* Posts by John Smith 19

16327 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Jun 2009

Graphene plus molybdenum oxides yields faster electronics

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Meh

Re: What do you do with it afterward?

"That would be inert in the same way that asbestos is inert?"

No. That would be inert as in coal.

I think you'll find once Graphene passes it's ignition temperature in air you'll be left with a cloud of carbon dioxide.

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Happy

Re: That's Osbourne's 50mill wasted then

"we've been trumped by fosters drinking, kangeroo bothering, sheila ignoring excuses for scientists who peed on the wonder material and made it even more amszing"

Full marks for a quality rant but I think you'll find the Aus scientist are a bit sharper than your caricature.

BTW "Exfoliation" is a technique used to expand the mineral vermiculite, used as a bedding compound and (potentially) for the precursor to inorganic plastics.

Australia has a lot of vermiculite.

UK.gov: You didn't trust us with your ID, so we gave it to private biz

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

You know when someone's using a downvote bot

When even AMFM1 gets it.

You also know you're dealing with the US Gov when they list a 194 page document as a "pamphlet"

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Meh

Re: If at first you don't succeed...

"She bears more than watching, but I suppose she has a safe seat so is unlikely to be voted out. "

The Speaker of the house has a majority of 26000. He fell to a Scottish Nationalist who now has a majority of somewhere north of 2000. That's a shift of 28000+.

The bigger they are the harder they fall. But note she's just another victim of the usual Home Office brainwashing briefings by their in house spy-on-everyone unit (whatever it's called this time).

This will continue until the group involved are seriously dis-incentivised. I'll leave readers to imagine what would be an appropriate means of doing so.

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Big Brother

Your childrens data safe in *their* hands

I think not.

And still no explanation of how Farr'sMay's CCDP plan will save£5Bn over its first 10 years of operation.

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Thumb Up

Re: If at first you don't succeed...

"The security community will try again and again for increased powers of surveillance and interference; "

Well the civil servants in charge of those groups will at any rate.

It appears (as Winston Churchill put it) that the price of freedom is eternal vigilance against the security services.

Thumbs up for the observation, not for the good news.

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

Re: ... eradicate terrorism and pedophilia.

" The country is screwed because of Labour and Tory policies over the past 20 years (i.e. PFI), we know this; just be honest, swallow your party pride and fix the problem."

Look at the civil servants.

8 Home secretaries (or thereabouts)

3 different governments

1 Policy.

You need to identify "The enemy within"

Delay climate mitigation, escalate the costs: study

John Smith 19 Gold badge

Re: Oh Dear God the fools

"The correct question is, what is the right amount of climate change? Where "right" is that the costs of mitigating it equal the costs of suffering that amount of climate change."

I though that UK govt report settled on £86 per tonne of CO2 as a valid carbon tax?

"Which is simply wrong. They're not understanding the basic economics they're trying to use. If you change the costs of mitigation then you change the amount of climate change that we should mitigate."

I think the problem with that is that from their PoV that gives them too many variables to keep track of in (what I suspect) is already a fairly complex set of feedback loops.

Just an impression.

John Smith 19 Gold badge

Re: Too funny!

"Spot on. It's beginning to look as if the GCMs have been over estimating the cooling effects of particulates and aerosols by quite some margin."

I'm aware climate is complex but don't you mean underestimating the cooling effects particulates & aerosols?

Just puzzled.how it would work otherwise.

30 years ago, at flip of a switch, the internet as we know it WAS BORN

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Happy

I doubt we'll know the *real* start of the Internet

When the first piece of pron was sent.

Rocket 'Grasshopper' leaps higher than tall building in single bound

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Happy

Re: Fifteen years earlier

"RS-232 has nearly sent me into orbit a couple of times..."

So true. So true.....

Joking aside the 422 version is quite popular for some launch vehicles. The differential signal format makes it much more resilient to electrical noise (lots of high current pulses flying around).

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Meh

Re: Pilot required?

