There were other court decisions that I left out. Even immediate danger does not create any obligation. Absent statutory law saying otherwise, only a "special relationship" confers any duty to protect. The case I remember is one where detectives were staking out a business like a liqueur store and did nothing while observing a robbery get out of hand.
Kidnapping is a separate issue (and crime) which law enforcement tends to take seriously if they believe you which is not always the case.
Also, they do have an obligation to help, just as certain as a fire department has an obligation to put out a fire even if you have not paid the applicable annual fees for emergency service to your home (although you would get billed quite heavily afterwards if that were the case), because to leave the situation unchecked can result in a much bigger problems if it should escalate beyond just the isolated incident,
If someone is willing to be so morally bankrupt as to do such a thing in the first place, why would you think they should be somehow morally obligated to be telling you the truth about not hurting your family if you do what they tell you?
I agree, however . ..
And with that, you then just call the cops.... if someone is actually capable of hurting your wife and children if you don't do what they say, they are also capable of doing so even if you do... The reality is that in that situation, you are completely powerless to determine your family's future, as much as one might wish it to be otherwise, and the smartest thing you can do is get help, if you can summon it.
The same thing applies to law enforcement and they are under no obligation to help you in any way even if they caused the situation.
Fair enough: electricity is fungible, and it doesn't matter what powers what (if it is even possible to tell).
This is not the case because most renewable sources cannot provide the base load capacity which is required 100% of the time. Base load and peaking power plants can provide power at any time; most renewable sources are intermittent to one extent or another. This makes the power they provide worth more.
There is an insidious aspect to this regarding power plants which can provide base load power with low variable costs like nuclear power plants; if they are throttled during times when intermittent power can replace their output, then their capacity factor decreases and they become less economical to operate. If they become too costly because of this, then what is going to provide base load power when renewable sources cannot?
It used to be that every computer had one of these DIP switches on the motherboard. Need to flash the BIOS? Flip the switch physically, boot the machine to the MS-DOS floppy, let it do its reads/writes/verifies, then flip the DIP switch back.
I'm pretty sure it was cost that did away with that physical safeguard, replacing it a signature algorithm. I first saw this in the mid 1990s where one major brand of computers has a "password" in the BIOS flash mechanism, that if it wasn't part of the upload, the machine wouldn't accept the code.
The reason a switch was originally available is because the Flash memory required a high voltage programming supply and it was best to leave this off or disconnected when not needed. When it became practical, the high voltage programming supply was generated on the chip using a charge pump and controlled by the write command so there was no longer any need for an external switch.
.That said, because these are network cables, that telescoping shield is irrelevant. You're not going to get ground hum into your amplifier from your network card, the way you would with a shield on an analog audio cable. They're simply not connected, and if they were, you'd have much bigger issues - like that hum causing all sorts of problems on your PCI bus. This is why network cable shields are typically connected at both ends: ground loops are irrelevant.
The ground loop formed by using ethernet over shielded twisted pair is not irrelevant if it corrupts the chassis ground which is also the shielded side of any singled ended signals like RCA audio. It would be very unlikely to affect the ethernet but it could sure screw up sensitive single ended signals.
Unlike Unshielded Twist Pair (UTP) which uses an RJ45 style connector with a plastic body, shielded twisted pair (STP) uses an RJ45 style connector with a metal body that connects to the cable shield.
From the cable tear-down, it does not appear that either end had any of the shielding connected to the plug shield.
I suspect the reviewer was not looking for this during the teardown and missed it if it was present.
With XLR cable connections, you have your shield, which IS connected at both ends, and your signal ground, which is isolated from the shield.
And equipment with XLR connections often has a "ground lift" switch to safely disconnect the ground and XLR ground isolators are available for equipment that lacks it.
The article covered this. There was no continuity between the connectors through the shield but they did not test to see if the shield was connected at only one end:
It is also possible—I have no handy way to test—that they've tied the shield to one end only, though this would be highly nonstandard for network cabling."
Idiot. A ground loop is *not* going to affect the quality of digtial audio delivered via an ethernet cable
This will almost always be the case however the problem is not with the ethernet signals being affected; it is with sensitive equipment like audio equipment at either end being affected. Balanced audio signals are commonly used where a single point ground cannot be guarantied and grounding a shielded cable at both ends would defeat this.
