technologies that are coming along, but it seems to be incremental progress, along with incremental increases in manufacturing capacity. I'll bet on the progress continuing, so rather than a breakthrough, we'll just keep seeing better and cheaper panels each year moving progressively into more markets. There really isn't a "tipping point"-- market penetration just happens step by step, as the highest cost of electricity and the highest sunlight availability markets progressively become economically competitive.
Dr. Eggman asked: Any biologists out there who wishes to inform me of how this solar cell compares in efficiency and equivalent energy production for photosynthesis?
I'm a photovoltaics expert, not a biologist, but I can answer that question. The answer is, they don't quote any efficiency numbers.
I find this pretty frightening. The whole point of the good guys is that they act like good guys. I don't think that implementing a policy of lying, slander and attacking the trust of the social network is a good idea, period-- it's not good when the bad guys do it, and it's not good if the good guys do it. "It's ok for us to lie and cheat because we're on the side of truth and justice" is a justification that sounds awful easy to bend.
Far too much of the fabric of social networks-- and that includes the internet-- is built on the assumption that people avoid doing things exactly like what's being proposed here.
Or, to phrase it differently... Superman used to fight for "truth, justice, and the American way." If you're going to be one of the good guys, how about keeping "truth" in there... it's actually something very valuable.
Yeah, I clicked the link looking for some cool videos of it flying (I love to see that fire and smoke...), but "flies" is a misleading headline. "Plans to be launched sometime in future" is correct.
Clearly, to implement this you'd have to register your SIM card in your phone. I presume that this would be a verifiable process. If you had more than 1 SIM cards, the only ones that would be cleared to have votes from that card accepted would be ones which had a unique voter registered with them.
The fact that SIM cards would have to be registered with the government carries with it some degree of invasion of privacy. However, as long as the government allows people to own SIM cards that weren't registered with the government as voting-enabled cards.
In the US, we would also have to have a mechanism for people not owning mobile phones to vote (I know it's hard for a/.'er to envision any reason a person would not have one). The trivial way to do this would be to have people who don't own phones be able to go to a voting place and get a assigned a SIM chip, which could either be used as an insert into any phone (hey, can I borrow your phone to vote?) or else could be taken to a polling place and used in a specially equipped voting booth.
The annoying problem I see with this is that it pretty much removes the last traces of privacy for voting. It's actually really useful to democracy that ballots should be secret. This is, unfortunately, already becoming a thing of the past, with the proliferation of absentee ballots that have no longer become the voting method of last resort, but the voting method of (in some cases) first resort. Voting should be private, not public-- not your boss, not your friends, and not the friendly guy who says "I'll give you ten bucks if you vote the way I ask-- none of these should not be able to say, "hey, let me watch while you vote so I can see who you voted for."
I would think that they can live with this. After all, it doesn't prevent searches, it only means that they have to clear them with a judge first. Historically, this has not been hard to do-- the judge only hears one side, and they almost always sign off. There's no reason they can't do this.
What this does is give a paper trail for a search, so if the reason is political, you may be able to determine it-- or, at least, they will have to have a plausible cover story. But it doesn't significantly impact real searches.
And it's worth pointing out that it turns itself upside down every time it takes a step. This would, I think, end up being a real bear of a problem in a practical robot... sometimes the head's on the top... sometimes the head's on the bottom.
It also has each of the three sides being the "front" alternately-- so, essentially, it has no front...
Still, it's pretty darn cool.
daveschroeder wrote: "Of course the cosponsor of the bill said that. What do you expect?"
What I expect is for you to say "Oh, looks like I was wrong saying that linking this bill to habeus corpus is merely an opinion voiced by _The Nation_ that we should ignore because it's a leftist rag."
If you don't think Leahy is an accurate source to the statement that the bill was about restoring habeas corpus, here's Republican Senator Arlen Specter's comments: "The issue of the availability of habeas corpus for the detainees at Guantanamo is a matter of enormous importance. It is a matter of a fundamental constitutional right that people should not be held in detention unless there is an evidentiary reason to do so, or at least some showing that the person ought to be in detention. It is a constitutional right that has existed since the Magna Carta in 1215, and it has been upheld in a series of cases in the Supreme Court of the United States."
daveschroeder continues: "...To believe otherwise believes that the Constitution applies equally to every human on the planet, whether they are a US citizen or permanent resident or not."
