Monthy python jokes aside, this is very true and quite a few people die from it every year. Part of the problem is that moose have tall enough legs that when you hit one it won't go under the car but it gets thrown through the windshield. Seeing that an adult moose can be several hundred kilograms the front passengers are therefore faced with a shower of splintered glass and getting crushed by the animal as it crashes through the windshield. It should be noted that driving a gas-guzzling SUV won't help you here as as it is essentially the speed and design of windshield which determines how bad the outcome is. If anything driving a heavy car would probably mean you have a longer breaking distance, making things much worse.
Sorry but I don't buy the optics issue. It really can't be THAT hard to put a lens or reflector in the armature and point multiple LEDs in different directions. If anything LEDs should be preferable to incandescents because it is easier to take something very directional and spread the light than it is focus the light from a divergent source. I think the main reason LEDs are not popular yet is cost and "it's not what I'm used to". Seeing the type of crap people will buy even when there are better alternatives I simply don't believe that something as sophisticated as the beam profile of an LED will be a huge issue.
The way they approach research is fundamentally different from how a scientist in biology, chemistry, or physics would approach the same research.
I don't think you want to know how we approach real research. Here's a hint: If we make a mistake and mess up our results worst that can happen is our career takes a hit, but unless you acted outright fraudulent it is far more likely that you simply won't be able to publish your results. In contrast, if an engineer messes up the design of some train component he might get charged with negligence and be jailed for causing a train accident. Who do you think is going to be more inclined to ensure they got it right? Theres a bit of a difference between "I messed up so we wasted a bunch of cash making this measurement." and "I messed up so this patient got severe complications from the treatment and he will be in a wheelchair for the rest of his life.". Physics makes me paranoid about if I've forgotten something. Medicine I simply could not do. The thought of having somebody's life depend on me making the right call is not a pleasant one.
I find it amazing that not only is there a 19 year old out there who doesn't download music, but the RIAA managed to find them!
If you sue enough people without bothering to do any investigation, eventually you will. This should give you an idea of how many baseless lawsuits they file.
However, heat will be dissipated somewhere else because current still must flow from high potential to low potential.
You're forgetting that since superconducting components have a negligible resistance you need negligible potential differences to achieve the same current. In fact, for a true super conductor it is impossible to have a stable high potential difference across it (since it would imply infinite current through it ). You can turn them into solenoids to get an impedance for oscillating currents, and thus achieve a high peak potential. Simply put super conductors have no resistive energy losses and thus any energy lost from the system is going to be in the form of EM radiation from the oscillating currents. To some extent you may prevent this with shielding ( as in a coaxial cable ) and then the energy loss will be determined by the dielectric properties of your insulating material. I would go on, but now I'm starting to get mental images of superconducting cavities with standing waves in them, and I remember from my course in accelerator technique that those things are not fun to try to think about.
So yea. I'm positive 98% of all the Vista hate is irrelevant now unless you have 1GB of RAM or less. If you have 2GB and can run DirectX 9 you have no issues with Vista, or shouldn't be
That's sort of the point. On my Ubuntu box I currently have EVERYTHING I normally use running. This includes among other things: Firefox ( currently streaming off youtube ), Pidgin, Last FM , Compiz at graphics setting "oooh shiny", Xchat , Thunderbird, Open office etc... My memory usage at the moment is about 900 MB, out of which a lot is cache and buffers. My machine is not "vista capable" according to Microsoft's official numbers, yet it runs the above fine. This therefore makes me wonder, why on earth does Vista require 1GB as a minimum just to run Aero ? I don't even use that much RAM when I run everything I use my computer for, so what does Vista use all that RAM for? It's not just in comparison to XP that vista is a resource hog, even compared to operating systems that are significantly newer and have more features, Vista uses more than twice the memory and have drastically higher hardware requirements over all. There's simply not a good reason for this.
The French Baccalaureate is not the same as the International Baccalaureate. (Although, having complete the IB program, I do not have many good things to say about it's science standards and offerings.)
I guess it depends what you compare with. As compared to the Norwegian system I'd say it was great, especially in mathematics. If you're going for a degree in Physics, Maths or another math's heavy subject I'd claim the IB Mathematics High Level course will be very useful ( depending on teacher of course ).
What the parent says is very true, but there is more too it. Among other things:
1)The power plants are stationary and can hence employ heavier and more sophisticated effluent treatments, meaning that for the same amount of fuel consumed, the power station will emit less pollutants than does a car.
