You can pretty much bet that "wireless power" would be found to cause cancer or herpes or somesuch by the envirowackos, who are absolutely impossible to please anyway.
Meanwhile, the problem we are most trying to solve is the use of gasoline and diesel fuels, and for a variety of reasons from national security to balance of trade to pollution to expense. Fusion won't do anything about that. Fusion won't solve much of any problems, really, since there are other, easier ways to produce electricity. Solar thermal is probably the best, since it involved no exotic minerals in its manufacture and is very common in its operation. The only problem with solar thermal is that it is best done in the desert southwest, and of course there are legions of envirowackos that don't want anyone building power lines, either.
Big hairy deal. Solve the fusion problem tomorrow, and then what? You have unlimited electricity, that's what. The problem is, it will STILL take gasoline to power your car down the road. I mean, unless you can get the fusion reactor into your car, you're STILL going to need gasoline. Unless, of course, someone invents the magic battery that can power cars and trucks 300 miles and be recharged or replaced in a reasonable time, which is defined as how long it takes to refuel a car or truck right now.
We have tons of fairly cheap electricity anyway, with enough to allow it to take a couple hundred years to solve the fusion problem if we need it. Solar, geothermal, etc. will also make for unlimited electricity. Is it even a good idea to spend money on fusion when solar and geothermal power generation can achieve essentially the same thing? Probably not.
...is to lease it, anyway. $349 a month makes it pretty darn affordable. Then just buy it after 3 years for something like $19k, if I remember right.
And it doesn't need 10 hours to charge. More like 4. Just get the 220 volt charger. No problems running it 80 miles a day in 2 separate charges, and electricity is about 1/5th the cost of gasoline.
Hydrogen sucks for fueling vehicles. It is difficult to compress sufficiently to get a car to have a reasonable range, and brittlizes metals used for storage tanks, causing them to leak. Hydrogen will accumulate in garages and houses, with the result that houses either begin looking like the Hindenburg if they simply catch fire, or a bomb if the hydrogen mixes with the air in the right (wrong) proportions.
IOW, this article has attached to it a "So what?" If we want to use it to store solar power for overnight commercial power for sale, we STILL have to compress it, which is STILL expensive in terms of energy, but it could be done. But solar-thermal power generation with the "thermal" part stored in the heat of fusion of molten salt is much easier. Sooo... what?
Yes. There will be a lot of scrambling to make a turn about to be missed, and I believe probable accidents resulting from the delayed lane changes. Its hard enough to hit a particular sidestreet with the moving maps we have now. Screw that up, and we'll have a lot of weird driving behavior that will be hard to compensate for, and more collisions.
These bozos haven't studied the unintended consequences of their sweeping pronouncements, as usual, and so will muck up yet another aspect of driving and roadways. I just got my moving map Kenwood DNX9140 transferred to my new Subaru WRX, so I'm good for about another 7 - 10 years, hopefully, unless the Iranian orbital nuke explodes miles over the US and the EMP knocks it out. Of course, GPS will likely be the least of my problems at that point...
What we should do is teach people not to crash. Really, most accidents are avoidable with a little training and a lot of "paying attention."
I had a situation last May where I was surprised by an unusually long line of stopped cars in a backup on an interstate. It was 5 to midnight, I was still going 65 mph, and I didn't see the car stopped in the road until it was visible in my low beam headlights. Had I been one of the "jam the brakes and scream" people, I'd have probably hit the other car at 64 mph, they'd be dead, I'd be dead, end of story. But my first reaction, born of early-life racing experience about 50 years ago, was, "I AM GOING TO AVOID THIS" and I did, by turning the wheel hard left into the next lane. My standard practice of not allowing anyone to drive beside me ensured there was no one else there to hit, and all I did was cause deep scratches in the right side of my car as well as removing the right outside mirror. That is what proper reaction will do, as compared to an air bag that would likely have busted me all up and STILL killed the 3 ladies in the stopped car. We could use some serious driver training that goes a lot farther than "Slow down and live" and "don't drink and drive."
