As you sit there right now, look down. How old is your surge surpressor? Is it within it's lifetime as specified by the manufacturer?
You have a better point than you think...
I've taken apart a lot of surge protectors, and the sad fact of the matter is, only the HOT line is protected, while neutral and ground are wired straight through, unprotected. This is true from the no-name one you bought at the $1 store, up through APC and other companies' expensive UPSes.
I've seen several computers on a surge protector damaged by lightning, and am led to believe the lack of protection on neutral and ground lines was the culprit.
And how many people have their TV and phone lines connected to a surge protector? I had a hard time finding a surge protector that even had an option for connecting coax cables.
With a plane crash, my chance of survival is hovering somewhere around 0%.
Actually there are a huge number of non-fatal airline accidents for every fatal one. There are plenty of times when an airliner skids off the runway, runs out of fuel, has severe mechanical failure, etc., where it stops mostly in-tact, and most everyone gets out alive.
On a plane, my safety is entirely in the hands of other people, who have a "random" combination of awareness and reaction time. They also have a "random" proficiency in checking the equipment (which is likely to be half-assed).
It's not random, any more that the safety of driving is random. You can chose your airline, the type of airplane, the time of day, the time of year, etc., etc. Southwest and Delta, for instance, have extremely good safety records, well ahead of any other airline.
So when it comes to my INDIVIDUAL probability of being in a crash, my driving may actually be safer than flying, when you consider the likeliness of a fatal outcome.
Do you use ultrasound equipment to determine if cracks are developing in the drive-train of your car? Do you have the car companies on speed-dial? Are you a professional and highly paid driver with strict regulations on how many hours you drive each day? Do you know what the exact weather conditions will be along your route before you set-out?
Yes, it's at least an outside possibility that you could control every variable, and make your own automotive transportation safer than some anomalous statistic about flying safety, but if you put a fraction as much effort into finding a safe airline, the statistics probably read the other way.
The per-hour death rate of driving versus flying, however, is about equal.
That's a clever analysis. I've always known the standard statistics we're given are crap. However, that conclusion still is not exactly a rebuke of air travel, as airlines travel nearly 10X faster than cars, that suggests air travel is 10X safer.
The problem I still see with that, is the fact that "driving" is an extremely nebulous term. The billions of 2 mile trips people take every day to go out to eat or shop REALLY shouldn't be compared to interstate travel, which is just about the only trips commercial airlines make. Similarly, international flights shouldn't be included in the comparison either.
I would love to get some actually fair and accurate comparisons of airline travel vs. automobiles, buses, and trains. However, even if it was done perfectly, it wouldn't be a good source of info to make decisions... The individual driving will have a drastic effect on automobile safety. Different airlines that can be select from, have drastically different safety records as well. The weather conditions, and the route taken, will drastically affect the safety of both, but in very different ways.
And finally, I have yet to be subjected to a cavity search, before being allowed to drive...
Even this study, which the AP was quick to hit the panic button about, states that your odds of dying on any given airline flight is one in 4.5 million.
They didn't interview pilots that died... They interviewed pilots that came close to having mid-air collisions. As the skies get more congested, that problem will get much more serious, and it will move from the "almost crashed" category to the "bodies in a smoking crater" category.
[...] and hardly anything on automotive safety.
Now that's just patently... ridiculously... laughably wrong.
All the road construction, all the bridges, all the snow removal, all the automotive regulations, and much of the money spent on law enforcement... it's ALL "automotive safety", and it totals hundreds of billions of dollars in the US.
My laptop uses on 20 watts while operating, so cutting out 6 watts would be quite beneficial.
Your laptop hard drive is far more efficient than desktop hard drives. There probably isn't even 6 watts to be cut from your notebook's hard drive power consumption to begin with.
There will be feedback from the chip, when it is read and that feedback is probably what is causing the problems.
That 'feedback' is really just the RFID chips reflecting the same RF energy back to the receiver.
There are several studies that show that cellphone frequencies do have an effect on the body.