2)A few large power plants are easier to monitor for malfunctioning systems than millions of cars.
3)With power plants you can often utilize the heat that is left over for district heating. Since even the most efficient engines/turbines will be well below 50% thermal efficiency this can potentially double the fuel efficiency.
4)The higher efficiency from a power plant tends to correspond to a more efficient burn of teh fuel, meaning that the pollutants produced for teh same quantity of fuel burnt is less.
In addition there's of course many ways to generate electricity with very little air pollution. Including Nuclear, Hydroelectric and Wind power. Over here in Sweden virtually all our electricity comes from Hydroelectric or Nuclear power. Iceland uses geothermal extensively, France uses almost exclusively nuclear and Norway uses mostly hydroelectric. Denmark gets substantial amounts of its electricity from wind. As I understand it the US has fairly diverse weather patterns and geography so you guys should be able to utilize Wind, Hydro, Solar, Geothermal and obviously Nuclear. The only reason you're still on Coal is that it appears cheaper when you fail to consider the secondary costs associated with all the crap it spews out.
Something to think about when you use the GPL for your own code - you may be preventing it from being bundled with other Free Software.
Of course the same applies to the CDDL. Whenever this example is mentioned people like to blame the copyleft provisions of the GPL, not mentioning that the CDDL is also copyleft which is in fact why the incompatibility arises. If you replaced either the CDDL or the GPL with the X11 license there would be no problem. It's just that the GPL and CDDL, both of which are copyleft free software licenes, are incompatible with one another. It's no more the fault of the GPL and the FSF than it is the fault of the CDDL and Sun. However, for one reason or another people like to use this example to bash the GPL, not mentioning that you could equally well see it as a problem with the CDDL. The conflict arises because the requirements of the CDDL and GPL differ on some points, and neither license allows you to change those requirements to resolve the conflict.
Now lets see... why is it that we need addons for something a simple as playing a video on youtube or streaming sound? Oh yea, that's right there's no cross platform open standards for doing so because SOMEBODY keeps failing to implement it. Seriously, even if the problem is buggy addons like Flash the whole reason we need those addons is because Microsoft has kept sabotaging the open standards that would have made them redundant. If it was not for Microsoft's continued hampering of web standards the majority of stuff flash is currently being used for could easily have been implemented using just html and javascript. So blame the browser or blame the addons, it's still all your fault in the end.
Siiigh, no matter how much you check one or two always slip through... It's not just fermions that have non-zero rest masses. Some bosons ( W and Z ) also have nonzero rest mass, which is quite important because it limits the range of the weak nuclear force. Heisenberg's uncertainty relation only allows virtual particles to exist for a time corresponding to their energies, so if the particles have nonzero rest mass it limits this time, and thus the distance they can travel. In contrast the electromagnetic force is mediated by photons, which need not have nonzero rest mass ( indeed only virtual photons can have mass ) and thus its range is believed to be unlimited.
Not quite. The Higg's mechanism is a suggested explanation for why some particles have nonzero rest mass ( such as electrons ) while others do not ( such as photons ). The idea is that just like photon-particle interactions can make light travel slower than C when it passes through a medium, so can interactions between fermions and the Higgs field allow fermions to move at speeds lower than C , which implies they have mass. Massless particles travel at C in all inertial frames, while particles with rest mass can never be brought to this speed since their kinetic energy diverges to infinity as their speed tend to C.
As it happens this explanation works quite well and can predict the rest masses for some particles with great accuracy, with one minor catch. It also implies that there should exist a boson with some particular properties, called the Higg's boson, which nobody has yet managed to detect. This is the Higg's particle. If detected it would provide strong evidence for the Higg's mechanism, strongly suggesting that it is indeed interactions with the Higg's field that cause fermions to have nonzero rest mass. Furthermore, the predictions of a few theories in particle physics depend upon properties of the Higg's boson that we can't deduce from other theories. As a consequence if you can detect the Higg's boson and determine some of these properties, it would further our understanding of particle physics.
Microsoft DO do the same thing. Ever wondered why OEMs pay less for a windows license that does any other old customer? It's either a tax crime or a violation of antitrust law, and Microsoft gets away with it.
"The Grid" is to be used to analyze data from the LHC. Or in other words, you have some of the brightest scientists, mathematicians and computer scientists in the world involved with this project with high stakes in it. To say you don't trust it because it was funded by the EU is a bit like saying you don't trust NASA to write code for a robot because it was funded by the white house.
