- In terms of efficiency, complexity, and reliability, fuel cells in cars seem to be as good as or better than gas engines
- In terms of lifespan, all my experience (and all I've heard about electric cars) tells me that batteries have their own problems, especially if 'fast-charge' is used.
Recall too that battery packs are very expensive. For high-mileage cars, the maintenance costs of a fuel cell system vs the replacement costs of battery packs could argue in favour of fuel cells.
But there are working examples - the Honda FCX Clarity, for example (Top gear review)
That car - the size of an Accord, more or less - has a range of 270 miles, which is comparable to gas cars. So the tanks may be heavy, but not so much that they make the car impractical.
And remember, battery power needs big breakthroughs before it will be mainstream: fast(ish) charging batteries are in the works, but fast-charge reduces the operating life of the battery. And the battery packs - as they are now - are very expensive. The only workable solution seems to be a battery-rental infrastructure, which would require a lot of cooperation, and would a lot of details (how to make a standard pack that would work with SUVs, sports cars, vans, and sedans, for example).
A quick look at Oberheide's site shows a talk from a week ago at Summer Con detailing problems with Google's 'Bouncer' system, designed to detect malicious apps before they enter the Android Market:
Bouncer doesn't have to be perfect to be useful â-- It will catch crappy malware â-- It won't catch sophisticated malware â-- Same as AV, IDS, â-- How much does Bouncer raise the bar? â-- Currently: not much â-- Future: hopefully more?
Or rather, true genius is making things as simple as they can be but no simpler.
Speaking as an amateur, it seems that adding the 'minor planet' category was a reasonable decision. Charon & Pluto are distinct from asteroids, but quite a lot smaller than the rest of the bodies we call planets.
In other fields, we distinguish between islets and islands, streams and rivers, bushes and trees, etc etc etc. Not to add complexity, but to more fully describe reality.
"Outs" Battlefield 4? What, are they going to be in rainbow camouflage or something?
Nah, it's just set in 1000 BC, and you play the Athenians against the Persians.
Like Plato said,
And if there were only some way of contriving that a state or an army should be made up of lovers and their loves, they would be the very best governors of their own city, abstaining from all dishonour, and emulating one another in honour; and when fighting at each other's side, although a mere handful, they would overcome the world.
How stupefyingly rational. Thanks for taking the fun out of it, man.
This is 2012, FFS. We deserve an epic worldwide disaster, be it an attack by the sun, volcanoes unleashing eons worth of pent-up primordial energy, or accidental release of hyper-engineered bio-weapons.
I was quoting posts from El Reg (I could have formatted it better, I admit), so it isn't strictly my terminology. But I accept your point, 'local climate' would have been more accurate.
Thanks to the link below I got to read the actual paper - the standard of reporting on this issue is atrocious. The paper looked at tree data from a small area of Scandinavia. Also pointing out that they have experienced a lot less warming in recent years than other northern areas.... Hmm do you think that may be true 1000's of years ago - it could have been warmer or cooler than the global average we don't know. So for CLIMATE in Lewis's article read WEATHER, i.e. Local effects for which it is extremely inaccurate to extrapolate to the world. Glad my knee jerk feeling that this was a daft extrapolation has been verified by the paper."
and
Anonymous Coward
Paper says:
"These findings, together with the missing orbital signature in published dendrochronological records, *suggest* that large-scale near-surface air-temperature reconstructions9, 10, 11, 12, 13 relying on tree-ring data *may* underestimate pre-instrumental temperatures including warmth during Medieval and Roman times."
Lewis says:
"CLIMATE WAS HOTTER IN ROMAN, MEDIEVAL TIMES THAN NOW: STUDY"
Well, they ought to have updated it to be a picture of a flying chair instead.
That'd be good. Even better, maybe, would be a flying chair coming off of a sinking Titanic (rearrange the chairs? I'll rearrange the funking chairs!).
That map (or rather, that webpage) is very well put-together. Clearly WV has people of sufficient caliber to see what's needed and to plan on how to achieve it. Let's hope those people are given the resources they need to build their network.
My astronomy is rusty, but I seem to recall that the inner planets are rocky because their proximity to the sun meant they were unable to build up the kind of atmosphere the gas giants did: their atmospheres boiled off before they could grow to the mammoth proportions of the gas giants.
Given the distance from the sun to Cerers, would Ceres ever have been able to form into a gas giant?
Anyway, who's to say Jupiter (or at least its moons) are lifeless?:|]
Curling is strangely entertaining. For years, I mocked it.. it was 'that sport you can do with a beer belly... while drinking a beer'.
But one afternoon, I got home early from work and it was the only thing on TV. So I watched it, and loved it. The open-face strategy; the way the game can appear to swing from one team to the next after every shot, and the copious amount of both luck and skill required to win, all make it thrilling to watch.