This particular consumption tax is PROgressive, not regressive. Poor people don't pay a penny of it, and the rich... well, its almost unfair to the rich. For example, John Kerry and his wife made about $10M, and paid about $1.75M in income taxes, in recent disclosures. However, that $70M yacht they own would have been taxed at $21M at purchase, or about 12 years worth of their income tax . If they buy a bauble like that every 12 years or so, it'd equal their income tax bite, but I'm betting they don't string out their trinkets to that extent.
Return the 35% of profits skimmed off by corporate income tax (or the money spent on lawyers and accountants guiding your corporation's every step so it is least exposed to the corporate taxes) and then we can compete with the Chinese and bring these jobs back to the USA.
Think just because they are making a dollar two ninety eight we can't compete with them? Think again - look at how they work. Thousands of people standing at tables assembling everything from I-pads to gym shoes. We here in America don't pay 1000's of people chicken-feed wages, we automate and pay 1 guy or 11 guys (and gals) to do the work of 1000s with the aid of machines. We automate. And we pay them well to run these machines. If we don't, the union will see that we do.
But we can't do it while the gov't is sucking the lifeblood out of our economy in the form of income taxes. As RR said, if you want less of something, tax it, and income taxes are taxes on prosperity. Soooo... we have less prosperity, probably less than we've ever had. If we want to fix it, we havet to quit taxing income. See how at www.fairtax.org
until it is once again a good idea to manufacture in the USA. That isn't going to happen when the Feds are taxing corporate income at 35% while the states pile on another 4.5% to equal the 2nd-highest corporate tax rate on the planet. Plain and simple, the taxes have sucked the prosperity out of the USA. It has gone to foreign shores, and will not return until we learn to zeroize the income taxes, all of them, and tax something else. IOW, we should go to a consumption tax, and free our businesses to compete internationally again. Read about it at www.fairtax.org.
We don't have the tech to switch away from carbon NOW.
What we need to do NOW is to do the cheapest thing we can, so we have the money left over to develop the right thing.
The right thing is electric cars, and the right source for electricity is probably solar and/or geo. If we erect windchargers for as far as we can see no matter where we stand in the USA, it might be enough, but probably not. We can probably use solar-thermal in the SW deserts to do electric cars 100% if we just keep building. That might best be effected by charging electric car batteries right at the solar farm site, and shipping the charged batteries by rail (extremely energy effficient) to where they need to be to be changed out from the electric car that has spent batteries, and shipping those spent batteries back to the solar farm for charging. Eliminates the need for building power wire distribution systems, with their IR losses as well.
Someone frames someone for a crime and you think they should just get away with it? Sure, I think most people would injure someone over that. What good would it do? It would greatly deter that person from doing that or anything else against that person, and it would show the rest of those privy to the situation that it is an extremely poor idea to cross that individual. It's the way things work in the real world. Don't want to get the holy S*** beat out of you? Then don't F with this guy...
That is, opt out... of airline travel completely. Unless going across oceans, I don't need to be getting on airplanes since they started x-raying people. My car will go everywhere I want to go. If they want me to fly, they're going to have to cut the crap and make it pleasant again. That means killing the TSA and the accompanying idiocy of security screens with long lines and machines that may give you cancer, as well as people touching people where that would normally start a fight.
Going to 'Vegas from Virginia next month, and I'm driving.
What's the sense in building a receiver to reject adjacent channel interference that, via an FCC band plan, was never meant to exist? Managing the spectrum so that large amplitude signals are not present is a whale of a lot cheaper than turning a $100 GPS receiver into a $200 GPS receiver when the design and construction of the filtering necessary to reject the supposedly non-existent adjacent channel high power signal causes the doubling of the price.
If everyone just goes by the band plan, and doesn't try to do some end-run around the intent of the rules, then we can have $100 GPS receivers instead of $200 GPS receivers. I think building them cheaper is the better idea.
