If you actually went right to the source, you wouldn't be repeating tired old silliness. For your edification: in a standard wind turbine, the outermost part of the propeller blade is generating most of the energy. The rest is essentially dead weight. Makani's approach cuts the weight by roughly an order of magnitude. They can also operate in slower winds, and they can operate higher when the wind is faster and more stable. Never mind that their tethered airplane automatically copes with wind gusts - the tail realigns the wing to face the apparent wind. Standard turbines need to use relatively slow and bulky high-torque servos to adjust the blade pitch. Such an adjustment's time constant is an order of magnitude longer than what you get in Makani's approach.
I think this free market argument gets really tired when it comes to telecom. From my point of view, it's not competition, it's price fixing to make sure that nobody sees enough advantage to move to a competitor. Where I live, besides DSL you have two cable providers who both offer internet and digital phone service. Their prices are within 5% of each other, and their customer service could well be the same call center with the exception of how they greet you.
Exactly same problem shows up with medical care providers. Their billing practices are screwed up exactly the same across the board. It's so bad that it doesn't matter whether you go to a non-profit medical system vs. one that is for profit.
I don't really know what sort of advantages you see to this free market economy. It's free market only because there's no central planning committee. It doesn't mean it's any good for you, the consumer. Consumer needs some governmental protections, backed by strong enforcement lest it all be wink-wink-nod-nod, I think it's clear as day.
That's why you send your metal parts to Shapeways etc. They don't need to look anything like being gun-related, it can be a generic-looking thing embedded in plastic or pushed over the plastic to reinforce said plastic. Maybe ceramic bullets would be a bit more suspicious, but I doubt the printing people care that much - yet.
Of course there are some laws that prohibit some of this. If the owner is a racist, there are non-discrimation laws that prohibit the owner for kicking you out just because you are black. I think we need non-discrimation laws for telecom clients.
In 30 years we will probably have 3d printers printing in metal.
Not only we have them already, but common 3d printing services like Shapeways let you print in metal. You can also print in glazed ceramics, if you fancy literally your own cup of tea:)
And that's why, if you'd just go to a nearby hardware store, you'll find, oh horror of horrors, that the nail gun charges are available in multiple power levels. You pick one for the job at hand. There are charges that are good for driving nails into solid structural steel (think I-beam columns). Nail guns are not rifled, so they don't carry accurately, but a nail fired with the most powerful charge can go through a single layer of a hollow cement block wall and sure as hell it'll seriously injure anyone on the opposite side of it. All but the lowest powered nail gun charges will rip apart the bullet casing (usually the rim) if you're stupid enough to use them to reload regular ammo.
What's a projectile? I'm sure as heck a good old CRT is shooting out photons at the speed of light. I'm also sure that all radionuclides shoot off particles other than photons at speeds way over 300 fps. An electron moving at 300 fps has a rather laughable energy of 5E-8 eV. I don't think there are any small decay products with energies so may orders of magnitude below 1eV.
So, where do we draw a line between what's machine instructions and what isn't? That's where the slippery slope lies. I don't think there'd be much of a problem in printing out a set of usual-looking human-readable plans, and having an image processing system designed that can read those plans, convert them into a solid model, and have it printed out. Heck, I wouldn't be surprised if someone was coding one right now out of spite. It'd make a nice Ph.D. if it was a reasonably general-purpose system.
That's understood, but I don't get the point of doing unsafe work of any kind on your own place. I thought the whole point of doing it yourself is to do it at least with due care. Yes, sometimes it may not look as pretty as something done by a long-time pro, but it's supposed to be safe and long-lasting. I'm sure my tiling isn't as perfectly even as someone who has done it thousands of times, but sure as heck it's at least level, decoupled from the subfloor, very solid and is not supposed to crack in my lifetime. Same goes for plumbing, electrical, or really any other trade I'd do on my home. For major things I do get permits and have the inspections pass without problems. In the U.S., laws are free, thus you can get all of the relevant codes for free. Europe sucks in that regards, I'm sure Australia suffered from European braindamage in that respect as well.
It would be way too complex, logistically, to have it shipped by road directly. It pretty much blocks one direction of traffic on a divided highway. It will travel probably a 100 miles or so over land, and the rest by barge - down the east coast, and up the Mississippi River.
Well, that's if the wires are "short", like in a typical single-family home. For long runs, NEC has you calculate the voltage drop and mitigate excessive voltage drop by going to a larger wire size. But this has nothing to do with overloads - the larger wire does not automatically let you install a larger breaker!
