I thought you were going to say "I'm sure somewhere you gave some engineer a serious hard-on."
Seriously, elevating water seems like a nearly ideal way to store energy. The greatest benefit is that water, once elevated, does not lose its potential energy (except for evaporation.)
So the efficiency of energy storage would be something like this:
(Captured wind energy) * (efficiency of converting energy to water elevation via pumps) * (efficiency of storing water considering evaporation effects) * (efficiency of converting elevated water back to usable energy.)
If we can manage 90% efficiency in each step, we can effectively store about 73% of all captured wind energy, which would be excellent. I wonder if that is anywhere near feasible.
If you're going to respond, at least try to argue with a point actually made by the parent. He never said sharing those CDs with friends should be considered legally or morally proper. His point is that the punishment should be proportional to the crime.
Do you think that copying a CD of 15 songs for a friend is a crime worthy of a $2.25 million fine?
TFA contains a rather awful quote from Edward Owusu, the Assistant Principal at Wootton High School.
"It is unfortunate that kids have a lot of time on their hands that they can think of doing such a thing."
Did this educator really just lament that kids have free time for thinking? Should they instead be spending all their extra time on rote memorization and household chores so that the devil won't get a foothold?
"But teacher, I was just trying to tell you the answer is 132!"
If you bend each finger at the first knuckle, you can have three positions for each finger, allowing you to count to 59,048 in base 3.
You could add in other body parts too, each of them also a base 3 digit. Each wrist straight, bent in, or bent out. Elbow extended, at 90 degrees, or fully bent. Same for each knee. Foot straight, pointed inward, or pointed outward. Eyes open, left closed, or right closed. Neck straight, bent left, or bent right. Shoulders down, left shoulder raised, or right shoulder raised. Back straight, arched back, or hunched forward. Hips straight, twisted left, or twisted right.
Combined with the fingers that gives you 23 base 3 "digits", allowing your body to count to 94,143,178,826.
If this catches on for research institutions it may increase Sony's sales, but they might not be seeing the corresponding sale of games spike...
Why "might not"? Are you implying that people may be building PS3 clusters just so that they can sneak into the lab at night and have big gaming parties? Because I can totally see that.
The space fountain shouldn't have any trouble with sideways forces, I think. If it is being pushed west, it could simply send a higher percentage of pellets back down the east side of the tower to compensate.
Yes, only an established artist such as Paul could afford the risk of going DRM free. You'd never see your average small time bands releasing their albums in an unencrypted, uncompressed, easily convertible format.
Does this version resolve the privacy flaw in 3.0? Namely, the fact that the autocomplete history for the URL bar is not erased, even when the user manually clears all available privacy options?
I noticed that these computers make use of Lotus Symphony rather than Open Office, so I did a little reading. Lotus Symphony is based on an Open Office back end with a custom front end. This front end has gotten mixed reviews for having a better interface than Open Office, but less features.
Symphony is not open source. Open Office is open source, but has loose licensing rules which allow Symphony to build off of it without contributing back. Symphony is free, which is nice, but IBM retains control of it.
Control is the key here. The point of Lotus Symphony, and the point of this line of computers, is the same: to sell other Lotus software which will tie in with Symphony, and to sell support for Lotus products.
This isn't such a bad thing, really. Having an IBM-backed line of Linux business machines will give Linux a better reputation in the business world. However, I am wary of the closed source Symphony becoming a standard for Linux business machines. Also, if IBM is going to benefit from Open Office, I hope that they would also contribute back to it.
Show me a study that radio use has a similar effect on safety as cell phone use and drunkenness, and I'll agree that perhaps it needs to go. However, I can't imagine that law ever being passed. (And anyway, my best guess is that radio use actually improves safety by helping prevent boredom and sleepiness.)
One of the main uses of a car is to transport people including small children, so it wouldn't make any sense to outlaw that.
I like the idea of training people to deal with distractions. Considering the people I know, however, I have my doubts it would be effective. Not everyone can be a pilot, but almost everyone drives.
There are ways to enforce cell phone laws. Cops could have cell detectors just like radar detectors.
How dangerous do cell phones have to be in order to be outlawed for drivers? If they result in 3 accidents and 1 death per year per 100,000 drivers, is that acceptable risk? What if the number of deaths goes up to 10, or 100?
Before you scoff, consider that speed limits are set in this manner. Raising limits adds convenience at the cost of higher rates of accidents and deaths.
However, I am inclined to view the convenience of cell phones much more harshly, because cell phone use is not an essential part of the driving process. If you want the privilege of using public roads and putting others at risk, you should take the responsibility of devoting your full attention to driving well. I would be glad to see cell phones outlawed on the road entirely.
