The answer to this problem, and also to the problem of grid failure due to extreme weather, is to decentralize power production.
Won't help AT ALL.
If you've got a solar panel on your roof, you'll always have power, of course... But your neighbors will still be in the dark, even if you have enough power to supply a few of them. Grid-tied systems MUST have safety circuitry which shuts down if the grid is dark... That's mainly so that your inverter doesn't fry some unsuspecting line workers fixing a downed line that SHOULD be off. But even if that wasn't the case, your puny rooftop PV provides so little power that you simply can't fulfill the entire needs, and even in an area packed with PVs, others would be getting incredibly low voltage coming in, and destroying any appliances unlucky enough to be turned on.
Without a power plant in every neighborhood (which doesn't work well for manyfold reasons) that can provide full peak power needs entirely on it's own, distributed generation will NOT solve this problem.
I've always suggested making the grid slightly smarter, so that it will respond to voltage drops by automatically cutting off sections of the grid, neighborhood by neighborhood. That would prevent sudden power events from destroying generating stations. It would ensure that power failures would remain localized, and not affect entire time-zones for weeks. And these changes would make it far quicker and easier to recover from failures, as a much lesser amount of power (and therefore, coordination) is needed to restart service.
But since no power grid will EVER have 100% reliability, most everyone should invest in at least a $100 engine/generator (the key capacity metric is whether it can power your refrigerator). In most areas of the country, it will sit around gathering dust for a few years, then the week you need it, it will suddenly pay for itself several times over. This goes DOUBLE or TRIPLE for businesses that serve large numbers of people, like gas stations, office buildings (see: elevators), cell tower sites, etc.
Years ago, when everybody had a feature phone that couldn't connect to WiFi, OpenBTS would have been interesting. But now, every smartphone can connect to high-speed WiFi and run a VoIP app.
OpenBTS doesn't do the connectivity back to the rest of the world... "The kind folks at the Burning Man NOC provide us our Internet connectivity." Those are the guys we should hear from. The rest is just a matter of putting a dozen $40 DD-WRT routers on poles, acting as bridges, or in a mesh routing configuration, and everyone is set. All the cellular work is a waste, unless you really want to start manufacturing cellular base stations to compete with Siemens, Huawai, etc.
It makes some sense... If Amazon has enough Kindles out there scarfing down content, they might be able to save a lot of money by having their own wireless data service comparable to the nation-wide cellular service. Making the hardware, they can stick in whatever kind of proprietary radios they want, and then they'll have a large installed base of potential customers that only need to click the button to signs-up for service. And they've got lots of content in their walled-garden to fill those invisible series of tubes as well.
They've obviously got a partner with enough spectrum. And telcos like Sprint are actively soliciting rental space on their cell towers, so Amazon doesn't even need to do the hard part. They could have service up and running in a few big cities in just weeks.
They excelled in maintaining backwards compatibility with BINARY legacy applications coded with all kinds of brutal behaviours under the hood.
They sure TRIED, and recognized the benefits, but they certainly didn't excel. I knew every new version of Windows was going to break a modest number of apps I'd been using, and would need to find more modern alternatives.
Some apps held up just fine, many did not. First specific example that comes to mind is Netscape Navigator... Windows 98 managed to make the damn thing segfault rather than start-up, and downloading the new version through a dial-up modem was unpleasant.
with an OS that was still suffering from first-gen problems.
Microsoft has been developing Windows CE since 1996. Windows Phone is hardly a first-gen product. I've seen Windows CE-powered smart phones around for a LONG time (and everybody hated them). Microsoft has ZERO excuse for being run over by iPhone and Android.
the main difference between Bill and Steve on recent issues was that Bill resigned to the fact that they were already too late on things like music players and phones and he wouldn't have even tried getting in.
Microsoft was one of the earliest forces in PDAs, smartphones, and tablets. They had very early projects to develop the technology, they knew it was coming, but no amount of a lead could get their foot in the door. Their offerings were just such committee-designed crap that nobody wanted it. Microsoft failed miserably at coming up with anything new or innovating, so here they are, today, high-tech roadkill.