You could perform a study that would "prove" that the type of car you drive decides whether you will get diabetes or not... Correlation does not show cause, and it's a sad comment on society that news organizations like to report the results of every such study, as if they mean ANYTHING at all. It's crap like that which causes people to think that certain foods are unhealthy one week, and healthy the next.
They have no idea whether it's going to kill us or not.
After a century of understanding and studying electromagnetic radiation, it seems pretty unlikely that there's something significant we don't know its effects on humans.
Can you explain how big these will need to be to produce the power to drill, excavate, dive, and transmit to an orbiter?
There is no limit. It's just a trade-off of power vs. time. Use a 1W RTG and it'll simply take FOREVER to drill to any depth.
At 620W+, Cassini's 3 (man-sized) RTGs should have more than enough power to do the job in a reasonable time-frame. What's more, if NASA's Sterling tech works, you're able to make them SRGs instead, and get 2,500W+ from the same-size/weight package. That's easily FAR more power than you need.
I'm not sure that ligher weight has anything to do with safety though.
The heavier it is, the faster it falls from the sky.
I can take a 12HP scooter and hit the same wall at 60-70MPH too.
That's because you picked a low enough speed, and a light enough object (humans) that 12HP is just as sufficient as a much more powerful engine. Since there are no speed limits in the sky, the engine power makes a world of difference.
Put a 12HP engine in this helicopter, and you won't be going very high at all.
the first inventors of powered flight fearlessly went up into the air, and nowadays we know so much about flight that it's probably safer than that first generation.
I don't recall the Wright Brothers' first plane weighing half a ton, and being powered by a 133HP engine...
Experimenting with powerful engines, allowing for heavy construction, means that any small mistake is going to be much, much more disasterous than it would have been in the old days.
RFID chips will increase exposure because the areas around the chips will be exposed to the radiation more often, when the RFID sender is held against the chip in order to read the chip.
In other words, it's the fact that someone believes you might have an RFID chip, and continually scans for it that (in your mind) causes cancer. Nothing to do with the chip, and whether it is implanted or not. In which case, there wouldn't be any statistical correlation, as those lab-rats without RFID chips get scanned just as much, and hence would be at equal risk.
Put simply, you have no idea what you're talking about.
A high-speed, link-local network is created, the file is transfered as fast as my hard drive (obviously a solid state one - this is the future) can read, and we can watch the movie in no time. Without cables.
This is a rather ignorant and VERY Microsoft-centric world-view... Use any other operating system, and you can start playing the video while it's being transferred.
If your link can't transfer the video file faster than real-time, you might have to wait until some percentage of the file has been downloaded before starting playback, but that's not very likely to be a problem. Even 802.11g should provide more than enough bandwidth for real-time transfers for high-def videos, and in the future, you'll have 802.11n or other, even faster, standards.
if you want to limit your WiFi to the inside of a building and such it might limit the range to an acceptable level outside where someone passing by on the road wont be able to pick up a wireless signal.
A very bad idea. You're likely to install it in a room with a window, which it will go through with no trouble and provide a strong signal to anyone outside, while you'll still struggle to get a signal in the next room (through a wall, not a window).
Very, very few authorities on the subject agree with you. It's only in the case of lower-case words, that the S could be confused as being part of the acronym, that the apostrophe should be used. You do have a point though, it certainly isn't the worst use of an apostrophe I've seen today...
How do you power it? Not solar. Nuclear would make a big stink with environmentalists (bringing nuclear waste on your search for life!?) if you could even *get* a nuclear powered up that far (reactors aren't small...).
This is an INCREDIBLY ignorant statement.
Any and all probes designed to go out past Mars or so are powered by nuclear sources. Sunlight gets extremely weak the further you go, and Jupiter is a LONG way out there and solar panels simply won't work. They WILL BE NUCLEAR, no matter who wants to protest. The recent Cassini and New Horizons probes were both nuclear powered.
With one single exception, such probes are NOT nuclear reactors as we have on earth, but generally RTGs. Simply plutonium-238 generating a few hundred watts of heat, and a Peltier/Seebeck device to convert the heat to electricity. Quite small, and NASA's developments with Sterling engines will make it much, much more efficient (needing even less Plutonium).