Fluid dynamic concerns limit the efficiency of any wind turbine, using any mechanism, to about 59%. This is a theorem of fluid dynamics, much like you cannot exceed the carnot efficiency of a heat engine due to thermodynamic concerns, you cannot build a perfect wind turbine due to fluid dynamic concerns. The reason for this is fairly simple. If you achieved 100% efficiency it means you extract 100% of the energy, so the air behind the turbine should stand still. However, unless you have air accumulating in the turbine ( you don't ) an equal amount must enter the turbine as leaves it. The consequence is that the slower air stream behind the turbine must be wider than the incoming air stream. It takes a bit of math to show it, but in the ideal case you end up just short of 60% efficiency. I guess depending on how you count you could consider that a 100% increase over typical values of 30% , but you will not be getting anywhere above 60% efficiency and certainly not 100%.
The total cost of the is estimated to be somewhere between 3 billion to 7 billion. A couple of tens of millions will increase the overall cost by less than 1%.
The fact that we exist is to me no more surprising than the fact that unicorns and goblins do not. What people usually forget when it comes to amazing things happening is that a vast number of equally improbable things did NOT happen. Take the lottery as an example. One person might find it amazing he won since the chance must have been one in a million or less. However, in a big lottery there were also millions of people who did not win, but could have. The probability that somebody would win is 100%, but it will still be surprising to the ones who do. When seen in this light the fact that life exists in this universe can be seen as simply a curious coincidence which occurred instead of a large number of equally bizarre possible events that did not. Elves, goblins, unicorns, gold at the end of the rainbows, the mad hatter and the easter bunny, honest politicians and well documented computer programs, they cold all have been real... It is only the limits of our imagination that cause us to think the universe would be more likely to be "dead" than amazing and alive.
The reason I doubt photovoltaics will ever kick off is that solar thermal and solar heating are likely to be more cost effective. With high temperature brayton cycles solar thermal plants can reach above 50% efficiency, and they have other advantages, like the ability to buffer heat for night time electricity production. In colder climates photovoltaics get even harsher competition since a lot of energy is used for heating, which is much easier to collect with a relatively simple solar heating installation.
Photovoltaics is great for mobile and remote applications such as meterological instruments, sattelites, boats etc... For large scale production to power homes there are better alternatives.
Slashdot Mirror
Monthy python jokes aside, this is very true and quite a few people die from it every year. Part of the problem is that moose have tall enough legs that when you hit one it won't go under the car but it gets thrown through the windshield. Seeing that an adult moose can be several hundred kilograms the front passengers are therefore faced with a shower of splintered glass and getting crushed by the animal as it crashes through the windshield. It should be noted that driving a gas-guzzling SUV won't help you here as as it is essentially the speed and design of windshield which determines how bad the outcome is. If anything driving a heavy car would probably mean you have a longer breaking distance, making things much worse.
You sick pervert!
Sorry but I don't buy the optics issue. It really can't be THAT hard to put a lens or reflector in the armature and point multiple LEDs in different directions. If anything LEDs should be preferable to incandescents because it is easier to take something very directional and spread the light than it is focus the light from a divergent source. I think the main reason LEDs are not popular yet is cost and "it's not what I'm used to". Seeing the type of crap people will buy even when there are better alternatives I simply don't believe that something as sophisticated as the beam profile of an LED will be a huge issue.
You may not realize it, but your statement is a dressed up version of "this statement is false", the lier paradox. It falls on its own absurdity.
Yea, that would be totally unlike Microsoft.
Just imagine if you short it... ouch ...
Convenience wins, every time. Hence subscription models are likely to be far more popular.
I don't think you want to know how we approach real research. Here's a hint: If we make a mistake and mess up our results worst that can happen is our career takes a hit, but unless you acted outright fraudulent it is far more likely that you simply won't be able to publish your results. In contrast, if an engineer messes up the design of some train component he might get charged with negligence and be jailed for causing a train accident. Who do you think is going to be more inclined to ensure they got it right? Theres a bit of a difference between "I messed up so we wasted a bunch of cash making this measurement." and "I messed up so this patient got severe complications from the treatment and he will be in a wheelchair for the rest of his life.". Physics makes me paranoid about if I've forgotten something. Medicine I simply could not do. The thought of having somebody's life depend on me making the right call is not a pleasant one.
