Siiigh, kinetic energy can in principle be converted to electric energy with efficiency arbitrarily close to 100%. There are existing dynamos and electric engines with 95% efficiency and higher. The parent clearly did not understand the GPs post.
Heat engines are limited to the Carnot efficiency ( which at temperatures found in petrol engines is less than 40%, in practice much less ) because their operation involves the conversion of heat into mechanical work. Electric engines and generators effectively convert kinetic energy from moving electrons into kinetic energy in moving the car, and thus the Carnot limit does not apply to them. The only theoretical limit to the efficiency of electric engines is conservation of energy, meaning you can get arbitrarily close to 100% efficiency, though in practice you will lose some energy to friction and electrical resistance.
Correlation by itself does not imply causation, but if the correlation is not a statistical anomaly, it implies either (a) causation or (b) common cause.
That's not quite true. In particular
a) Correlation says nothing about which way any causation goes. As an example people that cough a lot are more likely to have the flue than people who don't cough. That does not however mean that coughing causes the flu. It is the flu that causes coughing.
b) Even if there is causation it does not mean that any mechanism for explaining the causation is correct. If I decide to treat a cold by resting beneath a "magic" carpet with astrological signs on it, and if I combine it with drinking a lot of "homoeopathic" remedy, then it will most likely help me feel better, but it doesn't make Astrology or Homoeopathy any less nonsensical.
c) Two things can be correlated with statistical significance, but still have distinct unrelated causes if the causes themselves are correlated due to statistical coincidences. Such a situation can arise because the periods over which the causes fluctuate may be much longer than the period over which you observe the consequences.
To give a concrete example of how tricky things like this can be, consider the correlation between low vitamin D levels and skin cancer mortality. Does skin cancer tend to reduce the skin's ability to produce vitamin D ? Are patients that know they are at risk of skin cancer avoiding the sun, hence having lower vitamin D levels in the skin? Does vitamin D protect again skin cancer? Does UV light cause damage healthy cells can repair but cancer cells cannot, thereby functioning as a form of radiation therapy when exposure is moderate? Do people with dark skin, who are less prone to skin cancer, naturally produce less vitamin D ?
As should be clear to anybody with some sense of logic, it can be quite a little bit more complicated than "causation or common cause" because there could easily be multiple common causes and mechanisms of causation, and the various means of causation may indeed run both ways forming various types of feedbacks.
Seriously, the metric system has a lot going for it in some ways, but is harder in others. For example, while 10 is a great multiplier (since we tend to think in base 10), it doesn't have a lot of factors.
You miss the point. The advantage of using the same base across all measurements is not merely that it goes well with the digits we use, but it means different type of measurements work well together. A cubic meter works out to exactly a thousand liters, which when filled with water would weigh 1 metric tonne, which is 1 thousand kilograms. The pressure of 10 metres of water works out to 1 atmosphere, which is approximately 100,000 Pascal, which is 100,000 Newtons per square meter. At sea level the acceleration due to gravity is approximately 10 M/s so 1kg is roughly 10 newtons worth of weight. If you have a force of 1 Newton over 1 meter , you get 1 joule worth of energy, which is the energy drawn per second by 1 ampere of electric current at an electric potential of 1 volt.
Now, lets say you have a pool of water that is 10 feet deep and 10x20 yards by the sides. You want an electric engine operating at 230V to drive a pump that can empty the pool through a pipe that has a diameter of 3inches. The drain is at ground level. You don't want to leave it on unsupervised at night so you want it to take no more than 2 hours. How many amperes of current will your engine draw? What's the total amount of energy necessary to empty the pool? How much pressure does the pump have to handle?
I would STRONGLY suggest you convert to SI units before trying to solve that problem.
I'm starting to think that one of the biggest problems with patents is being able to sell them and hold them with out making products based on them.
Naaa, the biggest problems are pretty much the following:
1)There are no effective checks to stop people patenting obvious things or things that are not patentable. Combined with a complete lack of penalties (at least in practice ) for abusing the system and the expense involved with defending yourself against a lawsuit this allows patent trolls to cause a great deal of harm to companies and individuals who have done nothing wrong.
2)There is in practice a complete lack of punishment for deliberately filing invalid patents and patent claims.
3)Patent law is to a very large extent not based on any form of independent analysis of its consequences but rather the work of lobbying by special interest groups. In otehr words, patent law is designed to be profitable, not just.
4)Because patent law allows very vague and broad interpretations of patent claims, and because you can be found to be infringing even if you had never heard of a plaintiff's patent, it is in practice impossible to market ANY product without infringing on SOME patent.
5)Because large plaintiffs can essentially force smaller companies to settle by simply dragging a case along, the outcome of a lawsuit is often determined not by who is in the right, but who has the most money to spend on legal battles ( this is a more general problem with the US legal system ).
Or simply put: Due to intense lobbying by patent holders and existing monopolies the system is more or less designed to allow plaintiffs to abuse the system for purposes different from the original motivation of promoting arts and sciences. There is little justice or balance in the system and patent lawsuits mostly boil down to who has the deepest pockets rather than who is in the right.