To get an open-platform STB to talk to services such as Netflix, you'd need to meet their DRM requirements. Currently this seems to require Windows/Silverlight, which really limits what can be done.
So the question is this - in five years will most people find a 512GB SSD is adequate for their needs, or will they have found reasons to make use of the 12TB conventional drive? I would guess they will each have their uses.
Or on the other hand, in 5 years will SSDs be catching up to conventional drives? Murphy's Law seems likely to favor the pure silicon nature of SSDs over the electro-mechanical awkwardness of conventional drives.
I agree that SSDs will find a niche soon, and that niche will continue to grow. My point is simply that spinning drives are nowhere near being a "dead" technology as the original post stated.
You can expect SSDs to become cheaper than hard disks in about two years, at least for the smaller capacity drives.
Is this just speculation? In any case, it seems likely. Every hard drive requires a calibrated motor and many other specialized parts. The cheapest hard drive can only be so cheap, and so at smaller sizes, SSDs may take over soon.
Interesting business plan, I wonder if they patented it.
Re:This is Neal's Best Book Yet
on
Anathem
·
· Score: 1
I was going to post a review here, but you said it better than I could. This book has a tremendous scope and very ambitious concept, and not only does Stephenson pull it off, he makes it downright fun.
I can just imagine an editor saying, "Nobody wants to read all this theoretical mumbo jumbo. Why not put in more of a love story instead?" I'm so very glad that no such editor got near this fantastic novel.
It's depressing if they limit themselves to Monty Python and never explore newer comedies or create their own humor.
However, when people quote Monty Python, they're doing something social. They are connecting with other people in recalling a shared experience of appreciating a comedic performance, and identifying with one another as being able to appreciate that experience. For humor to strike a chord, it must relate back to one's worldview. In celebrating a comic moment from Monty Python, the celebrators are also communicating about a mutual understanding of the world. I don't think the quoting is meant to be a fresh expression of humor, rather it is about forming human connections.
Slashdot Mirror
These have the same meaning. What is the problem?
I thought you were going to say "I'm sure somewhere you gave some engineer a serious hard-on."
Seriously, elevating water seems like a nearly ideal way to store energy. The greatest benefit is that water, once elevated, does not lose its potential energy (except for evaporation.)
So the efficiency of energy storage would be something like this:
(Captured wind energy) * (efficiency of converting energy to water elevation via pumps) * (efficiency of storing water considering evaporation effects) * (efficiency of converting elevated water back to usable energy.)
If we can manage 90% efficiency in each step, we can effectively store about 73% of all captured wind energy, which would be excellent. I wonder if that is anywhere near feasible.
I just need to be the first to patent two mirrors facing each other...
Getting it to display audio level meters for your music would be kinda fun.
Your sentence was terminated with two of them. (And aren't some sentences terminated with none?)
Woosh!
If you're going to respond, at least try to argue with a point actually made by the parent. He never said sharing those CDs with friends should be considered legally or morally proper. His point is that the punishment should be proportional to the crime.
Do you think that copying a CD of 15 songs for a friend is a crime worthy of a $2.25 million fine?
TFA contains a rather awful quote from Edward Owusu, the Assistant Principal at Wootton High School.
Did this educator really just lament that kids have free time for thinking? Should they instead be spending all their extra time on rote memorization and household chores so that the devil won't get a foothold?
"But teacher, I was just trying to tell you the answer is 132!"
If you bend each finger at the first knuckle, you can have three positions for each finger, allowing you to count to 59,048 in base 3.
You could add in other body parts too, each of them also a base 3 digit. Each wrist straight, bent in, or bent out. Elbow extended, at 90 degrees, or fully bent. Same for each knee. Foot straight, pointed inward, or pointed outward. Eyes open, left closed, or right closed. Neck straight, bent left, or bent right. Shoulders down, left shoulder raised, or right shoulder raised. Back straight, arched back, or hunched forward. Hips straight, twisted left, or twisted right.
Combined with the fingers that gives you 23 base 3 "digits", allowing your body to count to 94,143,178,826.
I have a friend who is a nurse. The most advanced procedure she can perform in this area is "digital extraction of fecal impaction."
No, I'm not making that up. And yes, I mean digital in the "base 10" sense!
Why "might not"? Are you implying that people may be building PS3 clusters just so that they can sneak into the lab at night and have big gaming parties? Because I can totally see that.
Even better, use ccTiddly: http://sourceforge.net/projects/cctiddly/
It's tiddly with a PHP/MySQL backend. You can access it from anywhere and don't need to carry anything with you.
You could just use Google notebook, of course, but I find that I can organize and display information much more compactly on a tiddly wiki.
