Well, it would depend on the relay design of such a system. If the plane interacts directly with ground-based stations, it will probably work fine. However, a couple of proposals that I saw called for uplinking to satellites, geostationary or otherwise. Both can create a varying amount of delay. While VoIP could technically still work with a sat link, the delay through it could become particularly annoying...especially if the link were through a geostationary bird, rather than ones in low earth orbit.
Cellphones were used effectively by passengers and cabin crew during the 9/11 hijackings, apparently without messing up ground communications.
Has anyone studied this? I have little doubt that they were able to successfully make calls, but interference isn't an all or nothing condition. A couple of calls coming from one plane probably created a negligible amount of interference. Scale that up to several thousand planes, what happens at that point?
As for the skyscraper argument, I give you credit for its insightfulness, but I'd also counter that with saying that the glass in most large building like that have metallic coatings to reflect heat. These coatings also attenuate cell phone signals, thus reducing their effective radiation footprint somewhat. Add to this that the tallest buildings are ~1,500feet, not ~35,000feet.
I have a pair...they're wonderful (thankfully, I received them as a gift as they're damned expensive). While they are nearly 100% effective at removing the drone and rumbling sounds of the plane, they're still not totally effective at cancelling out human voices. Part of the problem is that our skulls do part of the work of hearing, making it difficult to make a totally cancelling waveform. So when people drone on inanely or cough incessantly, that's where the MP3 player comes in quite handily (which plugs into them).
Aircraft communications and navigation typically take place at VHF frequencies, between 108-132MHz. Voice communication is almost always AM in this frequency range.
Cell phones ~824-894MHz (traditional cellular) ~1900MHz (PCS - Sprint, Verizon, et al) - In the United States, anyway.
Regardless, the issue isn't interference with Avionics and communication, but the implications it would have on the cell network with one handset being able to reach (interfere with) hundreds of towers at one time.
Sounds to me that the designers of your clock were about a short-sighted as those who decided that using two digits to define a year was sound implementation.
If you look at the WWVB signal description NIST encodes a DST signal within the time information. Thus, if the clock you own had been designed properly to derive DST from the radio signal, rather than using an internal calendar, it would have changed just fine (provided that it had a good signal at the time).
The clocks that I have that monitor WWVB (i.e. Atomic clocks) changed when they should have.
I thought that the TGV was totally electrified (e.g. no onboard engine). Perhaps they meant that the combined horsepower output of the axle motors is 25,000hp?
I suspect this type of transmission might be viable in locomotives too, actually, and might be what they were talking about somewhere where I heard they were talking about a "hybrid locomotive", as it probably would improve their efficiency. I don't remember where that was though.
Aside from the size/complexity issue of a transmission in a Diesel locomotive, the main reason that each axle in the truck has an electric motor is the technical difficulty of getting the torque mechanically into the truck (part that holds 2-3 axles) itself. If you were to put a drive shaft into a truck, you'd likely twist the truck right off the tracks.
While a CVT would eliminate the hundreds of gear ratios needed to get up to speed, CVT's don't scale up real well to high torque applications. The CVTs that you see in automobiles now are pretty much snowmobile transmissions on steroids. It's a V-belt that runs across a tapered pulley. Building a belt that is strong enough/reliable is the key.
Yes, hybrid yard locomotives have been developed. These are locomotives that have a genset (smaller than the typical prime mover (Diesel)) to charge huge banks of batteries that run the axle motors. It works in a yard application because there's lots of intermittent use of the locomotives, starting and stopping. Something that hybrids are very adept at proving themselves. Under road conditions where high power demands are called for long durations, it just couldn't keep up. Even if it could, the hybrid advantage would be fairly minimal in road service.
Don't tell me that you're proposing the "infinite number of monkeys, put in front an infinite number of typewriters given an infinite amount of time" theory...
...the professors did, prior to submitting the students' work for cross referencing. How does Turnitin get released when the people suing never consented, or even saw those usage terms?
What this might end up doing is having a similar type suit brought against the professors and/or University. When the first one gets burned at the stake, the other schools that are taking note will quickly enact policies that would allow them to do this as a condition of attending their institution.
They are at the bottom of the organizational structure (i.e. they have little/no one beneath them reporting to them), not necessarily at the bottom of the payscale.
I agree with you that online sales have definitely strengthened the aspect of competition on bottom line price alone. However, I do think that there's still a market niche for excellent customer service. This is something that "brick and mortar" stores normally would have a leg-up on their internet competition. The problem is making sure that your stores just don't become the quazi-showroom for your competition. (i.e. "Thanks for the info, I'm going home now to buy it online at the lowest price I can find.")