Nobody should be penalized. The GPS receivers were built to the standards that existed at their manufacture, which did not include aggressive adjacent channel interference. That was supposed to be satphones, which would have been a few watts from a handheld transmitter, that would not likely have interfered with most GPS receivers. But the Lightsquared transmitters were not low power, and would have overwhelmed the GPS receivers built to reject low power signals from sat phones.
Can you see making virtually all of the GPS receivers in existence obsolete? The one in my car is part of an entertainment console that was right around $2700 installed. The GPS handheld that I own was around $400. The GPS receivers for my laptop mapping program would also have to be replaced, and cost about $10 as they were offered from Delorme. Think they'll be able to build something that rejects a high power adjacent channel signal for $10? I'd suspect not.
Its good to see the FCC doing the right thing for the American people this time, rather than the right thing for some big business.
I think shoutcast is worthless. You'll be able to read in the paper the perp's descriptions and what they were driving before hearing it on the shoutcast. Why would anyone listen to a shoutcast?
At least the police will be able to prevent the racist comments like "Gorillas in the Mist" from being heard the next time they beat the snot out of some black guy.
Personally, _I_ don't listen at all - not really interested - but for those that do, they will no longer be capable of HELPING the police, either. If the cops don't think they need the public for anything, let 'em go ahead and encrypt. I am not personally affected.
Who WANTS to hear police traffic with a delay? The point of monitoring police traffic is either to be able to help by looking for and calling in fleeing perps, or to know where the problems are and thus not wander into an area where police and perp bullets are thick in the air and thereby getting punctured yourself. Delayed broadcasts are no good for either purpose.
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Sure. All we have to do is kill 3/4 of our population, and we can use way less oil. Oil sustains life here, get used to it.
You can pretty much bet that "wireless power" would be found to cause cancer or herpes or somesuch by the envirowackos, who are absolutely impossible to please anyway.
Meanwhile, the problem we are most trying to solve is the use of gasoline and diesel fuels, and for a variety of reasons from national security to balance of trade to pollution to expense. Fusion won't do anything about that. Fusion won't solve much of any problems, really, since there are other, easier ways to produce electricity. Solar thermal is probably the best, since it involved no exotic minerals in its manufacture and is very common in its operation. The only problem with solar thermal is that it is best done in the desert southwest, and of course there are legions of envirowackos that don't want anyone building power lines, either.
Big hairy deal. Solve the fusion problem tomorrow, and then what? You have unlimited electricity, that's what. The problem is, it will STILL take gasoline to power your car down the road. I mean, unless you can get the fusion reactor into your car, you're STILL going to need gasoline. Unless, of course, someone invents the magic battery that can power cars and trucks 300 miles and be recharged or replaced in a reasonable time, which is defined as how long it takes to refuel a car or truck right now.
We have tons of fairly cheap electricity anyway, with enough to allow it to take a couple hundred years to solve the fusion problem if we need it. Solar, geothermal, etc. will also make for unlimited electricity. Is it even a good idea to spend money on fusion when solar and geothermal power generation can achieve essentially the same thing? Probably not.
...is to lease it, anyway. $349 a month makes it pretty darn affordable. Then just buy it after 3 years for something like $19k, if I remember right.
And it doesn't need 10 hours to charge. More like 4. Just get the 220 volt charger. No problems running it 80 miles a day in 2 separate charges, and electricity is about 1/5th the cost of gasoline.
is fueling vehicles.
Hydrogen sucks for fueling vehicles. It is difficult to compress sufficiently to get a car to have a reasonable range, and brittlizes metals used for storage tanks, causing them to leak. Hydrogen will accumulate in garages and houses, with the result that houses either begin looking like the Hindenburg if they simply catch fire, or a bomb if the hydrogen mixes with the air in the right (wrong) proportions.
IOW, this article has attached to it a "So what?" If we want to use it to store solar power for overnight commercial power for sale, we STILL have to compress it, which is STILL expensive in terms of energy, but it could be done. But solar-thermal power generation with the "thermal" part stored in the heat of fusion of molten salt is much easier. Sooo... what?