As for hockey, I'd miss it, but I would rather see the Don Cherry style ditched in favour of the european style. There is still an entertaining game beneath the fights and the checks. I know an old fellow who's over 80 years old but still plays, in a senior's league, where the violence is completely verboten. Yet somehow the game is still fun. If that's possible, then it surely possible for 20 year olds to play without destroying themselves.
The fact that they corrected the problems found in the first test, and have a clear idea about why the second test failed, speaks very well to this program. I look forward to reading more about it.
Perhaps 100% of the unvaccinated 8% got ill, but only 10% of the vaccinated 81% got the whooping cough.
Read his post again. That was the point he was making: if more than 8% of the student population was _not_ vaccinated, then the non-vacciated people had a lower rate of infection than the vaccinated people. Of course, if less than 8% of the student population was not vaccinated, then the non-vaccinated people had a higher rate of infection than vaccinated people.
And there is another thing: when you get ill, you build antibodies, so you won't become ill for at least 10 years. With vaccine, you need to vaccinate after a few years.
Are you pulling that 10-year figure out of your hat or your ass? Or the same place as your 'you need to vaccinate every few years' figure?
I don't think that whooping cough is deadly, so not vaccinating against it is not unwise. But if the illness has a letal risk (like measles), it's just stupid to avoid vaccines. Between autism and death, I choose autism.
Vaccines don't cause autism. Keep up with the The Lancet's retractions list.
This device sounds basically like a miniaturized ion drive. Is that correct? If so, how does its efficiency compare with ion drives in use on exploration spacecraft?
Slashdot Mirror
Argh - the top gear review is here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ffRagsjSpkE
You may well be right, but recall that
- In terms of efficiency, complexity, and reliability, fuel cells in cars seem to be as good as or better than gas engines
- In terms of lifespan, all my experience (and all I've heard about electric cars) tells me that batteries have their own problems, especially if 'fast-charge' is used.
Recall too that battery packs are very expensive. For high-mileage cars, the maintenance costs of a fuel cell system vs the replacement costs of battery packs could argue in favour of fuel cells.
But there are working examples - the Honda FCX Clarity, for example (Top gear review)
That car - the size of an Accord, more or less - has a range of 270 miles, which is comparable to gas cars. So the tanks may be heavy, but not so much that they make the car impractical.
And remember, battery power needs big breakthroughs before it will be mainstream: fast(ish) charging batteries are in the works, but fast-charge reduces the operating life of the battery. And the battery packs - as they are now - are very expensive. The only workable solution seems to be a battery-rental infrastructure, which would require a lot of cooperation, and would a lot of details (how to make a standard pack that would work with SUVs, sports cars, vans, and sedans, for example).
Hydrogen fuel cells will win out because you can refuel them in as much time as it takes to refuel a gas or diesel car.
Electric will be held back by the cost, limited lifespan, weight, and recharge time of the batteries.
zenophobic
Affraid of Zeus??
You mean "xenophobic".
I'll claim typo on that one
To be honest I knew of him, but only by the name 'Captain Cyborg'. I'll go ahead and blame El Reg for that ;)
Still, Slashdot posted the story in record time - that's a positive, right?
Most violence nowadays are from immigrants and directed towards the natives.
Care to back this up?
Or is it what it so clearly looks like - zenophobic, alarmist, and race-baiting?
My apologies.
A quick look at Oberheide's site shows a talk from a week ago at Summer Con detailing problems with Google's 'Bouncer' system, designed to detect malicious apps before they enter the Android Market:
http://jon.oberheide.org/blog/2012/06/21/dissecting-the-android-bouncer/
http://jon.oberheide.org/files/summercon12-bouncer.pdf
The executive summary:
Bouncer doesn't have to be perfect to
be useful
â-- It will catch crappy malware
â-- It won't catch sophisticated malware
â-- Same as AV, IDS,
â-- How much does Bouncer raise the
bar?
â-- Currently: not much
â-- Future: hopefully more?
true genius is making things simpler.
Or rather, true genius is making things as simple as they can be but no simpler.
Speaking as an amateur, it seems that adding the 'minor planet' category was a reasonable decision. Charon & Pluto are distinct from asteroids, but quite a lot smaller than the rest of the bodies we call planets.
In other fields, we distinguish between islets and islands, streams and rivers, bushes and trees, etc etc etc. Not to add complexity, but to more fully describe reality.
"Outs" Battlefield 4? What, are they going to be in rainbow camouflage or something?
Nah, it's just set in 1000 BC, and you play the Athenians against the Persians.
Like Plato said,
And if there were only some way of contriving that a state or an army should be made up of lovers and their loves, they would be the very best governors of their own city, abstaining from all dishonour, and emulating one another in honour; and when fighting at each other's side, although a mere handful, they would overcome the world.
How stupefyingly rational. Thanks for taking the fun out of it, man.