Anything DIN-rail mounted obviously is out of scope, you don't put DIN rails in an electrical junction box in the wall. The spring-loaded terminals are a complete joke as well, they usually have a couple of tiny points of contact and I personally wouldn't use them for anything but signal wiring. When you have a twisted wire nut, the wires are in contact over a length of a centimeter or more directly wire-to-wire, and they are all also in contact with the spring material in the wire nut itself. And who the heck uses stranded wire inside the wall?
I think that the problem we have is only tangential to the vaccines. Our communication skills demonstrably have not evolved to rationally cope with ubiquitous access to communications. People get quite irrational and their selection biases show simply because they see an "OMG" post on Facebook or an alarmist segment on their evening news.
Wireless recharging, LOL. For anything that's not a solar-powered watch or a calculator, there won't be such a thing over distances beyond inches. Well, unless you want to live literally inside of a microwave oven. If you want to have high power available wirelessly throughout a building, the only solution is to make the building out of metal, size the openings for the wavelength used, and put a transmitter antenna inside. That's precisely how microwave ovens work, you don't need to plug your potato in for it to get hot. Radio waves at any practical frequency will be heavily absorbed by your body, and possibly anything else that's a bit wet, so good luck with that. There's ideas, and then there's reality.
I somewhat agree. There's ZERO reason for such insanity given that female twist-lock plugs can be had in a local home improvement store, and male twist-lock panel-mountable receptacles can be bought in a local electrical supply store.
The inspector only cares about it being UL listed and used in accordance with the listing, unless the local variations to the code prohibit something in particular.
What?! NEC code is not based on operation at any given temperature, they certainly address temperature raise and variable ambient temperatures. You have to do a bit of elementary school math and table lookups to design for operation at any given ambient.
Safety != codes. What's allowed by NEC is certainly disallowed under EU regulations, even where NEC promotes better solutions. Spring-loaded wire nuts are just great, they are a big step forward from european-style connection blocks. The problem with euro-style screw-loaded connections is that there's nothing there to apply positive pressure on the wire over time. With thermal cycles, the screws have a tendency to undo themselves. A properly installed wire nut is pretty much a 100 year solution that requires no further maintenance and is not expected to get loose.
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If you actually went right to the source, you wouldn't be repeating tired old silliness. For your edification: in a standard wind turbine, the outermost part of the propeller blade is generating most of the energy. The rest is essentially dead weight. Makani's approach cuts the weight by roughly an order of magnitude. They can also operate in slower winds, and they can operate higher when the wind is faster and more stable. Never mind that their tethered airplane automatically copes with wind gusts - the tail realigns the wing to face the apparent wind. Standard turbines need to use relatively slow and bulky high-torque servos to adjust the blade pitch. Such an adjustment's time constant is an order of magnitude longer than what you get in Makani's approach.
I think this free market argument gets really tired when it comes to telecom. From my point of view, it's not competition, it's price fixing to make sure that nobody sees enough advantage to move to a competitor. Where I live, besides DSL you have two cable providers who both offer internet and digital phone service. Their prices are within 5% of each other, and their customer service could well be the same call center with the exception of how they greet you.
Exactly same problem shows up with medical care providers. Their billing practices are screwed up exactly the same across the board. It's so bad that it doesn't matter whether you go to a non-profit medical system vs. one that is for profit.
I don't really know what sort of advantages you see to this free market economy. It's free market only because there's no central planning committee. It doesn't mean it's any good for you, the consumer. Consumer needs some governmental protections, backed by strong enforcement lest it all be wink-wink-nod-nod, I think it's clear as day.
I think you're just being silly, sorry.
That's why you send your metal parts to Shapeways etc. They don't need to look anything like being gun-related, it can be a generic-looking thing embedded in plastic or pushed over the plastic to reinforce said plastic. Maybe ceramic bullets would be a bit more suspicious, but I doubt the printing people care that much - yet.
Of course there are some laws that prohibit some of this. If the owner is a racist, there are non-discrimation laws that prohibit the owner for kicking you out just because you are black. I think we need non-discrimation laws for telecom clients.
Buy some firable modeling clay from the hobby shop... squeeze it into a mold... bake it in the oven. Bam... Bullet.
You're behind times. Just order them from any 3D printing service that prints ceramics. There's a few of those out there, bound to be more over time.
In 30 years we will probably have 3d printers printing in metal.
Not only we have them already, but common 3d printing services like Shapeways let you print in metal. You can also print in glazed ceramics, if you fancy literally your own cup of tea :)
And that's why, if you'd just go to a nearby hardware store, you'll find, oh horror of horrors, that the nail gun charges are available in multiple power levels. You pick one for the job at hand. There are charges that are good for driving nails into solid structural steel (think I-beam columns). Nail guns are not rifled, so they don't carry accurately, but a nail fired with the most powerful charge can go through a single layer of a hollow cement block wall and sure as hell it'll seriously injure anyone on the opposite side of it. All but the lowest powered nail gun charges will rip apart the bullet casing (usually the rim) if you're stupid enough to use them to reload regular ammo.
