And it had nothing to do with taking out a military nuisance for Israel.
Different groups had different ways to benefit off of a war in Iraq. The far right social conservatives are always hopeful that a mideast war can grease the skids for armagheddon. Halliburton made wonderful profits from supplying war related activities. Wars also serve as a conservative economic stimulus package.
But yeah, in order to settle an old family fight, we were going to go into Iraq to settle that score. Everything else was just gravy to some folks.
By my calculation, the ~1g of lithium in a common phone, if converted to tritium, could generate enough electricity to power a typical household for several years. So the cost of the lithium itself is negligible.
The costs involved with gathering and handling the tritium would be a different story.
What percentage efficiency of conversion are you using?
Fusion produces less waste than fission, and it is shorter lived. But it doesn't help with the political problems. The Greenies and NIMBYs are going to oppose fusion just like they oppose fission.
As I've noted before, one doesn't need to be a Greenie, and one might understandably become a Nimby when they watch what happens to some of these completely safe reactors when things go wrong.
In short, I don't have a problem with Nuclear energy power generation. We can do this.
What I have a huge problem with is trusting that the humans in the loop are going to build something safe. The more dense the energy, the worse the problems when a human induced problem lets that genie out of the bottle.
What did we save money on? What corners did we cut to save money or meet the schedule? Who might we have paid off in order to pass a safety inspection?
I know people. I know energy. I know what happens when you put a shitload of energy in the hands of normal humans with their normal traits.
My first thought was "did they actually just explain to slashdotters what a fusion reactor is??"
I don't know how it was in the bad old days, but I'm pretty certain that a lot of present day Slashdotters need much of this stuff explained to them. Just looking at the conversations about Samsung phone batteries shows a remarkable lack of knowledge by many.
And really, that's okay. None of us were born knowing everything - even though I've been accused of being a "know-it-all". But if there is something I don't know, I have this excellent tool for learning that I'm typing on right now.
It is a very new thing to many readers because so little investment has been put in that development has taken decades.
Now let me get this straight. You are saying that Fusion generated power is a 100% certainty, and the only reason we aren't enjoying it right now in our homes is because not enough money has been put into it?
Well, I'm no dummy in such matters, but I'm not convinced that the bootstrap scheme is going to ever work. Not cynicism, or pessimism, but just looking at the positive feedback aspect of trying to sustain and contain fusion, and have leftover energy available to generate power.
The project is real enough and it's exciting, as in, it's a fusion design concept that has not yet hit the wall.
Give it time. I'll save getting excited until when they actually generate some surplus power with fusion. Until then it is a pulling yourself up by your bootstraps device.
The problem is not so much fusion, or fission, it's that there are other forms of energy too. And while fusion reactor designs have increased in cost three or four orders of magnitude in the last 50 years, in that same period PV has decreased three orders of magnitude.
So much this! And one interesting reason is that fusion/fission is relying on an old paradigm, that you have to generate a shitload of electricity at a centralized location, feed it through lossy lines and transformers, and it eventually arrives at your house. This involves a grid network of power generation and control, and all of the vulnerabilities thereof.
My guess is that legacy power needs will start to flatten out and possibly even decrease, as the renewables allow more and more people to go off-grid. If you build a house in an area that isn't in a development already served by grid power, solar is already cheaper by a mile than paying for the Utility company to run a line of poles to your place.
Yeah, I'm pissed off! Where's all the riches and oil we were supposed to get from Iraq after we invaded?
Not certain if you are poe-ing or not, since you seem to have an obsession with those left wingers you always rail about, but you have to forget the hearts and minds, and the WMD's, and the oil, and allowing some folks to believe that old Saddam was behind the twin tower attacks.
That's all so many different things that it gets pretty complicated.
Occam's razor cuts it down to the simplest and most credible reason. We were never going to get anything from the War in Iraq, or at least it didn't matter if we did. It was settling a Bush family score.
So a blanket of Lithium is added to the vessel, and the neutron hitting it, produce tritium and helium. That is where the "tritium is bred from lithium, so essentially free" from parent post come from.
I had no idea that lithium was free.
I guess that since you add yeast to a sugary concoction, and it pisses out alcohol, that ethanol is free too. Who knew?
I know you and Slashdot have a fetish for removable batteries but is dishonest to pain this as a sealed battery problem.