No, in fact the constitution applies to the actions of the U.S. government.
daveschroeder wrote: "Note that the linked article is an opinion piece from The Nation, self described as "the flagship of the left"... it's not a fact, it's just what the type of article it is explicitly states: an opinion."
That may be so, but other links could have been used.
Here's RTE news, for example, or tothecenter, or any of a hundred other links you could get from Googlenews or your search engine of choice.
daveschroeder continued: "The fact of the matter is that Habeas Corpus was not suspended in any way, shape, or form."
The co-sponsor of the bill, Senator Leahy, explicitly stated that the bill was about habeas corpus: "The truth is, casting aside the time-honored protection of habeas corpus makes us more vulnerable as a nation because it leads us away from our core American values and calls into question our historic role as a defender of human rights around the world."
They explicitly solve for the amount of time it takes to connect the N cities with one fiber connection between each pair of cities. This is, of course, N^2, so that part of the problem is in fact polynomial in N.
(they don't account for the speed of light delay for the light to travel the length of the required fibers! This is actually exponential in N, the way they chose to solve the problem.)
It's an analog computer solution to the problem; note that analog computers are not subject to limits based on theorems relating to Turing machines (and related algorithmic computational devices).
However, the resources required still scale exponentially; the computation (if you want to call it that) is done by photons, and the number of photons required scales as N^N. Essentially, they are trading time for computational resources, where in this case the computational resource is "photons".
>Most solar panels have an efficiency of about 12%.
As a photovoltaics researcher, let me inform you that there are plenty of technologies that don't make 12% efficiency. You just don't see them, because they never get to the market. You say even if these "only" produce 5% they'll be useful. If they've made 5% efficient solar cells, they would have mentioned it-- 5% would be not too bad for the technology they've been talking about. I have no reason to believe they've made 1% solar cells. If they don't quote verified numbers, I am going to wonder why they don't.
What is conspicuously missing from that article is any kind of a figure for the conversion efficiency of the devices they're making. Lots of researchers have been working on fullerines. What efficiency are they achieving? 5 percent? 1 percent? A tenth of a percent? Lacking any kind of number for efficiency-- preferably an efficiency measurement verified by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory-- tends to make me think that this is theory with no actual devices manufactured at all.
catbutt wrote "What you describe is not ranked approval voting, but Borda count, which has some big problems."
No, it's not Borda count. In the situation you describe, I can rank Nader 100 (out of 100), Kerry 100 out of 100, and Bush zero out of 100, if that's how I chose to vote. Unfortunately, there is no uniformity in nomenclature of some of the alternate voting systems.
No, proprietary secret code is worse.
You're right that open source counting software isn't a perfect solution that solves all possible ways of fraud. But it is still vastly better than secret code, which is nearly an open invitation to cheat without being noticed.
Replacing hardware and even software is going to take a moderately well-orchestrated conspiracy. Crafting software with deliberately indetectable weak points takes one person, if nobody is allowed to see what the software is.
A paper trail is still better.
Absolutely. It's hard to emphasize how much the actual balloting system determines the outcome. The balloting system we have tends to push the outcome to a choice between extremes; it does not have any mechanism pushing toward center candidates-- the center gets eliminated before the election even starts.
I'm a great fan of approval voting; it avoids a lot of the problems and doesn't eliminate the center candidates. (Condorcet voting is a bit too complicated for my taste; I think the balloting system should be more transparent than that). Ranked approval voting is fine as well (this is the one where each voter ranks each candate, say, from 1 to 10, and then you just add all the scores-- like reviewing a restaurant. Technically it has exactly the same advantages and disadvantages of approval voting, but people understand it, and since they understand it, they trust it.
But if the voting machines can't be trusted, it doesn't matter what balloting system is used. And if you can't even tell whether a machine is counting accurately or not, you can't trust it. Every single voter should have the right to know what software is counting the votes.