That doesn't really logically follow. I'm sure most Californians wouldn't vote to confine gays to a lifetime in a small cage, and wouldn't vote to allow chickens to marry.
What troubles me is that it feels a lot less implausible than it certainly should...
So you go for the game with no LAN play that you have to connect to proprietary Blizzard Servers? At least consoles give you little to no expectation of openness.
While I think Blizzard's decisions are deplorable there's a world of difference for several reasons. In particular:
a)Blizzard's actions mainly affect their own products. Them limiting their games in this way does not in any way prevent competition from other video game vendors. It won't interfere with you running a game made by Westwood, an open source game, or a game you wrote yourself on the same machine.
b)In Blizzard's case they actually have some valid reasons to do it. While many of us ( myself included ) dislike the way blizzard go about this, trying to make it difficult for people to play their game without paying for it is not quite in the same league as limiting the functionality of hardware in order to make you buy more stuff. In one case they are limiting the functionality of a product to enforce their terms for you using THAT product. In the other case Microsoft is limiting the functionality in order to stop you using OTHER products. The two are not the same.
To make a mandatory car analogy. What Blizzard is doing is akin to programing a car you rent from them to only run after checking that the monthly payment has been made. What Microsoft is doing is more akin to putting gates on the road that only open for vehicles Microsoft approve of.
I mean even at bit rates multiple times what this article tested storage space and bandwidth is unlikely to be an issue. At this point one should not have to worry about which codec sounds better, rather I would have expected codec's to be competing based on which is cheaper/easier to implement in embedded devices assuming that the parameters like bit-rate have already been set so they are indistinguishable from the original recording even using the best hi-fi systems out there.
So basically, when used at a "high" bit-rate (not $300 cable "high" , but "Mozart probably wouldn't tell the difference" high ), which codec has the lowest processing requirements?
Btw, using typical bitrates found on say iTunes or Amazon, how does lossless codecs like FLAC compare to the lossy ones in processing requirements? Are they in general quicker / slower to encode and decode or does it depend completely on the codec?
Which, just as with Inertial Confinemenet Fusion, means they just traded confinement time for Temperature and density.
There's this neat little thing called the triple product which relates to the power output of a fusion plasma.
n*T*tau
n is the number density, T is the temperature and tau is the confinement time. In Tokamaks n is low and T and tau are high. In other fusion schemes tau may be low, meaning they need higher n and T to make up for it. Thus while this particular machine may not need to increase the confinement time, they will then simply have to increase either temperature or number density instead.
I'm concerned about the idea of 'endless growth in a finite world' that cheap food and energy seem to sustain. If the world population was the same now as it was before the green revolution (2 billion or so) everything would be rosy. That is is now 6.8 billion, set for 7 billion in 2012 and utterly dependent on fossil-fuel centered food production is a worry for me.
It goes something like this:
1: Living organisms reproduce until the natural resources cannot sustain the population
2: Some of the organisms changes to get an advantage. This could be by using another source of resources, using resources more efficiently, or simply killing off competition
3: Those best adapted to their surroundings on average increase in number on the expense of those who don't.
Really, don't think that our tendency to reproduce until we hit a limitation of resources is something unnatural. It's the very reason evolution occurs. There are some people suggesting we should stop technological development and simply cease reproducing to conserve resources. Considering you are fighting genetic impulses that has come about as a result of billions of years of evolution, all I can say is: Good luck with that!
In fusion research it always look good when you do low-energy tests or low density etc... It is relatively easy to confine plasmas that don't "burn". A penning trap will do the job quite nicely. The problems always show up when you try to push your design to operate close to the lawson criterion, at which point many otherwise promising designs just fall short ( taking the penning trap as an example the required magnetic field for any practical confinement time exceeds that at which modern superconductors stop beeing superconducting ).
Now I admit that I don't know the details of this particular scheme, but I can say with almost certainty that when they try to get closer to break even the higher temperatures, densities and confinement times required will turn the thing into a massive headache.
The parent made a bunch of strong claims, without any data reference or argument to back them up. He contradicts the findings of EPOCA, BIOACID and the Royal Society in the UK, the NERC and various other organisations directly tasked with evaluating the situation. Moreover he claims these organisations essentially lie in order to get research money, without as much as a shred of evidence to back up his claims, and this is moderated insightful?
Come on moderators hand in your nerd cards! When somebody rejects scientific theories pretending it is oh-so obvious we know nothing about the matter while major scientific research bodies report the contrary, then you don't mod that insightful. "It is too complicated we can't know anything about it!" is not an argument. It is an unsubstantiated claim without as much as a shred of evidence to back it up.
Considering the Internet is IP based you could use a look up system based on... IP numbers like this thing called "whois". Then you could actually list information on the user in the whois database. Seems simple to me, no need to do mess with protocols and such. ISPs would likely just be mandated to link account information to whois records and I don't see that being a problem, even dynamically.
