I'm not an electrical engineer, but couldn't grid-tied houses use some technology to reduce input to the grid based on either a signal from the grid itself, or based on local factors such as overvoltage in the grid?
Grid-tie inverters already do this in one form or another. If the grid voltage or frequency falls outside of bounds then they limit their output power or shut off. There are certifications either being worked on or finished wish specify the details.
On those days, everyone will also be trying to run their air conditioning full blast, and although newer homes will be adding power to the grid, it probably won't balance out the extra usage from all the older, less insulated homes and businesses.
Besides, unless I'm misremembering my basic electronics, having extra power available is usually not a problem unless there is someone to consume it (*)
The non-zero impedance of the power distribution lines is the real problem. Adding uncontrolled sources at the end of the distributions lines will allow more variability in the line voltage at the midpoint of the distribution lines. When grid-tie production is a fraction of the total generated power this is not a problem but as it grows, conditions arise where the line voltage varies outside of specified limits.
Grid-tie inverters already regulate their output to prevent operation out of range but the problem lies within the power distribution system itself. The line impedance is finite and fixed assuming that the power generation is centralized so voltage drop along the line is roughly compensated for. This however creates a situation where grid-tie power generation at the end of a line can produce a high voltage in the middle which cannot be compensated for without changing transformer taps which is not normally done in real time. As long as the percentage of grid-tie power is small this is not a problem.
As a practical matter this means that either the power distribution impedance needs to be lowered (heavier wire or real time control of the step-up and step-down transformation) or the grid-tie inverter output power needs to be limited by the power company as needed.
I fear I would then end up with two bills, one covering the cost of the energy I want and another to allow the delivery of that energy to the location I desire...
Some places do this; they have an ongoing "connection fee" which is separate from the fee for the metered power. Places which do not just combine the connection fee with the power usage but the cost is still there.
As a practical matter I think the solution is to have an itemized bill with separate ongoing connection fee which is based on the circuit size and pays for the distribution infrastructure.
"I can only assume that T-mobile demanded that the FM radio be disabled, in order to get people to use up all their data listening to streaming music."
That does not explain why another carrier outside the US would not want to do the same thing.
I expect that they would if they had less competition and/or more regulatory capture.
Someone mentioned weather radio, which is on an even higher frequency than broadcast FM. I can't see any reason why phones manufacturers can't throw in a dirt-cheap weather-band radio as well. Heck, the could even do this with little or no "hit to their bottom line" (the likely reason FM is disabled in many phones) and market it as a selling point: "your phone is an emergency weather radio even if you can't get a cell signal, buy now!"
The FM broadcast band is 87.9 to 107.9 MHz and weather radio has several channels in the 161 to 163 MHz range. I will not say that using the same compact antenna for both is impossible but it would require an extra switched tuning circuit for acceptable performance.
A broadcast band AM receiver can be integrated to the same extent that a broadcast band FM receiver can be but it requires a loopstick antenna. Broadcast band FM can get by with an actively tuned 10 centimeter loop.
We have seen how well that worked out in recent wide scale disasters. Even if communications is maintained while the generators are operating, they run out of fuel in hours to days.
DSL and Cable at least where I am in no better however. We have a backup power supply which came with the DSL modem which also provides phone service but if the power goes out, the connection is lost upstream making the modem no more than an expensive and poorly performing switch/router/AP for the local network. I gather that there was a requirement that the modem be backed up since it provides phone service but guess that the same rule does not apply to the rest of the network.
Cell towers also depend on digital backbone and data connections (routers) that also need uninterruptible power.
They also rely on not too many people using them at once. To borrow a quote concerning the evacuation of a major city, "It does not matter if the freeways are usable because millions of people will be trying to use them." SMS is the exception because it operates asynchronously like email but I wonder how well IP based messaging protocols will work during emergencies.
The lower frequency cell phone bands have the same problem with antenna size and efficiency with the added complication of also being used for transmission. The same solution involving active tuning applies to integrated FM broadcast band antennas:
I noticed a couple years ago that switching capacitor tuning solutions were showing up for cell phone handsets that use the lower frequency cell phone bands which recently became available.
I ran across this link to a transcript about the history of the 68000 after my post here. There is a discussion thread on the Real World Technology forums about why IBM chose the 8088 where this transcript was linked:
Then when they balk it can be handled in a secret court where nobody knows the results. Even better I could see a situation where they identify an employee or two and order them to hand the data over and not even allow them to tell twitter about the court order (if they can't tell some people then why can't these orders be restricted to their boss as well?)
How does this work when the boss discovers what the employee did, fires them, and refers them to law enforcement for prosecution? This seems like a great way for the NSA or other agency to persecute people with secret orders; do what we want or face our wrath and if you do what we want, face your employer's wrath and the criminal justice system.
then they would be *safer* here in the USA where the NSA is not allowed to spy on them, because it's A: in the USA (FBI territory, right?) B: whoever it is would need a warrant.
They just need an administrative subpena (we think this is relevant to something) since it is third party data. No notification of the target is necessary.