If you sue enough people without bothering to do any investigation, eventually you will. This should give you an idea of how many baseless lawsuits they file.
You're forgetting that since superconducting components have a negligible resistance you need negligible potential differences to achieve the same current. In fact, for a true super conductor it is impossible to have a stable high potential difference across it (since it would imply infinite current through it ). You can turn them into solenoids to get an impedance for oscillating currents, and thus achieve a high peak potential. Simply put super conductors have no resistive energy losses and thus any energy lost from the system is going to be in the form of EM radiation from the oscillating currents. To some extent you may prevent this with shielding ( as in a coaxial cable ) and then the energy loss will be determined by the dielectric properties of your insulating material. I would go on, but now I'm starting to get mental images of superconducting cavities with standing waves in them, and I remember from my course in accelerator technique that those things are not fun to try to think about.
That's sort of the point. On my Ubuntu box I currently have EVERYTHING I normally use running. This includes among other things: Firefox ( currently streaming off youtube ), Pidgin, Last FM , Compiz at graphics setting "oooh shiny", Xchat , Thunderbird, Open office etc... My memory usage at the moment is about 900 MB, out of which a lot is cache and buffers. My machine is not "vista capable" according to Microsoft's official numbers, yet it runs the above fine. This therefore makes me wonder, why on earth does Vista require 1GB as a minimum just to run Aero ? I don't even use that much RAM when I run everything I use my computer for, so what does Vista use all that RAM for? It's not just in comparison to XP that vista is a resource hog, even compared to operating systems that are significantly newer and have more features, Vista uses more than twice the memory and have drastically higher hardware requirements over all. There's simply not a good reason for this.
I guess it depends what you compare with. As compared to the Norwegian system I'd say it was great, especially in mathematics. If you're going for a degree in Physics, Maths or another math's heavy subject I'd claim the IB Mathematics High Level course will be very useful ( depending on teacher of course ).
What the parent says is very true, but there is more too it.
Among other things:
1)The power plants are stationary and can hence employ heavier and more sophisticated effluent treatments, meaning that for the same amount of fuel consumed, the power station will emit less pollutants than does a car.
2)A few large power plants are easier to monitor for malfunctioning systems than millions of cars.
3)With power plants you can often utilize the heat that is left over for district heating. Since even the most efficient engines/turbines will be well below 50% thermal efficiency this can potentially double the fuel efficiency.
4)The higher efficiency from a power plant tends to correspond to a more efficient burn of teh fuel, meaning that the pollutants produced for teh same quantity of fuel burnt is less.
In addition there's of course many ways to generate electricity with very little air pollution. Including Nuclear, Hydroelectric and Wind power. Over here in Sweden virtually all our electricity comes from Hydroelectric or Nuclear power. Iceland uses geothermal extensively, France uses almost exclusively nuclear and Norway uses mostly hydroelectric. Denmark gets substantial amounts of its electricity from wind. As I understand it the US has fairly diverse weather patterns and geography so you guys should be able to utilize Wind, Hydro, Solar, Geothermal and obviously Nuclear. The only reason you're still on Coal is that it appears cheaper when you fail to consider the secondary costs associated with all the crap it spews out.
Sorry but even OED recognizes "who" as a valid substitute of "whom" these days. Welcome to the 21st century.
Of course the same applies to the CDDL. Whenever this example is mentioned people like to blame the copyleft provisions of the GPL, not mentioning that the CDDL is also copyleft which is in fact why the incompatibility arises. If you replaced either the CDDL or the GPL with the X11 license there would be no problem. It's just that the GPL and CDDL, both of which are copyleft free software licenes, are incompatible with one another. It's no more the fault of the GPL and the FSF than it is the fault of the CDDL and Sun. However, for one reason or another people like to use this example to bash the GPL, not mentioning that you could equally well see it as a problem with the CDDL. The conflict arises because the requirements of the CDDL and GPL differ on some points, and neither license allows you to change those requirements to resolve the conflict.
Now lets see... why is it that we need addons for something a simple as playing a video on youtube or streaming sound? Oh yea, that's right there's no cross platform open standards for doing so because SOMEBODY keeps failing to implement it. Seriously, even if the problem is buggy addons like Flash the whole reason we need those addons is because Microsoft has kept sabotaging the open standards that would have made them redundant. If it was not for Microsoft's continued hampering of web standards the majority of stuff flash is currently being used for could easily have been implemented using just html and javascript. So blame the browser or blame the addons, it's still all your fault in the end.