"To me the spaceplane idea such as SpaceShipTwo, where the whole launch vehicle returns under pilot control, seems a more practical and politically-acceptable idea."

Despite its name SS2 is sub orbital.

It's maximum speed is about M3.

And no the airframe is unlikely to manage roughly 7x increase in speed (and the roughly 49x increase in kinetic energy) needed to reach orbit.

John Smith 19 Gold badge

@Robert Sneddon

I note you seem to hold some views which seem to contradict each other.

You admire the Shuttle, which managed to kill 14 crew after being declared "operational," while being unimpressed by the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo capsules, which across 3 programmes killed 3 crew in test and none in operation.

You appear to be unaware large solids have intrinsic safety issues (critical diameter) and are not quite as simple to design as they appear, but disregard this as a problem. You don't appear to have a problem with the original SRB contract award either, which given their performance did not seem to justify their premium pricing (about $50m above the original awardee) .

You point out Grasshoppers ability was demonstrated by DC-X 15 years ago but view that programme's ultimate goal as absurd. You don't really have a reason for this you just think it was. Do you view Grasshoppers goal as absurd as well?

Summing up you're a fan of winged vehicles and large solid boosters, even if they are quite expensive and have killed more crew than other designs. That might sound an unfair characterisation, and I'm always happy to listen to other people's PoV, and I've sometimes changed mine as a result. Rather than down vote me why don't you just explain your views?

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Happy

Re: I've often wondered why this wasn't tried before. It seems such an obvious thing to do.

Usual payload mass fractions for ELV's are around 3-3.5% of GTOW. if (as Musk estimates) F9 will achieve 4% of GTOW as PMF and he looses 50% (giving a 2% PMF) of that for the recovery fuel and hardware that roughly a rocket x2 as big to lift the original payload.

How do you calculate the rockets size?

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

Re: To land vertically?

"NASA is not that interested in saving money and many of their missions are 'one offs' where the cost of an expendable launch vehicle is insignificant next to the development costs of the payload."

Actually it's worse than that.

The rule of thumb for spaceflight is

Launch cost L

Payload cost 2L

Operations cost over life of satellite/probe/lander 3L

In theory the cost of launch should have no connection to payload cost or operations but in reality it's the yardstick for estimating them.

What happens when launch cost L becomes << than the other 2 costs is unknown, as is the effect of making recovery from orbit (downmass) substantially cheaper.

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Thumb Up

Keep in mind this has *never* been done before.

VTOL experiments have been done since the 1950's (Search for "tailsitters")

Rocket thrust since the 1960's (NASA's Apollo lander simulator the "flying bedstead").

But never with a tank structure with this aspect ratio and this size. It's huge.

This combination makes for a relatively "floppy" vehicle and a very tricky control problem. Take a broom handle and try balancing on your fingertip. It's not quite as simple as it seems.

Now imaging the boomstick is 2 hollow chambers with fluid sloshing about in the bottom 1/10th of both. Tricky, is it not?

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Boffin

Re: But you have to land on a landing pad...

And yet the later members of the Gemini series managed to land within 1 nautical mile of their target, despite loosing any effective directional control below about 65000 ft.

Keep in mind this is a stage, not a capsule. Historically no capsule has had any aerodynamic controls at all. It's all been done to shifting the centre of mass.

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Happy

Re: Navigation Budget

"SRBs are incredibly well-behaved compared to LOX plus anything with carbon and/or hydrogen in it and a lot easier to handle and store, one reason most military missiles use solid fuels these days."

Solids make excellent weapon systems. Except the filling of the Shuttle SRB's, which slumps over time.

There virtues (storage vessel is combustion chamber, mechanical simplicity, once started never go out) are either irrelevant to commercial use or active liabilities. LOX is dangerous due to it's concentration and temperature. In time it warms up and diffuses into the air. In contrast both solids and hypergolics are intrinsically dangerous. Solids don't evaporate and a cloud of UDMH is an effective chemical weapon.

