You could be an ISP if you wanted to. That's what all that stuff about telcos having to install ISP equipment in their facilities was about.
There is nothing magic about being an ISP. All it takes is money and effort.
If you became an ISP, then you could have your own customers, bribe your own politicians (don't quite understand why, though), and fret about customers stealing bandwith from you so they could set up their own free WiFi networks while they bitch and complain about you.
Wow! Cool! It's neat-O how you took a statement out of my post, ignored the arguments, and then said I should provide an argument if I was to convince anyone.
Maybe you too should read the very last line in my post that you replied to...
Dude, there is nothing magic about an ISP. You could pay for a T1 or so and be your own ISP. You can set up your own hardware. Just be prepared to pay for it - the exact same way your ISP does.
Being an ISP is not anything that special. You just have to be willing to pay the costs, deal with the business aspects, deal with the legal aspects, and if you have employees, deal with income tax, unemployment tax, etc.
It's not like being an ISP is something willed or auctioned like season tickets or anything.
You can be an ISP, or even eliminate needing an ISP. All it takes is money.
You see, that is what ISPs provide - they handle all the business side of things and charge individual subscribers some reasonable amount for access through cable, DSL, digital cell access, etc.
The service that customers are paying for should tailor to their needs and wants.
Yeah, and my car should fly and run on water.
What kind of world do you live in that you think the world should cater to your wants and needs? Some things either are not technologically or economically feasible. Maybe they just don't feel like doing it.
If you don't like it, and think you could do a better job, do it. You can be your own ISP if you pay for your own T1 connection. You could share bandwidth with your neighborhood, make arrangements to provide service somehow to your customers that travel (maybe get an 800 number dialup connection), or even negotiate sharing bandwidth with other ISPs so your customers could travel and use high speed somehow.
Because, of course, none of my tax dollars went into developing and deploying the internet backbone.
And you aren't benefiting from those tax dollars?
Just because your (and my) tax dollars helped develop the Internet doesn't mean that you are entitled to steal from your ISP.
With that kind of logic, why isn't it OK to shoplift a router or two at BestBuy? The technology they use was also developed using your tax dollars. How about a spool of Cat5e? Maybe a modem?
I know - why not shoplift your next computer? A whole lot of computer technology was developed during WWII to support the Manhattan Project - again using tax dollars. That makes it OK to steal from the manufacturers now, doesn't it?
"It is not actually illegal to share your bandwidth with you neighbor whereas stealing cable is. Yes, it breaks the EULAs but they aren't law and all the ISP can do is terminate your service."
And it is OK for people to just decide that contracts they sign and agree to are no longer valid because???
It really is stealing, moron, and you know it. All you are doing is trying to justify it and find some way to appease what little conscience you might still have.
What is worse for your ISP is that you are depriving it, and its employees, of revenue that could be used to make your own service better, feed their families, etc. It isn't up to you to subvert and deny their legitimate business.
There is a simple answer. What you are doing is wrong. It really is that simple. And your ISP could disconnect your service or even take you to court and sue for lost revenue and damages.
Why is that so hard for people like you to understand? Are you retarded or just stupid?
Exactly. This is what is going to happen - metered Internet use.
And it will happen because some people abuse their connections and allow others free use of service they are not paying to support. Another pressure to move to metered use is because of file sharing.
But both will cause a change in Internet contracts. Maybe some fixed price as long as users stay below some data level, but tiered pricing after that level based on data transferred. Or even a straight cost per megabyte.
Whenever something good comes along, there will always be those that look for how it can be exploited to their advantage. Eventually the holes will get closed by some kind of draconian measure and everybody will be the worse for it.
The ISP sells service with a bandwidth cap for those that use a lot of it and impact others who pay for and expect certain bandwidth levels with their connection.
And a lot of people use WiFi permanently - not temporarily. It isn't so easy to retrofit most houses with ethernet.
What you are doing is rationalizing theft and misuse.
Read your contract. It's what you supposedly agreed to. If you now decide to do as you please, and steal bandwidth for your neighbors because it makes you some kind of hero, you are in violation of your contract (which you agreed to) and are a thief.
I'm sure you and others will probably argue, but if you are operating outside of your contract to give your ISPs services to other people, you are indedd a thief.
