Given the context of Sprint/ T-Mobile approving a deal, I assume it ment the Corporate approval of AT&T/ DirectTV, rather than FCC approval.
There are many approvals that are needed. The FCC is just one branch of government. There's the FTC as well... and I'm sure there are regulatory bodies for satellite and TV... and a hundred other things.
Yes, but this isn't the only result. There have been many over the past 10yrs. None are definitive, but they all seem to agree. That's hard to swallow as a random statistical anomaly. Don't get me wrong, it still could be... But it's worth our interest.
Its hard to see how the energy cycle makes sense. Melting down the aluminum to reform a "charged" battery does not seem intuitively efficient. Even if the process is powered from beautiful clean hydro.
Battery trailers make more sense than swapping, IMO.
It appears to be based on the oxidation of the Aluminum.
The energy is released via a chemical reaction that draws oxygen from the air and uses water fed into the car by the user to turn the aluminum into alumina (similar to the reaction that turns iron into rust)
So using the battery literally destroys it. The aluminum is all still there. So it's not rechargeable at all. It's disposable. They recycle it at the smelter, they don't recharge it. I suspect it will be treated like other car parts and there will be a core charge that you get back for swapping your old battery in.
I've no idea how efficient the process is, that would really be the key question.
Given design, setup/prep, printing/molding, and trim work, that's still quite impressive. Mass producing one thing over and over is easy. Changing your tooling to deal with a new part is what's hard. When I worked in factories, we'd get laid off for a week when it was time to switch products. The engineers needed time to swap everything out. It was equivalent to rearranging a huge house where all the furniture weight over 30tons. I'd imagine these places are setup for lots of rapid changes so it wouldn't be so bad, but it's still probably requires a lot of work. Also, I doubt the workers are your regular linemen. They'd almost have to all be engineers.
The "monopoly" (which is not what it is at all) is the only way a phone company can be profitable and the only way they will maintain the network. If the city doesn't like it they're welcome to maintain it themselves. Several have tried and after bankrupting the city re-signed their carrier agreements. Copper networks are hugely expensive to maintain. The only way they are profitable is because the phone company can spread the rates out to everyone in town. The people in the cheap areas to server pay more than they would otherwise (business parks, high density areas like apartments) and people that live in expensive areas to serve get VERY large discounts so they can afford service. Without this setup most of the city could not even afford to have phone service. This entire system requires reduced competition. If any other company could come in and install their own network, they would install it ONLY in the areas that were cheap to serve... they'd undercut the telco and people living in that "Cheap to serve" area would obviously switch. The phone company would be required to raise rates for everyone else. The competitors would again move in to the cheaper ares, people would switch and the telco death spiral would end with rural customer unable to get service at all...
Screw the consumer. Its how barely regulated (virtual) monopolies, that are out of control, operate.
Break them up, jail the board of directors. Return control to the people.
Barely regulated? The telecom industry is one of the most heavily regulated industries in the country. I work for a telco. We've got an entire floor of people dedicated to regulatory compliance. It's a huge cost to every telco out there.
Cable companies, however, are barely regulated at all. That's real problem. You need to either regulate them or deregulate telcos. If you don't most telcos will be bankrupt in a decade or two. Every major Telco out there is selling off exchanges as fast as they can. They're losing their asses to the cable companies now that everyones moving to cellphones.
Again with this one-sided uninformed bullshit. Why did the city sign those agreements? A gift to the telecom? It's a joke. City after city trys to install their own network and gets their ass sued by their local telecom. And they lose... every time. Why? Because it's breach of contract.
Those telecoms agreed to maintain the cities aging copper network in exchange for no direct competition for teleco services. Maintaining that network is hugely expensive. The city comes in and plans to install fiber which will clearly be a direct competitor to the old copper network. Does the city want to release the telco from their obligation to maintain the copper? If they were I'd pretty damned sure the telco would jump at the chance. But they're not. They want the telephone company to continue to maintain a dieing network while the city installs fiber to only the most profitable areas, in direct competition with the telco.