When solids are built, moved or stacked they are classed as an explosive and the expenses are those of an explosive, not a set of propellants which can be moved separately.

"The material they're made of (an auminium powder and perchlorate mix plus a binder in the case of the SRBs) doesn't explode"

Under normal circumstances, but solids have exploded and the combustion of 1.1 million lbs of explosive is pretty serious. The normal physics of operation are deflagration but it can move into the detonation regime (and has) and the transition process is not that well understood. It used to be thought hybrids were immune to this, but even they are not.

"If the flame had been directed towards the outside of the stack away from the ET then the Challenger would probably have survived and made it to orbit."

Highly doubtful. At that point you have a case weak spot and increased burning area of the grain. You now have a thrust vector acting on the stack it was never designed for. If this SRB fails you've now got massive force imbalance on the stack. If it does not you have a (growing) side force until the SRB burns out (prematurely) leaving the other (because you cannot shut them down) SRB to rip the stack apart.

As for the contention that only Thiokol could build large solids and my recollection there were at least 3 companies that could perhaps you should look at this little item on Shuttle design choices and mfg selection.

http://www.tsgc.utexas.edu/archive/general/ethics/boosters.html

"I don't know what fuel the Dragon capsule's LES is going to use. I presume it will be storable hypergolics such as UDMH and N2O4, not something I'd be comfortable sharing such a compact capsule with in quantity."

Agreed but they are the common state of practice. Again what does that have to do with Grasshopper, which is mostly LOX/RP1?

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Thumb Up

Re: Nice test

"I wonder how well this would work on Selene or Mars?"

Good question.

Obvious answer. Badly.

Mars atmospheric pressure is about 1/1000 of Earth sea level at Mars sea level.

The Moon is worse.

Air drag is an integral part of the process. While the lower gravity of Mars or the Moon helps I don't think the balance of forces works out too well in either case. I think you'll need more terminal thrust (but OTOH the propellant to do so weighs less). Lots of testing needing.

Thumbs up for the question.

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Happy

"Obsolete junk. What really needs to be done is throw lots of money at the Skylon people. Real, surface to space jet/rocket hybrid engines which look EXACTLY like the engines from just about every one of the more awesome sci-fi spaceships? (The atmospheric capable ones at least!) I'll buy that for a dollar!"

Sold! To the man with £12Bn in his bank account.

What's that. You don't have £12Bn in your account?

Skylon's capabilities are indeed very impressive. They are also still highly speculative (but becoming less so each year). And that is there estimated total budget.

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Happy

Re: Whoa! Very sweet trick

"Kind of strange watching that footage, when I consider that the last time I saw a rocket rise off the pad and hover like that was the attempted launch of Vanguard I"

Well there was also that Lunar Lander Simulator that Buzz Aldrin was flying (the flying bedstead IIRC was one of it's nicknames).

Jet engine to cancel 5/6 of the mass so the lander rocket engine though it was in 1/6 g.

Good thing they went ahead and fitted the ejector seat anyway though.

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Boffin

Re: Navigation Budget

"I don't think the first stage has anything like the energy at separation to make it across the Atlantic on its own."

You're probably right. If it coasts to maximum altitude it's forward speed is zero. At this point it could fall vertically or be given a reverse thrust which starts it on a parabolic fall back to the area of the launch site.

"The Spanish landing strips for the Shuttle abort plans required the Shuttle to continue in powered flight for several minutes with or without the SRBs. "

With the SRB's providing c90% of the thrust (and being impossible to shut down without the loads tearing the stack to pieces) I'd suggest that would be with the SRB's attached. I think you'll find the technical term for the crew of a Shuttle that has one or both it's SRB's detach while still firing was "dead."