Unfortunately the rumor is that IBM selected the 8086 crapitecture (segemented addressing) because it was so weird that it would never come to compete with their own high-end proprietary products.
There were lots of practical reasons for IBM to use the 8086 in the form of the 8088. It had compatibility with the existing base of 8080 CP/M software, the 8 bit external bus could use 8080 peripherals and halved the memory granularity, and Intel was willing to allow alternate sources. The prime alternative was the 68000 which lacked an 8 bit external bus and was more expensive to produce.
That New York Times article does not discuss reliability. Routine maintenance needs have gone down in some cases but outright failures which completely disable a vehicle are more common and what routine maintenance is needed is more expensive.
The problem, though, is that anyone has a monopoly when you get specific enough.
Prosecutors take advantage of this in anti-trust trials. When they went after ALCOA just before World War 2, the market was considered virgin aluminum and excluded recycled aluminum and other metals like steel. They simultaneously argued that ALCOA had gained market share at the expense of any competitors by excessively expanding production and lowering price while simultaneously arguing that ALCOA needed to be constrained to prevent shortages of aluminum during the war.
The reason car electronics cost so much is that they don't sell very many of them, relatively speaking. Even cars that sell very well will only sell a few hundred thousand units per year and the design cycles are at least for a 4-8 year production run minimum. Electronics advances WAY faster than car companies can keep up with. The GPS in my truck (a 2009 model) is laughably obsolete albeit still useful. My company makes a part for a backup camera for one of the big US auto makers and the volumes simply aren't enough to get huge economies of scale even at a few hundred thousand a year. Plus they often do stupid stuff like design the parts to use custom connectors instead of off the shelf ones that would cost far less.
This is deliberate on the part of the car manufacturers. The last thing they want is standards which allow third parties to undermine the profits they make in selling repairs and selling new cars. Total cost of ownership is well hidden.
I hate automatic transmission vehicles because I loose fine-grain control over the speed of the vehicle especially on slippery surfaces and in emergency deceleration situations.
I hate them because they are less reliable and have a higher cost of ownership. I hate "electronic" transmissions even more. I also hate power anything for the same reason. Car companies are incredibly cheap so any extra complexity adds to the unreliability faster than the convenience. They deliberately go out of their way to obfuscate systems so only they can repair and maintain them and encourage forced obsolescence.
The manufacturers do not like to advertise this so specifications are in short supply. I ran some of my own tests on various unused USB Flash drives I had laying around and none of them retained data more than a year whether powered or unpowered so I assume they do no background scrubbing. SSDs generally have better documentation and will specify something like 1 year of unpowered retention. Beware of "typical" specifications which have almost no meaning.
Unfortunately high density Flash memory has a retention of months to years unless it is scrubbed. That makes it great for SSDs which are regularly used but useless for archival purposes or even as a replacement for magnetic and optical removable media in many applications.
I thought using hydraulics and fiber optics was obvious and such things are common in hazardous industrial environments. I remember seeing demonstrations of fluidic logic although I am not sure it scales down well enough compared to MEMs logic:
Radiation. Our electronics and robotics thrive on miniturization however that is not useful when you're dealing with radiation. You want really thick circuits. You want something that can be swiss cheesed by the radiation all day and all night for years on end and still work.
It is a little trickier than that. Finer circuits present a smaller cross section; for example if the cross section decreases faster than the stored charge, then resistance to single event upset becomes greater which is the case with the later DRAM generations. Thinner substrates have less volume to capture stray charge which can act in a way similar to minority carrier injection. That explains why silicon on insulator is a good way to increase radiation resistance; the silicon volume to capture charge is smaller.
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Grid-tie inverters already do this in one form or another. If the grid voltage or frequency falls outside of bounds then they limit their output power or shut off. There are certifications either being worked on or finished wish specify the details.
The non-zero impedance of the power distribution lines is the real problem. Adding uncontrolled sources at the end of the distributions lines will allow more variability in the line voltage at the midpoint of the distribution lines. When grid-tie production is a fraction of the total generated power this is not a problem but as it grows, conditions arise where the line voltage varies outside of specified limits.
Grid-tie inverters already regulate their output to prevent operation out of range but the problem lies within the power distribution system itself. The line impedance is finite and fixed assuming that the power generation is centralized so voltage drop along the line is roughly compensated for. This however creates a situation where grid-tie power generation at the end of a line can produce a high voltage in the middle which cannot be compensated for without changing transformer taps which is not normally done in real time. As long as the percentage of grid-tie power is small this is not a problem.
As a practical matter this means that either the power distribution impedance needs to be lowered (heavier wire or real time control of the step-up and step-down transformation) or the grid-tie inverter output power needs to be limited by the power company as needed.
Some places do this; they have an ongoing "connection fee" which is separate from the fee for the metered power. Places which do not just combine the connection fee with the power usage but the cost is still there.
As a practical matter I think the solution is to have an itemized bill with separate ongoing connection fee which is based on the circuit size and pays for the distribution infrastructure.
I expect that they would if they had less competition and/or more regulatory capture.