It has not one single solitary little bitty thing to do with a battery that is sealed in place, versus a removable battery. Where on earth did you ever in a million years get that idea that I was arguing that?
It has 100 percent, not a shadow of a doubt, irrefutable laws of physics, total to do with a battery compartment that is simply and 100 percent clearly - too small.
So unless the laws of physics make replaceable batteries somehow not expand when heated, not expand when charged, simply not expand - a replaceable battery will do exactly the same thing when placed in a compartment that is not capable of accomodating it's laws of physics bound expansion.
Don't imply that there' some vast conspiracy to keep better products away from the public. The consumers speak, and they want thinner phones with more battery life.
And they also want perpetual motion and to heat their entire house on 2 tea candles and a clay flower pot. You can't always get what you want.
You cant make "Want" alter the laws of physics. You can't just keep packing more power into smaller spaces and have no limits. You need to go back and learn just what chemistry is involved here. There are some real limits here. First of course is squeezing more power out of a battery. But as we do that, we can get to a point where a battery can be pretty dangerous. Li makes a nice powerful battery, but doesn't suffer fools gladly. Lithium isn't as nasty as Sodium or Potassium, but it's like Mr Bigglesworth - you don't want it to get angry with ya.
The electronics can be made less power hungry, there is some wiggle room there yet. But the amount of power needed to connect to a cell phone tower isn't changing all that much, and might actually increase as we end up with an overall noise floor increase with all of the wireless devices of all kinds in use.
You are a child, give your phone back to your mommy. You're not old enough or responsible enough now.
This is Slashdot, where somehow being a flaming asshole - how appropriate the term - makes a person a man of the highest character. I suspect - hope actually - that AC is just trolling, as it takes a special kind of stupid to actually want to hang on to a phone that has such a nasty design flaw.
It's part and parcel with all lithium ion batteries that the charge circuitry *must& limit charging or the thing explodes. That's how these chargers work.
No on your no. Limiting charge to 60 percent is exactly what you would expect on a phone that has a battery compartment that is too small for the battery in it. They were desperately trying to eliminate battery expansion and compression within it's compartment. Unfortunately, that didn't work.
At one point, I felt a little badly for Samsung, but after the facts came out, this was engineers bowing to marketing pressure, and marketing has seldom been able to break the laws of physics.
There is an engineering term called a "Blivet". Its defined as trying to put 10 pounds of shit into a 5 pound container. the Note 7 phone was a Blivet.
I never understood their decisions...why disable the phone when you can redesign the battery to not blow up and just swap batteries? I mean the battery is a removable part.
Apparently the battery is too big physically for the space allotted for it. Batteries expand when heated/charged. A teardown revealed this https://www.cnet.com/news/gala... (beware, the assholes have an autoplaying video.
This is all redolent of the marketing issues I've often spoke about with phones. "Users need longer battery life! Users need thinner phones! Users need wireless charging!"
Size and battery capacity are opposing traits. And while compressing a Li based battery of high energy density is never a good idea, they designed a phone that did just that. reducing the margin of error to no margin of error, and when you get a positive feedback loop like a battery expanding with nowhere to go, yet getting hotter and expanding more, you get the Galaxy Note 7 phone.
So if they did replace the battery with a new one of proper size, it would not have as much capacity, so marketing would be pissed.
He does make a good point though. Holding the corporation liable for outright criminal action, but not the individuals who actually give the order, means there is little reason not to take the risk and break the law.
I find myself in the cynical position of agreeing with both of you, yet understanding that the situation has become much worse for the idea of holding the "gods of the universe" in any way accountable. It isn't a fine, it's a cost of doing business. An expense against profit.
And with the encouragement we've given them recently, with a whacked-ass stunt of a company threatening to move 2000 jobs overseas, and gets a nice tax break for "only" moving over half of them overseas and keeping 800 some here in the US - and this is something that is bragged about as a positive change?
Christ - I find myself in the weird position of agreeing with Sarah Palin that it's crony capitalism, blessed and approved by the people who will be it's biggest victims.
I really enjoy the ritual of going to the theater. Something about the process of going somewhere specifically to see a film, participating in a large group of people lining up and filing in, then the lights lower and the film is going. Nothing can stop it, no pausing for a pee break or for some douche to explain the backstory or argue some fine point. I think I will always enjoy the whole inconvenient procedure.