What's a projectile? I'm sure as heck a good old CRT is shooting out photons at the speed of light. I'm also sure that all radionuclides shoot off particles other than photons at speeds way over 300 fps. An electron moving at 300 fps has a rather laughable energy of 5E-8 eV. I don't think there are any small decay products with energies so may orders of magnitude below 1eV.
So, where do we draw a line between what's machine instructions and what isn't? That's where the slippery slope lies. I don't think there'd be much of a problem in printing out a set of usual-looking human-readable plans, and having an image processing system designed that can read those plans, convert them into a solid model, and have it printed out. Heck, I wouldn't be surprised if someone was coding one right now out of spite. It'd make a nice Ph.D. if it was a reasonably general-purpose system.
That's understood, but I don't get the point of doing unsafe work of any kind on your own place. I thought the whole point of doing it yourself is to do it at least with due care. Yes, sometimes it may not look as pretty as something done by a long-time pro, but it's supposed to be safe and long-lasting. I'm sure my tiling isn't as perfectly even as someone who has done it thousands of times, but sure as heck it's at least level, decoupled from the subfloor, very solid and is not supposed to crack in my lifetime. Same goes for plumbing, electrical, or really any other trade I'd do on my home. For major things I do get permits and have the inspections pass without problems. In the U.S., laws are free, thus you can get all of the relevant codes for free. Europe sucks in that regards, I'm sure Australia suffered from European braindamage in that respect as well.
It would be way too complex, logistically, to have it shipped by road directly. It pretty much blocks one direction of traffic on a divided highway. It will travel probably a 100 miles or so over land, and the rest by barge - down the east coast, and up the Mississippi River.
Well, that's if the wires are "short", like in a typical single-family home. For long runs, NEC has you calculate the voltage drop and mitigate excessive voltage drop by going to a larger wire size. But this has nothing to do with overloads - the larger wire does not automatically let you install a larger breaker!
So, this vs. taking the vaccine and its horrible risks. I think I'd rather risk it, you know :)
Anything DIN-rail mounted obviously is out of scope, you don't put DIN rails in an electrical junction box in the wall. The spring-loaded terminals are a complete joke as well, they usually have a couple of tiny points of contact and I personally wouldn't use them for anything but signal wiring. When you have a twisted wire nut, the wires are in contact over a length of a centimeter or more directly wire-to-wire, and they are all also in contact with the spring material in the wire nut itself. And who the heck uses stranded wire inside the wall?
HPV is preventable in behavior? Pray tell, how? LOL.
I think that the problem we have is only tangential to the vaccines. Our communication skills demonstrably have not evolved to rationally cope with ubiquitous access to communications. People get quite irrational and their selection biases show simply because they see an "OMG" post on Facebook or an alarmist segment on their evening news.
Agreed. For WIFI that works well, you need roaming, and you need one AP per just a couple of PCs.
Wireless recharging, LOL. For anything that's not a solar-powered watch or a calculator, there won't be such a thing over distances beyond inches. Well, unless you want to live literally inside of a microwave oven. If you want to have high power available wirelessly throughout a building, the only solution is to make the building out of metal, size the openings for the wavelength used, and put a transmitter antenna inside. That's precisely how microwave ovens work, you don't need to plug your potato in for it to get hot. Radio waves at any practical frequency will be heavily absorbed by your body, and possibly anything else that's a bit wet, so good luck with that. There's ideas, and then there's reality.
Don't put outlets on the top of the table. You'll spill, drop crumbs, and ruin the outlets.
There's a good reason why NEC forbids outlets in kitchen countertops, after all :)
I somewhat agree. There's ZERO reason for such insanity given that female twist-lock plugs can be had in a local home improvement store, and male twist-lock panel-mountable receptacles can be bought in a local electrical supply store.
What's the problem with using male-to-female, with the female end being twistlock like it should be?
The inspector only cares about it being UL listed and used in accordance with the listing, unless the local variations to the code prohibit something in particular.
What?! NEC code is not based on operation at any given temperature, they certainly address temperature raise and variable ambient temperatures. You have to do a bit of elementary school math and table lookups to design for operation at any given ambient.
Safety != codes. What's allowed by NEC is certainly disallowed under EU regulations, even where NEC promotes better solutions. Spring-loaded wire nuts are just great, they are a big step forward from european-style connection blocks. The problem with euro-style screw-loaded connections is that there's nothing there to apply positive pressure on the wire over time. With thermal cycles, the screws have a tendency to undo themselves. A properly installed wire nut is pretty much a 100 year solution that requires no further maintenance and is not expected to get loose.