You think all this buzz is just hot air?

#ifihadglass - I would fly planes, go on hot air balloon rides, fence, become a model, play ping pong, go on rollercoasters. All thanks to Glass!

Proof that you have that experience and not just blowing hot air?

Dunno man, human hot-air may just destroy us all...

>> ^VoodooV:

It's less dirty coal, but it's still dirty, yet they get to call it CLEAN for some reason.
cold fusion, solar, hydrogen fuel cells or GTFO


Name 3 things that won't work in time for it to matter!

Go gen4 reactors, lots of them, and now! I recommend David MacKay's book "Sustainable Energy - without the hot air" as to why I believe this. Available for free at http://www.withouthotair.com/

Video reference here:

http://videosift.com/video/TEDxWarwick-Physics-Constrain-Sustainable-Energy-Options


But ya, coal needs to go, but you have to remember, 2 billion people live in abject poverty. They try to bridge the gap using as cheap a source of energy they can...like coal. Until you make energy cheaper than coal, your never going to displace the use of dino fuels around the world. The physics on fusion, solar, and hydrogen can't answer that call for quite awhile (we have been trying to make fusion work for decades, same with solar, and fuel cells are just terrible right now and only work for transportation fuels not baseload power generation). I do think we can answer a large number of these problems with new generations of nuclear power, with passive safety and no emissions, gen4 reactors have a lot of great points if people give them a chance!

http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2012/06/10/energys-deathprint-a-price-always-paid/

In relation to the direct content of the video, your NEVER going to get China and India on board with giving up cheap energy...they are BOTH x3 the population of the US, they have to care about cheap energy WAAAAY more than us, for population and standard of living issues. The only way to win this isn't through regulation, it is through technological innovation...and China has been buying up our AP1000 Gen3 for all the reasons I just mentioned.

To say that dino fuels are "Destroying us" is a little bit of a misnomer, you don't get food without hydrocarbons, you don't have refrigeration without hydrocarbons, you don't get heating and cooling without hydrocarbons. Energy isn't the enemy, any attempts to price out energy will only hurt the most reliant on its low price...if you doubled the price of gas via taxation, you aren't helping the little man. Cheap energy prices, even if they are oil based, aren't the devil, any attempts to make them so is a misunderstanding of the energy crisis. More oil drilling isn't even going to lower costs, at best, it will keep them the same, but peak oil in the US has already come, more drilling in more exotic places is just going to tow the line...and it isn't even going to do that.

Talking about clean coal is just so "we" can talk about how much we need cheap energy without talking about the health effects. Coal does kill, without a doubt, but so does electricity so costly you can't afford heating or cooling. You can't call for an elimination of coal without talking about what is going to replace it, and at what cost. This is even MORE relevant with the recent spout of weather, imagine if that area was packed full of solar and wind...it most likely be completely destroyed, and those are already very cost heavy forms of energy.

Anyway, I will end the rant. I really recommend the book above if you wish to delve down the rabbit hole of energy solutions. It isn't as easy as you think, it is why we are still using dino fuels. Any path you choose is challenging, and VERY capital and R&D intensive. Were are talking multiple trillion dollars to role out replacements on a national scale. Now, oil does a trillion a year, so this isn't outside the realm of possibility, but it is going to take a technical answer to solve, not a political one.

actually that loud click is part of the selling point.

if you watch the CES demonstration one of the new marketing terms is "listen for the click"

the optional touchpad was manufactured to have a very loud click, which according to research they said supposedly gave this satisfying feel when clicked and the loud click was to let you know it's connected and to "show off" to others when they hear your "click"

the click thing is a bit silly though imo.

here is more talk about the patented "click" sound
http://gizmodo.com/5952078/inside-surface-microsofts-insane-quest-for-gadget-perfection


The extent to which this click was obsessed over during the design process seems like marketing hot air, then insanity, and then after you keep hearing them talk about it, you realize it's just a company truly giving a damn about making something beautiful and nearly perfect.

Surface has an extra, custom-designed hinge devoted solely to create this particular click sound.

>> ^deathcow:

They must be talking about using space to get from Europe to Australia, as friction is a real bitch otherwise.

Possibly, although I think its somewhat more likely they'd just be flying at very high altitudes where the atmosphere is very thin.


From what I read on wiki it seems the engine is basically rocket/turbine hybrid. They use liquid hydrogen as fuel but instead of storing oxygen they suck it out of the air. The problem the cooling fixes seems to be related to supersonic airflow. Turbine engines need subsonic airflow to work properly so they use a ram, a cone on the front of the turbine, to slow the airflow before it enters the engine. This heats the air entering the engine up a lot, hot air takes up more space and so its difficult to get enough oxygen to the hydrogen fuel. Cooling the air after it passes over the ram lowers the air pressure and allows more air to pass through the engine. Scramjets approach this problem a different way in that they can operate with supersonic airflow, although they have the limitation of not working subsonic.