The FM broadcast band is 87.9 to 107.9 MHz and weather radio has several channels in the 161 to 163 MHz range. I will not say that using the same compact antenna for both is impossible but it would require an extra switched tuning circuit for acceptable performance.
A broadcast band AM receiver can be integrated to the same extent that a broadcast band FM receiver can be but it requires a loopstick antenna. Broadcast band FM can get by with an actively tuned 10 centimeter loop.
We have seen how well that worked out in recent wide scale disasters. Even if communications is maintained while the generators are operating, they run out of fuel in hours to days.
DSL and Cable at least where I am in no better however. We have a backup power supply which came with the DSL modem which also provides phone service but if the power goes out, the connection is lost upstream making the modem no more than an expensive and poorly performing switch/router/AP for the local network. I gather that there was a requirement that the modem be backed up since it provides phone service but guess that the same rule does not apply to the rest of the network.
They also rely on not too many people using them at once. To borrow a quote concerning the evacuation of a major city, "It does not matter if the freeways are usable because millions of people will be trying to use them." SMS is the exception because it operates asynchronously like email but I wonder how well IP based messaging protocols will work during emergencies.
The lower frequency cell phone bands have the same problem with antenna size and efficiency with the added complication of also being used for transmission. The same solution involving active tuning applies to integrated FM broadcast band antennas:
http://www.silabs.com/Support%...
Wire loop length can be as short as 10 centimeters:
http://www.silabs.com/Support%...
I noticed a couple years ago that switching capacitor tuning solutions were showing up for cell phone handsets that use the lower frequency cell phone bands which recently became available.
I ran across this link to a transcript about the history of the 68000 after my post here. There is a discussion thread on the Real World Technology forums about why IBM chose the 8088 where this transcript was linked:
http://archive.computerhistory...
http://www.realworldtech.com/f...
The additional cost of the 68000 over the 8088 was an even larger factor than I remember.
How does this work when the boss discovers what the employee did, fires them, and refers them to law enforcement for prosecution? This seems like a great way for the NSA or other agency to persecute people with secret orders; do what we want or face our wrath and if you do what we want, face your employer's wrath and the criminal justice system.
They just need an administrative subpena (we think this is relevant to something) since it is third party data. No notification of the target is necessary.
The 68008 became available years (3?) after the 8088. I do not remember it even being planned or announced at the time.
There were lots of practical reasons for IBM to use the 8086 in the form of the 8088. It had compatibility with the existing base of 8080 CP/M software, the 8 bit external bus could use 8080 peripherals and halved the memory granularity, and Intel was willing to allow alternate sources. The prime alternative was the 68000 which lacked an 8 bit external bus and was more expensive to produce.
That New York Times article does not discuss reliability. Routine maintenance needs have gone down in some cases but outright failures which completely disable a vehicle are more common and what routine maintenance is needed is more expensive.
Prosecutors take advantage of this in anti-trust trials. When they went after ALCOA just before World War 2, the market was considered virgin aluminum and excluded recycled aluminum and other metals like steel. They simultaneously argued that ALCOA had gained market share at the expense of any competitors by excessively expanding production and lowering price while simultaneously arguing that ALCOA needed to be constrained to prevent shortages of aluminum during the war.
This is deliberate on the part of the car manufacturers. The last thing they want is standards which allow third parties to undermine the profits they make in selling repairs and selling new cars. Total cost of ownership is well hidden.
I hate them because they are less reliable and have a higher cost of ownership. I hate "electronic" transmissions even more. I also hate power anything for the same reason. Car companies are incredibly cheap so any extra complexity adds to the unreliability faster than the convenience. They deliberately go out of their way to obfuscate systems so only they can repair and maintain them and encourage forced obsolescence.
Just apply public pressure. Prominently advertise that nVidia policies are preventing support of their products.
The manufacturers do not like to advertise this so specifications are in short supply. I ran some of my own tests on various unused USB Flash drives I had laying around and none of them retained data more than a year whether powered or unpowered so I assume they do no background scrubbing. SSDs generally have better documentation and will specify something like 1 year of unpowered retention. Beware of "typical" specifications which have almost no meaning.
Unfortunately high density Flash memory has a retention of months to years unless it is scrubbed. That makes it great for SSDs which are regularly used but useless for archival purposes or even as a replacement for magnetic and optical removable media in many applications.
I thought Mote Prime was short on fossil fuels (and radioactives). Why not ask the Moties?
I thought using hydraulics and fiber optics was obvious and such things are common in hazardous industrial environments. I remember seeing demonstrations of fluidic logic although I am not sure it scales down well enough compared to MEMs logic:
http://www.eetimes.com/documen...
I wonder how it would compare though to a much faster dedicated silicon on insulator process with 100^2 micron feature size.
It is a little trickier than that. Finer circuits present a smaller cross section; for example if the cross section decreases faster than the stored charge, then resistance to single event upset becomes greater which is the case with the later DRAM generations. Thinner substrates have less volume to capture stray charge which can act in a way similar to minority carrier injection. That explains why silicon on insulator is a good way to increase radiation resistance; the silicon volume to capture charge is smaller.