As for waste, RTGs do NOT generate long-lived waste, like the common nuclear power plants. In fact it would be terrible at generating electricity if it did. The plutonium just keeps generating heat until it is depleted. RTGs are also NOT powered by gamma emitters like nuclear reactors. That would be far too difficult to contain with the weight limits of spacecraft, and would quickly destroy the internal systems. So even if there is a catastrophic accident, it'll just be a chunk of heavy metal that happens to stay warm for a couple centuries, emitting some short-lived particles that won't even be detectable a few feet away. In fact Apollo 13's RTG is still chugging away at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean, and nobody seems to care (never mind the 1,000+ lost somewhere in Russia)... They are designed to withstand extreme forces, so even the above scenario is unlikely.
"Technology breeds crime" is not at all true, and quite the opposite of reality. Technology may open new frontiers, which may offer new criminal possibilities, but the technology itself has the opposite effect.
Telegraphs are what ended the era of the Wild West train robbers.
Encryption has eliminated the benefit of tapping into data lines, and has obsoleted messengers carrying critical information that could be easily intercepted. Unfortunately, it is the human element that has prevented its use on laptops, which would put an a end to major vector of data theft.
While printers may have made it easier to forge checks, the technology to detect forged checks (and cash) is far better now too. While you may be able to place hundreds of orders on a stolen credit card in minutes, the same technology allows the credit card companies to see that strange activity, and instantly contact the actual owner of the account.
The man doing the complaining is a criminal, and has very clear motivation for making everyone afraid of technology to push his wares. If anything has bred crime, it's changing social norms making continually lower standards acceptable.
Or maybe it just means they don't want to disable and reclaim/recycle the 20 idle/unused/abandoned IDs each person has... Or did you really think over 1 million people that read Slashdot registered for accounts (just one each)?
some corporation is going to have to go public with the details of its patent protection racket.
Pick one that has long-since gone out of business, and possibly long enough ago that many of its former owners are deceased. Or better yet, pick a company that has ALREADY faced prosecution for a similar scheme, so the details are already public record. Problem solved.
if "teh terrist" wanted to send a message like "attack now", why couldn't the message be given via a pre-arranged signal
Because then it has to be prearranged, and all the vast limitations that poses... You have a very limited amount of information you can convey, all possible messages have to be decided upon before-hand, and everyone has to remember every one of them exactly. When there's important information to convey, like someone or some place's name, you have no way to do so.
Second, if you ARE going to prearrange signals, you want them to be hiding in plain sight themselves... eg. subtly moving some small object in a high-traffic public place. Sending a photo some place leaves quite a digital trail, that isn't hard to pick up on.
Slashdot Mirror
They do better, but not by a lot.
Chips consume a lot of power.
It's really pretty easy to cut power consumption if you're willing to drastically cut performance as well.
You have a better point than you think...
I've taken apart a lot of surge protectors, and the sad fact of the matter is, only the HOT line is protected, while neutral and ground are wired straight through, unprotected. This is true from the no-name one you bought at the $1 store, up through APC and other companies' expensive UPSes.
I've seen several computers on a surge protector damaged by lightning, and am led to believe the lack of protection on neutral and ground lines was the culprit.
And how many people have their TV and phone lines connected to a surge protector? I had a hard time finding a surge protector that even had an option for connecting coax cables.
Actually there are a huge number of non-fatal airline accidents for every fatal one. There are plenty of times when an airliner skids off the runway, runs out of fuel, has severe mechanical failure, etc., where it stops mostly in-tact, and most everyone gets out alive.
It's not random, any more that the safety of driving is random. You can chose your airline, the type of airplane, the time of day, the time of year, etc., etc. Southwest and Delta, for instance, have extremely good safety records, well ahead of any other airline.
Do you use ultrasound equipment to determine if cracks are developing in the drive-train of your car? Do you have the car companies on speed-dial? Are you a professional and highly paid driver with strict regulations on how many hours you drive each day? Do you know what the exact weather conditions will be along your route before you set-out?