WinCE dates back to 1996 and they were just about giving it away. Up until recently, they were nearly the only recognizable name in the PDA/Smartphone/tablet space, so EVERYTHING was running WinCE, no matter how hard you looked for something else. They had EVERY advantage, and squandered it all.
I can't really blame them for missing the MP3 boat... That's hardware, and Microsoft doesn't do hardware. That said, playing MP3s (and Oggs) and low-res videos was one of the first killer-apps for WinCE PDAs. It's amazing that they never put together a decent media player for the platform (ala iTunes), nor developed good power management for such purposes, nor pushed manufacturers to build-in multimedia features that might have led to something with a CompactFlash hard drive that pre-dated the iPod. I guess Microsoft saw portable devices as gadgets that wouldn't impact their big profitable PC market, so they didn't put hardly any effort behind it.
even with all the rules and regulations in the world, there will be 10 deaths a year due to 10 guys who think they are super men, and doesn't need that safety equipment and will do their job without it, no matter how much it is enforced.
Except one of the ten had his harness clipped on, but to a weak part of the structure that broke when he slipped... Inadequate training killed him.
And installing proper safety gear on the towers could completely eliminate any slowdowns, so there'd be no reason NOT to be secured:
Care to explain how a 9V battery can kill someone, other than by trying to ingest it?
If you have you tongue on one contact, and the other side touches your lip, you've got a much longer circuit than just across your tongue. Your circulatory system being what it is, the shortest path in that instance may go right through your brain... dead.
Most commonly, you are supposed to announce when you hook in, and one of your wire crew should tug on the primary and backup lines to make sure both are attached
Of course that wouldn't work with a tower, because you have to reconnect your harness several times through the climb and decent.
IMHO, it's a pretty simple problem to fix. There are sliding rail systems that would eliminate the time, hassle, and DANGER of ever having to disconnect your safety line:
But sadly, they are making the towers as cheap as possible, sacrificing obvious safety rather than a fairly minor expense that would obviously save MANY lives.
If you are eating a well-balanced diet of 2000 kcal/day, and you go on a calorie restriction diet that lowers that to 1500 kcal/day but now you are eating shitty meals with lots of refined carbs and sugars, you will get fat.
That's entirely impossible, and utter nonsense. A calorie is THE measure of how much energy food has, and cutting it down below the baseline of WHAT YOU NEED will NEVER result in any (non-water) weight gain.
The difference in the digestibility of different foods is NOWHERE NEAR as dramatic as you imagine it to be.
Not all diets involve calorie restrictions.
Yes they do. Some are explicit (measuring your food), and some are implicit ("You can eat all the SALAD you want!"), but ALL are intended to reduce your calorie consumption.
Back then the USA was riding high after the cold war and the worst that the president did was have an affair. Or raise taxes after promising not to. Or have an ill-conceived tax reform. Or just kinda not get much done.
Good call... NOTHING BAD EVER HAPPENED BEFORE GW BUSH.
Like Iran Contra, Keating Five/Savings and Loan Scandal, etc. Those didn't happen.
Nothing we're talking about here is affecting EVERYONE. It's affecting the population as a whole, on a STATISTICAL level. That doesn't imply anything whatsoever about any given individual.
Not entirely everyone, but just about...
"As of 2007, 33% of men and 36% of women [in the USA] are obese" And "It was not until the 20th century that it became common."
Any cause you come up with, which isn't significant in the lives of at least 40% of the US population, simply can't be the cause.
And it's similarly likely that nearly 100% of us are being exposed to the cause, and other factors (like will power, lifestyle, or any other negating factors) are counter-acting the cause. It's also likely to be nearly 100% because if only 40% of people were doing something, and they were 100X more likely to be obese than the rest of the population, we'd have identified the cause in no time, not scratching our heads after decades of research...
Well, I for one doubt that ingesting 400 kcal of food causes you to *keep* 400 kcal
Human digestion is pretty efficient on most foods we eat. Those foods your body does not absorb extremely well are known as "laxatives". Everybody knows what happens if you eat beans (or other very high fiber foods like some fruits and vegetables), because humans lack the enzyme (found in Beano) to effectively digest it. Some people have the same problem with lactose (milk, cheese, etc.), but that's not very common.
