I have a hard time believing that St. Helen's toal energy is only about 1/5,0000 of our total annual energy consumption.
I think that was just the energy of the explosion (kinetic energy of the stuff that was blown into the air). It doesn't count the thermal energy of all that molten rock. For melting 1 cubic km of rock, count on about 3e18 J.
Vacuum is an excellent heat isolator. It's used in between double glassed windows for example.
No, it isn't, at least not for regular cost-sensitive applications; they use argon or air. Vacuum insulated glass exists, but it has a lot of visible spacers between the glass panes to deal with the 10 tonnes per square meter (2000 lbs/sq ft) of atmospheric pressure.
But why couldn't you just expose the processor to the vacuum of space?
Radiative heat transfer at temperatures around room temperature (300 K) is about 6 W/(m^2K). For a CPU that is 10 cm2 that is allowed to be 50 K above environmental temperature, you would be able to radiate away around 0.3 watts, which is unpractical. If you could expose the CPU to the outside of the satellite, shaded from direct sunlight, it would see the 4 K background temperature in space and could radiate about 600 W/m^2, or about 0.6 W, which is still not much.
To make things even more complicated, a silicon chip does not only have a maximum temperature, but also a minimum temperature. You don't want the chip to cool down to 4 K when it's idle. I think a typical satellite is constructed as a thermos bottle (the silver or gold-colored foil wrapping that you see in science museums acts as an infrared reflector). I think they use heat pipes to transport excess heat to big radiators on the outside, although I'm not sure of that; maybe the heat needs to stay inside the satellite anyway to prevent it from cooling down too much.
I, as a manager, have absolutely no reason to doubt the safety of any data put in The Cloud.
Bravo! this has been reposted only 35 times over the past couple of years and keeps on getting moderated as funny. Some jokes don't get old, apparently.
Just having top and powertop on my N900 allows me to identify battery-draining apps in minutes, unlike my friend with Android
The Android Market has a Terminal Emulator app which will give you a command prompt that will let you run (a bare-bones version of) top, which is already part of the Android OS. Or you get PowerTutor from the Market for a more fancy graphical user interface. Or you go to Settings/About Phone/Battery/Battery Use.
...how much current the battery charger draws. Mistake. Even with no batteries charging it draws 10 watts.
A typical cheap battery charger with an iron-core transformer will draw a considerable current if not loaded, but with a very small power factor, i.e., the current is out of phase with voltage. You cannot determine the power draw by just measuring the current directly with a multimeter and multiplying by the line voltage. Even plug-in watt meters can have difficulty measuring the power factor at low loads like 10 W (at least, that's my experience).
If it really draws 10 W without useful output, then it would probably be too hot to touch; imagine that there was a 10 W light bulb inside the device, without ventilation holes.
Most of the remaining work to be done is article maintenance, and filling in mundane details of niche articles or emerging fields.
I disagree. It is true for most things that I know about enough to be confident in writing about without further research (i.e., physics-related stuff), but when I look up scientific-ish topics outside the more geeky fields (math, physics, computer science), I encounter articles all the time that could be improved vastly.
Think about plant species. I look out of the window and see hedera helix, which has an article covering the basic information but feels way too short for such a common garden plant and invasive species. I look at a common house plant in front of me and get an article that is just two paragraphs. Other example: An over-the counter drug, bromhexine, with only a very brief article.
I once made a link from a mention of a leading kit car manufacturer to their web site.
As usual with Slashdot discussions about Wikipedia, there are many stories of people who got reverted and rarely any links to the edit history.
In this case, I suspect that this was your first and only edit on Wikipedia and that possibly you are affiliated with this "leading kit manufacturer". My experience is that if I bother to check out external links added as first-time edits, they look like link spam 99% of the time; that's why they are often reverted immediately.
In case you are curious about what makes something look like link spam: the same editor added links to the same website to 10 other articles, or the text with the links reads like an advert ("..is a leading manufacturer of high quality $product"), or the landing page is a web shop, or the landing page is a content-scraping farm plastered with ads.
I have done many such reverts myself (no, not an admin), although I am not very active anymore, for exactly the reasons mentioned in TFS: got older, got married, too many other things to deal with in life.
Some of the pollutants that burning coal dumps into the air? Radioactive uranium.
Someone else already mentioned that this statement is about nuclear plants under normal operation, not ones that have a failure.
But moreover: it was about uranium and thorium, which have half-lives of billions of years, which means a very low level of radioactivity and therefore hardly a radiation hazard.
And the uranium and thorium are in the fly ash. In a decent modern coal plant, fly ash is removed from the exhaust gases. Yes, disposing of the ash is a problem, but I dare say, less problematic than disposal of nuclear waste. See Wikipedia, fly ash.
I also use it on my netbook these days, although not for posting.
in fact we use more energy each year than is delivered by sunlight!
is not correct. From World energy consumption at Wikipedia: total energy consumption (oil, coal, etc.) is 1.5e13 W, while solar irradiation is 1.7e17 W. That's about a factor 10,000.
And none of those algorithms has ever been broken. The same is true for the various Internet cryptographic protocols: SSL, S/MIME, IPSec, SSH, and so on.
The ssh 1.x protocol had several notable vulnerabilities which could only be fixed by changing the protocol. One of those was discovered in 1998, before the above statement was made.
if there were two artists, A and B, and A has 1 million recent fans and B has 10 thousand recent fans, and there's $1m to go around, a linear distribution would say that A gets $999,010, and B gets $9,990. Under the above formula, A gets 1000 shares and B gets 100 shares, meaning A gets $909,090 and B gets $90,909.. Artist A hardly suffers, but artist B can now live on their work.
But if there were a 100 'B-class' artists for every 'A' class artist, then artist 'A' gets $500 k and each 'B' gets $50 k. And if, in addition there is a class 'C' consisting of everyone who has rudimentary musical skills (10 million videotaped children performing for their parents) have 2 fans, they can claim 1.4 M shares; the royalties will be distributed as $71 for artist A, $7 for each artist B, and $0,10 for each artist C.
I don't think that is what you want.
The hardest part of climbing the ladder of success is getting through the crowd at the bottom.