And then I use SSH to my friend in Korea and connect from his computer to a mail server (using SSL and TLS ) in Norway, from which I send Kapersky an e-mail saying "Fuck you bastard!". Now what?
Most all posions have their medicinal values. Most medicines become poisonous at a certain level too, so there is some symmetry to it all.
This may or may not be true for chemical and biological toxins ( I'm not qualified to tell ), but it is certainly not true for radioactive elements. In fact with the exceptions of a few isotopes used for radiation therapy ( like Iodine ) and some tracers used for PET scans, almost all isotopes with a significant activity are bad for you. There are some theories that very minor radioactive doses can be helpful in triggering the immune system, but these are speculative hypotheses at best, and with a few notable exceptions radioactive exposure can quite clearly be said to be undesirable. I doubt you will ever find medical use of strong alpha emitters like Polonium or Americium as an example. They may be useful for other things related to medicine ( like powering a pacemaker or calibrating equipment ) but I doubt you will ever see a good reason to administer them directly to patients.
In order to actually enforce what he is suggesting you would have to effectively ban or censor all private individuals and companies from using protocols not endorsed by the government, all countries would have to agree on the bans and rules, and you would have to block traffic from non-cooperating countries.
However that is not enough, because some of the countries from which you want to allow traffic may be allowing proxies used by countries that don't cooperate. So if Switzerland were to allow the Swedish to use Swiss proxies, and if the US didn't like Sweden's way to do things, then not only would they have to refuse all traffic from Sweden, they would have to refuse all traffic from Switzerland too. And if the UK allowed the Swiss to use UK proxies, you'd have to ban the UK too.
Then there is the practical problems. How do you stop people from stealing each others "passports"?. How do you stop people peeking over each others back when they type in passwords ? How do you stop man in the middle attacks? Are you going to encrypt every single transmission ? And all countries will agree to encrypt all their traffic too? How do you manage the keys across international boundaries? What happens when I go on vacation in a country that doesn't agree with your rules ?
Now what about compromised systems? What do you do when you get packages from Russia, Nigeria and China flooding your key servers with false requests? What do you do when the attacks come from compromised systems in Australia, Norway, Israel and France? Do you block all those countries, do you disconnect all your citizens that can't access your key servers? Do you allow everybody access if the key-servers are flooded? Do you cut foreign countries off from your citizens thereby screwing over all your international trade?
The problem is, given all we don't actually know about quantum mechanics, and all we don't know about super-small things, all it would take is a single observation to throw this minimum out the window.
You make it sound as if all of quantum mechanics is unreliable and stuff we don't know. In reality there are plenty of quantum mechanical limitations that are likely on as solid footing as other fundamental limits like conservation of energy, momentum and the second law of thermodynamics.
Take Heisenberg's uncertainty relation as an example. There may be things we don't fully understand about quantum mechanical phenomena ( such as wave function collapse ) , but I would not hold my breath waiting for a breakthrough which allow accurately measuring a particle's position and momentum. Likewise I would not expect to see two fermions occupy the same quantum state ( and thereby violate the pauli exclusion principle ) any time soon, nor would I expect the de-Broglie wavelength of a particle to be anything other than h/p.
I think part of the reason a lot of people seem to think QM is some unreliable theory that we don't really understand is simply ignorance of how fundamental it is to modern physics. Put it this way, without QM we would not have solid state physics, which is what chip designers rely on making the CPU I'm using to write this. We would not have LEDs or Lasers for the optic communications used in many internet backbones, and we would not have nuclear reactors to power the whole thing ( The stability of a nuclear reactor relies on two phenomena Doppler Broadening and the tendency of Neutron cross sections to change with neutron energy. Both of these are QM phenomena.)
Basically saying "it's just a theory" is as much a naive criticism of Quantum Mechanics as it is a naive criticism of Evolution. It may not be absolute truth ( physical theories in general are not ) , but it very much is the best available description of nature we have and it is certainly more reliable than assuming without good reason that theory will not agree with practice.
No, "high temperature" superconductors cannot be used in magnets.
Quite the contrary. High temperature superconductors can withstand stronger magnetic fields than low temperature ones. The reason you still use liquid helium to cool them is that it allows even greater field strengths. Now it is true that many magnets use low temperature superconductors instead, but the reason for this is mainly that the high temperature ones are ceramics that can be expensive and difficult to manufacture.
What part of "tritium which is highly mutagenic once it's in the foodchain" didn't you understand?
The part where it is chemically equivalent to hydrogen and hence rapidly dissolves and disperses in water, quickly being diluted to lower than background levels. In addition the very low energy of the beta radiation it emits, it's tendency to be ejected with urine or sweat if ingested ( as opposed to staying in the body ) the short half-life, the minuscule amount produced, and the lack of any major pathway into the food-chain that would not first dilute any release by many orders of magnitude.
Honestly of all the elements in nuclear waste tritium is one of the more harmless ones. If you want to do scaremongering it's Iodine, Caesium, Strontium, Technetium and Neptunium you should harp about ( your arguments would still be rubbish of course, but those are the elements most likely to cause trouble ).
