Somewhat Useful Facts Thread

[Senator]

Now THAT looks more like it.

[Senator]

One of the... less well known engineering competitions.

THE OVERUNITY PRIZE.

1.You need to build 2 working units, both must work the same, so to make sure, it is a replicateable device.
One device you must keep yourself for verification processes and the other device you must ship to me:

Stefan Hartmann, Keplerstr. 11 B, 10589 Berlin, Germany
for the testing and verification process.

2.Each  devices must not weight more than 20 Kg and at least put out
1 Watt of contineous electrical DC power.
( Voltage and current ratio does not matter, but it should be less than 1000 Volts DC for handling it more safely,
so at 1000 Volts DC it should deliver at least constantly 1 mA, or at 100 Volts at least 10 mA or at 10 Volts at least 100 mA for instance)
( Please rectify and buffer with a cap, if you just only have AC power, so please convert it to DC power for easier output power measurements)
If your device is more a mechanical or chemical ( e.g. rotational, electrolyis or cold fusion-type, etc. ) device,
you must build also into it the converter to get electrical DC power out of it, so it is producing at least a contineous
1 Watt of free electrical DC power without using any fuel other than water or air. Your device must not be
powered by an outside source, such as wind, solar or received radio energy and must work 24 hours / 7 days a week / 365 days per year long.
The output power must stay constant and must not fall down after some time.
It must only have a ?fuel? or ?maintainance cost? per year of less than
0.001 US$ = 0.1 UScent PER GENERATED KILOWATTHOUR
including "fuel-", repair-" and maintainance costs.

3.It can be powered by radioactive decay, but the used materials must not be harmfull and must be easy
to get in every city and must not be special parts which are difficult to get or hard to produce and must
not be highly dangerously radioactive or unlawfull to posess.
It also must not use any very expensive or forbidden and/or  banned
radioactive materials, which are hard to get for the average guy
and are dangerous to handle and pose a threat for the environment.

Also if it used water as the "fuel", it should not use more than 1 Liter
of normal tap water per day.

It also must not put out any dangerous pollution stuff and
must not be harmful to the environment.

4.A maximum of 4 x 9 Volts Batteries or accumulators or a maximum of
4 pieces D-cell type batteries or accumulators can be used in it. These batteries must only be used
as storage or start batteries and they must not have more than  20 Watthours (Voltage x Amphours)
of energy storage capacity.
They  must be declared and must not be hidden and battery lifetime and recharge time must be specified.

5.Battery life should be at least 3 years and to replace the batteries should not
cost more than 5 USD for all of the batteries (if batteries are at all used in the device)

6.Patented devices do not apply, cause we want a solution that has no rights yet on it and which would
be free to build by anyone. Commercial replications must pay at least 10 % license fees to charity
organisations or simular organisations, that "feed the world" and help the poor.
This should be watched by the community to verify that commercial builder companies really pay
these licenses to charity organisations.
The inventor who wants to patent his device should not apply for the Prize.

7.The inventor will get the prize money from me, if the device works at my home and will still work
after 3 months of time without dropping in output power level. 3 Months should be long enough
to study and verify the unit and also do extensive tests and measurements with it and first
replications would be then already available from the community.
The verification tests will be published widely all over the internet to spread quickly together
with the blueprints PDF File building instructions.

8.The device should not cost more than 300 US$ in parts- and material-costs to build and the inventor
must also supply a DOC or PDF file with pictures and building instructions and an explanation how he thinks that it works.
Labor costs to produce and build these units should not be higher than an additional 50 Euros or 75 US$ per device.

9.The inventor of the devices must build the 2 devices from his own money and loan one of these devices to me
( Stefan Hartmann)  for the 3 months test period and after this he can choose, if he wants to get the device
back or would like to sell the devices to me to keep for it for myself. ( the Prize-money would be reduced
then by 300 US$ costs if the inventor wants the device back)

10.The inventor needs to ship the device on his own costs to me. If he can supply convincing videos in advance
of the functioning of the device shipping charges to my address in Germany can be paid by me, if he is low on money.