If you aren't running to the bathroom an hour after eating, your body is very efficiently converting the food you ate into energy. And the calories from high-fructose corn syrup in the two examples I listed are particularly very easily processed.
I do not see people who regularly exercise become/be fat. You'd have to be doing something deliberately wrong (be a sumo wrestler) to pull something like that off.
They certainly exist in significant numbers, and you even named one example to disprove your own assertion.
Go look at any blue-collar jobs, and you'll find LOTS of unattractive fat people, who do large amounts of physical labor every day, yet stay overweight.
It's almost entirely about calories. Exercise is a small contributor, but insignificant next to diet. Whether your food is "nutritious" or not has extremely little effect on your weight and waistline.
Processed food generally means the fiber has been removed in some manner or another or involves low fiber foods to begin with.
Uhh, what? They're removing the fiber from my steak? McDonalds is removing the fiber from their hamburger buns? Canned chili has the fiber removed from its beans? What are you even talking about?
Coke is frequently demonized, but it has fewer calories than the non-processed fruit juice, and fruit juice similarly has little or no fiber. Also, fruit juice contains a more easily absorbed form of sugar (pure fructose) than processed table sugar (paired fructose/sucrose which is harder to absorb and more often excreted instead) usually used in Coke (outside the US).
Long term hunger will cause your body to become more efficient in extracting energy from the food you take in.
No, it's the short-term sudden starvation that causes your body to retain every calorie it can. Long slow calorie reduction is very effective.
This is why alternate day fasting is very successful.
Show me a single controlled study that shows fasting is significantly (better than the margin of error) more effective than conventional diets over a medium or long-term basis. Otherwise, I will now dismiss you as a loon and go on with my day.
Take a good look at all the "superstitious" scientific papers being cited. Attempts were even made to develop BPA as a synthetic estrogen, it just wasn't as effective as existing drugs (estradiol).
Absolutely not. Eating ANY foods cause fat. There is NO food out there which you can eat to excess and not get fat. Too many calories cause fat, and ALL food has calories.
You can not retain more fat then the calories you intake
No, but appetite stimulants can drive you to eat more calories than you otherwise would. And your body turning more calories into fat WILL cause you to get less energy out of the same amount of food, and that hunger will cause you to eat more, unless you're carefully measuring out exact amounts of food and drinks at every meal.
Slashdot Mirror
Won't help AT ALL.
If you've got a solar panel on your roof, you'll always have power, of course... But your neighbors will still be in the dark, even if you have enough power to supply a few of them. Grid-tied systems MUST have safety circuitry which shuts down if the grid is dark... That's mainly so that your inverter doesn't fry some unsuspecting line workers fixing a downed line that SHOULD be off. But even if that wasn't the case, your puny rooftop PV provides so little power that you simply can't fulfill the entire needs, and even in an area packed with PVs, others would be getting incredibly low voltage coming in, and destroying any appliances unlucky enough to be turned on.
Without a power plant in every neighborhood (which doesn't work well for manyfold reasons) that can provide full peak power needs entirely on it's own, distributed generation will NOT solve this problem.
I've always suggested making the grid slightly smarter, so that it will respond to voltage drops by automatically cutting off sections of the grid, neighborhood by neighborhood. That would prevent sudden power events from destroying generating stations. It would ensure that power failures would remain localized, and not affect entire time-zones for weeks. And these changes would make it far quicker and easier to recover from failures, as a much lesser amount of power (and therefore, coordination) is needed to restart service.
But since no power grid will EVER have 100% reliability, most everyone should invest in at least a $100 engine/generator (the key capacity metric is whether it can power your refrigerator). In most areas of the country, it will sit around gathering dust for a few years, then the week you need it, it will suddenly pay for itself several times over. This goes DOUBLE or TRIPLE for businesses that serve large numbers of people, like gas stations, office buildings (see: elevators), cell tower sites, etc.
Years ago, when everybody had a feature phone that couldn't connect to WiFi, OpenBTS would have been interesting. But now, every smartphone can connect to high-speed WiFi and run a VoIP app.