No city is required to sign these agreements. They are up for renewal all over the country every day of the year. Yet, they all sign. They could maintain the network themselves, but they don't. If it was such a profit rich venture why don't we see cities doing this all over? Because it's not very profitable. They city could certainly buy out the contract, even in the middle of the contract and take over the network any time they wanted. But then they would have to maintain that network... the WHOLE network. Not just that business park where they wanted the fiber.
What I'd suggest, is if the cities want more control over this sort of thing. They should buy the network, not sign any more contracts and then install fiber conduit only. Lease conduit to vendors. They you have competition. Any vendor can come in, blow a new fiber through the conduit, and get going. When they dont need it anymore they pull their fiber, and viola. The governments not providing your intenet and you have real competition. This will require the city to maintain the phonelines however. No phone company is going to touch them if they're losing the most profitable part of town, they'll lose money.
The moral of the story? The police write down whatever you tell them. Where are the crashes? Where are the blind pilots? Maybe the cow hungry aliens took them!
A typical flash from a hand-held laser at 1000 feet lasts about 1/50 of a second. In the FAA simulator studies, the flash used was one second long. The animation above "splits the difference" by using 1/2 second flashes. We feel this is a realistic portrayal of how long a typical exposure might last.
I don't even need to refute that link. It refutes itself.
Because in Egypt the military was using aircraft and snipers to shoot protesters. So it's common there now to "lase" aircraft to point them out to other people so they know to take cover.
Notice there are hundreds of lasers on these things... yet there's a a surprising lack of blind pilots or aircraft crashing into crowds.
Yes, it's technically possible this could hard the pilot. But practically? Not very likely. These pilots circled the crowds for hours every night for months with hundreds of lasers trained on them the entire time without incident.
Polarized glass will do nothing. The issue with the laser is that, by time it reaches the plane, it's spread a fair amount. When it hits the glass of the cockpit, which has various minuscule scratches and dirt and whatnot, it gets lit up like a Christmas tree. Polarized glass will suffer the same fate. It's the dirt and imperfections that blind the pilot.
Ok, wheres your studies to prove this?
Remember, we're talking about sending stupid per-pubesent teenagers to prison. I'm not saying they shouldn't get in trouble. I'm saying $10,000 rewards are insanely excessive. And if polarizing the glass wont work, something equally as silly likely would. This isn't a hard problem to engineer your way out of. Trying to pass laws that make being young and stupid illegal haven't worked very well in the past.
ok, and how many people do you know that have been permanently blinded by a laser? Any? Can you find ANY evidence that it's ever happened? I can't even find anything on a lab experiment gone wrong or military laser accident. Nothing. The only thing I can find are articles from pilots complaining, and they have an understandable axe to grind.
There are plenty of things that are potentially harmful. I'm sure pointing a laser at an aircraft is potentially harmful to the pilots, the plane and the passengers. But what's the practical chance of that happening? Given the nearly complete lack of evidence, I'd say it's about damn near 0.
You'd think they'd have just put polarized glass in the cockpit by now if it were that big of a deal. Oh wait... that's right, it's not that big of a deal.
Why do we continue to allow things like this to get blown so far out of proportion that we end up sending 16yr olds to prison for something that never really had a chance to do harm to anyone in the first place? A landing aircraft is moving faster than freeway traffic at it's slowest. Without computer control and actuators there is no way a person could, by hand, hold a laser on a cockpit window for more than a tenth of a second. If a pilot is unable to land a plane after a flash of light that brief, we'd better start making lightening illegal because it's a hell of a lot brighter, and more common than a laser strike.
You're asuming it went something like "I'll make this stuff up and no-one will know!"