Yes, it's at least an outside possibility that you could control every variable, and make your own automotive transportation safer than some anomalous statistic about flying safety, but if you put a fraction as much effort into finding a safe airline, the statistics probably read the other way.
That's a clever analysis. I've always known the standard statistics we're given are crap. However, that conclusion still is not exactly a rebuke of air travel, as airlines travel nearly 10X faster than cars, that suggests air travel is 10X safer.
The problem I still see with that, is the fact that "driving" is an extremely nebulous term. The billions of 2 mile trips people take every day to go out to eat or shop REALLY shouldn't be compared to interstate travel, which is just about the only trips commercial airlines make. Similarly, international flights shouldn't be included in the comparison either.
I would love to get some actually fair and accurate comparisons of airline travel vs. automobiles, buses, and trains. However, even if it was done perfectly, it wouldn't be a good source of info to make decisions... The individual driving will have a drastic effect on automobile safety. Different airlines that can be select from, have drastically different safety records as well. The weather conditions, and the route taken, will drastically affect the safety of both, but in very different ways.
And finally, I have yet to be subjected to a cavity search, before being allowed to drive...
They didn't interview pilots that died... They interviewed pilots that came close to having mid-air collisions. As the skies get more congested, that problem will get much more serious, and it will move from the "almost crashed" category to the "bodies in a smoking crater" category.
Now that's just patently... ridiculously... laughably wrong.
All the road construction, all the bridges, all the snow removal, all the automotive regulations, and much of the money spent on law enforcement... it's ALL "automotive safety", and it totals hundreds of billions of dollars in the US.
Your laptop hard drive is far more efficient than desktop hard drives. There probably isn't even 6 watts to be cut from your notebook's hard drive power consumption to begin with.
That 'feedback' is really just the RFID chips reflecting the same RF energy back to the receiver.
You could perform a study that would "prove" that the type of car you drive decides whether you will get diabetes or not... Correlation does not show cause, and it's a sad comment on society that news organizations like to report the results of every such study, as if they mean ANYTHING at all. It's crap like that which causes people to think that certain foods are unhealthy one week, and healthy the next.
After a century of understanding and studying electromagnetic radiation, it seems pretty unlikely that there's something significant we don't know its effects on humans.
There is no limit. It's just a trade-off of power vs. time. Use a 1W RTG and it'll simply take FOREVER to drill to any depth.
At 620W+, Cassini's 3 (man-sized) RTGs should have more than enough power to do the job in a reasonable time-frame. What's more, if NASA's Sterling tech works, you're able to make them SRGs instead, and get 2,500W+ from the same-size/weight package. That's easily FAR more power than you need.
Helicopters don't fly in a vacuum.
Helicopters don't fly in a vacuum.
The heavier it is, the faster it falls from the sky.
That's because you picked a low enough speed, and a light enough object (humans) that 12HP is just as sufficient as a much more powerful engine. Since there are no speed limits in the sky, the engine power makes a world of difference.
Put a 12HP engine in this helicopter, and you won't be going very high at all.
I don't recall the Wright Brothers' first plane weighing half a ton, and being powered by a 133HP engine...
Experimenting with powerful engines, allowing for heavy construction, means that any small mistake is going to be much, much more disasterous than it would have been in the old days.
I much prefer the first model... With a maximum altitude of 7 feet, boy will flying over a crowded market make for a great video.
In other words, it's the fact that someone believes you might have an RFID chip, and continually scans for it that (in your mind) causes cancer. Nothing to do with the chip, and whether it is implanted or not. In which case, there wouldn't be any statistical correlation, as those lab-rats without RFID chips get scanned just as much, and hence would be at equal risk.
Put simply, you have no idea what you're talking about.
This is a rather ignorant and VERY Microsoft-centric world-view... Use any other operating system, and you can start playing the video while it's being transferred.