This is 2012, FFS. We deserve an epic worldwide disaster, be it an attack by the sun, volcanoes unleashing eons worth of pent-up primordial energy, or accidental release of hyper-engineered bio-weapons.
I was quoting posts from El Reg (I could have formatted it better, I admit), so it isn't strictly my terminology. But I accept your point, 'local climate' would have been more accurate.
"Oolons
Did Lewis read the same paper?
Thanks to the link below I got to read the actual paper - the standard of reporting on this issue is atrocious. The paper looked at tree data from a small area of Scandinavia. Also pointing out that they have experienced a lot less warming in recent years than other northern areas.... Hmm do you think that may be true 1000's of years ago - it could have been warmer or cooler than the global average we don't know. So for CLIMATE in Lewis's article read WEATHER, i.e. Local effects for which it is extremely inaccurate to extrapolate to the world. Glad my knee jerk feeling that this was a daft extrapolation has been verified by the paper."
and
Anonymous Coward
Paper says:
"These findings, together with the missing orbital signature in published dendrochronological records, *suggest* that large-scale near-surface air-temperature reconstructions9, 10, 11, 12, 13 relying on tree-ring data *may* underestimate pre-instrumental temperatures including warmth during Medieval and Roman times."
Lewis says:
"CLIMATE WAS HOTTER IN ROMAN, MEDIEVAL TIMES THAN NOW: STUDY"
flame on...
Well, they ought to have updated it to be a picture of a flying chair instead.
That'd be good. Even better, maybe, would be a flying chair coming off of a sinking Titanic (rearrange the chairs? I'll rearrange the funking chairs!).
I've been away from /. for awhile, so seeing the MS corporate logo in place of the familiar Gates-Borg icon came as a bit of a shock.
When did our dear leaders get rid it? What possible reason, aside from a desire to be more bland, could they have?
The thing is, the utopianism is what makes trek Trek. DS9 was Babylon 5 with the pessimism of Battlestar Galactica in Starfleet uniforms.
TV is escapism; why 'puke' when the escapism is hopeful?
That map (or rather, that webpage) is very well put-together. Clearly WV has people of sufficient caliber to see what's needed and to plan on how to achieve it. Let's hope those people are given the resources they need to build their network.
Are you sure about that?
My astronomy is rusty, but I seem to recall that the inner planets are rocky because their proximity to the sun meant they were unable to build up the kind of atmosphere the gas giants did: their atmospheres boiled off before they could grow to the mammoth proportions of the gas giants.
Given the distance from the sun to Cerers, would Ceres ever have been able to form into a gas giant?
Anyway, who's to say Jupiter (or at least its moons) are lifeless? :|]
Curling is strangely entertaining. For years, I mocked it.. it was 'that sport you can do with a beer belly... while drinking a beer'.
But one afternoon, I got home early from work and it was the only thing on TV. So I watched it, and loved it. The open-face strategy; the way the game can appear to swing from one team to the next after every shot, and the copious amount of both luck and skill required to win, all make it thrilling to watch.
As for hockey, I'd miss it, but I would rather see the Don Cherry style ditched in favour of the european style. There is still an entertaining game beneath the fights and the checks. I know an old fellow who's over 80 years old but still plays, in a senior's league, where the violence is completely verboten. Yet somehow the game is still fun. If that's possible, then it surely possible for 20 year olds to play without destroying themselves.
Search for "furd focus" and tell me what you get.
Hint: it's not about furd.
As a person who flies hypersonic aircraft for a living... JJ
I don't see your name here. Who are you? What do you fly? Please tell me it's not a flightsim!
The fact that they corrected the problems found in the first test, and have a clear idea about why the second test failed, speaks very well to this program. I look forward to reading more about it.
No, you should count everybody (ill and not ill).
Perhaps 100% of the unvaccinated 8% got ill, but only 10% of the vaccinated 81% got the whooping cough.
Read his post again. That was the point he was making: if more than 8% of the student population was _not_ vaccinated, then the non-vacciated people had a lower rate of infection than the vaccinated people. Of course, if less than 8% of the student population was not vaccinated, then the non-vaccinated people had a higher rate of infection than vaccinated people.
And there is another thing: when you get ill, you build antibodies, so you won't become ill for at least 10 years.
With vaccine, you need to vaccinate after a few years.
Are you pulling that 10-year figure out of your hat or your ass? Or the same place as your 'you need to vaccinate every few years' figure?
I don't think that whooping cough is deadly, so not vaccinating against it is not unwise.
But if the illness has a letal risk (like measles), it's just stupid to avoid vaccines.
Between autism and death, I choose autism.
Vaccines don't cause autism. Keep up with the The Lancet's retractions list.
This device sounds basically like a miniaturized ion drive. Is that correct? If so, how does its efficiency compare with ion drives in use on exploration spacecraft?
Either way, I'm sure Scotty would be impressed with your work :)