I believe the currently accepted term is "stupidity challenged."
The space fountain shouldn't have any trouble with sideways forces, I think. If it is being pushed west, it could simply send a higher percentage of pellets back down the east side of the tower to compensate.
Yes, only an established artist such as Paul could afford the risk of going DRM free. You'd never see your average small time bands releasing their albums in an unencrypted, uncompressed, easily convertible format.
Except... they do. It's called a CD.
Does this version resolve the privacy flaw in 3.0? Namely, the fact that the autocomplete history for the URL bar is not erased, even when the user manually clears all available privacy options?
I noticed that these computers make use of Lotus Symphony rather than Open Office, so I did a little reading. Lotus Symphony is based on an Open Office back end with a custom front end. This front end has gotten mixed reviews for having a better interface than Open Office, but less features.
Symphony is not open source. Open Office is open source, but has loose licensing rules which allow Symphony to build off of it without contributing back. Symphony is free, which is nice, but IBM retains control of it.
Control is the key here. The point of Lotus Symphony, and the point of this line of computers, is the same: to sell other Lotus software which will tie in with Symphony, and to sell support for Lotus products.
This isn't such a bad thing, really. Having an IBM-backed line of Linux business machines will give Linux a better reputation in the business world. However, I am wary of the closed source Symphony becoming a standard for Linux business machines. Also, if IBM is going to benefit from Open Office, I hope that they would also contribute back to it.
Show me a study that radio use has a similar effect on safety as cell phone use and drunkenness, and I'll agree that perhaps it needs to go. However, I can't imagine that law ever being passed. (And anyway, my best guess is that radio use actually improves safety by helping prevent boredom and sleepiness.)
One of the main uses of a car is to transport people including small children, so it wouldn't make any sense to outlaw that.
I like the idea of training people to deal with distractions. Considering the people I know, however, I have my doubts it would be effective. Not everyone can be a pilot, but almost everyone drives.
There are ways to enforce cell phone laws. Cops could have cell detectors just like radar detectors.
How dangerous do cell phones have to be in order to be outlawed for drivers? If they result in 3 accidents and 1 death per year per 100,000 drivers, is that acceptable risk? What if the number of deaths goes up to 10, or 100?
Before you scoff, consider that speed limits are set in this manner. Raising limits adds convenience at the cost of higher rates of accidents and deaths.
However, I am inclined to view the convenience of cell phones much more harshly, because cell phone use is not an essential part of the driving process. If you want the privilege of using public roads and putting others at risk, you should take the responsibility of devoting your full attention to driving well. I would be glad to see cell phones outlawed on the road entirely.
To get an open-platform STB to talk to services such as Netflix, you'd need to meet their DRM requirements. Currently this seems to require Windows/Silverlight, which really limits what can be done.
Is there a way around this? I hope so.
So the question is this - in five years will most people find a 512GB SSD is adequate for their needs, or will they have found reasons to make use of the 12TB conventional drive? I would guess they will each have their uses.
Or on the other hand, in 5 years will SSDs be catching up to conventional drives? Murphy's Law seems likely to favor the pure silicon nature of SSDs over the electro-mechanical awkwardness of conventional drives.
I agree that SSDs will find a niche soon, and that niche will continue to grow. My point is simply that spinning drives are nowhere near being a "dead" technology as the original post stated.
Is this just speculation? In any case, it seems likely. Every hard drive requires a calibrated motor and many other specialized parts. The cheapest hard drive can only be so cheap, and so at smaller sizes, SSDs may take over soon.
1 TB of SSD today = 17 * $150 = $2,550.
1 TB conventional storage = $95.
SSDs are still over 25 times as expensive. They will improve quickly, but they need to hit a moving target to kill conventional drives.
Interesting business plan, I wonder if they patented it.
I was going to post a review here, but you said it better than I could. This book has a tremendous scope and very ambitious concept, and not only does Stephenson pull it off, he makes it downright fun.
I can just imagine an editor saying, "Nobody wants to read all this theoretical mumbo jumbo. Why not put in more of a love story instead?" I'm so very glad that no such editor got near this fantastic novel.
It's depressing if they limit themselves to Monty Python and never explore newer comedies or create their own humor.
However, when people quote Monty Python, they're doing something social. They are connecting with other people in recalling a shared experience of appreciating a comedic performance, and identifying with one another as being able to appreciate that experience. For humor to strike a chord, it must relate back to one's worldview. In celebrating a comic moment from Monty Python, the celebrators are also communicating about a mutual understanding of the world. I don't think the quoting is meant to be a fresh expression of humor, rather it is about forming human connections.