If your link can't transfer the video file faster than real-time, you might have to wait until some percentage of the file has been downloaded before starting playback, but that's not very likely to be a problem. Even 802.11g should provide more than enough bandwidth for real-time transfers for high-def videos, and in the future, you'll have 802.11n or other, even faster, standards.
A very bad idea. You're likely to install it in a room with a window, which it will go through with no trouble and provide a strong signal to anyone outside, while you'll still struggle to get a signal in the next room (through a wall, not a window).
At 60GHz? Not if there's any... you know... MOISTURE in the air around you.
Very, very few authorities on the subject agree with you. It's only in the case of lower-case words, that the S could be confused as being part of the acronym, that the apostrophe should be used. You do have a point though, it certainly isn't the worst use of an apostrophe I've seen today...
This is an INCREDIBLY ignorant statement.
Any and all probes designed to go out past Mars or so are powered by nuclear sources. Sunlight gets extremely weak the further you go, and Jupiter is a LONG way out there and solar panels simply won't work. They WILL BE NUCLEAR, no matter who wants to protest. The recent Cassini and New Horizons probes were both nuclear powered.
With one single exception, such probes are NOT nuclear reactors as we have on earth, but generally RTGs. Simply plutonium-238 generating a few hundred watts of heat, and a Peltier/Seebeck device to convert the heat to electricity. Quite small, and NASA's developments with Sterling engines will make it much, much more efficient (needing even less Plutonium).
As for waste, RTGs do NOT generate long-lived waste, like the common nuclear power plants. In fact it would be terrible at generating electricity if it did. The plutonium just keeps generating heat until it is depleted.
RTGs are also NOT powered by gamma emitters like nuclear reactors. That would be far too difficult to contain with the weight limits of spacecraft, and would quickly destroy the internal systems. So even if there is a catastrophic accident, it'll just be a chunk of heavy metal that happens to stay warm for a couple centuries, emitting some short-lived particles that won't even be detectable a few feet away.
In fact Apollo 13's RTG is still chugging away at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean, and nobody seems to care (never mind the 1,000+ lost somewhere in Russia)... They are designed to withstand extreme forces, so even the above scenario is unlikely.
"Technology breeds crime" is not at all true, and quite the opposite of reality. Technology may open new frontiers, which may offer new criminal possibilities, but the technology itself has the opposite effect.
Telegraphs are what ended the era of the Wild West train robbers.
Encryption has eliminated the benefit of tapping into data lines, and has obsoleted messengers carrying critical information that could be easily intercepted. Unfortunately, it is the human element that has prevented its use on laptops, which would put an a end to major vector of data theft.
While printers may have made it easier to forge checks, the technology to detect forged checks (and cash) is far better now too. While you may be able to place hundreds of orders on a stolen credit card in minutes, the same technology allows the credit card companies to see that strange activity, and instantly contact the actual owner of the account.
The man doing the complaining is a criminal, and has very clear motivation for making everyone afraid of technology to push his wares. If anything has bred crime, it's changing social norms making continually lower standards acceptable.
An apostrophe mean's, "Lookout! Here come's an S!"
Or maybe it just means they don't want to disable and reclaim/recycle the 20 idle/unused/abandoned IDs each person has... Or did you really think over 1 million people that read Slashdot registered for accounts (just one each)?
What's you're alternative? US Government cell-phone service? Free-for-all access, and hope your signal is powerful enough to get through the noise?
Your complaining isn't "Insightful" by any stretch of the imagination.
Pick one that has long-since gone out of business, and possibly long enough ago that many of its former owners are deceased. Or better yet, pick a company that has ALREADY faced prosecution for a similar scheme, so the details are already public record. Problem solved.
Because then it has to be prearranged, and all the vast limitations that poses... You have a very limited amount of information you can convey, all possible messages have to be decided upon before-hand, and everyone has to remember every one of them exactly. When there's important information to convey, like someone or some place's name, you have no way to do so.
Second, if you ARE going to prearrange signals, you want them to be hiding in plain sight themselves... eg. subtly moving some small object in a high-traffic public place. Sending a photo some place leaves quite a digital trail, that isn't hard to pick up on.