Anyway. Its quite fascinating. I don't think we'll be seeing commercial aircraft using this technology anytime soon though. I'd be pretty nervous about flying on something that is basically rocket powered. Space tourism maybe? If it can fly to high altitudes with the turbine and then switch seamlessly to using onboard oxygen it could be a much more efficient way of getting into space without using onboard oxygen the whole way up.

Oh, and RIP Concorde. I used to go to school under their flightpath out of Heathrow. 11am on Wednesdays they used to rattle the windows passing over.

Right, instead boring and hot air was replaced with sad, confusing, and just a little disturbing. He looked like he was going senile up there and it's definitely not how I want to remember Dirty Harry.

Clint's 'speech' was the only part of that entire weeks worth of convention that wasn't contrived, boring and full of hot air.

>> ^vaire2ube:

maybe he dries things to freshen them... the punisher doesn't make things clean for change... he makes them pay and heats them up

... and this was well done damn good action sequence


yes, first he had to punish his socks with hot air.

now Obama just needs to stop taking campaign moneys from the local oil multis and fossil fuel conglomerates (politicians on both sides do it GLADLY) and everything will be golden...

I'd probably nominate the keystone issue as a benchmark as to how much hot air is in that one

The DNS control mechanism of implementing SOPA and/or PIPA policies needs to get some more full explanation to Joe Public. Everything that the Content groups, the MPAAs and RIAAs etc. have done has been fatally flawed in that it can at best delay casual piracy, and usually even that is circumvented almost instantaneously. From what I can see, policing DNS would do no better than their other historical efforts in that regard.

This guy mentions that you can still type in an IP address and get to an infringing site. Maybe I am wrong or don't understand the full situation, but I would go a step further and say that this practice would simply result in US-based DNS servers being immediately replaced by DNS providers in other nations that fail to tow the SOPA/PIPA line. Joe User would get a quick walkthrough of changing his DNS provider through router or software settings, everybody would scramble for a brief period of time, and then the "sanctions" could be fairly safely ignored.

When the *AA's realize that the legislation they purchased with massive "campaign contributions" has no teeth, they would probably push (as in, push more dollars into the hands of lobbyists) for legal penalties to infringing sites beyond being de-listed from (US-based) DNS. If *that* were to actually happen also, it would simply chase ALL internet hosting outside of the US. The US could threaten trade sanctions or whatever against countries that turn a blind eye to infringing, but there would be so much of it going on that everyone could just balk at it and we'd be blowing a whole lot of hot air with jack behind it.

I think that the mainstream media needs a somebody with the balls to stand up and say that the cat is out of the bag on "protecting" Intellectual Property. For better or worse, it just isn't going to happen. The first group that accepts that and moves towards some new model is going to be way ahead of the curve in comparison to these dinosaurs that are trying to stitch a broken balloon together with needle and thread.

from the Vimeo account: ""I am very very sorry for scaring my friends there that day :-/ I was just unconscious about 10sec from impact, nothing more, thanx god.

All was my fault absolutely! I wanted to learn spiral landings, and i remembered that once someone told me to do it first over water, many times to practice exits from spiral 50m above lake, then to lover exits slowly in a lot of attempts, till i do it right. I would be happy if i did that :-/ No lake nearby, so i decided to practice a little different on our local hill. Here in video, that was the second attempt to make landing from a sharp turn(like in moment when exiting from spiral and bleeding out the energy). I wanted to do it without spiral, just from rotation that will be similar to spiral exiting. First time there was a little thermal activity so i flu more ahead from the hill and started turn a little higher, just enough to make a one and a half turn, and it was perfect landing. Then in second attempt, no hot air to lift me, so everything started closer to ground, little wind(just enough to drift me back few meters), and...no thinking about road traffic at all!!! I sow that i will hit that little slope near road pretty fast, so exited turn to "jump over" the road. And than come moment when i start thinking about traffic, but it is too late now I don't know, i was an idiot with adrenalin in blood who thought that knows everything. Icaro syndrome call it...""

Anti-hot air balloon weapon..?

No, he'd send weird materials up to the space station, and he'd run experiments to determine their melting points. It sounds cooler if you just say "melt stuff in space" though.

In reply to this comment by oohahh:
"melt stuff in space"? What does that mean? Like, shoot lasers at satellites? Suspend things in his shop and melt them with jets of hot air?

In reply to this comment by bmacs27:
Yea, the guy that made it used to melt stuff in space for a living, so I'm not surprised it came out pretty awesomesauce.

In reply to this comment by oohahh:
Best BM timelapse I've seen. Just forwarded it to portland@burningman.com in fact.

Thanks for uploading it!

In reply to this comment by bmacs27:
Thanks man!

In reply to this comment by oohahh:
*promote