My thinking is that it should be illegal to use any voting software unless the source code is available for inspection by anyone.
The electronic-voting companies all seem to be saying that the source code is proprietary, nobody is allowed to look at it and see it. I find this frightening. The actual voting in a democracy needs to be secret, but every aspect of counting the votes needs to be completely, absolutely, without exception open.
as for paper trails-- that's easy; just do the voting using optical scanning. Everybody in America who's gone through the education system has been trained on number two pencils and standardized test forms. Yes, I'm aware that in a few isolated cases the scanners have had problems, but, first, that's a solvable technical problem, and second, optically scanned ballots can be counted by hand; if there's a problem, it is possible to detect it.
Unlike the touch-screen electronic ballots, where if there's a problem, you'll never know.
I find it hard to credit that statement that Windows users "turn like rabid wolves on any company that makes even the slightest error." I end up having to use both Microsoft and Apple products, and my experience would be the opposite-- Windows users are very forgiving; they expect their software to be buggy.
If developing the Windows version of Safari is, in fact, a relatively small amount of added effort after the word to develop the Mac Safari, it seems a good strategic move for Apple to develop it. After all, they have developed it for the Mac users anyway, and if a little more work will give them some access to the Windows user base, which is 20 times larger than the Mac user base, it's hard to see how this can be a bad decision. If Safari sofware got even a five percent market share of the Windows users, it would more than double the user base.
Slashdot Mirror
In fact, fuel cells can run on other materials, e.g., methane, but this is typically done by the simple trick of using a reformer to produce hydrogen from the methane, and running that hydrogen in a fuel cell. And this can be difficult if the source of the methane is less than extremely pure; in that a lot of common impurities can poison either the catalyst or the reformer.
So, without a good means of storing hydrogen, it's not at all clear that advances in fuel cell technology are terribly useful.
Still, gotta start somewhere...
The solar panels were designed to generate power from illumination either on the front or the back (although they are not as efficient when back-illuminated.) This allows the panels to gain a bit of power from albedo illumination (i.e., light reflected from the Earth). So turning them backside to the sun wouldn't stop them from generating power.
Yes, and I suggest reading the FAQ, too:
"Q: Will the source code be available to the public?
A: No. The EAC will make all information available to the public consistent with Federal law. The EAC is prohibited under the Trade Secrets Act (18 U.S.C. 1905) from making the source code information available to the public.
This is a bad idea. A much better idea is this: "No voting machine shall be certified unless the vendor makes the source code available for public inspection." This is fully in compliance with 18 U.S.C. 1905: any company has the right to keep their code proprietary. However, if they do so, they should not be allowed to have their machines used in public elections.
Voting should be secret. Vote counting should never be secret.
If the receipt shows that you have voted, but doesn't show how you voted, I don't see what use it is to making the process verifiable.
On the other hand, if the receipt does show how you voted, it defeats the point of the secret ballot.
...I do agree with the open source part (at least, meaning "all voting and counting software must be available for inspection.")
Reading the link, the article states that 150,000 jobs in science and engineering are added annually, not including those created by people retiring or leaving a profession, and 435,000 people graduate with degrees in science and engineering. From this he concludes "nearly two-thirds" fo the graduates take jobs in fields other than science and engineering.
This is idiotic. If he ignores openings from retirees, deaths, and people leaving the field, his isn't actually counting all the jobs. This calculation is essentially worthless. Given that this trivial calculation is misleading to the extent of being wrong, it's hard to credit much of the rest of what was said.
Nope. Photosynthesis typically runs at about 1-2% energy conversion efficiency; the best plants ever are about 4%. The best solar cells are now hitting 40%.
On the other hand, photosynthesis isn't just about energy conversion-- plants also synthesize sugars.