OpenBTS doesn't do the connectivity back to the rest of the world... "The kind folks at the Burning Man NOC provide us our Internet connectivity." Those are the guys we should hear from. The rest is just a matter of putting a dozen $40 DD-WRT routers on poles, acting as bridges, or in a mesh routing configuration, and everyone is set. All the cellular work is a waste, unless you really want to start manufacturing cellular base stations to compete with Siemens, Huawai, etc.
Noob!
From TFA: "Globalstar is seeking regulatory approval to convert about 80 percent of its spectrum to terrestrial use."
So what's it like being a brain surgeon?
We can only hope...
I'm not so sure you have to "pretend".
It makes some sense... If Amazon has enough Kindles out there scarfing down content, they might be able to save a lot of money by having their own wireless data service comparable to the nation-wide cellular service. Making the hardware, they can stick in whatever kind of proprietary radios they want, and then they'll have a large installed base of potential customers that only need to click the button to signs-up for service. And they've got lots of content in their walled-garden to fill those invisible series of tubes as well.
They've obviously got a partner with enough spectrum. And telcos like Sprint are actively soliciting rental space on their cell towers, so Amazon doesn't even need to do the hard part. They could have service up and running in a few big cities in just weeks.
They sure TRIED, and recognized the benefits, but they certainly didn't excel. I knew every new version of Windows was going to break a modest number of apps I'd been using, and would need to find more modern alternatives.
Some apps held up just fine, many did not. First specific example that comes to mind is Netscape Navigator... Windows 98 managed to make the damn thing segfault rather than start-up, and downloading the new version through a dial-up modem was unpleasant.
Microsoft has been developing Windows CE since 1996. Windows Phone is hardly a first-gen product. I've seen Windows CE-powered smart phones around for a LONG time (and everybody hated them). Microsoft has ZERO excuse for being run over by iPhone and Android.
Microsoft was one of the earliest forces in PDAs, smartphones, and tablets. They had very early projects to develop the technology, they knew it was coming, but no amount of a lead could get their foot in the door. Their offerings were just such committee-designed crap that nobody wanted it. Microsoft failed miserably at coming up with anything new or innovating, so here they are, today, high-tech roadkill.
WinCE dates back to 1996 and they were just about giving it away. Up until recently, they were nearly the only recognizable name in the PDA/Smartphone/tablet space, so EVERYTHING was running WinCE, no matter how hard you looked for something else. They had EVERY advantage, and squandered it all.
I can't really blame them for missing the MP3 boat... That's hardware, and Microsoft doesn't do hardware. That said, playing MP3s (and Oggs) and low-res videos was one of the first killer-apps for WinCE PDAs. It's amazing that they never put together a decent media player for the platform (ala iTunes), nor developed good power management for such purposes, nor pushed manufacturers to build-in multimedia features that might have led to something with a CompactFlash hard drive that pre-dated the iPod. I guess Microsoft saw portable devices as gadgets that wouldn't impact their big profitable PC market, so they didn't put hardly any effort behind it.
So when do we get the really cool pictures from Magelan II, in higher resolution than we got from Hubble?
Iconic photos like Mars:
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Mars_Hubble.jpg
Jupiter:
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:An_Ancient_Storm_in_the_Jovian_Atmosphere_-_GPN-2000-000910.jpg
Saturn:
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Saturn_with_auroras.jpg
And the Hubble Deep Field:
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Hubble_ultra_deep_field.jpg
And completely off-topic, how often do you see a color photo of the moon:
http://www.astro.virginia.edu/class/oconnell/astr121/im/moon-color-mosaic-NCarboni.jpg
Except one of the ten had his harness clipped on, but to a weak part of the structure that broke when he slipped... Inadequate training killed him.
And installing proper safety gear on the towers could completely eliminate any slowdowns, so there'd be no reason NOT to be secured:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=4117967&cid=44647495
If you have you tongue on one contact, and the other side touches your lip, you've got a much longer circuit than just across your tongue. Your circulatory system being what it is, the shortest path in that instance may go right through your brain... dead.
Of course that wouldn't work with a tower, because you have to reconnect your harness several times through the climb and decent.