"The first stage of a three-stage stack like the venerable Saturn V separated about 50km up at about 3km/s velocity,"

The Saturn V stack used 2 stages to achieve orbit. The third was the Earth departure stage for the Moon. Given most flights were to the Moon (or around it) that's the configuration that tended to fly. The usual rule of thumb is the delta-V for orbit with 2 liquid stages is about 50/50 between the 2 stages. Black Arrow was unusual. It's first stage supplied about 1500m/s. A big chunk was supplied by the 3rd stage Waxwing solid. This fact is under appreciated by people who have seen it in a museum. Orbital velocity is about 7950m/s but losses typically bump it up to about 9100-9200m/s. Shaving those losses pays very big dividends.

This stuff might look to you like the "same old same old" but it's not. Building a new gas generator LOX/RP1 rocket engine (albeit one with a pretty good T/W) is rocket engineering. Likewise building a good lightweight tank structure is also engineering. There is lots of prior art on these areas.

Actually learning how to land a stage of a TSTO vehicle is rocket science. Yes that aspect ratio makes a hell of a difference which DC-X (along with other SSTO concepts, especially those of Philip Bono) designed out. But you cannot build a TSTO that shape. Musk is trying to square the circle, which is why this is "super damm tough." As old maps put it "Here be monsters," and yes he may fail. But his team have gone further than any previous AFAIK with dealing with real world size (and shaped) hardware.

You might find the work of John Carnack and his team at Armadillo aerospace instructive. From PC game programing to hardware hacking on large scale. Reading through their back posts is highly instructive, especially how supposedly trivial issues can bite you. How what seem to be fairly easy performance specs require top class components and near semiconductor levels of cleanliness.

Keep in minds most of there stuff has been relatively well behaved liquid fuels. Not giant explosive SRB's or vicious hypergolics.

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Boffin

Re: Great job of controlling that rocket....

"So to make this work you'd have to boost your payload up to several thousand miles an hour, separate and then turn the boosters around and fly back to Vandenberg or Cape Kennedy."

No. Following separation the stage continues to coast to high altitude. At that point the wind resistance is practically zero (close to space vacuum) and the force needed to spin it round is pretty low. Those 9 engine bells make pretty good air brakes. Those two details make a bigdifference to feasibility. How big is the key question.

"At that point, I would think it would become impractical. "

Well that's part of the point of these tests. You might like to revise you views given that how you think this is going to fly is incorrect.

John Smith 19 Gold badge

Re: Great job of controlling that rocket....

"This is a lot more expensive in fuel than simply arresting a vertical drop to a zero-zero landing after parachutes have taken most of the energy out of the fall from twenty miles up."

The Shuttle SRB's separated at c43miles. The question is how much fuel is needed for this manoeuvre, which I guess is one of the questions these tests are designed to answer.

"he interesting point is that the first stage will in effect be a guided missile with the possibility of it going astray and ending up in, say, downtown Miami or some other populated area instead of returning to the desired landing spot. How they are going to cover the insurance costs on that I don't know."

Well I'll take a wild guess as see if they are going to approach it like the blind landing certification of 1 failure per billion hours of operation. I'll also note that "guided missile" is in fact more like a rapidly rapidly decelerating set of propellant tanks, which will probably emergency vent at high altitude before anything serious happens, rather than the classic exploding shower of bits beloved of military self destruct systems. Bad news for anyone directly under them who does not look upward in time.

Just like any aircraft crash in fact (although with less debris).

"The Thiokol deal was basically that there was only really one company in the US that has experience with big solid-fuel motors and that happens to be in Utah. "

No. In the late 1960s IIRC there were at least three mfg of big solids in the US. The original competition gave them the lowest score. I think Lockheed won but proposed constructing a propellant loading site at the Cape. The administrator of the time (Webb) required a re-marking and the rest is history. In reference to the SLS I asked if you could bulk mfg them and store them as complete SRBs upright in (basically) pits blasted in the Utah desert (something there is no shortage of). Another poster explained the SRB mix would slump as it's nothing like the ICBM mix.

As for using solids it was all about meeting the budget.