And of course, most movies are made for 14 year old boys or 12 year old girls.
THIS! Either fifth grader blow up the universe stuff, or some young lady gains super powers, and runs around beating the shit out of men. Or how about another never exciting rework of comic book stars or the always stupid video game to movie.
When will we start cracking down and throwing some CEO's in prison for theft for these sorts of practices? Instead they get to walk away with a declaration of no guilt, write off the payback and go on about their business: figuring out the next scam.
Um, I believe that this situation is not heading in the direction you want it to go.
This is peanuts. Assuming they hit each consumer for $9.99/mo. and 2.7M victims, that $88M would be collected in 4 months. They did this for years. Maybe decades. How is this punishment? There needs to be a couple of zeros added on to the end of that fine.
Back of th envelope calculations show the lawyers collecting some 58 million, leaving 30 million for the victims, whichcomes out to an earth shattering 11 dollars per victim.
So ATT users, you gonna open up an offshore account with your newly gained wealth?
I stopped when the yuppies started using golf umbrellas that took up the entire sidewalk.
Ahhh, a fellow Seattleite? Are you freezing yer knobs off this morning too? It was 17 degrees out when I woke up.:(
I'm in Pennsylvania. Our Yuppies specialize in umbrellas, and baby carriages that are at least 4 feet across.
17 in Seattle? Damn, that's off. Every time I was there is wasn't hot, but it wasn't cold, either. Though there was the one time it was clear every day from September through November when I was there. It's low 40's here, not too bad for December.
"Troll" Such puerile little crybabies with mod points...
I think that a lot of people with mod points are just searching pages for the word "fake" then modding the post down.
I've made obvious jokes with the word fake in it that get modded as troll. And fustakrakich's post was obviously in that middle ground between a joke and insightful, and it gets the same treatment.
Perhaps the moderators would be better used to mod down the anal sex haiku and the endless screwed your mother quips.
Slashdot Mirror
And it had nothing to do with taking out a military nuisance for Israel.
Different groups had different ways to benefit off of a war in Iraq. The far right social conservatives are always hopeful that a mideast war can grease the skids for armagheddon. Halliburton made wonderful profits from supplying war related activities. Wars also serve as a conservative economic stimulus package.
But yeah, in order to settle an old family fight, we were going to go into Iraq to settle that score. Everything else was just gravy to some folks.
By my calculation, the ~1g of lithium in a common phone, if converted to tritium, could generate enough electricity to power a typical household for several years. So the cost of the lithium itself is negligible.
The costs involved with gathering and handling the tritium would be a different story.
What percentage efficiency of conversion are you using?
Greenie here.
Then what are you doing on an online forum for intelligent people who are passioned about technology?
If you ask that question, then you aren't nearly as intelligent as you would presume to be.
"passioned", that sounds kinda dirty.
it still produces lots of radioactive waste.
Fusion produces less waste than fission, and it is shorter lived. But it doesn't help with the political problems. The Greenies and NIMBYs are going to oppose fusion just like they oppose fission.
As I've noted before, one doesn't need to be a Greenie, and one might understandably become a Nimby when they watch what happens to some of these completely safe reactors when things go wrong.
In short, I don't have a problem with Nuclear energy power generation. We can do this.
What I have a huge problem with is trusting that the humans in the loop are going to build something safe. The more dense the energy, the worse the problems when a human induced problem lets that genie out of the bottle.
What did we save money on? What corners did we cut to save money or meet the schedule? Who might we have paid off in order to pass a safety inspection?
I know people. I know energy. I know what happens when you put a shitload of energy in the hands of normal humans with their normal traits.
I know, right?
My first thought was "did they actually just explain to slashdotters what a fusion reactor is??"
I don't know how it was in the bad old days, but I'm pretty certain that a lot of present day Slashdotters need much of this stuff explained to them. Just looking at the conversations about Samsung phone batteries shows a remarkable lack of knowledge by many.
And really, that's okay. None of us were born knowing everything - even though I've been accused of being a "know-it-all". But if there is something I don't know, I have this excellent tool for learning that I'm typing on right now.
It is a very new thing to many readers because so little investment has been put in that development has taken decades.
Now let me get this straight. You are saying that Fusion generated power is a 100% certainty, and the only reason we aren't enjoying it right now in our homes is because not enough money has been put into it?