IMHO, it's a pretty simple problem to fix. There are sliding rail systems that would eliminate the time, hassle, and DANGER of ever having to disconnect your safety line:
http://www.saferack.com/ladder-fall-protection.cfm
Or ladders can be installed with cages, and landing platforms every 30 feet as required by OSHA:
http://www.aclindustries.com/construction/cage-ladders/roof-int-platform.html
But sadly, they are making the towers as cheap as possible, sacrificing obvious safety rather than a fairly minor expense that would obviously save MANY lives.
That's entirely impossible, and utter nonsense. A calorie is THE measure of how much energy food has, and cutting it down below the baseline of WHAT YOU NEED will NEVER result in any (non-water) weight gain.
The difference in the digestibility of different foods is NOWHERE NEAR as dramatic as you imagine it to be.
Yes they do. Some are explicit (measuring your food), and some are implicit ("You can eat all the SALAD you want!"), but ALL are intended to reduce your calorie consumption.
Go educate yourself, rather than arguing.
Good call... NOTHING BAD EVER HAPPENED BEFORE GW BUSH.
Like Iran Contra, Keating Five/Savings and Loan Scandal, etc. Those didn't happen.
A few Americans might have been killed, with the authorization of the president, during the US Civil War.
Good God... This was Microsoft's secret plan with the Zune all along! They'll make BILLIONS
Not entirely everyone, but just about...
"As of 2007, 33% of men and 36% of women [in the USA] are obese" And "It was not until the 20th century that it became common."
Any cause you come up with, which isn't significant in the lives of at least 40% of the US population, simply can't be the cause.
And it's similarly likely that nearly 100% of us are being exposed to the cause, and other factors (like will power, lifestyle, or any other negating factors) are counter-acting the cause. It's also likely to be nearly 100% because if only 40% of people were doing something, and they were 100X more likely to be obese than the rest of the population, we'd have identified the cause in no time, not scratching our heads after decades of research...
Human digestion is pretty efficient on most foods we eat. Those foods your body does not absorb extremely well are known as "laxatives". Everybody knows what happens if you eat beans (or other very high fiber foods like some fruits and vegetables), because humans lack the enzyme (found in Beano) to effectively digest it. Some people have the same problem with lactose (milk, cheese, etc.), but that's not very common.
If you aren't running to the bathroom an hour after eating, your body is very efficiently converting the food you ate into energy. And the calories from high-fructose corn syrup in the two examples I listed are particularly very easily processed.
They certainly exist in significant numbers, and you even named one example to disprove your own assertion.
Go look at any blue-collar jobs, and you'll find LOTS of unattractive fat people, who do large amounts of physical labor every day, yet stay overweight.
It's almost entirely about calories. Exercise is a small contributor, but insignificant next to diet. Whether your food is "nutritious" or not has extremely little effect on your weight and waistline.
Uhh, what? They're removing the fiber from my steak? McDonalds is removing the fiber from their hamburger buns? Canned chili has the fiber removed from its beans? What are you even talking about?
Coke is frequently demonized, but it has fewer calories than the non-processed fruit juice, and fruit juice similarly has little or no fiber. Also, fruit juice contains a more easily absorbed form of sugar (pure fructose) than processed table sugar (paired fructose/sucrose which is harder to absorb and more often excreted instead) usually used in Coke (outside the US).
No, it's the short-term sudden starvation that causes your body to retain every calorie it can. Long slow calorie reduction is very effective.
Show me a single controlled study that shows fasting is significantly (better than the margin of error) more effective than conventional diets over a medium or long-term basis. Otherwise, I will now dismiss you as a loon and go on with my day.
Here's proof (that you are an idiot):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bisphenol_A#Health_effects
Take a good look at all the "superstitious" scientific papers being cited. Attempts were even made to develop BPA as a synthetic estrogen, it just wasn't as effective as existing drugs (estradiol).
Absolutely not. Eating ANY foods cause fat. There is NO food out there which you can eat to excess and not get fat. Too many calories cause fat, and ALL food has calories.
No, but appetite stimulants can drive you to eat more calories than you otherwise would. And your body turning more calories into fat WILL cause you to get less energy out of the same amount of food, and that hunger will cause you to eat more, unless you're carefully measuring out exact amounts of food and drinks at every meal.