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Boffin

Re: Fifteen years earlier

"Being pedantic to be polite... The Shuttle's ET could have been carried to orbit; it was nearly empty at Main Engine Cut Off (MECO) and there were BOTE plans at one time to collect them in orbit to build a space station and/or orbital tank farm for fuel and consumables for Moon and Mars missions etc."

I was aware of that. I think the design went a bit beyond the BOTE stage but parts of NASA seemed to feel it was "Skylab" all over again and wanted the new shiny made-to-order space station (they would not even allow flight experiments to be attached to one of the access doors). 2 (or was it 3?) design iterations later they got it.

And not to be pedantic but the first S in SSTO stands for "Single." Actually the STS payload could have been substantially higher if NASA had recognized that lower tank pressures directly lead to lower tank mass (and within 150m/s of orbital velocity tank mass translates more or less directly into additional payload). SSME tests indicated it could comfortably support lower tank pressures.

"The Shuttle was unique in that its main engines burned from takeoff to orbit, a critical part of an SSTO design I think you would agree."

IMO the SSME was one of the "crown jewels" of STS development. Had all upgrades been implemented it would have been even better(at least 300lbs lighter, more if you can dump the 6 stage LP LOX drive turbine, less inspection etc). The issue was (given its size) how to make effective use of its capabilities.

"The Soyuz capsules already use rocket braking to soften their landing but it's not a zero-zero landing system, it just takes some of the energy out of the ground impact after the parachutes have bled off most of the vertical speed."

Irrelevant in this context. This is a stage, not a capsule. The aspect ratio of diameter to height is part of what makes it tough.

"As for the Dragon capsule being "cramped", I'd compare it to the Shuttle's accommodations which were spacious in comparison for the same planned crew capacity, seven. It's also missing a toilet, one of those luxuries that you get to appreciate after your tenth day in orbit from what I've been told. No shower either."

The Shuttle was designed to be the sole on orbit accommodation for the 7 person crew for up to 14 days. Crewed Dragon, CST-100 and Dream Chaser are designed to be buses to the ISS, not camper vans.

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Boffin

Re: Fifteen years earlier

"The shuttle wasn't designed to need that much refurbishment between flights, it just happened somewhere betweeen design and reality. I wish Elon all the luck in the world."

No it happened when Nixon's OMB required it be built to a fixed constant yearly amount despite high inflation in the US during the development and the fact that no major aerospace project had that funding profile.

The architecture was the only one that could come close to meeting that budget profile. That design, and that apparent lack of someone in overall charge of the project, who understood the issues between sub systems and could trade their performance accordingly, are the reasons STS was what it was.

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Boffin

Re: Great job of controlling that rocket....

" and then the detached boosters turn around and fly back home and land vertically."

The trick (or part of it) is to avoid having to "fly" them back. It's more like a sort of controlled "fall" back from orbit.

"I'd think the amount of extra fuel, structural weight and complex control and telemetry systems to make this work would more than outweigh the cost of using a good old-fashioned "let's fire it and drop it in the drink" reusable booster like the space shuttle had."

That's what Spacex is trying to find out. But those SRB's took serious refurbishment (At one time the new cost was equal to the refurb cost, which sounds highly suspicious to me). And of course transporting roughly 1million lbs of explosive from Utah to Florida per booster. Do you think having a solid rocket booster mfg plant in a landlocked state and making them so big they cannot fit in one piece onto a train was a bit of a design oversight?

John Smith 19 Gold badge

Re: Fifteen years earlier

"As for the SSTO fully-recoverable Delta Clipper concept, yes I would regard it as absurd. The energy budget is against it -- there isn't a disposable rocket today that can do SSTO even with LOX/LH2,"

You appear to think that people don't do VTOL SSTO because of this "energy budget"

It's not. The problem is the loss of payload. Historically both the Titan II 1st stage is believed to have been SSTO capable, as (probably) was the Russian engined Atlas III. A payload of 3-3.5% of the whole payload of a TSTO is historically common state of practice. Musk is aiming at 4% so his reuseable TSTO will still have 2% of its GTOW as payload after the recovery hardware and fuel is added to each stage.