I think that it would go without saying that virtually everyone on this forum is at least above average when it comes to technical knowledge. That being the case, we rarely need a salesperson to assist us with our tech purchases, thus online buying is a natural fit. There are, however, still a large number of consumers that need the visual, aural and tactile experience first before committing to buy. The trick is to close the sale then and there and not let them walk out empty-handed, yet loaded with knowledge so they can now shop on price alone. That said, a salesperson experienced and adept in making sales becomes all that much more important of an asset to a store.
Yet another corporate management that views the bottom-end labor as a pure commodity. Can they get more warm bodies in to replace those displaced? You sure bet. Can the displaced find sales work elsewhere? Most likely so as well. Apparently, someone missed the day in class when they discussed intrinsic value. If you have someone that's experienced and good at what they do, they are very likely worth more because they know how to be more productive at what they do. They likely know how to sell and market a product, in addition to helping customers find the product that best suits their needs and desires.
Having a knowledgeable and competent sales staff is usually considered a cornerstone of having a good store. Get rid of that, and you're probably competing strictly on price and not on value. Hey, if that's their new business model, then they probably made a good move towards achieving that model. But generally, taking the service out of a service industry usually is a risky plan.
If I were Circuit City's direct competition, I'd seriously consider finding a way to talk to these displaced salepeople. It could be a windfall of people that I wouldn't have to spend too much effort in training myself, and still have an opportunity to weed out any undesirables.
I seem to recall that someone made a similar fuel cell not too long ago that used ethyl alcohol to do the same thing. It also used enzymes. The trick was attaching the enzymes to conductive rods to extract the electricity. They were able to get it to work with a variety of spirits, including vodka.
Sucrose (not glucose or fructose), as a pure carbohydrate, has an energy content of 4 kilocalories per gram (or 17 kilojoules per gram)[Wikipedia]. 1 gram of hydrogen has about 140kJ of energy.
Whether, in fact, this is a fair comparison depends largely on the efficiencies of the devices extracting this energy, as well as the amount of energy put into producing each of the chemical products for consumption. While hydrogen is more energy dense, can we produce it more efficiently than refining sugar from plant sources?
Using electrolysis to produce hydrogen would require more energy than 140kJ/g, making it energy negative. Refining the sugar from plant sources would likely be somewhat energy positive. However, most hydrogen gas produced today is steam reformed from natural gas. I'm not certain where that would fall out if the natural gas were derived from biomass, instead of underground petroleum-related sources.
It seems to me that technology functions by putting a chemical (sugar) into the cell, and it produces electricity by breaking down the sugar. It isn't a directly reciprocating process like a lead-acid battery (i.e. you put electrical power back into it and it produces sugar). Its operation would seem to be more akin to that of a fuel cell than a battery, would it not?
I didn't realize that submitting a story made me a "twat".
That's great that you brought the fact that the UK government has released some similar information to the public, long before France had done so. Perhaps the reporter of this article should be labelled a "twat" for not researching the topic further and bringing up that point, or at least not make the bold comment about France being the first.
Which brings up another point. If you ever have submitted a story to Slashdot, you'd recognize that the editors tend to take quite a bit of liberty on rewriting the story summaries (for better or worse). I didn't "note" anything...the summary was just rewritten to say I did.
Of course, it will be several years after the initial commercial release before these boots will be available in California, pending additional emissions control devices.
Perhaps I'm mistaken on this, but I think the foam also helps prevent heating of the tank while the shuttle reaches the necessary escape velocity (High Speed + Atmospheric Drag/Friction = Heat). The last thing you want to happen is for the tank to heat up as it starts to get close to empty. When there's less fuel, there's less mass to heat, so it can heat even faster. The result could possibly be a boiling liquid expanding vapor explosion (BLEVE), not too much different in principle from when a compromised liquid propane tank/vessel catches fire and heats itself from the flames.
But do you realize how much of these crops the United States exports to other countries just so they can feed their people? Why do you think there has been some ado about the price of corn going up because it is being used as a feedstock for making Ethanol? Corn could conceivably become too expensive for poor countries to afford it.
Yes, there are quite a number of subsistence farmers in the world. But there are also quite a few of them that cannot grow enough to fulfill their entire annual requirement of food. In such cases, their food supply is augmented with grain, which comes primarily from the United States.
As you can see, the search term is in URL as part of the query request. Now all you have to do is go back through your browser's history file, find this particular URL, and from it you can derive that someone using the browser on your computer searched for Hippopotamus.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, it would depend on the relay design of such a system. If the plane interacts directly with ground-based stations, it will probably work fine. However, a couple of proposals that I saw called for uplinking to satellites, geostationary or otherwise. Both can create a varying amount of delay. While VoIP could technically still work with a sat link, the delay through it could become particularly annoying...especially if the link were through a geostationary bird, rather than ones in low earth orbit.