Nobody so far has said anything about your point that ISPs won't like it.
One would hope (yeah, I know...) that people on some kind of open mesh network might think to be a little more secure with their passwords, CC numbers, etc.
For some time, ISPs had clauses in contracts that only allowed a single computer to use a connection. With NAT so easy to implement, they relaxed that stipulation. But if subscribers start providing free internet to their neighbors, and especially if that network gets expanded as per suggestion, ISPs will probably start disconnecting users that abuse their policies.
And sure, people could figure out ways to spoof it, but if the technology is simple enough and the use gets widespread, ISPs will figure out how to detect these networks and get compensation for the misuse.
Actually, contrary to some of the posts here, security cameras are quite sensitive in the near-IR and they don't use a flash. They use near-IR LEDs to provide illumination.
The Bush administration's deliberate use of the RNC e-mail system, and the amazing coincidence that the White House allowed the e-mail records to get overwritten (or at least claims they have).
It's a blatant coverup not unlike Nixon's 18 minute gap in a tape recorded conversation between him and H.R. Haldeman.
The American people need to demand Bush surrender all evidence or that he and his administration be held in contempt of court.
Um, I know that carbon-based fuels lead to carbon dioxide emissions.
The point I was replying to was that beaming energy down to the planet added energy to the biosphere.
The point I was making was that any method of producing energy terrestrially will have losses associated with it and that will release additional energy in the biosphere.
Collecting energy in outer space, and converting it to some beamable form of energy will have any inefficiencies in that process occur in outer space and the heat generated won't be added to the biosphere.
Obviously, the receiver conversion will have inefficiencies and that waste heat will be in the biosphere, as will all the inefficiencies in transmission and ultimate use.
In other words, I was saying that beaming in would add less heat than converting the same amount of end use energy as current methods. I never said anything about carbon dioxide - which as you say, just makes fossil fuels that much worse.
What I was referring to was current squared times resistance which equals power. The R was resistance and not radius. V = I * R, and W = I * V. Therefore, W = I * I * R.
Likewise, the IR drop is also just Ohm's law which equals voltage. The resistance will have some value per unit length and the longer the length, the more voltage drop.
The way to drop the current, so the I^2R (watts) losses can be reduced is to increase the voltage. But as you go to higher voltage, and higher altitude, where the air pressure starts getting low enough to support a plasma discharge, insulation starts getting important which just leads to more weight, etc.
There is another limit to Moore's law - as the feature size has shrunk to literally where you can count the atoms in a trace width, diffusion can cause real problems.
The circuit features literally blur over time and cause failure.
Another issue is leakage currents. As features get smaller, probabilities that electrons can jump around go up. You also have to lower the voltages used on chip because as things get smaller, the voltage gradients go up. Get them too high and you can literally have arcing inside the chip and device failure. As you lower voltages, the way charge gets herded becomes less efficient and leakage currents also go up.
Induction works great when you are tightly coupled. But induction occurs through an electromagnetic field and the strength falls off with the square of the distance and you just can't transfer that much energy. It gets really lossy.
It's why power transformers have some kind of core - to help increase the coupling between primary and secondary.
"And I'd prefer to not have any randomly scattered ionizing radiation impinging on my home, thanks."
You already do. It's all around you, at varying levels depending on where you live, the altitude where you live, the things in your home, what it's made of, what you eat, etc.
"Cosmic rays" are everywhere and then you have radioactive decay of radon gas, the significant radioactive isotope of potassium (lite salt is slightly radioactive), thorium in lantern mantles, thorium in arc welding rods, traces of uranium and other radioactive materials in everything from granite to concrete, etc.
If you can get your hands on a Geiger counter, it's kind of fun just to roam around and see what gives off easily measurable levels of radioactivity / ionizing radiation. But just be aware that stuff like alpha particles don't register on a number of detector types so if anything, you might be measuring a bit low.
Circuit fabrication is already using x-rays for the really fine feature devices. The lens they made was for microwaves - much much longer (orders of magnitude longer) wavelengths, where the feature size is possible to construct the capacitors.
The feature size to be able to lens visible light will be much much smaller, and to lens x-rays, will be smaller still.