I doubt that's what happened. Most lies start very innocently. For example:
When I was much younger and dumber... a freshman in my FIRST attempt at college... I had... some class... probably biology or something. We were put into groups of about 5 students each. We were supposed to come up with experiments and provide a result. Well, we were going to grow beansprouts under different condition and report on the best way to grow them. I volunteered to take "Light" and would grow my sprouts under sunlight, ambient indoor light in my dorm and a black light.
Well... I was kind of busy drinking heavily and never got around to it. I'd never even bought the black light. Then, Suddenly (3 months later), one of my group who I totally forgot about asked for the results. Well, it should have been clear right? Sun is best, ambient is ok, Black light would have killed them. Who's to know I didn't actually do it right? It's a choice I made in less than the second it took me to answer her, but I regretted it immediately. It would have been far easier to admit my failure than admit the lie, but what was done was done so we reported all our results. got a B+ and everyone was happy! Whew... load off my mind. Then, a few days later the professor was talking about something and I was totally not paying attention and he turned to me "Well you have a blacklight right? Bring it in tomorrow and we could try that out!" I nearly peed myself.
I got out of it by running to walmart... but I suspect she started with a small white lie like I did... and things snowballed. Each time she was in a bind, she had to make the lie worse. Until eventually she was defending herself to an international crowd and ruining her career. Don't lie... but if you do and get caught, come clean asap. The longer you wait, the worse it will get.
I've defended myself in such cases when I was in college and the local police were making a significant amount of their revenue through frivolous tickets. They brought in witnesses and everything in one case. Every time the city was extremely angry with me for taking it to court. The judge was ok with it however. The police officers were literally rolling their eyes in court. I asked one if she needed eye drops and the judge snickered.
The problem with parking tickets is they are usually based on Ordinances which, in the USA, are often passed by committee... sometimes even by the local law enforcement and can be changed on a whim. In one case, they'd required a permit for certain parking spots which I had, but a few days before I got my ticket they "revoked" permit parking in that area with no notification or indication. I lost that case with the judges sympathy. The fines are too small to get a real lawyer for, but taking them to court at least deprives local government of any profit. Also, it's fun to play Perry Mason and give a cops a hard time on the stand. Just be respectful and don't argue with the judge. If the judge appears not to like you and/or be a "hanging judge" just sit back and lose. You might make things worse by being talking too much. In my experience though, you wont run into much of that in traffic court. Familly court however? Those judges, understandably, have a bad day, ever day... Just nod and agree with them.
Psst. Catalyst is indeed still shipped with ATI drivers, especially proprietary ones in Linux, and I think you misunderstood the GP was talking about how he's had shit luck with ATI but his nVidia drivers were fine.
...but nvidia offers far better drivers and some extra features like physx
It's more than that. NVIDIAs drivers aren't even that good. It's just that ATI's (AMDs) are just so terrible that they look good in comparison. Who the hell decided the catalyst control center was a good idea? It reminds me of some glitchy 1990s spam ladened chat program. What a joke. The drivers are so sketchy almost every game I'd play would have "STICKY: For ATI users check here first!" at the top of their support forums. Trying to get hardware acceleration to work on my linux media PC was almost impossible until I switch to NVIDIA. Stop creating new cards I can cook and egg on and fix your damned drivers. I have enough fried eggs I just want to watch a movie without spending 30min dinking around with arcane driver settings while my wife keeps asking me why we canceled cable.
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Given the context of Sprint/ T-Mobile approving a deal, I assume it ment the Corporate approval of AT&T/ DirectTV, rather than FCC approval.
There are many approvals that are needed. The FCC is just one branch of government. There's the FTC as well... and I'm sure there are regulatory bodies for satellite and TV... and a hundred other things.
How long do you think it will take for them to apply this to some high-school senior that hacks his grades or something? A month?
Yes, but this isn't the only result. There have been many over the past 10yrs. None are definitive, but they all seem to agree. That's hard to swallow as a random statistical anomaly. Don't get me wrong, it still could be... But it's worth our interest.