Well, I'm no dummy in such matters, but I'm not convinced that the bootstrap scheme is going to ever work. Not cynicism, or pessimism, but just looking at the positive feedback aspect of trying to sustain and contain fusion, and have leftover energy available to generate power.
The project is real enough and it's exciting, as in, it's a fusion design concept that has not yet hit the wall.
Give it time. I'll save getting excited until when they actually generate some surplus power with fusion. Until then it is a pulling yourself up by your bootstraps device.
The problem is not so much fusion, or fission, it's that there are other forms of energy too. And while fusion reactor designs have increased in cost three or four orders of magnitude in the last 50 years, in that same period PV has decreased three orders of magnitude.
So much this! And one interesting reason is that fusion/fission is relying on an old paradigm, that you have to generate a shitload of electricity at a centralized location, feed it through lossy lines and transformers, and it eventually arrives at your house. This involves a grid network of power generation and control, and all of the vulnerabilities thereof.
My guess is that legacy power needs will start to flatten out and possibly even decrease, as the renewables allow more and more people to go off-grid. If you build a house in an area that isn't in a development already served by grid power, solar is already cheaper by a mile than paying for the Utility company to run a line of poles to your place.
Yeah, I'm pissed off! Where's all the riches and oil we were supposed to get from Iraq after we invaded?
Not certain if you are poe-ing or not, since you seem to have an obsession with those left wingers you always rail about, but you have to forget the hearts and minds, and the WMD's, and the oil, and allowing some folks to believe that old Saddam was behind the twin tower attacks.
That's all so many different things that it gets pretty complicated.
Occam's razor cuts it down to the simplest and most credible reason. We were never going to get anything from the War in Iraq, or at least it didn't matter if we did. It was settling a Bush family score.
So a blanket of Lithium is added to the vessel, and the neutron hitting it, produce tritium and helium. That is where the "tritium is bred from lithium, so essentially free" from parent post come from.
I had no idea that lithium was free.
I guess that since you add yeast to a sugary concoction, and it pisses out alcohol, that ethanol is free too. Who knew?
Greed is like how you are hoarding your paragraph returns.
So I guess it's been live for about ten months now?
I know you and Slashdot have a fetish for removable batteries but is dishonest to pain this as a sealed battery problem.
It has not one single solitary little bitty thing to do with a battery that is sealed in place, versus a removable battery. Where on earth did you ever in a million years get that idea that I was arguing that?
It has 100 percent, not a shadow of a doubt, irrefutable laws of physics, total to do with a battery compartment that is simply and 100 percent clearly - too small.
So unless the laws of physics make replaceable batteries somehow not expand when heated, not expand when charged, simply not expand - a replaceable battery will do exactly the same thing when placed in a compartment that is not capable of accomodating it's laws of physics bound expansion.
Don't imply that there' some vast conspiracy to keep better products away from the public. The consumers speak, and they want thinner phones with more battery life.
And they also want perpetual motion and to heat their entire house on 2 tea candles and a clay flower pot. You can't always get what you want.
You cant make "Want" alter the laws of physics. You can't just keep packing more power into smaller spaces and have no limits. You need to go back and learn just what chemistry is involved here. There are some real limits here. First of course is squeezing more power out of a battery. But as we do that, we can get to a point where a battery can be pretty dangerous. Li makes a nice powerful battery, but doesn't suffer fools gladly. Lithium isn't as nasty as Sodium or Potassium, but it's like Mr Bigglesworth - you don't want it to get angry with ya.
The electronics can be made less power hungry, there is some wiggle room there yet. But the amount of power needed to connect to a cell phone tower isn't changing all that much, and might actually increase as we end up with an overall noise floor increase with all of the wireless devices of all kinds in use.
You are a child, give your phone back to your mommy. You're not old enough or responsible enough now.
This is Slashdot, where somehow being a flaming asshole - how appropriate the term - makes a person a man of the highest character. I suspect - hope actually - that AC is just trolling, as it takes a special kind of stupid to actually want to hang on to a phone that has such a nasty design flaw.
No?
It's part and parcel with all lithium ion batteries that the charge circuitry *must& limit charging or the thing explodes. That's how these chargers work.
No on your no. Limiting charge to 60 percent is exactly what you would expect on a phone that has a battery compartment that is too small for the battery in it. They were desperately trying to eliminate battery expansion and compression within it's compartment. Unfortunately, that didn't work.