I guess you don't know as much about nuclear power as you think you do. Leaks between primary and secondary cooling are commonplace.
Good thing then that the secondary circuit is also a closed circuit that is heavily monitored for radioactivity. Seriously can you quote even a single incident where a dangerous amount of radioactive material was released through the secondary circuit ?
What part of "the *authorised* effluents" did you not understand?
I got news for you buddy. Your body fluids are radioactive, as is air, milk, ponies and everything else on the planet. If it is dangerous or not is not simply a matter of it containing something radioactive and being a lot of it. The concentration, chemical properties, decay constant, and concentration matters. It is physically impossible to do ANYTHING without releasing small amounts of radioactivity. Even the carbon dioxide in the air you exhale contains some C-14. The authorised emissions from nuclear power-plants are set sufficiently strict that if you lived next to one for 50 years you get just a couple of "banana units" equivalent of exposure ( the same amount as you would get from eating a few bananas ).
I don't know if you are unaware of the serious flaws in your scaremongering, or if you do it deliberately, in either case you've quite clearly demonstrated that your claims are half-truths at the very best if not deliberately misleading.
In real life however the actual evidence points to a net energy deficit when the entire fuel cycle is taken into account.
This is how far I read because if you seriously think Nuclear power ends up in an energy deficit you are either completely ignorant about the subject, your sources are rubbish, or you are deliberately lieing ( or possibly a combination of the three ).
To give a slight idea of just how much energy is released in a nuclear reactor, the main limit of a reactor's power rating is how high temperatures the construction materials and cooling system can cope with. The reaction itself is limited only by the temperature at which the ceramic fuel rods and steel cladding melts, and at any time the fuel present in a large reactor contains more energy than entire countries consume in a year. If that is not enough to convince you, consider that the energy bound in chemical molecules like gas or petroleum is measured in electron volt, while the energy released in a fission reaction is hundreds of millions of electron volt.
Or put another way, one atom of uranium when fissioned will release an amount of energy equivalent to hundreds of millions of molecules of conventional fuel. Even if you take the fuel that has the highest chemical energy/weight ratio there is ( hydrogen ) it still releases only 1.53eV per atomic weight unit, while uranium fission is closer to a million eV per atomic weight unit.
For nuclear power to end up on an energy deficit the energy needed to extract, refine, burn and dispose it would have to be hundreds of millions times larger ( per atom counted ) than the energy needed to extract and refine conventional fuels. Now I accept that handling, mining, burning and disposing uranium and the waste products may be more involved than say coal. I'll even let you say 100 times more energy intensive, or heck why not say 10.000 times just for the hell of it, lets even assume coal is used 100% efficiently, and that only 1% of uranium is burned. You would still have THREE ORDERS OF MAGNITUDE to account for.
Really it is hard to grasp the energy released in nuclear reactions. A few kilograms would be enough to turn an entire city to ash, a couple of metric tonnes correspond to entire nations' annual energy consumption. Even though most reactors today only burn about 5% of it the amount much power you can tap from it is limited only by how much energy the cooling system can safely transport away, and the energy content is enough that a reactor can run for years without refueling.
I'll post this preemptively since usually when battery fires are discussed some people insist this is unavoidable if you want a high energy density, but this is not true. Whether batteries can fail catastrophically or not is mainly down to two things:
a)Whether the energy released when a cell fails is sufficient to cause nearby fails to fail, thereby causing a cascade of failed cells.
b)Whether the materials the battery is made of can react violently with materials it is likely to come into contact with when it does fail.
For traditional Lithium ion batteries the answer to both these questions is yes. The temperature necessary to cause a cell to fail is easily within the range of what is generated when a nearby cell fails. Furthermore the lithium batteries and their electrolyte burn quite well upon contact with air, adding even more energy to the reaction.
There's however no principal reason why this has to be the case. As an example if the heat capacity and conductivity of the battery is good enough it is possible to design batteries so that the failure of one cell won't heat nearby cells enough to cause them to fail. Different chemistries also have different activation energies, as an example lithium iron phosphate batteries are much safer for this reason. It is also quite plausible that one might be able to create a battery from a chemistry that doesn't react violently with oxygen.
Many batteries that use a water-based electrolytes qualify for both these criteria. Water has a high heat capacity and doesn't burn in oxygen. Unfortunately such batteries have other drawbacks. In particular while water itself won't burn it is susceptible to electrolysis at typical battery voltages, producing flammable hydrogen.
One reason it matters is that we are forever being told how embryonic stem cell research is going to find the cure for every disease under the sun
Bullshit.
There are a number of people who repeat that straw-man for political and religious motives, but what promoters of embryonic stem cell research usually argue is something more along the lines of:
"Embryonic stem cells are worthy of research not only because understanding how they differentiate can help us understand how to better use adult stem cells, but also because they have a number of unique features that make them promising to be useful for a number of conditions where adult stem cells would not suffice (such as tissue types that lack adults stem cells, like the pancreas). In any case history suggests that understanding how the body functions is absolutely essential for modern medicine and thus embryonic stem cell research is worth pursuing if for no other reason than its academic value."