Well, from what we know there ought to be some electrostatic effects going on... but all the clearing events we've seen so far look like they've been wind events. (Not necessarily dust devils-- some of the clearing events have occurred at night. And we see them on Opportunity, where we haven't seen actual dust devils.) Many of the images--e.g., this one show clear wind tails on the shadow post of the cal target and elsewhere. For terrestrial use, thin-film PV has to be both cheap and also durable-- the Earth envrionment is pretty corrosive. There are a couple of thin film technologies that are coming along, but it seems to be incremental progress, along with incremental increases in manufacturing capacity. I'll bet on the progress continuing, so rather than a breakthrough, we'll just keep seeing better and cheaper panels each year moving progressively into more markets. There really isn't a "tipping point"-- market penetration just happens step by step, as the highest cost of electricity and the highest sunlight availability markets progressively become economically competitive.
I'm a photovoltaics expert, not a biologist, but I can answer that question. The answer is, they don't quote any efficiency numbers.
That's usually a suspicious sign.
Far too much of the fabric of social networks-- and that includes the internet-- is built on the assumption that people avoid doing things exactly like what's being proposed here.
Or, to phrase it differently... Superman used to fight for "truth, justice, and the American way." If you're going to be one of the good guys, how about keeping "truth" in there... it's actually something very valuable.
Yeah, I clicked the link looking for some cool videos of it flying (I love to see that fire and smoke...), but "flies" is a misleading headline. "Plans to be launched sometime in future" is correct.
The fact that SIM cards would have to be registered with the government carries with it some degree of invasion of privacy. However, as long as the government allows people to own SIM cards that weren't registered with the government as voting-enabled cards.
In the US, we would also have to have a mechanism for people not owning mobile phones to vote (I know it's hard for a /.'er to envision any reason a person would not have one). The trivial way to do this would be to have people who don't own phones be able to go to a voting place and get a assigned a SIM chip, which could either be used as an insert into any phone (hey, can I borrow your phone to vote?) or else could be taken to a polling place and used in a specially equipped voting booth.
The annoying problem I see with this is that it pretty much removes the last traces of privacy for voting. It's actually really useful to democracy that ballots should be secret. This is, unfortunately, already becoming a thing of the past, with the proliferation of absentee ballots that have no longer become the voting method of last resort, but the voting method of (in some cases) first resort. Voting should be private, not public-- not your boss, not your friends, and not the friendly guy who says "I'll give you ten bucks if you vote the way I ask-- none of these should not be able to say, "hey, let me watch while you vote so I can see who you voted for."
I would think that they can live with this. After all, it doesn't prevent searches, it only means that they have to clear them with a judge first. Historically, this has not been hard to do-- the judge only hears one side, and they almost always sign off. There's no reason they can't do this. What this does is give a paper trail for a search, so if the reason is political, you may be able to determine it-- or, at least, they will have to have a plausible cover story. But it doesn't significantly impact real searches.
And it's worth pointing out that it turns itself upside down every time it takes a step. This would, I think, end up being a real bear of a problem in a practical robot... sometimes the head's on the top... sometimes the head's on the bottom. It also has each of the three sides being the "front" alternately-- so, essentially, it has no front... Still, it's pretty darn cool.
What I expect is for you to say "Oh, looks like I was wrong saying that linking this bill to habeus corpus is merely an opinion voiced by _The Nation_ that we should ignore because it's a leftist rag."
If you don't think Leahy is an accurate source to the statement that the bill was about restoring habeas corpus, here's Republican Senator Arlen Specter's comments: "The issue of the availability of habeas corpus for the detainees at Guantanamo is a matter of enormous importance. It is a matter of a fundamental constitutional right that people should not be held in detention unless there is an evidentiary reason to do so, or at least some showing that the person ought to be in detention. It is a constitutional right that has existed since the Magna Carta in 1215, and it has been upheld in a series of cases in the Supreme Court of the United States."
daveschroeder continues: "...To believe otherwise believes that the Constitution applies equally to every human on the planet, whether they are a US citizen or permanent resident or not."
No, in fact the constitution applies to the actions of the U.S. government.
That may be so, but other links could have been used. Here's RTE news, for example, or tothecenter, or any of a hundred other links you could get from Googlenews or your search engine of choice.
daveschroeder continued: "The fact of the matter is that Habeas Corpus was not suspended in any way, shape, or form."