Ethernet by definition isn't a grounded protocol. if you attempt to ground one end, you're going to fundamentally screw up 0 detection on the other. Both ends need to know where 0 is, and this is achieved by using a floating ground. Granted, since we're talking Ethernet anyway, any ground would be an earth ground and relatively close to each other. That statement is literally non-sense. You'd never use an earth ground on one side and a floating ground on the other. You never ground on one side and not the other. Plus, a "ground loop"? What the hell are you talking about? Ground is where 0 voltage is defined. To imply a loop, that would mean 0 on one side was connected to something other than 0 on the other, which would lead to a feed back loop which would cause all electronics connected to it to let the magic smoke out. You'd burn everything out if you tried to do such a thing. If you're concerned about grounding non-connected items, you use an earth ground, as it's a constant and not relative. As a power engineer I literally have no idea what you're talking about. You want all grounds in the system to be tied to a constant voltage. It doesn't matter what that voltage is, just as long as it's constant across all connected nodes. if they're not all connected and you want different ground voltages, then you have to use electric isolation, usually in the form of either magnetic or optical isolation. But Ethernet doesn't support either of those.
Ethernet is transformer isolated on both ends but if a shielded cable is used, then the shield connects to chassis ground on both ends. The problem occurs when chassis ground at each end differs which is not uncommon when dealing with the distances that long lengths of cable allow.
If a current flows through the shield then it couples to the ethernet signal lines but this would be unlikely to affect ethernet. When dealing with audio gear or sensitive instrumentation however, the ground current can cause problems whether it affects the ethernet interface or not and the common solution is to use an unshielded cable or ground the cable at only one end.
Professional audio gear uses balanced instead of single ended connections for audio to prevent ground loops; this is just an extension of that. It is also why USB and Firewire and not suitable in many cases unless a galvanically isolated interface is used.
"Crappy power" is not normal. Many western power grids have strict standards for voltage spikes, dips, sags, frequency errors, and THD that they will provide you. If you have crappy power it's because either your wiring is stuffed or you're running devices which are absolutely ancient (30 year old fridges make for some nasty power spikes), or have electronics which are failing / fake / never had the right certification to begin with and are spewing noise back onto your powerline.
- standards are great. You know what is greater though? How often are the standards met. Get back to us with metrics or you are talking about "in a perfect world..."; - lightning. 'Nuff said;
Which sums up were I live about 30 minutes west of St. Louis, Missouri. We get regular thunderstorms and lose power 2 or 3 times a year for hours and probably twice that often for seconds to minutes every year. Light bulbs including incandescent, compact florescent, and LED have half lives here of 3 to 6 months so the later two are not even close to economical no matter how much more efficient they are.
All of my computers, network gear, and test equipment is protected by online UPSes which has worked out well.
DDR3 is about 10ns. If XPoint is 1000x faster than 5us NAND, then it has 1/2 the latency of DRAM. I doubt it, but you can see how it can easily be within a a factor or two.
I can believe it. Internally it operates like a static ram so there are no need for separate address strobes (although DRAM technically does not need them either) and no precharge.
"And here's a biggy. If you don't want Microsoft installing updates automatically -- if you're a user who has chosen to take control of this process up to now -- you probably will hate Win10." Ok, here we have arguably the first real problem. MS has botched Windows updates in the past. Being able to block them and roll them back is how those situations have been limited and fixed. Lumping drivers into this forced upgrade schedule... as a laptop user this makes me nervous. Laptop drivers can be quite finicky and I don't always blindly trust newer versions when they land.
It only took one botched automatic update for me to disable automatic updates on all of my systems.
Imagine what happens when the power goes out, the UPS kicks in, the UPS software starts the orderly shutdown procedure, Windows starts installing updates in response to the shutdown, and the update process takes so long that the UPS runs out of power before Windows finishes so power is lost during the update procedure.
So you're saying it's impossible to do an arbitrary DC/AC to DC/AC without a massive efficiency penalty?
Efficiency is not so much as a problem as cost. It is easier to design converters with specific input and output voltages.
Converters commonly have a fixed output and 2:1 input voltage range which covers universal input power supplies with a 120 through 240 AC input . Converters with a 4:1 input voltage range are not as common but are available for a price premium. 10:1 input ranges are rare.
The problem with large input and output voltage ranges is that for the same power, the electronics have to handle both high voltage at low current and high current at low voltage making the design less optimal, less efficient, and more expensive.
There is no way to supply a high-power appliance (such as an AirCon) directly out of a PV array. None.
The panel is always operated at a point (MPPT) where it produces the most power, but that power is highly fluctuating whenever there's a slight obstruction in the incident sunlight (clouds, stray leafs, even passing birds).
You need a DC/DC power converter feeding a battery array. Then the DC appliance can be powered from that battery pack. Overall, an expensive solution mostly due to the need of local energy storage.