Calling research into fundamental aspects of how our bodies develop "dead-end" is pretty much a strong display of profound ignorance about modern medicine.
I don't think you realize just how stupid it is. Consider:
Doubling efficiency from 5% to 10% - relatively easy. Doubling efficiency from 25% to 50% - hard Doubling efficiency from 55% to 110% - requires breaking the laws of thermodynamics
It is obvious that if you start out with rubbish efficiency you will see some great improvements when you put some effort into it, but that rapid improvement will stall when you are up to par with what the tech is actually capable off.
Or to quote Dilbert: "Are you expecting a room full of engineers to be impressed by a percentage improvement over a trivial base?"
Slashdot Mirror
The Tesla has a 53kWh battery pack
If you used a 500W space heater for 9 hours that works out to 4.5 kWh, which is less than 8.5% of the battery capacity.
With a 500km range that would reduce your range to 457km.
Interpret as you like.
Siiigh, kinetic energy can in principle be converted to electric energy with efficiency arbitrarily close to 100%. There are existing dynamos and electric engines with 95% efficiency and higher. The parent clearly did not understand the GPs post.
Heat engines are limited to the Carnot efficiency ( which at temperatures found in petrol engines is less than 40%, in practice much less ) because their operation involves the conversion of heat into mechanical work. Electric engines and generators effectively convert kinetic energy from moving electrons into kinetic energy in moving the car, and thus the Carnot limit does not apply to them. The only theoretical limit to the efficiency of electric engines is conservation of energy, meaning you can get arbitrarily close to 100% efficiency, though in practice you will lose some energy to friction and electrical resistance.
That's not quite true. In particular
a) Correlation says nothing about which way any causation goes. As an example people that cough a lot are more likely to have the flue than people who don't cough. That does not however mean that coughing causes the flu. It is the flu that causes coughing.
b) Even if there is causation it does not mean that any mechanism for explaining the causation is correct. If I decide to treat a cold by resting beneath a "magic" carpet with astrological signs on it, and if I combine it with drinking a lot of "homoeopathic" remedy, then it will most likely help me feel better, but it doesn't make Astrology or Homoeopathy any less nonsensical.
c) Two things can be correlated with statistical significance, but still have distinct unrelated causes if the causes themselves are correlated due to statistical coincidences. Such a situation can arise because the periods over which the causes fluctuate may be much longer than the period over which you observe the consequences.
To give a concrete example of how tricky things like this can be, consider the correlation between low vitamin D levels and skin cancer mortality. Does skin cancer tend to reduce the skin's ability to produce vitamin D ? Are patients that know they are at risk of skin cancer avoiding the sun, hence having lower vitamin D levels in the skin? Does vitamin D protect again skin cancer? Does UV light cause damage healthy cells can repair but cancer cells cannot, thereby functioning as a form of radiation therapy when exposure is moderate? Do people with dark skin, who are less prone to skin cancer, naturally produce less vitamin D ?
As should be clear to anybody with some sense of logic, it can be quite a little bit more complicated than "causation or common cause" because there could easily be multiple common causes and mechanisms of causation, and the various means of causation may indeed run both ways forming various types of feedbacks.
If you zoom in 400% you can tell the image has high resolution even on a low resolution screen. Especially if you compare with a low-res image.
a) Listen harder
b) They only tell your parents about it and by the time you are old enough to care chances are your parents have forgotten.
You miss the point. The advantage of using the same base across all measurements is not merely that it goes well with the digits we use, but it means different type of measurements work well together. A cubic meter works out to exactly a thousand liters, which when filled with water would weigh 1 metric tonne, which is 1 thousand kilograms. The pressure of 10 metres of water works out to 1 atmosphere, which is approximately 100,000 Pascal, which is 100,000 Newtons per square meter. At sea level the acceleration due to gravity is approximately 10 M/s so 1kg is roughly 10 newtons worth of weight. If you have a force of 1 Newton over 1 meter , you get 1 joule worth of energy, which is the energy drawn per second by 1 ampere of electric current at an electric potential of 1 volt.
Now, lets say you have a pool of water that is 10 feet deep and 10x20 yards by the sides. You want an electric engine operating at 230V to drive a pump that can empty the pool through a pipe that has a diameter of 3inches. The drain is at ground level. You don't want to leave it on unsupervised at night so you want it to take no more than 2 hours. How many amperes of current will your engine draw? What's the total amount of energy necessary to empty the pool? How much pressure does the pump have to handle?
I would STRONGLY suggest you convert to SI units before trying to solve that problem.
Naaa, the biggest problems are pretty much the following:
1)There are no effective checks to stop people patenting obvious things or things that are not patentable. Combined with a complete lack of penalties (at least in practice ) for abusing the system and the expense involved with defending yourself against a lawsuit this allows patent trolls to cause a great deal of harm to companies and individuals who have done nothing wrong.
2)There is in practice a complete lack of punishment for deliberately filing invalid patents and patent claims.