Has anyone studied this? I have little doubt that they were able to successfully make calls, but interference isn't an all or nothing condition. A couple of calls coming from one plane probably created a negligible amount of interference. Scale that up to several thousand planes, what happens at that point?
As for the skyscraper argument, I give you credit for its insightfulness, but I'd also counter that with saying that the glass in most large building like that have metallic coatings to reflect heat. These coatings also attenuate cell phone signals, thus reducing their effective radiation footprint somewhat. Add to this that the tallest buildings are ~1,500feet, not ~35,000feet.
I have a pair...they're wonderful (thankfully, I received them as a gift as they're damned expensive). While they are nearly 100% effective at removing the drone and rumbling sounds of the plane, they're still not totally effective at cancelling out human voices. Part of the problem is that our skulls do part of the work of hearing, making it difficult to make a totally cancelling waveform. So when people drone on inanely or cough incessantly, that's where the MP3 player comes in quite handily (which plugs into them).
Aircraft communications and navigation typically take place at VHF frequencies, between 108-132MHz. Voice communication is almost always AM in this frequency range.
Cell phones ~824-894MHz (traditional cellular) ~1900MHz (PCS - Sprint, Verizon, et al) - In the United States, anyway.
Regardless, the issue isn't interference with Avionics and communication, but the implications it would have on the cell network with one handset being able to reach (interfere with) hundreds of towers at one time.
Sounds to me that the designers of your clock were about a short-sighted as those who decided that using two digits to define a year was sound implementation.
If you look at the WWVB signal description NIST encodes a DST signal within the time information. Thus, if the clock you own had been designed properly to derive DST from the radio signal, rather than using an internal calendar, it would have changed just fine (provided that it had a good signal at the time).
The clocks that I have that monitor WWVB (i.e. Atomic clocks) changed when they should have.
I thought that the TGV was totally electrified (e.g. no onboard engine). Perhaps they meant that the combined horsepower output of the axle motors is 25,000hp?
Aside from the size/complexity issue of a transmission in a Diesel locomotive, the main reason that each axle in the truck has an electric motor is the technical difficulty of getting the torque mechanically into the truck (part that holds 2-3 axles) itself. If you were to put a drive shaft into a truck, you'd likely twist the truck right off the tracks.
While a CVT would eliminate the hundreds of gear ratios needed to get up to speed, CVT's don't scale up real well to high torque applications. The CVTs that you see in automobiles now are pretty much snowmobile transmissions on steroids. It's a V-belt that runs across a tapered pulley. Building a belt that is strong enough/reliable is the key.
Yes, hybrid yard locomotives have been developed. These are locomotives that have a genset (smaller than the typical prime mover (Diesel)) to charge huge banks of batteries that run the axle motors. It works in a yard application because there's lots of intermittent use of the locomotives, starting and stopping. Something that hybrids are very adept at proving themselves. Under road conditions where high power demands are called for long durations, it just couldn't keep up. Even if it could, the hybrid advantage would be fairly minimal in road service.
Don't tell me that you're proposing the "infinite number of monkeys, put in front an infinite number of typewriters given an infinite amount of time" theory...
(said in a joking manner)
...the professors did, prior to submitting the students' work for cross referencing. How does Turnitin get released when the people suing never consented, or even saw those usage terms?
What this might end up doing is having a similar type suit brought against the professors and/or University. When the first one gets burned at the stake, the other schools that are taking note will quickly enact policies that would allow them to do this as a condition of attending their institution.
They are at the bottom of the organizational structure (i.e. they have little/no one beneath them reporting to them), not necessarily at the bottom of the payscale.
I agree with you that online sales have definitely strengthened the aspect of competition on bottom line price alone. However, I do think that there's still a market niche for excellent customer service. This is something that "brick and mortar" stores normally would have a leg-up on their internet competition. The problem is making sure that your stores just don't become the quazi-showroom for your competition. (i.e. "Thanks for the info, I'm going home now to buy it online at the lowest price I can find.")
I think that it would go without saying that virtually everyone on this forum is at least above average when it comes to technical knowledge. That being the case, we rarely need a salesperson to assist us with our tech purchases, thus online buying is a natural fit. There are, however, still a large number of consumers that need the visual, aural and tactile experience first before committing to buy. The trick is to close the sale then and there and not let them walk out empty-handed, yet loaded with knowledge so they can now shop on price alone. That said, a salesperson experienced and adept in making sales becomes all that much more important of an asset to a store.