Since they are using photolithography to create these devices now, they are using a much shorter wavlength of light to make features that allow the lens to work with much longer wavelengths.
To be able to create features small enough to lens x-rays, they will need techniques that don't even exist now.
There could always be some other innovation that this new technique enables, though. Maybe it could eventually happen.
I don't see how it is that different from burning carbon-based fuels or running nuclear power plants. Both of those release heat energy back into the atmosphere/biosphere as well.
Beaming the power in, where some of it (depending on efficiencies in transmission and use) would be turned into heat energy, would actually release less energy into the biosphere than nuclear or fossil fuels where the inefficiencies in power production itself, since it occurs in the biosphere, release additional heat energy.
The issue with wires is that you will have IR drop and I^2R power losses. If you make the wires thicker to cut the resistance and losses, you have now made the wires heavier. Plus, you have to somehow support the weight of all that wire which means the tensile strength must be huge.
On the other hand, if you beam the energy down, you will have much lower losses provided the atmosphere is transparent at the wavelength you use to send the energy. All you will get from beam spread will be a lower energy density but the same total amount of energy (aside from absorption and scatter losses) will be available.
Beaming power down is probably a much more efficient way to go depending on conversion losses at the source, the scatter and absorption losses, and the conversion losses again at the receiver.
I don't know about the efficiencies and losses of beaming but would guess they would be much less than however many miles of cable would be required and would bet the cost would be lower as well.
You would just need to make damn sure you switch the beam off if it quits tracking the target receiver. Bu as the other person commented, I think this isn't intended to beam power from space.
A generic insulting noun, coined by Butthead of MTV's Beavis and Butthead.
While they were watching the premier of GWAR's "Saddam a Go-Go" video, Beavis got in Butthead's line of view of the TV. Butthead shouted "Move it, fartknocker!"
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Please see my post above.
You could be an ISP if you wanted to. That's what all that stuff about telcos having to install ISP equipment in their facilities was about.
There is nothing magic about being an ISP. All it takes is money and effort.
If you became an ISP, then you could have your own customers, bribe your own politicians (don't quite understand why, though), and fret about customers stealing bandwith from you so they could set up their own free WiFi networks while they bitch and complain about you.
Wow! Cool! It's neat-O how you took a statement out of my post, ignored the arguments, and then said I should provide an argument if I was to convince anyone.
Maybe you too should read the very last line in my post that you replied to...
I think that was called FIDONet.
Dude, there is nothing magic about an ISP. You could pay for a T1 or so and be your own ISP. You can set up your own hardware. Just be prepared to pay for it - the exact same way your ISP does.
Being an ISP is not anything that special. You just have to be willing to pay the costs, deal with the business aspects, deal with the legal aspects, and if you have employees, deal with income tax, unemployment tax, etc.
It's not like being an ISP is something willed or auctioned like season tickets or anything.
You can be an ISP, or even eliminate needing an ISP. All it takes is money.
You see, that is what ISPs provide - they handle all the business side of things and charge individual subscribers some reasonable amount for access through cable, DSL, digital cell access, etc.
The service that customers are paying for should tailor to their needs and wants.
Yeah, and my car should fly and run on water.
What kind of world do you live in that you think the world should cater to your wants and needs? Some things either are not technologically or economically feasible. Maybe they just don't feel like doing it.
If you don't like it, and think you could do a better job, do it. You can be your own ISP if you pay for your own T1 connection. You could share bandwidth with your neighborhood, make arrangements to provide service somehow to your customers that travel (maybe get an 800 number dialup connection), or even negotiate sharing bandwidth with other ISPs so your customers could travel and use high speed somehow.
Too much work? Hmmmm.
Because, of course, none of my tax dollars went into developing and deploying the internet backbone.
And you aren't benefiting from those tax dollars?
Just because your (and my) tax dollars helped develop the Internet doesn't mean that you are entitled to steal from your ISP.
With that kind of logic, why isn't it OK to shoplift a router or two at BestBuy? The technology they use was also developed using your tax dollars. How about a spool of Cat5e? Maybe a modem?
I know - why not shoplift your next computer? A whole lot of computer technology was developed during WWII to support the Manhattan Project - again using tax dollars. That makes it OK to steal from the manufacturers now, doesn't it?