3)Patent law is to a very large extent not based on any form of independent analysis of its consequences but rather the work of lobbying by special interest groups. In otehr words, patent law is designed to be profitable, not just.
4)Because patent law allows very vague and broad interpretations of patent claims, and because you can be found to be infringing even if you had never heard of a plaintiff's patent, it is in practice impossible to market ANY product without infringing on SOME patent.
5)Because large plaintiffs can essentially force smaller companies to settle by simply dragging a case along, the outcome of a lawsuit is often determined not by who is in the right, but who has the most money to spend on legal battles ( this is a more general problem with the US legal system ).
Or simply put: Due to intense lobbying by patent holders and existing monopolies the system is more or less designed to allow plaintiffs to abuse the system for purposes different from the original motivation of promoting arts and sciences. There is little justice or balance in the system and patent lawsuits mostly boil down to who has the deepest pockets rather than who is in the right.
What troubles me is that it feels a lot less implausible than it certainly should...
While I think Blizzard's decisions are deplorable there's a world of difference for several reasons. In particular:
a)Blizzard's actions mainly affect their own products. Them limiting their games in this way does not in any way prevent competition from other video game vendors. It won't interfere with you running a game made by Westwood, an open source game, or a game you wrote yourself on the same machine.
b)In Blizzard's case they actually have some valid reasons to do it. While many of us ( myself included ) dislike the way blizzard go about this, trying to make it difficult for people to play their game without paying for it is not quite in the same league as limiting the functionality of hardware in order to make you buy more stuff. In one case they are limiting the functionality of a product to enforce their terms for you using THAT product. In the other case Microsoft is limiting the functionality in order to stop you using OTHER products. The two are not the same.
To make a mandatory car analogy. What Blizzard is doing is akin to programing a car you rent from them to only run after checking that the monthly payment has been made. What Microsoft is doing is more akin to putting gates on the road that only open for vehicles Microsoft approve of.
I mean even at bit rates multiple times what this article tested storage space and bandwidth is unlikely to be an issue. At this point one should not have to worry about which codec sounds better, rather I would have expected codec's to be competing based on which is cheaper/easier to implement in embedded devices assuming that the parameters like bit-rate have already been set so they are indistinguishable from the original recording even using the best hi-fi systems out there.
So basically, when used at a "high" bit-rate (not $300 cable "high" , but "Mozart probably wouldn't tell the difference" high ), which codec has the lowest processing requirements?
Btw, using typical bitrates found on say iTunes or Amazon, how does lossless codecs like FLAC compare to the lossy ones in processing requirements? Are they in general quicker / slower to encode and decode or does it depend completely on the codec?
Which, just as with Inertial Confinemenet Fusion, means they just traded confinement time for Temperature and density.
There's this neat little thing called the triple product which relates to the power output of a fusion plasma.
n*T*tau
n is the number density, T is the temperature and tau is the confinement time. In Tokamaks n is low and T and tau are high. In other fusion schemes tau may be low, meaning they need higher n and T to make up for it. Thus while this particular machine may not need to increase the confinement time, they will then simply have to increase either temperature or number density instead.
It goes something like this:
1: Living organisms reproduce until the natural resources cannot sustain the population
2: Some of the organisms changes to get an advantage. This could be by using another source
of resources, using resources more efficiently, or simply killing off competition
3: Those best adapted to their surroundings on average increase in number on the expense of those who don't.
Really, don't think that our tendency to reproduce until we hit a limitation of resources is something unnatural. It's the very reason evolution occurs. There are some people suggesting we should stop technological development and simply cease reproducing to conserve resources. Considering you are fighting genetic impulses that has come about as a result of billions of years of evolution, all I can say is: Good luck with that!
In fusion research it always look good when you do low-energy tests or low density etc... It is relatively easy to confine plasmas that don't "burn". A penning trap will do the job quite nicely. The problems always show up when you try to push your design to operate close to the lawson criterion, at which point many otherwise promising designs just fall short ( taking the penning trap as an example the required magnetic field for any practical confinement time exceeds that at which modern superconductors stop beeing superconducting ).
Now I admit that I don't know the details of this particular scheme, but I can say with almost certainty that when they try to get closer to break even the higher temperatures, densities and confinement times required will turn the thing into a massive headache.
The parent made a bunch of strong claims, without any data reference or argument to back them up. He contradicts the findings of EPOCA, BIOACID and the Royal Society in the UK, the NERC and various other organisations directly tasked with evaluating the situation. Moreover he claims these organisations essentially lie in order to get research money, without as much as a shred of evidence to back up his claims, and this is moderated insightful?
Come on moderators hand in your nerd cards! When somebody rejects scientific theories pretending it is oh-so obvious we know nothing about the matter while major scientific research bodies report the contrary, then you don't mod that insightful. "It is too complicated we can't know anything about it!" is not an argument. It is an unsubstantiated claim without as much as a shred of evidence to back it up.
And then I use SSH to my friend in Korea and connect from his computer to a mail server (using SSL and TLS ) in Norway, from which I send Kapersky an e-mail saying "Fuck you bastard!". Now what?