At one point, I felt a little badly for Samsung, but after the facts came out, this was engineers bowing to marketing pressure, and marketing has seldom been able to break the laws of physics.
There is an engineering term called a "Blivet". Its defined as trying to put 10 pounds of shit into a 5 pound container. the Note 7 phone was a Blivet.
I never understood their decisions...why disable the phone when you can redesign the battery to not blow up and just swap batteries? I mean the battery is a removable part.
Apparently the battery is too big physically for the space allotted for it. Batteries expand when heated/charged. A teardown revealed this https://www.cnet.com/news/gala... (beware, the assholes have an autoplaying video.
This is all redolent of the marketing issues I've often spoke about with phones. "Users need longer battery life! Users need thinner phones! Users need wireless charging!"
Size and battery capacity are opposing traits. And while compressing a Li based battery of high energy density is never a good idea, they designed a phone that did just that. reducing the margin of error to no margin of error, and when you get a positive feedback loop like a battery expanding with nowhere to go, yet getting hotter and expanding more, you get the Galaxy Note 7 phone.
So if they did replace the battery with a new one of proper size, it would not have as much capacity, so marketing would be pissed.
He does make a good point though. Holding the corporation liable for outright criminal action, but not the individuals who actually give the order, means there is little reason not to take the risk and break the law.
I find myself in the cynical position of agreeing with both of you, yet understanding that the situation has become much worse for the idea of holding the "gods of the universe" in any way accountable. It isn't a fine, it's a cost of doing business. An expense against profit.
And with the encouragement we've given them recently, with a whacked-ass stunt of a company threatening to move 2000 jobs overseas, and gets a nice tax break for "only" moving over half of them overseas and keeping 800 some here in the US - and this is something that is bragged about as a positive change?
Christ - I find myself in the weird position of agreeing with Sarah Palin that it's crony capitalism, blessed and approved by the people who will be it's biggest victims.
I really enjoy the ritual of going to the theater. Something about the process of going somewhere specifically to see a film, participating in a large group of people lining up and filing in, then the lights lower and the film is going. Nothing can stop it, no pausing for a pee break or for some douche to explain the backstory or argue some fine point. I think I will always enjoy the whole inconvenient procedure.
You are part of a shrinking culture.
And of course, most movies are made for 14 year old boys or 12 year old girls.
THIS! Either fifth grader blow up the universe stuff, or some young lady gains super powers, and runs around beating the shit out of men. Or how about another never exciting rework of comic book stars or the always stupid video game to movie.
Start making intelligent movies that aren't the third version of an older one, and we can talk. Otherwise I'll keep my money.
When will we start cracking down and throwing some CEO's in prison for theft for these sorts of practices? Instead they get to walk away with a declaration of no guilt, write off the payback and go on about their business: figuring out the next scam.
Um, I believe that this situation is not heading in the direction you want it to go.
This is peanuts. Assuming they hit each consumer for $9.99/mo. and 2.7M victims, that $88M would be collected in 4 months. They did this for years. Maybe decades. How is this punishment? There needs to be a couple of zeros added on to the end of that fine.
Back of th envelope calculations show the lawyers collecting some 58 million, leaving 30 million for the victims, whichcomes out to an earth shattering 11 dollars per victim.
So ATT users, you gonna open up an offshore account with your newly gained wealth?
They're listening. They're learning. They're coming.
They're at least breathing pretty damn hard.
I stopped when the yuppies started using golf umbrellas that took up the entire sidewalk.
Ahhh, a fellow Seattleite? Are you freezing yer knobs off this morning too? It was 17 degrees out when I woke up. :(
I'm in Pennsylvania. Our Yuppies specialize in umbrellas, and baby carriages that are at least 4 feet across.
17 in Seattle? Damn, that's off. Every time I was there is wasn't hot, but it wasn't cold, either. Though there was the one time it was clear every day from September through November when I was there. It's low 40's here, not too bad for December.
"Troll" Such puerile little crybabies with mod points...
I think that a lot of people with mod points are just searching pages for the word "fake" then modding the post down.
I've made obvious jokes with the word fake in it that get modded as troll. And fustakrakich's post was obviously in that middle ground between a joke and insightful, and it gets the same treatment.
Perhaps the moderators would be better used to mod down the anal sex haiku and the endless screwed your mother quips.
But then - that's none of my business.