"The Shuttle was closest to the SSTO concept"

Only in the sense that if you only counted the payload bay capability it gave an SSTO payload fraction (1% of the whole stack) in a structure of 4 parts, 3 of which dropped off before orbit. Not most people's definition of "single" stage.

"Skylon (or whatever it's called this week) is airbreathing for a good chunk of its initial ascent so isn't a true SSTO rocket and besides it's still mostly a paper exercise."

Skylon (as it's been called for the last 30 years) is not designed to be a pure rocket. Which is why it gives the TSTO payload fraction with SSTO operations. As of now a complete sub-scale SABRE engine is in design, the next phase being construction and ground test. I'd suggest that fact you can have the full TSTO payload fraction "cake" and enjoy SSTO is why it's getting funding.

"The real problem is the extra mass of the landing gear etc. and the other equipment needed to achieve the soft landing as this has to be launched along with the rest of the rocket costing extra fuel to reach the same velocities."

Sounds like Spacex should build a simulation to study exactly how much mass this adds and study the control problems of landing a high aspect ratio tank structure (you might have noticed that VTOL SSTO concepts tend to be rather squat. There are good reasons for this. They don't work so well when you're starting with a TSTO stage).

"SpaceX have also been working on a rocket-landing variant of their Dragon capsule"

That variant will retain landing parachutes. As for "cramped," relative to what? It's a completely different problem, which will need to be addressed in a different way.

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Boffin

Re: Fifteen years earlier

"The Grasshopper is not capable of getting to orbit either. "

True. It's a control systems and concept of operations demonstrator.

"The DC-X flew higher, for longer and further crossrange than the Grasshopper has."

So far.

" I suspect the goal of a orbit-capable rocket's first stage landing as the DC-X and Grasshopper do is physically impossible due to mass fraction constraints,"

Then by extension you would have considered the ultimate goal of the DC-X programme (sometimes called the DC-1), a single stage to orbit vehicle with no major maintenance between flights, to have been absurd

"The RS-68 Block 1 motors used at the start of the Shuttle program were supposed to be rated for ten flights before rebuilds were necessary; in the real world they were rebuilt after every flight. "

The RS-68 did not exist during most of the Shuttle programme.

It's the expendable engine on the Delta IV and as such has 1 use, although like all liquid rocket engines it's capable of multiple test firings.

The manufacturer ID # for the Space Shuttle Main Engine (which I think is what you're talking about) is RS-25.

You might like to review the rocket equation, the thrust to weight ratio of the Merlin 1d and approximate current payload fraction of the F9. It's all down to how much of the orbital velocity each stage has to supply.

Eric Schmidt heading on mystery mission to North Korea

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Happy

Is it too soon to be thinking of regime change.

N. Korea or Google.

Either looks good to me.

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Meh

"A creepy pervassive surveillance culture requiring absolute loyalty to the leader."

Which one is saying it about the other?

After Sandy Hook, Senator calls for violent video game probe

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Happy

@Chriss 228

"http://usnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2012/12/27/16200800-man-pushed-to-death-on-new-york-subway-tracks?lite"

What an interesting compare and contrast.

Nut with guns 26 victims.

Nut on their own (She does sound like she has some mental health issues and I think any regular commuter would have stayed well away from her). 1 victim.

Nut with gun on subway platform. Hmm. Crowed target rich environment + head shots. Could have been quite a body count.

Except it wasn't.

Or were you lamenting the fact that no one took out their guns and took her out?

That would seem more in line with your somewhat extreme views on justice. $150k for file sharing not enough in your opinion IIRC.

John Smith 19 Gold badge

Re: Understanding the problem

"As with terroristism, until someone can identify every terrorist or whack-job bent on killing innocent people, these tragedies will continue"

As a former US police officer said "Police work is only easy in a police state"

"You can pass all the laws that you desire and it won't keep people from killing other people."

Perhaps not, but it will cut down the amount of damage the average whack job can do.