This is true in the sense that nobody bothers to make appliances which can be run directly from solar arrays. Air conditioners which use a variable speed drive instead of on/off operation could adjust their load to match the maximum power point of the solar array.
RMS works fine for DC; it is just that for DC, the RMS and average are the same.
Coronal losses are some nonlinear function of voltage which becomes significant during the peaks of the AC voltage cycle at high voltages; lowering the peak to RMS ratio minimizes this for a given voltage.
Your refrigerator, washing machine, and other household appliances run on inductive motors which use a thousand watts or so to generate electromagnetic fields strong enough to pull the magnets in the motor strongly enough to move 80 pounds of water and clothes. So those are electromagnetic fields in the kilowatt range.
Motors use as small a gap between the stator and rotor as is mechanically practical for best performance and this minimizes magnetic flux leakage.
Charging your phone requires around five watts or so. So the power levels, the amount of electromagnetic energy, is quite small - much smaller than the difference between a large washing machine and a small one.
Which is the opposite of how most inductive chargers work; they rely on loose coupling so that placement of the device to be charged is not critical.
The same trick works with double shotgun and rifle barrels. If there is a crack in the joint between the barrels, tapping them will yield a thunk instead of a ding because the crack causes loss in the reflected sound waves in the metal. The same loss in Q can be detected in a bell or other casting.
"I don't pay any attention to advertising at all unless I am proactively seeking a product in a store"
That's just the thing. You think you aren't, but you are, you're just not aware of it at a conscious level. And that is advertising's ultimate goal -- subconscious suggestion. It's an art form really. You've probably made thousands of decisions that have been very subtly manipulated by corporations, without you ever even knowing. IMO that is the reason why advertising is morally reprehensible. It's manipulative mass mind control.
It works to the extent that you do not see the advertising rather than ignoring it. Socrates despite being able to persuade anybody could not do so with his friends when they would not listen.
The disadvantage is that it is difficult to do and adds cost. Not only do surfaces need to be shielded but this has to be done with no seams because they will act as slot antennas compromising whatever shielding is used.
My wifi is near unusable at the extremes of my own house. When I go outside, I can't usefully hitch to it more than a few feet from the house. Any drone that wants to inject something would have fly really close.
Unless the drone has the ability to transmit at much higher power than your average access point would.
High power is not useful for maintaining a connection unless both stations have it. The drone may use high power to overcome interference or low signal levels but without corresponding high power on the other end, it will not be able to maintain a connection; it will only be able to send packets in the blind.
To be fair, nothing in the Budapest Memorandum requires the US to take action other than maybe to consult with the other signers which is of course next to useless. We did more than the treaty requires by bringing the situation up with the UN.
That however does not make the situation any better. The lesson is still not to rely on the US and provide for your own defense using nuclear weapons as a deterrent if possible.
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There were other court decisions that I left out. Even immediate danger does not create any obligation. Absent statutory law saying otherwise, only a "special relationship" confers any duty to protect. The case I remember is one where detectives were staking out a business like a liqueur store and did nothing while observing a robbery get out of hand.
Kidnapping is a separate issue (and crime) which law enforcement tends to take seriously if they believe you which is not always the case.
They have no obligation to help:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
I agree, however . . .
The same thing applies to law enforcement and they are under no obligation to help you in any way even if they caused the situation.
This is not the case because most renewable sources cannot provide the base load capacity which is required 100% of the time. Base load and peaking power plants can provide power at any time; most renewable sources are intermittent to one extent or another. This makes the power they provide worth more.
There is an insidious aspect to this regarding power plants which can provide base load power with low variable costs like nuclear power plants; if they are throttled during times when intermittent power can replace their output, then their capacity factor decreases and they become less economical to operate. If they become too costly because of this, then what is going to provide base load power when renewable sources cannot?
For historical and practical reasons these signals are usually active low.
The reason a switch was originally available is because the Flash memory required a high voltage programming supply and it was best to leave this off or disconnected when not needed. When it became practical, the high voltage programming supply was generated on the chip using a charge pump and controlled by the write command so there was no longer any need for an external switch.
The ground loop formed by using ethernet over shielded twisted pair is not irrelevant if it corrupts the chassis ground which is also the shielded side of any singled ended signals like RCA audio. It would be very unlikely to affect the ethernet but it could sure screw up sensitive single ended signals.
Unlike Unshielded Twist Pair (UTP) which uses an RJ45 style connector with a plastic body, shielded twisted pair (STP) uses an RJ45 style connector with a metal body that connects to the cable shield.