Moron.
"It is not actually illegal to share your bandwidth with you neighbor whereas stealing cable is. Yes, it breaks the EULAs but they aren't law and all the ISP can do is terminate your service."
And it is OK for people to just decide that contracts they sign and agree to are no longer valid because???
It really is stealing, moron, and you know it. All you are doing is trying to justify it and find some way to appease what little conscience you might still have.
What is worse for your ISP is that you are depriving it, and its employees, of revenue that could be used to make your own service better, feed their families, etc. It isn't up to you to subvert and deny their legitimate business.
There is a simple answer. What you are doing is wrong. It really is that simple. And your ISP could disconnect your service or even take you to court and sue for lost revenue and damages.
Why is that so hard for people like you to understand? Are you retarded or just stupid?
Exactly. This is what is going to happen - metered Internet use.
And it will happen because some people abuse their connections and allow others free use of service they are not paying to support. Another pressure to move to metered use is because of file sharing.
But both will cause a change in Internet contracts. Maybe some fixed price as long as users stay below some data level, but tiered pricing after that level based on data transferred. Or even a straight cost per megabyte.
Whenever something good comes along, there will always be those that look for how it can be exploited to their advantage. Eventually the holes will get closed by some kind of draconian measure and everybody will be the worse for it.
The ISP sells service with a bandwidth cap for those that use a lot of it and impact others who pay for and expect certain bandwidth levels with their connection.
And a lot of people use WiFi permanently - not temporarily. It isn't so easy to retrofit most houses with ethernet.
What you are doing is rationalizing theft and misuse.
Read your contract. It's what you supposedly agreed to. If you now decide to do as you please, and steal bandwidth for your neighbors because it makes you some kind of hero, you are in violation of your contract (which you agreed to) and are a thief.
I'm sure you and others will probably argue, but if you are operating outside of your contract to give your ISPs services to other people, you are indedd a thief.
Nobody so far has said anything about your point that ISPs won't like it.
One would hope (yeah, I know...) that people on some kind of open mesh network might think to be a little more secure with their passwords, CC numbers, etc.
For some time, ISPs had clauses in contracts that only allowed a single computer to use a connection. With NAT so easy to implement, they relaxed that stipulation. But if subscribers start providing free internet to their neighbors, and especially if that network gets expanded as per suggestion, ISPs will probably start disconnecting users that abuse their policies.
And sure, people could figure out ways to spoof it, but if the technology is simple enough and the use gets widespread, ISPs will figure out how to detect these networks and get compensation for the misuse.
I think Larry Craig might agree with you. ;-)
He has a wide stance, you know. 8-)
Actually, contrary to some of the posts here, security cameras are quite sensitive in the near-IR and they don't use a flash. They use near-IR LEDs to provide illumination.
Anyone interested in security cameras and equipment ought to check out http://www.supercircuits.com/
If I had mod points, I would mod you up.
The Bush administration's deliberate use of the RNC e-mail system, and the amazing coincidence that the White House allowed the e-mail records to get overwritten (or at least claims they have).
It's a blatant coverup not unlike Nixon's 18 minute gap in a tape recorded conversation between him and H.R. Haldeman.
The American people need to demand Bush surrender all evidence or that he and his administration be held in contempt of court.
Watts are a rate - not an absolute amount.
That's why your electric bill shows usage in watt-hours.
The AC post is great for the pun, too!
Um, I know that carbon-based fuels lead to carbon dioxide emissions.
The point I was replying to was that beaming energy down to the planet added energy to the biosphere.
The point I was making was that any method of producing energy terrestrially will have losses associated with it and that will release additional energy in the biosphere.
Collecting energy in outer space, and converting it to some beamable form of energy will have any inefficiencies in that process occur in outer space and the heat generated won't be added to the biosphere.
Obviously, the receiver conversion will have inefficiencies and that waste heat will be in the biosphere, as will all the inefficiencies in transmission and ultimate use.
In other words, I was saying that beaming in would add less heat than converting the same amount of end use energy as current methods. I never said anything about carbon dioxide - which as you say, just makes fossil fuels that much worse.
What I was referring to was current squared times resistance which equals power. The R was resistance and not radius. V = I * R, and W = I * V. Therefore, W = I * I * R.