This may or may not be true for chemical and biological toxins ( I'm not qualified to tell ), but it is certainly not true for radioactive elements. In fact with the exceptions of a few isotopes used for radiation therapy ( like Iodine ) and some tracers used for PET scans, almost all isotopes with a significant activity are bad for you. There are some theories that very minor radioactive doses can be helpful in triggering the immune system, but these are speculative hypotheses at best, and with a few notable exceptions radioactive exposure can quite clearly be said to be undesirable. I doubt you will ever find medical use of strong alpha emitters like Polonium or Americium as an example. They may be useful for other things related to medicine ( like powering a pacemaker or calibrating equipment ) but I doubt you will ever see a good reason to administer them directly to patients.
In order to actually enforce what he is suggesting you would have to effectively ban or censor all private individuals and companies from using protocols not endorsed by the government, all countries would have to agree on the bans and rules, and you would have to block traffic from non-cooperating countries.
However that is not enough, because some of the countries from which you want to allow traffic may be allowing proxies used by countries that don't cooperate. So if Switzerland were to allow the Swedish to use Swiss proxies, and if the US didn't like Sweden's way to do things, then not only would they have to refuse all traffic from Sweden, they would have to refuse all traffic from Switzerland too. And if the UK allowed the Swiss to use UK proxies, you'd have to ban the UK too.
Then there is the practical problems. How do you stop people from stealing each others "passports"?. How do you stop people peeking over each others back when they type in passwords ? How do you stop man in the middle attacks? Are you going to encrypt every single transmission ? And all countries will agree to encrypt all their traffic too? How do you manage the keys across international boundaries? What happens when I go on vacation in a country that doesn't agree with your rules ?
Now what about compromised systems? What do you do when you get packages from Russia, Nigeria and China flooding your key servers with false requests? What do you do when the attacks come from compromised systems in Australia, Norway, Israel and France? Do you block all those countries, do you disconnect all your citizens that can't access your key servers? Do you allow everybody access if the key-servers are flooded? Do you cut foreign countries off from your citizens thereby screwing over all your international trade?
Somebody didn't think this through...
You make it sound as if all of quantum mechanics is unreliable and stuff we don't know. In reality there are plenty of quantum mechanical limitations that are likely on as solid footing as other fundamental limits like conservation of energy, momentum and the second law of thermodynamics.
Take Heisenberg's uncertainty relation as an example. There may be things we don't fully understand about quantum mechanical phenomena ( such as wave function collapse ) , but I would not hold my breath waiting for a breakthrough which allow accurately measuring a particle's position and momentum. Likewise I would not expect to see two fermions occupy the same quantum state ( and thereby violate the pauli exclusion principle ) any time soon, nor would I expect the de-Broglie wavelength of a particle to be anything other than h/p.
I think part of the reason a lot of people seem to think QM is some unreliable theory that we don't really understand is simply ignorance of how fundamental it is to modern physics. Put it this way, without QM we would not have solid state physics, which is what chip designers rely on making the CPU I'm using to write this. We would not have LEDs or Lasers for the optic communications used in many internet backbones, and we would not have nuclear reactors to power the whole thing ( The stability of a nuclear reactor relies on two phenomena Doppler Broadening and the tendency of Neutron cross sections to change with neutron energy. Both of these are QM phenomena.)
Basically saying "it's just a theory" is as much a naive criticism of Quantum Mechanics as it is a naive criticism of Evolution. It may not be absolute truth ( physical theories in general are not ) , but it very much is the best available description of nature we have and it is certainly more reliable than assuming without good reason that theory will not agree with practice.
Quite the contrary. High temperature superconductors can withstand stronger magnetic fields than low temperature ones. The reason you still use liquid helium to cool them is that it allows even greater field strengths. Now it is true that many magnets use low temperature superconductors instead, but the reason for this is mainly that the high temperature ones are ceramics that can be expensive and difficult to manufacture.
The part where it is chemically equivalent to hydrogen and hence rapidly dissolves and disperses in water, quickly being diluted to lower than background levels. In addition the very low energy of the beta radiation it emits, it's tendency to be ejected with urine or sweat if ingested ( as opposed to staying in the body ) the short half-life, the minuscule amount produced, and the lack of any major pathway into the food-chain that would not first dilute any release by many orders of magnitude.
Honestly of all the elements in nuclear waste tritium is one of the more harmless ones. If you want to do scaremongering it's Iodine, Caesium, Strontium, Technetium and Neptunium you should harp about ( your arguments would still be rubbish of course, but those are the elements most likely to cause trouble ).
Good thing then that the secondary circuit is also a closed circuit that is heavily monitored for radioactivity. Seriously can you quote even a single incident where a dangerous amount of radioactive material was released through the secondary circuit ?