Siiigh, no matter how much you check one or two always slip through... It's not just fermions that have non-zero rest masses. Some bosons ( W and Z ) also have nonzero rest mass, which is quite important because it limits the range of the weak nuclear force. Heisenberg's uncertainty relation only allows virtual particles to exist for a time corresponding to their energies, so if the particles have nonzero rest mass it limits this time, and thus the distance they can travel. In contrast the electromagnetic force is mediated by photons, which need not have nonzero rest mass ( indeed only virtual photons can have mass ) and thus its range is believed to be unlimited.
Not quite. The Higg's mechanism is a suggested explanation for why some particles have nonzero rest mass ( such as electrons ) while others do not ( such as photons ). The idea is that just like photon-particle interactions can make light travel slower than C when it passes through a medium, so can interactions between fermions and the Higgs field allow fermions to move at speeds lower than C , which implies they have mass. Massless particles travel at C in all inertial frames, while particles with rest mass can never be brought to this speed since their kinetic energy diverges to infinity as their speed tend to C.
As it happens this explanation works quite well and can predict the rest masses for some particles with great accuracy, with one minor catch. It also implies that there should exist a boson with some particular properties, called the Higg's boson, which nobody has yet managed to detect. This is the Higg's particle. If detected it would provide strong evidence for the Higg's mechanism, strongly suggesting that it is indeed interactions with the Higg's field that cause fermions to have nonzero rest mass. Furthermore, the predictions of a few theories in particle physics depend upon properties of the Higg's boson that we can't deduce from other theories. As a consequence if you can detect the Higg's boson and determine some of these properties, it would further our understanding of particle physics.
Microsoft DO do the same thing. Ever wondered why OEMs pay less for a windows license that does any other old customer? It's either a tax crime or a violation of antitrust law, and Microsoft gets away with it.
"The Grid" is to be used to analyze data from the LHC. Or in other words, you have some of the brightest scientists, mathematicians and computer scientists in the world involved with this project with high stakes in it. To say you don't trust it because it was funded by the EU is a bit like saying you don't trust NASA to write code for a robot because it was funded by the white house.
Fluid dynamic concerns limit the efficiency of any wind turbine, using any mechanism, to about 59%. This is a theorem of fluid dynamics, much like you cannot exceed the carnot efficiency of a heat engine due to thermodynamic concerns, you cannot build a perfect wind turbine due to fluid dynamic concerns. The reason for this is fairly simple. If you achieved 100% efficiency it means you extract 100% of the energy, so the air behind the turbine should stand still. However, unless you have air accumulating in the turbine ( you don't ) an equal amount must enter the turbine as leaves it. The consequence is that the slower air stream behind the turbine must be wider than the incoming air stream. It takes a bit of math to show it, but in the ideal case you end up just short of 60% efficiency. I guess depending on how you count you could consider that a 100% increase over typical values of 30% , but you will not be getting anywhere above 60% efficiency and certainly not 100%.
The total cost of the is estimated to be somewhere between 3 billion to 7 billion. A couple of tens of millions will increase the overall cost by less than 1%.
The fact that we exist is to me no more surprising than the fact that unicorns and goblins do not. What people usually forget when it comes to amazing things happening is that a vast number of equally improbable things did NOT happen. Take the lottery as an example. One person might find it amazing he won since the chance must have been one in a million or less. However, in a big lottery there were also millions of people who did not win, but could have. The probability that somebody would win is 100%, but it will still be surprising to the ones who do. When seen in this light the fact that life exists in this universe can be seen as simply a curious coincidence which occurred instead of a large number of equally bizarre possible events that did not. Elves, goblins, unicorns, gold at the end of the rainbows, the mad hatter and the easter bunny, honest politicians and well documented computer programs, they cold all have been real... It is only the limits of our imagination that cause us to think the universe would be more likely to be "dead" than amazing and alive.
I just had a little nap ok!
The reason I doubt photovoltaics will ever kick off is that solar thermal and solar heating are likely to be more cost effective. With high temperature brayton cycles solar thermal plants can reach above 50% efficiency, and they have other advantages, like the ability to buffer heat for night time electricity production. In colder climates photovoltaics get even harsher competition since a lot of energy is used for heating, which is much easier to collect with a relatively simple solar heating installation.
Photovoltaics is great for mobile and remote applications such as meterological instruments, sattelites, boats etc... For large scale production to power homes there are better alternatives.