I suspect the reviewer was not looking for this during the teardown and missed it if it was present.
And equipment with XLR connections often has a "ground lift" switch to safely disconnect the ground and XLR ground isolators are available for equipment that lacks it.
The article covered this. There was no continuity between the connectors through the shield but they did not test to see if the shield was connected at only one end:
It is also possible—I have no handy way to test—that they've tied the shield to one end only, though this would be highly nonstandard for network cabling."
This will almost always be the case however the problem is not with the ethernet signals being affected; it is with sensitive equipment like audio equipment at either end being affected. Balanced audio signals are commonly used where a single point ground cannot be guarantied and grounding a shielded cable at both ends would defeat this.
Ethernet is transformer isolated on both ends but if a shielded cable is used, then the shield connects to chassis ground on both ends. The problem occurs when chassis ground at each end differs which is not uncommon when dealing with the distances that long lengths of cable allow.
If a current flows through the shield then it couples to the ethernet signal lines but this would be unlikely to affect ethernet. When dealing with audio gear or sensitive instrumentation however, the ground current can cause problems whether it affects the ethernet interface or not and the common solution is to use an unshielded cable or ground the cable at only one end.
Professional audio gear uses balanced instead of single ended connections for audio to prevent ground loops; this is just an extension of that. It is also why USB and Firewire and not suitable in many cases unless a galvanically isolated interface is used.
Which sums up were I live about 30 minutes west of St. Louis, Missouri. We get regular thunderstorms and lose power 2 or 3 times a year for hours and probably twice that often for seconds to minutes every year. Light bulbs including incandescent, compact florescent, and LED have half lives here of 3 to 6 months so the later two are not even close to economical no matter how much more efficient they are.
All of my computers, network gear, and test equipment is protected by online UPSes which has worked out well.
I can believe it. Internally it operates like a static ram so there are no need for separate address strobes (although DRAM technically does not need them either) and no precharge.
It only took one botched automatic update for me to disable automatic updates on all of my systems.
Imagine what happens when the power goes out, the UPS kicks in, the UPS software starts the orderly shutdown procedure, Windows starts installing updates in response to the shutdown, and the update process takes so long that the UPS runs out of power before Windows finishes so power is lost during the update procedure.
Efficiency is not so much as a problem as cost. It is easier to design converters with specific input and output voltages.
Converters commonly have a fixed output and 2:1 input voltage range which covers universal input power supplies with a 120 through 240 AC input . Converters with a 4:1 input voltage range are not as common but are available for a price premium. 10:1 input ranges are rare.
The problem with large input and output voltage ranges is that for the same power, the electronics have to handle both high voltage at low current and high current at low voltage making the design less optimal, less efficient, and more expensive.
This is true in the sense that nobody bothers to make appliances which can be run directly from solar arrays. Air conditioners which use a variable speed drive instead of on/off operation could adjust their load to match the maximum power point of the solar array.
RMS works fine for DC; it is just that for DC, the RMS and average are the same.
Coronal losses are some nonlinear function of voltage which becomes significant during the peaks of the AC voltage cycle at high voltages; lowering the peak to RMS ratio minimizes this for a given voltage.
Motors use as small a gap between the stator and rotor as is mechanically practical for best performance and this minimizes magnetic flux leakage.
Which is the opposite of how most inductive chargers work; they rely on loose coupling so that placement of the device to be charged is not critical.
Why would the politicians care? The abuse and pitfalls do not apply to them.
The same trick works with double shotgun and rifle barrels. If there is a crack in the joint between the barrels, tapping them will yield a thunk instead of a ding because the crack causes loss in the reflected sound waves in the metal. The same loss in Q can be detected in a bell or other casting.
It works to the extent that you do not see the advertising rather than ignoring it. Socrates despite being able to persuade anybody could not do so with his friends when they would not listen.
The disadvantage is that it is difficult to do and adds cost. Not only do surfaces need to be shielded but this has to be done with no seams because they will act as slot antennas compromising whatever shielding is used.
High power is not useful for maintaining a connection unless both stations have it. The drone may use high power to overcome interference or low signal levels but without corresponding high power on the other end, it will not be able to maintain a connection; it will only be able to send packets in the blind.
To be fair, nothing in the Budapest Memorandum requires the US to take action other than maybe to consult with the other signers which is of course next to useless. We did more than the treaty requires by bringing the situation up with the UN.
That however does not make the situation any better. The lesson is still not to rely on the US and provide for your own defense using nuclear weapons as a deterrent if possible.