Its hard to see how the energy cycle makes sense. Melting down the aluminum to reform a "charged" battery does not seem intuitively efficient. Even if the process is powered from beautiful clean hydro.
Battery trailers make more sense than swapping, IMO.
It appears to be based on the oxidation of the Aluminum.
The energy is released via a chemical reaction that draws oxygen from the air and uses water fed into the car by the user to turn the aluminum into alumina (similar to the reaction that turns iron into rust)
So using the battery literally destroys it. The aluminum is all still there. So it's not rechargeable at all. It's disposable. They recycle it at the smelter, they don't recharge it. I suspect it will be treated like other car parts and there will be a core charge that you get back for swapping your old battery in.
I've no idea how efficient the process is, that would really be the key question.
Watch THIS.
It blew my friggen mind. Michael Hayden is an evil motherfucker.
Given design, setup/prep, printing/molding, and trim work, that's still quite impressive. Mass producing one thing over and over is easy. Changing your tooling to deal with a new part is what's hard. When I worked in factories, we'd get laid off for a week when it was time to switch products. The engineers needed time to swap everything out. It was equivalent to rearranging a huge house where all the furniture weight over 30tons. I'd imagine these places are setup for lots of rapid changes so it wouldn't be so bad, but it's still probably requires a lot of work. Also, I doubt the workers are your regular linemen. They'd almost have to all be engineers.
The "monopoly" (which is not what it is at all) is the only way a phone company can be profitable and the only way they will maintain the network. If the city doesn't like it they're welcome to maintain it themselves. Several have tried and after bankrupting the city re-signed their carrier agreements. Copper networks are hugely expensive to maintain. The only way they are profitable is because the phone company can spread the rates out to everyone in town. The people in the cheap areas to server pay more than they would otherwise (business parks, high density areas like apartments) and people that live in expensive areas to serve get VERY large discounts so they can afford service. Without this setup most of the city could not even afford to have phone service. This entire system requires reduced competition. If any other company could come in and install their own network, they would install it ONLY in the areas that were cheap to serve... they'd undercut the telco and people living in that "Cheap to serve" area would obviously switch. The phone company would be required to raise rates for everyone else. The competitors would again move in to the cheaper ares, people would switch and the telco death spiral would end with rural customer unable to get service at all...
Screw the consumer. Its how barely regulated (virtual) monopolies, that are out of control, operate.
Break them up, jail the board of directors. Return control to the people.
Barely regulated? The telecom industry is one of the most heavily regulated industries in the country. I work for a telco. We've got an entire floor of people dedicated to regulatory compliance. It's a huge cost to every telco out there.
Cable companies, however, are barely regulated at all. That's real problem. You need to either regulate them or deregulate telcos. If you don't most telcos will be bankrupt in a decade or two. Every major Telco out there is selling off exchanges as fast as they can. They're losing their asses to the cable companies now that everyones moving to cellphones.
Again with this one-sided uninformed bullshit. Why did the city sign those agreements? A gift to the telecom? It's a joke. City after city trys to install their own network and gets their ass sued by their local telecom. And they lose... every time. Why? Because it's breach of contract.
Those telecoms agreed to maintain the cities aging copper network in exchange for no direct competition for teleco services. Maintaining that network is hugely expensive. The city comes in and plans to install fiber which will clearly be a direct competitor to the old copper network. Does the city want to release the telco from their obligation to maintain the copper? If they were I'd pretty damned sure the telco would jump at the chance. But they're not. They want the telephone company to continue to maintain a dieing network while the city installs fiber to only the most profitable areas, in direct competition with the telco.
No city is required to sign these agreements. They are up for renewal all over the country every day of the year. Yet, they all sign. They could maintain the network themselves, but they don't. If it was such a profit rich venture why don't we see cities doing this all over? Because it's not very profitable. They city could certainly buy out the contract, even in the middle of the contract and take over the network any time they wanted. But then they would have to maintain that network... the WHOLE network. Not just that business park where they wanted the fiber.