I got news for you buddy. Your body fluids are radioactive, as is air, milk, ponies and everything else on the planet. If it is dangerous or not is not simply a matter of it containing something radioactive and being a lot of it. The concentration, chemical properties, decay constant, and concentration matters. It is physically impossible to do ANYTHING without releasing small amounts of radioactivity. Even the carbon dioxide in the air you exhale contains some C-14. The authorised emissions from nuclear power-plants are set sufficiently strict that if you lived next to one for 50 years you get just a couple of "banana units" equivalent of exposure ( the same amount as you would get from eating a few bananas ).
I don't know if you are unaware of the serious flaws in your scaremongering, or if you do it deliberately, in either case you've quite clearly demonstrated that your claims are half-truths at the very best if not deliberately misleading.
This is how far I read because if you seriously think Nuclear power ends up in an energy deficit you are either completely ignorant about the subject, your sources are rubbish, or you are deliberately lieing ( or possibly a combination of the three ).
To give a slight idea of just how much energy is released in a nuclear reactor, the main limit of a reactor's power rating is how high temperatures the construction materials and cooling system can cope with. The reaction itself is limited only by the temperature at which the ceramic fuel rods and steel cladding melts, and at any time the fuel present in a large reactor contains more energy than entire countries consume in a year. If that is not enough to convince you, consider that the energy bound in chemical molecules like gas or petroleum is measured in electron volt, while the energy released in a fission reaction is hundreds of millions of electron volt.
Or put another way, one atom of uranium when fissioned will release an amount of energy equivalent to hundreds of millions of molecules of conventional fuel. Even if you take the fuel that has the highest chemical energy/weight ratio there is ( hydrogen ) it still releases only 1.53eV per atomic weight unit, while uranium fission is closer to a million eV per atomic weight unit.
For nuclear power to end up on an energy deficit the energy needed to extract, refine, burn and dispose it would have to be hundreds of millions times larger ( per atom counted ) than the energy needed to extract and refine conventional fuels. Now I accept that handling, mining, burning and disposing uranium and the waste products may be more involved than say coal. I'll even let you say 100 times more energy intensive, or heck why not say 10.000 times just for the hell of it, lets even assume coal is used 100% efficiently, and that only 1% of uranium is burned. You would still have THREE ORDERS OF MAGNITUDE to account for.
Really it is hard to grasp the energy released in nuclear reactions. A few kilograms would be enough to turn an entire city to ash, a couple of metric tonnes correspond to entire nations' annual energy consumption. Even though most reactors today only burn about 5% of it the amount much power you can tap from it is limited only by how much energy the cooling system can safely transport away, and the energy content is enough that a reactor can run for years without refueling.
"If you love someone, set them free. If they come back they're yours; if they don't they never were." - Bach
Interpret as you like.
I'll post this preemptively since usually when battery fires are discussed some people insist this is unavoidable if you want a high energy density, but this is not true. Whether batteries can fail catastrophically or not is mainly down to two things:
a)Whether the energy released when a cell fails is sufficient to cause nearby fails to fail, thereby causing a cascade of failed cells.
b)Whether the materials the battery is made of can react violently with materials it is likely to come into contact with when it does fail.
For traditional Lithium ion batteries the answer to both these questions is yes. The temperature necessary to cause a cell to fail is easily within the range of what is generated when a nearby cell fails. Furthermore the lithium batteries and their electrolyte burn quite well upon contact with air, adding even more energy to the reaction.
There's however no principal reason why this has to be the case. As an example if the heat capacity and conductivity of the battery is good enough it is possible to design batteries so that the failure of one cell won't heat nearby cells enough to cause them to fail. Different chemistries also have different activation energies, as an example lithium iron phosphate batteries are much safer for this reason. It is also quite plausible that one might be able to create a battery from a chemistry that doesn't react violently with oxygen.
Many batteries that use a water-based electrolytes qualify for both these criteria. Water has a high heat capacity and doesn't burn in oxygen. Unfortunately such batteries have other drawbacks. In particular while water itself won't burn it is susceptible to electrolysis at typical battery voltages, producing flammable hydrogen.
Bullshit.
There are a number of people who repeat that straw-man for political and religious motives, but what promoters of embryonic stem cell research usually argue is something more along the lines of:
"Embryonic stem cells are worthy of research not only because understanding how they differentiate can help us understand how to better use adult stem cells, but also because they have a number of unique features that make them promising to be useful for a number of conditions where adult stem cells would not suffice (such as tissue types that lack adults stem cells, like the pancreas). In any case history suggests that understanding how the body functions is absolutely essential for modern medicine and thus embryonic stem cell research is worth pursuing if for no other reason than its academic value."
Calling research into fundamental aspects of how our bodies develop "dead-end" is pretty much a strong display of profound ignorance about modern medicine.
I don't think you realize just how stupid it is. Consider:
Doubling efficiency from 5% to 10% - relatively easy.
Doubling efficiency from 25% to 50% - hard
Doubling efficiency from 55% to 110% - requires breaking the laws of thermodynamics
It is obvious that if you start out with rubbish efficiency you will see some great improvements when you put some effort into it, but that rapid improvement will stall when you are up to par with what the tech is actually capable off.
Or to quote Dilbert: "Are you expecting a room full of engineers to be impressed by a percentage improvement over a trivial base?"