Yet another corporate management that views the bottom-end labor as a pure commodity. Can they get more warm bodies in to replace those displaced? You sure bet. Can the displaced find sales work elsewhere? Most likely so as well. Apparently, someone missed the day in class when they discussed intrinsic value. If you have someone that's experienced and good at what they do, they are very likely worth more because they know how to be more productive at what they do. They likely know how to sell and market a product, in addition to helping customers find the product that best suits their needs and desires.
Having a knowledgeable and competent sales staff is usually considered a cornerstone of having a good store. Get rid of that, and you're probably competing strictly on price and not on value. Hey, if that's their new business model, then they probably made a good move towards achieving that model. But generally, taking the service out of a service industry usually is a risky plan.
If I were Circuit City's direct competition, I'd seriously consider finding a way to talk to these displaced salepeople. It could be a windfall of people that I wouldn't have to spend too much effort in training myself, and still have an opportunity to weed out any undesirables.
I did read the article...all six paragraphs, anyway. Where did you find this? Some white paper elsewhere?
I seem to recall that someone made a similar fuel cell not too long ago that used ethyl alcohol to do the same thing. It also used enzymes. The trick was attaching the enzymes to conductive rods to extract the electricity. They were able to get it to work with a variety of spirits, including vodka.
I think for the enzymes to work properly, the sugar would need to be dissolved in water, anyway.
Sucrose (not glucose or fructose), as a pure carbohydrate, has an energy content of 4 kilocalories per gram (or 17 kilojoules per gram)[Wikipedia]. 1 gram of hydrogen has about 140kJ of energy.
Whether, in fact, this is a fair comparison depends largely on the efficiencies of the devices extracting this energy, as well as the amount of energy put into producing each of the chemical products for consumption. While hydrogen is more energy dense, can we produce it more efficiently than refining sugar from plant sources?
Using electrolysis to produce hydrogen would require more energy than 140kJ/g, making it energy negative. Refining the sugar from plant sources would likely be somewhat energy positive. However, most hydrogen gas produced today is steam reformed from natural gas. I'm not certain where that would fall out if the natural gas were derived from biomass, instead of underground petroleum-related sources.
It seems to me that technology functions by putting a chemical (sugar) into the cell, and it produces electricity by breaking down the sugar. It isn't a directly reciprocating process like a lead-acid battery (i.e. you put electrical power back into it and it produces sugar). Its operation would seem to be more akin to that of a fuel cell than a battery, would it not?
I didn't realize that submitting a story made me a "twat".
That's great that you brought the fact that the UK government has released some similar information to the public, long before France had done so. Perhaps the reporter of this article should be labelled a "twat" for not researching the topic further and bringing up that point, or at least not make the bold comment about France being the first.
Which brings up another point. If you ever have submitted a story to Slashdot, you'd recognize that the editors tend to take quite a bit of liberty on rewriting the story summaries (for better or worse). I didn't "note" anything...the summary was just rewritten to say I did.
So, will the astronauts keep their base clean using autonomous robotic, magnetic vacuum cleaners called Moonbas?
Of course, it will be several years after the initial commercial release before these boots will be available in California, pending additional emissions control devices.
Perhaps I'm mistaken on this, but I think the foam also helps prevent heating of the tank while the shuttle reaches the necessary escape velocity (High Speed + Atmospheric Drag/Friction = Heat). The last thing you want to happen is for the tank to heat up as it starts to get close to empty. When there's less fuel, there's less mass to heat, so it can heat even faster. The result could possibly be a boiling liquid expanding vapor explosion (BLEVE), not too much different in principle from when a compromised liquid propane tank/vessel catches fire and heats itself from the flames.
But do you realize how much of these crops the United States exports to other countries just so they can feed their people? Why do you think there has been some ado about the price of corn going up because it is being used as a feedstock for making Ethanol? Corn could conceivably become too expensive for poor countries to afford it.
Yes, there are quite a number of subsistence farmers in the world. But there are also quite a few of them that cannot grow enough to fulfill their entire annual requirement of food. In such cases, their food supply is augmented with grain, which comes primarily from the United States.
But the United States is by far and away the largest producer of corn, soybeans and a big producer of wheat as well.
Corn on this linkSoybeans on this link
Wheat on this link
Too many responses think that this information was obtained by supoenas and dissecting Google/Yahoo/MSN logs and tracing IP's. Not the case.
If you go to Google, and search on "Hippopotamus" for example, the next page that you visit is the search results. Its URL is:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=Hippopotamus
As you can see, the search term is in URL as part of the query request. Now all you have to do is go back through your browser's history file, find this particular URL, and from it you can derive that someone using the browser on your computer searched for Hippopotamus.