What I'd suggest, is if the cities want more control over this sort of thing. They should buy the network, not sign any more contracts and then install fiber conduit only. Lease conduit to vendors. They you have competition. Any vendor can come in, blow a new fiber through the conduit, and get going. When they dont need it anymore they pull their fiber, and viola. The governments not providing your intenet and you have real competition. This will require the city to maintain the phonelines however. No phone company is going to touch them if they're losing the most profitable part of town, they'll lose money.
Both of those incidents are just like all of the others. Anecdotal, uncorroborated comments by officers on the scene.
According to the police, Aliens have been mutilating cows for years:
http://stlouis.cbslocal.com/20...
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/new...
The moral of the story? The police write down whatever you tell them. Where are the crashes? Where are the blind pilots? Maybe the cow hungry aliens took them!
Polarized for which orientation?
All. I propose NON-transparent aluminum.
A typical flash from a hand-held laser at 1000 feet lasts about 1/50 of a second. In the FAA simulator studies, the flash used was one second long. The animation above "splits the difference" by using 1/2 second flashes. We feel this is a realistic portrayal of how long a typical exposure might last.
I don't even need to refute that link. It refutes itself.
http://www.usnews.com/news/art...
14yrs in prison. Most people in prison for HOMICIDE serve half that.
This is the definition of unfair sentencing .
Because in Egypt the military was using aircraft and snipers to shoot protesters. So it's common there now to "lase" aircraft to point them out to other people so they know to take cover.
http://ichef.bbci.co.uk/wwfeat...
http://static2.businessinsider...
http://s3files.core77.com/blog...
http://media3.s-nbcnews.com/j/...
Notice there are hundreds of lasers on these things... yet there's a a surprising lack of blind pilots or aircraft crashing into crowds.
Yes, it's technically possible this could hard the pilot. But practically? Not very likely. These pilots circled the crowds for hours every night for months with hundreds of lasers trained on them the entire time without incident.
Polarized glass will do nothing. The issue with the laser is that, by time it reaches the plane, it's spread a fair amount. When it hits the glass of the cockpit, which has various minuscule scratches and dirt and whatnot, it gets lit up like a Christmas tree. Polarized glass will suffer the same fate. It's the dirt and imperfections that blind the pilot.
Ok, wheres your studies to prove this?
Remember, we're talking about sending stupid per-pubesent teenagers to prison. I'm not saying they shouldn't get in trouble. I'm saying $10,000 rewards are insanely excessive. And if polarizing the glass wont work, something equally as silly likely would. This isn't a hard problem to engineer your way out of. Trying to pass laws that make being young and stupid illegal haven't worked very well in the past.
ok, and how many people do you know that have been permanently blinded by a laser? Any? Can you find ANY evidence that it's ever happened? I can't even find anything on a lab experiment gone wrong or military laser accident. Nothing. The only thing I can find are articles from pilots complaining, and they have an understandable axe to grind.
There are plenty of things that are potentially harmful. I'm sure pointing a laser at an aircraft is potentially harmful to the pilots, the plane and the passengers. But what's the practical chance of that happening? Given the nearly complete lack of evidence, I'd say it's about damn near 0.
You'd think they'd have just put polarized glass in the cockpit by now if it were that big of a deal. Oh wait... that's right, it's not that big of a deal.
Why do we continue to allow things like this to get blown so far out of proportion that we end up sending 16yr olds to prison for something that never really had a chance to do harm to anyone in the first place? A landing aircraft is moving faster than freeway traffic at it's slowest. Without computer control and actuators there is no way a person could, by hand, hold a laser on a cockpit window for more than a tenth of a second. If a pilot is unable to land a plane after a flash of light that brief, we'd better start making lightening illegal because it's a hell of a lot brighter, and more common than a laser strike.