This "The doctors are evil conspirators" crap really, really gets old...
Yeah, using maps was so much better.
Not.
Moron.
Yes. There will be a lot of scrambling to make a turn about to be missed, and I believe probable accidents resulting from the delayed lane changes. Its hard enough to hit a particular sidestreet with the moving maps we have now. Screw that up, and we'll have a lot of weird driving behavior that will be hard to compensate for, and more collisions.
These bozos haven't studied the unintended consequences of their sweeping pronouncements, as usual, and so will muck up yet another aspect of driving and roadways. I just got my moving map Kenwood DNX9140 transferred to my new Subaru WRX, so I'm good for about another 7 - 10 years, hopefully, unless the Iranian orbital nuke explodes miles over the US and the EMP knocks it out. Of course, GPS will likely be the least of my problems at that point...
What we should do is teach people not to crash. Really, most accidents are avoidable with a little training and a lot of "paying attention."
I had a situation last May where I was surprised by an unusually long line of stopped cars in a backup on an interstate. It was 5 to midnight, I was still going 65 mph, and I didn't see the car stopped in the road until it was visible in my low beam headlights. Had I been one of the "jam the brakes and scream" people, I'd have probably hit the other car at 64 mph, they'd be dead, I'd be dead, end of story. But my first reaction, born of early-life racing experience about 50 years ago, was, "I AM GOING TO AVOID THIS" and I did, by turning the wheel hard left into the next lane. My standard practice of not allowing anyone to drive beside me ensured there was no one else there to hit, and all I did was cause deep scratches in the right side of my car as well as removing the right outside mirror. That is what proper reaction will do, as compared to an air bag that would likely have busted me all up and STILL killed the 3 ladies in the stopped car. We could use some serious driver training that goes a lot farther than "Slow down and live" and "don't drink and drive."
Yep. That's the way I do it.
Air bags should be optional.
All posts here labeled "funny" should be deleted as a waste of space.
Recall the Terminator's reply to the landlord that was pounding on the door when he was trying to fix his eye...
This particular consumption tax is PROgressive, not regressive. Poor people don't pay a penny of it, and the rich... well, its almost unfair to the rich. For example, John Kerry and his wife made about $10M, and paid about $1.75M in income taxes, in recent disclosures. However, that $70M yacht they own would have been taxed at $21M at purchase, or about 12 years worth of their income tax . If they buy a bauble like that every 12 years or so, it'd equal their income tax bite, but I'm betting they don't string out their trinkets to that extent.
For corporations? How about "for the American people"? Having prosperous corporations would make a lot of prosperous employees.
Return the 35% of profits skimmed off by corporate income tax (or the money spent on lawyers and accountants guiding your corporation's every step so it is least exposed to the corporate taxes) and then we can compete with the Chinese and bring these jobs back to the USA.
Think just because they are making a dollar two ninety eight we can't compete with them? Think again - look at how they work. Thousands of people standing at tables assembling everything from I-pads to gym shoes. We here in America don't pay 1000's of people chicken-feed wages, we automate and pay 1 guy or 11 guys (and gals) to do the work of 1000s with the aid of machines. We automate. And we pay them well to run these machines. If we don't, the union will see that we do.
But we can't do it while the gov't is sucking the lifeblood out of our economy in the form of income taxes. As RR said, if you want less of something, tax it, and income taxes are taxes on prosperity. Soooo... we have less prosperity, probably less than we've ever had. If we want to fix it, we havet to quit taxing income. See how at www.fairtax.org
until it is once again a good idea to manufacture in the USA. That isn't going to happen when the Feds are taxing corporate income at 35% while the states pile on another 4.5% to equal the 2nd-highest corporate tax rate on the planet. Plain and simple, the taxes have sucked the prosperity out of the USA. It has gone to foreign shores, and will not return until we learn to zeroize the income taxes, all of them, and tax something else. IOW, we should go to a consumption tax, and free our businesses to compete internationally again. Read about it at www.fairtax.org.