America really is a special case here. Its stats are completely out of scale to it's size. Perhaps it should be compared to Russia, China or India for death rates (and death rates by hand guns).

Making MACH 1: Can we build a cranial computer today?

John Smith 19 Gold badge

Re: Can't be.

"(In the spirit of homage, the first book I put on an e-reader was Stephenson's Diamond Age..."

Followed by "Snow Crash"?

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Coat

Re: Coat in advance

"Unless it was created by Apple, in which case it would be welded to your skull..."

There is also the "self destruct" function to guard against agent capture and interrogation*.

*Some call it a feature, some call it a flaw.

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

Re: Memory is the second thing to go

"It's a fascinating idea. Using hardware to store memories that can't be held by human memory due to conditions like Alzheimer's...the next step would be using processors to replaced damaged neural tissue but we're hundreds of years away from trying something that complicated."

1 word.

Interface.

Human brains neither store nor transmit information the way computers, microphones, cameras or speakers do. Despite decades of work on implantable electronics (including the ethical issues. See Creighton's "Terminal Man" for some of the problems) it appears they only started trying to read the output of the optic nerve last year.

The idea has great potential for both good and bad outcomes. But it's a long way from here (although perhaps not as far away as people might think).

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Thumb Up

"Heinlen had mobile phones in space patrol :) "

The neat bit is he does not make a point of it being a mobile.

It's no big thing, so nothing to notice unless you're looking for it (its the future), unless you understand (as he did) just how big a thing it would be to make it work. This is an era when computers are running on valves and only on enormously important (or secret) projects, not running a telephone system.

Boffins use laser to move maglev disk

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Happy

Re: crookes radiometer

The Crookes radiometer looks very impressive. A windmill powered directly by sunlight!

In reality the force generated by photon pressure is tiny. I've seen a figure of 4.5 micro N/m^2.

What's really happening is differential absorption by the black sides of the vanes and local heating of the air near the surface of the vanes exerting a force to push on the vanes. This force is much bigger. A "real" Crookes radiometer could operate in a vacuum. The air pressure inside the globe is an integral part of the device.

I've sometimes wondered if such vanes, enclosed in a transparent slightly pressurised housing would make a good power generator on the Moon.

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Thumb Up

The real question is why no one has "ever" thought of this before.

It's so simple

It's a graphite disk sitting on top of a stack of magnets and having laser shined on it.

No tricky materials, no exotic laser frequencies just a simple study of what happens if you try to do this.

Will the losses exceed the torque? Who knows. This is a demonstration not an engineered concept. But it is clever.

ANOTHER Huawei partner accused of slipping US tech to Iran

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

Re: NOoo? Really!?

""The US wants to restrict the flow of computing hardware into Iran to appease Israeli lobbyists""

No.

That's what co-developing stuxnet was for.

Hm, nice idea that. But somebody's already doing it less well

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Happy

Re: Wallowing in it here

"Stats can't measure quality of life."

Actually health economists (yes there are such things) can and do.

The term is something like "Qualies" IIRC the question is roughly will they get at least 5 years more reasonable life with this new treatment (as opposed to 5 years more being doublly incontinent in a bed).

But you're right. Not just the diagnosis and treatment but the underlying understanding of what's going on and why and what to avoid.

Humans appear to have a high pass filter. The process has been very gradual. It's only when someone observes 1/4 of everyone alive now in developed countries will live to 100 that something pretty amazing has happened (and can happen everywhere else).

The question is how to improve on that in 2013.

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Happy

"Several other innovations while I was there also failed, and in the end, they got completely out of designing, and even making, their own products."

Should we link your working for them as cause or effect?

Probably not something you want to include on the resume.

Crushing $1.17bn Marvell patent judgment could set record

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Happy

Re: 1 moment. Marvell is *fabless* semiconductor company.

It was -- Marvell argued that Seagate's patents trumped CMU's.

It did -- Pittsburgh rejected the attempt to move to North California (Marvell's home).