11.If you have such a unit and it produces at least 1 Watt of contineous free energy power indefinately, just put
all the construction details and diagrams first into a ZIP or RAR file and post it at OverUnity.com in the
OverUnity Prize category, so it is already open source, so nobody can apply for a patent anymore.
Then contact me and mail this unit to me for testing for a 3 months loan period, where it will be tested for the contineous power output.
As the blueprints are by then  already posted, other people can replicate it also during this time period and can verify it for themself and help
the test-process confirm or non-confirm, so the testing period before the prize is issued could also be reduced in time less than 3 months,
if it is clear, that the device really puts out this power indefinately with only a maintanance cost of less or equal of  0.1 US$cent  per KWatthour.

[Armondikov]

Not that any of that would actually be possible...

[JimmyB76]

there are 293 ways to make change for a dollar...

[Lionus]

doesn't that apply to few other currencies too?

[Senator]

Not that any of that would actually be possible...

That's because the oil establishment has washed your brains!

[captain_obvious]

Not that any of that would actually be possible...

That's because the oil establishment has washed your brains!

Tin foil hat time!!!

At room temp diesel will not ignite. It must be heated to it's flashpoint or higher first before it will ignite.

[Senator]

That tin foil hats work is a conspiracy by tin foil hatists. In reality tin foil hats might even help the government reading/controlling your mind by acting as an antenna.

Source: http://people.csail.mit.edu/rahimi/helmet/

[Dalek]

I thought tin foil hats was for teh alienz. No?

[JimmyB76]

the first product that Sony came out with was the rice cooker...

[Phaser]

Ares I-X breaking the sound barrier.

Not true.  The rocket is simply passing through a layer of water vapor, condensing it into a cloud around it.

Studio Ghibli and Miyazaki... later adopted a strict "no-edits" clause for future foreign releases of its films. On hearing that Miramax co-chairman Harvey Weinstein would try to cut Princess Mononoke to make it more marketable, one of Studio Ghibli's producers sent an authentic katana with a simple message: "No cuts".

Moral of the story: Don't fuck with anime producers.

Awesome.  I f*cking hate edits.

[Senator]

Well, I just copied what it said under the picture where I found it. Looks sonic boom-ish to me.

However, those things:
http://images.google.co.uk/images?q=sonic%20boom&oe=utf-8&rls=org.mozilla:en-GB:official&client=firefox-a&um=1&ie=UTF-8&sa=N&hl=en&tab=wi
Are apparently water condensation caused by the act of going faster than sound. So theres no reason it can't be both.

[captain_obvious]

Firefox has finally surpassed IE6 for market share

[Armondikov]

Firefox has finally surpassed IE6 for market share

Not surprising considering the standard is now IE8. Isn't this a little like saying that IE8 finally surpassed Mozilla?

[captain_obvious]

Firefox has finally surpassed IE6 for market share

Not surprising considering the standard is now IE8. Isn't this a little like saying that IE8 finally surpassed Mozilla?

True, but IE6 has been around much longer and was massively entrenched. Businesses, organizations, stubborn idiots and the ignorant. They all still use it.  Hell, even the army is still using IE6 as standard!!  It's almost like soldiers charging the trenches in WWI

Not bad for something almost open source though

[Senator]

So... the military is using windows? :wtf

[JimmyB76]

it snowed in the Sahara desert on February 18, 1979...

[Senator]

V-ray, a renderer for 3Ds Max, has already a working prototype for GPU based rendering. And it intents to support Open CL as well. (so ignore than Nvidia CUDA on the title)

[captain_obvious]

So... the military is using windows? :wtf

Did you not realise??
They have now introduced something called "DII" or defence information infrastructure.
In other words it's an oversized underpowered network that is basically a normal LAN but spread over a massive area that piggybacks on the back of internet traffic. The MOD uses windows XP for it and IE6. Some places are still on 2000.

And yes, the whole DII is absolutely shite. Dog slow and utterly useless.

[Dalek]

Today is the 40th Anniversary of Sesame Street.