Short answer: Yes, very.
We don't have the tech to switch away from carbon NOW.
What we need to do NOW is to do the cheapest thing we can, so we have the money left over to develop the right thing.
The right thing is electric cars, and the right source for electricity is probably solar and/or geo. If we erect windchargers for as far as we can see no matter where we stand in the USA, it might be enough, but probably not. We can probably use solar-thermal in the SW deserts to do electric cars 100% if we just keep building. That might best be effected by charging electric car batteries right at the solar farm site, and shipping the charged batteries by rail (extremely energy effficient) to where they need to be to be changed out from the electric car that has spent batteries, and shipping those spent batteries back to the solar farm for charging. Eliminates the need for building power wire distribution systems, with their IR losses as well.
I'd certainly be rigging some sort of "windshield wiper" device to do this without me climbing anywhere.
As for trees, there's a cure for that, too, its called a chainsaw.
Someone frames someone for a crime and you think they should just get away with it? Sure, I think most people would injure someone over that. What good would it do? It would greatly deter that person from doing that or anything else against that person, and it would show the rest of those privy to the situation that it is an extremely poor idea to cross that individual. It's the way things work in the real world. Don't want to get the holy S*** beat out of you? Then don't F with this guy...
That is, opt out... of airline travel completely. Unless going across oceans, I don't need to be getting on airplanes since they started x-raying people. My car will go everywhere I want to go. If they want me to fly, they're going to have to cut the crap and make it pleasant again. That means killing the TSA and the accompanying idiocy of security screens with long lines and machines that may give you cancer, as well as people touching people where that would normally start a fight.
Going to 'Vegas from Virginia next month, and I'm driving.
What's the sense in building a receiver to reject adjacent channel interference that, via an FCC band plan, was never meant to exist? Managing the spectrum so that large amplitude signals are not present is a whale of a lot cheaper than turning a $100 GPS receiver into a $200 GPS receiver when the design and construction of the filtering necessary to reject the supposedly non-existent adjacent channel high power signal causes the doubling of the price.
If everyone just goes by the band plan, and doesn't try to do some end-run around the intent of the rules, then we can have $100 GPS receivers instead of $200 GPS receivers. I think building them cheaper is the better idea.
Nobody should be penalized. The GPS receivers were built to the standards that existed at their manufacture, which did not include aggressive adjacent channel interference. That was supposed to be satphones, which would have been a few watts from a handheld transmitter, that would not likely have interfered with most GPS receivers. But the Lightsquared transmitters were not low power, and would have overwhelmed the GPS receivers built to reject low power signals from sat phones.
Can you see making virtually all of the GPS receivers in existence obsolete? The one in my car is part of an entertainment console that was right around $2700 installed. The GPS handheld that I own was around $400. The GPS receivers for my laptop mapping program would also have to be replaced, and cost about $10 as they were offered from Delorme. Think they'll be able to build something that rejects a high power adjacent channel signal for $10? I'd suspect not.
Its good to see the FCC doing the right thing for the American people this time, rather than the right thing for some big business.
I think shoutcast is worthless. You'll be able to read in the paper the perp's descriptions and what they were driving before hearing it on the shoutcast. Why would anyone listen to a shoutcast?
At least the police will be able to prevent the racist comments like "Gorillas in the Mist" from being heard the next time they beat the snot out of some black guy.
Personally, _I_ don't listen at all - not really interested - but for those that do, they will no longer be capable of HELPING the police, either. If the cops don't think they need the public for anything, let 'em go ahead and encrypt. I am not personally affected.
Who WANTS to hear police traffic with a delay? The point of monitoring police traffic is either to be able to help by looking for and calling in fleeing perps, or to know where the problems are and thus not wander into an area where police and perp bullets are thick in the air and thereby getting punctured yourself. Delayed broadcasts are no good for either purpose.