Thanks for the information. Interesting. So does that not suggest they are infringing Seagate's patent instead or in addition to the CMU one?

"Need to know more before ...

Commenting?"

Don't be silly. I'm pretty sure people comment here who've just read the headlines.

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Stop

Re: Crap article

"As an algorithm specialist and someone who for years has been designing RAID algorithms and have designed software based wear leveling algorithms for portable devices, when I come across an article about a patent verdict like this, I like to know what it is that is being talked about."

Agreed. Is this really a case of big bad corporate raider sticking it to the academics or is the university trading on it's reputation to pull a shake down? Impossible to say from this article.

" The money is a big number and will be appealed for 10 years and Marvell will file bankruptcy and sell its assets to a new company run by the same people before paying. "

Been there. Done that. Depends on wheather the management decide to use it as a chance to shaft the staff while they are at it.

"What people (and probably) the courts don't understand is that flash controller algorithms are typically quite trivial. 99.9% of the algorithms can be found in Donald Knuth's TAOCP and are just a mixture of what is already known."

So how can they even be patented?

"I would love to review the patent in question and disect it to see if there was anything Marvell implemented which could be considered more than just gluing together a pile of 40 year old algorithms."

Me too.

I'm starting to lean toward the Marvell position on this.

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

1 moment. Marvell is *fabless* semiconductor company.

Like ARM in the UK it's whole business is built on Intellectual Property.

So it should be aware of "prior art" in this area.

So the question is how close to the CMU patent is the Marvell stuff?

They would not be the first large company to say "Stuff it, you'll run out of money/interest/time before this gets to court, we're having your lunch (and breakfast and dinner)" Kodak Vs Polaroid comes to mind. I'm sure some people could quote Microsoft infringements ad nauseum (for or against them. You decide).

Given the locality of the court and the university I'm surprised Marvell did not try for a change of venue.

Need to know more before it's clear if this is fair or not.

John Smith 19 Gold badge

Re: Actual Value

"It's hard to believe that a single component of a product could be worth 92% of the company that produces that product... and many other products as well. Or even that a single component would be worth ~%30 of the company's value"

Firstly that would be the current market value (IE at their current stock price) while they've been selling the product for years.

El Reg man: Too bad, China - I was RIGHT about hoarding rare earths

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Happy

Re: Times are a changin'!

"once inflation hit a scary four precent per annum. "

Hahahahahahahahahahahahahah.

The other great gag of the early 70s was the insanely huge OPEC price hike to (gasp) fifteen whole dollars.

BTW most people don't realise oil companies essentially operate on a cost plus basis. They don't really care how high the price goes, because their profit is on top.

In fact when prices fall they have to re-jig their spending plans, cancel Xmas parties, cut back on expensive escort services etc.

Osborne stumps up £20m of your cash for wiggly wonder stuff graphene

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

Re: Whoah, cool the commentardery.

"We do alright here in the UK for investing in unproven ideas. "

Which is I guess an improvement over being rubbish at doing that as well.

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Thumb Down

Oh dear the UK governemnt has backed another "winner"

TBF at this stage no UK company would bankroll this as it's so far from a product that their banksters advisers would not allow them to.

The UK government's skills in picking winners and turning them into cash generating new industries is legendary.

Legendarily bad that is. BL sold to BAe with £63m "sweetner" INMOS flogged to the French ASAP. BAe itself a series of Frankenstein like mergers to create a "national champion," which turns out to be more a national champion of American aerospace.

Note the quick sale to "recoup" investment which turns out to be ridiculously under valued and note how often the new owner either a)Flogs it on ASAP or b)shuts down most of the UK operation and loads up its own divisions with the cream.

As for the "new" money it does look like that's about £500k. Sounds like an old New Labor trick policy is being given a fresh airing.

BTW Graphene is nearly pure Carbon. Its "stability" will quickly degrade on exposure to warm air as it reverts to "designer coal" as jet engine blade developers called it in the 1980's.