You're asuming it went something like "I'll make this stuff up and no-one will know!"
I doubt that's what happened. Most lies start very innocently. For example:
When I was much younger and dumber... a freshman in my FIRST attempt at college... I had... some class... probably biology or something. We were put into groups of about 5 students each. We were supposed to come up with experiments and provide a result. Well, we were going to grow beansprouts under different condition and report on the best way to grow them. I volunteered to take "Light" and would grow my sprouts under sunlight, ambient indoor light in my dorm and a black light.
Well... I was kind of busy drinking heavily and never got around to it. I'd never even bought the black light. Then, Suddenly (3 months later), one of my group who I totally forgot about asked for the results. Well, it should have been clear right? Sun is best, ambient is ok, Black light would have killed them. Who's to know I didn't actually do it right? It's a choice I made in less than the second it took me to answer her, but I regretted it immediately. It would have been far easier to admit my failure than admit the lie, but what was done was done so we reported all our results. got a B+ and everyone was happy! Whew... load off my mind. Then, a few days later the professor was talking about something and I was totally not paying attention and he turned to me "Well you have a blacklight right? Bring it in tomorrow and we could try that out!" I nearly peed myself.
I got out of it by running to walmart... but I suspect she started with a small white lie like I did... and things snowballed. Each time she was in a bind, she had to make the lie worse. Until eventually she was defending herself to an international crowd and ruining her career. Don't lie... but if you do and get caught, come clean asap. The longer you wait, the worse it will get.
I've defended myself in such cases when I was in college and the local police were making a significant amount of their revenue through frivolous tickets. They brought in witnesses and everything in one case. Every time the city was extremely angry with me for taking it to court. The judge was ok with it however. The police officers were literally rolling their eyes in court. I asked one if she needed eye drops and the judge snickered.
The problem with parking tickets is they are usually based on Ordinances which, in the USA, are often passed by committee... sometimes even by the local law enforcement and can be changed on a whim. In one case, they'd required a permit for certain parking spots which I had, but a few days before I got my ticket they "revoked" permit parking in that area with no notification or indication. I lost that case with the judges sympathy. The fines are too small to get a real lawyer for, but taking them to court at least deprives local government of any profit. Also, it's fun to play Perry Mason and give a cops a hard time on the stand. Just be respectful and don't argue with the judge. If the judge appears not to like you and/or be a "hanging judge" just sit back and lose. You might make things worse by being talking too much. In my experience though, you wont run into much of that in traffic court. Familly court however? Those judges, understandably, have a bad day, ever day... Just nod and agree with them.
That's awesome. Good work Ben Wellington. It's amazing what the "sort" button in Excel can do.
Psst. Catalyst is indeed still shipped with ATI drivers, especially proprietary ones in Linux, and I think you misunderstood the GP was talking about how he's had shit luck with ATI but his nVidia drivers were fine.
Thanks! That's exactly what I was saying. :-)
Glad to see the FCC is focusing their efforts of the important stuff. I'd hate it if they were bothering with unimportant issues.
There are that many comment trolls that have paid for HBO?
No, we pirate cable.
I would now like to rant about you putting half your post in the subject...
...but nvidia offers far better drivers and some extra features like physx
It's more than that. NVIDIAs drivers aren't even that good. It's just that ATI's (AMDs) are just so terrible that they look good in comparison. Who the hell decided the catalyst control center was a good idea? It reminds me of some glitchy 1990s spam ladened chat program. What a joke. The drivers are so sketchy almost every game I'd play would have "STICKY: For ATI users check here first!" at the top of their support forums. Trying to get hardware acceleration to work on my linux media PC was almost impossible until I switch to NVIDIA. Stop creating new cards I can cook and egg on and fix your damned drivers. I have enough fried eggs I just want to watch a movie without spending 30min dinking around with arcane driver settings while my wife keeps asking me why we canceled cable.
Well done sir. And me with no mod points.