The co-sponsor of the bill, Senator Leahy, explicitly stated that the bill was about habeas corpus: "The truth is, casting aside the time-honored protection of habeas corpus makes us more vulnerable as a nation because it leads us away from our core American values and calls into question our historic role as a defender of human rights around the world."
Why is Michael Dirda labelled as being a science fiction writer?
They explicitly solve for the amount of time it takes to connect the N cities with one fiber connection between each pair of cities. This is, of course, N^2, so that part of the problem is in fact polynomial in N. (they don't account for the speed of light delay for the light to travel the length of the required fibers! This is actually exponential in N, the way they chose to solve the problem.)
It's an analog computer solution to the problem; note that analog computers are not subject to limits based on theorems relating to Turing machines (and related algorithmic computational devices). However, the resources required still scale exponentially; the computation (if you want to call it that) is done by photons, and the number of photons required scales as N^N. Essentially, they are trading time for computational resources, where in this case the computational resource is "photons".
>Most solar panels have an efficiency of about 12%. As a photovoltaics researcher, let me inform you that there are plenty of technologies that don't make 12% efficiency. You just don't see them, because they never get to the market. You say even if these "only" produce 5% they'll be useful. If they've made 5% efficient solar cells, they would have mentioned it-- 5% would be not too bad for the technology they've been talking about. I have no reason to believe they've made 1% solar cells. If they don't quote verified numbers, I am going to wonder why they don't.
What is conspicuously missing from that article is any kind of a figure for the conversion efficiency of the devices they're making. Lots of researchers have been working on fullerines. What efficiency are they achieving? 5 percent? 1 percent? A tenth of a percent? Lacking any kind of number for efficiency-- preferably an efficiency measurement verified by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory-- tends to make me think that this is theory with no actual devices manufactured at all.
No, it's not Borda count. In the situation you describe, I can rank Nader 100 (out of 100), Kerry 100 out of 100, and Bush zero out of 100, if that's how I chose to vote. Unfortunately, there is no uniformity in nomenclature of some of the alternate voting systems.
No, proprietary secret code is worse. You're right that open source counting software isn't a perfect solution that solves all possible ways of fraud. But it is still vastly better than secret code, which is nearly an open invitation to cheat without being noticed. Replacing hardware and even software is going to take a moderately well-orchestrated conspiracy. Crafting software with deliberately indetectable weak points takes one person, if nobody is allowed to see what the software is. A paper trail is still better.
Absolutely. It's hard to emphasize how much the actual balloting system determines the outcome. The balloting system we have tends to push the outcome to a choice between extremes; it does not have any mechanism pushing toward center candidates-- the center gets eliminated before the election even starts. I'm a great fan of approval voting; it avoids a lot of the problems and doesn't eliminate the center candidates. (Condorcet voting is a bit too complicated for my taste; I think the balloting system should be more transparent than that). Ranked approval voting is fine as well (this is the one where each voter ranks each candate, say, from 1 to 10, and then you just add all the scores-- like reviewing a restaurant. Technically it has exactly the same advantages and disadvantages of approval voting, but people understand it, and since they understand it, they trust it. But if the voting machines can't be trusted, it doesn't matter what balloting system is used. And if you can't even tell whether a machine is counting accurately or not, you can't trust it. Every single voter should have the right to know what software is counting the votes.
as for paper trails-- that's easy; just do the voting using optical scanning. Everybody in America who's gone through the education system has been trained on number two pencils and standardized test forms. Yes, I'm aware that in a few isolated cases the scanners have had problems, but, first, that's a solvable technical problem, and second, optically scanned ballots can be counted by hand; if there's a problem, it is possible to detect it.
Unlike the touch-screen electronic ballots, where if there's a problem, you'll never know.
If developing the Windows version of Safari is, in fact, a relatively small amount of added effort after the word to develop the Mac Safari, it seems a good strategic move for Apple to develop it. After all, they have developed it for the Mac users anyway, and if a little more work will give them some access to the Windows user base, which is 20 times larger than the Mac user base, it's hard to see how this can be a bad decision. If Safari sofware got even a five percent market share of the Windows users, it would more than double the user base.