Likewise, the IR drop is also just Ohm's law which equals voltage. The resistance will have some value per unit length and the longer the length, the more voltage drop.
The way to drop the current, so the I^2R (watts) losses can be reduced is to increase the voltage. But as you go to higher voltage, and higher altitude, where the air pressure starts getting low enough to support a plasma discharge, insulation starts getting important which just leads to more weight, etc.
There is another limit to Moore's law - as the feature size has shrunk to literally where you can count the atoms in a trace width, diffusion can cause real problems.
The circuit features literally blur over time and cause failure.
Another issue is leakage currents. As features get smaller, probabilities that electrons can jump around go up. You also have to lower the voltages used on chip because as things get smaller, the voltage gradients go up. Get them too high and you can literally have arcing inside the chip and device failure. As you lower voltages, the way charge gets herded becomes less efficient and leakage currents also go up.
Moore's law really is running out of steam...
Induction works great when you are tightly coupled. But induction occurs through an electromagnetic field and the strength falls off with the square of the distance and you just can't transfer that much energy. It gets really lossy.
It's why power transformers have some kind of core - to help increase the coupling between primary and secondary.
"And I'd prefer to not have any randomly scattered ionizing radiation impinging on my home, thanks."
You already do. It's all around you, at varying levels depending on where you live, the altitude where you live, the things in your home, what it's made of, what you eat, etc.
"Cosmic rays" are everywhere and then you have radioactive decay of radon gas, the significant radioactive isotope of potassium (lite salt is slightly radioactive), thorium in lantern mantles, thorium in arc welding rods, traces of uranium and other radioactive materials in everything from granite to concrete, etc.
If you can get your hands on a Geiger counter, it's kind of fun just to roam around and see what gives off easily measurable levels of radioactivity / ionizing radiation. But just be aware that stuff like alpha particles don't register on a number of detector types so if anything, you might be measuring a bit low.
Circuit fabrication is already using x-rays for the really fine feature devices. The lens they made was for microwaves - much much longer (orders of magnitude longer) wavelengths, where the feature size is possible to construct the capacitors.
The feature size to be able to lens visible light will be much much smaller, and to lens x-rays, will be smaller still.
Since they are using photolithography to create these devices now, they are using a much shorter wavlength of light to make features that allow the lens to work with much longer wavelengths.
To be able to create features small enough to lens x-rays, they will need techniques that don't even exist now.
There could always be some other innovation that this new technique enables, though. Maybe it could eventually happen.
I don't see how it is that different from burning carbon-based fuels or running nuclear power plants. Both of those release heat energy back into the atmosphere/biosphere as well.
Beaming the power in, where some of it (depending on efficiencies in transmission and use) would be turned into heat energy, would actually release less energy into the biosphere than nuclear or fossil fuels where the inefficiencies in power production itself, since it occurs in the biosphere, release additional heat energy.
It might be more like the standard inverse square law...
In Soviet Russia, I, for one, welcome our batteryless, microwave-beaming, imagine a beowulf cluster of them, overlords?
The issue with wires is that you will have IR drop and I^2R power losses. If you make the wires thicker to cut the resistance and losses, you have now made the wires heavier. Plus, you have to somehow support the weight of all that wire which means the tensile strength must be huge.
On the other hand, if you beam the energy down, you will have much lower losses provided the atmosphere is transparent at the wavelength you use to send the energy. All you will get from beam spread will be a lower energy density but the same total amount of energy (aside from absorption and scatter losses) will be available.
Beaming power down is probably a much more efficient way to go depending on conversion losses at the source, the scatter and absorption losses, and the conversion losses again at the receiver.
I don't know about the efficiencies and losses of beaming but would guess they would be much less than however many miles of cable would be required and would bet the cost would be lower as well.
You would just need to make damn sure you switch the beam off if it quits tracking the target receiver. Bu as the other person commented, I think this isn't intended to beam power from space.
From the Urban Dictionary http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=fartknocker
A generic insulting noun, coined by Butthead of MTV's Beavis and Butthead.
While they were watching the premier of GWAR's "Saddam a Go-Go" video, Beavis got in Butthead's line of view of the TV. Butthead shouted "Move it, fartknocker!"