Philips christmas lights - 60 LEDs using 2 legs of 30. Depends on the LED's own voltage/current resistance to prevent burnout by reverse current, and is actually 'lit' around 35% of the time.
Another AC design option might be to bridge-rectify the AC power to use both sides of the AC cycle. That would double the pulse rate, which might be better. But it would also double the average current flow, which would require a larger resistor to reduce it, with more power loss. Alternately, a power supply with current control could produce high-voltage DC, which would eliminate light pulsing. That would come at substantial cost, and introduce potential reliability issues when compared to the resistor alternative.
One thing I think he's wrong on is that a simple rectifier circuit would decrease efficiency due to higher average current - I think it'd increase efficiency, but also double the apparent brightness of the string*. After all, it'd be lit 70% of the time, 'blinking' at 120Hz. You might need a 'larger' resister in the sense of higher wattage, but it wouldn't have to be larger in terms of ohms. With something built to a price point like this, they might be depending on that 35% duty cycle to halve the wattage rating of the resister.
If building from scratch, the solution might be to use smaller LEDs**.
As for the 'current limited high voltage DC supply', given that we don't need to change the voltage, a still pretty simple full-wave bridge rectifyer circuit with a cap and resister would work. You'd probably still be able to use the one that came with the lights; the voltage drop from the rectification would help.
*keeping in mind that human perception of 'brightness' is non-linear and highly variable due to our automatic adoption to wildly different illumination levels **Possibly saving enough money to pay for the rectifyer circuit?
Yes, some viewers are indeed more aware. Remember when monitor refresh rates really mattered? A CRT@60HZ really, really bothers me. I can see the refresh(it looks like the screen is blinking), 70HZ usually fixed the problem, but normally found 85hz the easiest on my eyes. Yet, there's plenty of people who handle that 60hz monitor just fine. Otherwise it wouldn't have been a standard.
Given that people have managed to pick up information off of ethernet on the basis of blinking LED status lights on old hubs, LEDs can blink discretely, very, very fast. I can see a simple/cheap circuit that uses a single diode to simply chop off the negative voltage portion, resulting in lights that flicker at 60hz. A couple diodes would give you a 120Hz 'flicker', which most wouldn't be able to see. Add a capaciter to even even that out.
Hmmm... I'm already considering various possibilities...
Looks like we have some disagreement here. I didn't hit Norway(or the other northern ones) up when I toured around Europe, and I spent some time in Germany, and my brother in Italy.
One exemption doesn't a 'tradition' break - just because one US phone company might of charged for local calls, or one European one didn't, doesn't break the general rule - local calls have historically been free in the USA and toll in Europe.
At least those undesirable chemicals are pretty much 100% recyclable. For energy storage like this, you need two things. It needs to be cheap per kwh, keeping in mind maintenance and longevity. Efficiency is also huge - a few points of efficiency can make all the difference, cost wise. Still, a lesser factor than cost, especially when you're simply looking at recovering power that would otherwise not be used.
NiMH is around 66% efficient charge wise, LiIon, though twice as expensive(at this time), is 99.9% efficient.
The extra efficiency would make a huge difference - not so much in the cost of the batteries, but in how many turbines you need to build.
Looks like LiIon is in the same magnitude at durability, ~1200 cycles vs ~1000, assuming excellent battery management, which the power companies would presumably do.
Still, you're looking at $560-700 for a battery pack to store/distribute $.10 of electricity. Assuming full charge and discharge daily, that's $36.50 of electricity using today's retail prices in my area, but a THIRD of the battery's lifespan. $110 of electricity for the pack's life.
Sigh... Back to the problem with electric vehicles. We 'only' need lithium ion batteries to be around an order of magnitude cheaper to be economical.
Unless we control spending, lowering taxes won't help. The 'first' world is reaching the capacity for other nations to support our borrowing. Note: I blame MOST first world nations because most all are carrying similar debt to GDP levels as the USA.
It's one thing to borrow money to build a dam that will produce revenue generating electricity, that will prevent floods causing millions/billions of dollars of damage. It's quite another to fund operating costs that way. Right now we're funding stuff like police and medical care on loans. This can't go on.
I don't understand why, but that is the way it works here.
It's simple enough - you're paying for the radio time associated with your phone. It mostly stems from the 'local calls are free' tradition. Back in the days before cellular phones, when only doctors and stock brokers had them, they didn't want the equivalent of 900(extra charge) numbers, so they picked up the radio tab. That continued on into the cell phone age.
Doesn't mean text messages aren't profit gold for the cell companies. Part of the reason I don't use them.
WTF? Does that mean the US telcos are double dipping?!
Well, you have to understand the differences in evolution in telephone service. Traditionally in the USA, local phone calls are unmetered. That was never the case in Europe.
When the first radio phones started coming out(they weren't cellular yet), ALL calls were metered because you were paying for relatively expensive limited radio transmissions. Because such people were relatively rich, and didn't want to discourage calls too much with getting the equivalent of a 900 number, they accepted the charges.
Think of it as the tradition is that the owner of the cell phone pays for the radio transmission costs, outgoing or incoming. Thus the reason you get charged minutes for incoming as well as outgoing calls.
That's not to say that the charges for text messages aren't crazy. It's one of those things that I wouldn't be surprised that there's more bit traffic to charge for text messages than to send them. More expense to bill for a text message than to send one, etc...
People keep forgetting, Bill isn't exactly at the helm anymore. Steve Ballmer has replaced him.
As for Compuserve and AOL, well, metered billing made sense back then because, well, phone lines aren't free and can be a shared resource.
Metered billing for software doesn't make much sense unless you're running it on the company's hardware; today that better be a cluster, or at least a $5k server, with you having the whole thing.
Given people's known preference for flat rates and predictable bills; I don't think this is going to fly.
I mean, people already complain about unexpected cell phone bills from exceeding minutes or text messages. What happens when the kid forgets and leaves an office app open for a week?
Good point. Heck, I'm still using a 1280x1024 17" LCD as a secondary display. Heck, I use two of them at work. My home primary is a 26" LCD with a resolution of 1920x1200.
The extra 120 lines is just enough for a status panel on the bottem when I play 1080 content.
Anything beyond that is optional prettification and counts as luxury.
I have to agree, and how much of that will you really notice; especially for some otherwise lame FPS? I mean, how much detail are you going to notice while you're trying to kill the latest 20 hell-demons that are throwing flaming skulls at you?
Are you really going to pay much attention to the photorealistic framed picture of the Mona Lisa on the wall?
I see this sort of stuff being more realistic for a more laid back sort of game - and you generally don't have so much going along at once during such a game that modern video cards can't easily keep up.
there's no reason console games couldn't support the connection of usb keyboards and mice for those who want to play with them.
I think that Microsoft isn't quite ready for the general public to realize that that $399 'gaming' machine is perfectly powerful enough to run an office suite. With a 1080p HDTV, it's even got more resolution than monitors of 5-10 years ago. 80/160GB? Again, look back a few years, we did fine with less storage than that*.
There's not actually that much difference between an XBox 360 or a PS3 and a PC/Mac.
*I am, of course, talking about the average user. Think grandma and the secretary's desktop, not the machines in the server farms, or on our enthusiastic desktop.
One site lists the Tesla's motor as weighing in at 70 pounds!!! For any other motor of that horsepower(248 hp), I've been seeing weights of over a thousand pounds - the biggest difference I see is the Tesla motor maxes out at 13k rpms, the ones I was looking at are rated for a mere 2k or less. Found a 70 pound motor - rated at 2 hp@1800 RPM. 230/460Volts. Motor size/weight goes down as voltage goes up, and HP goes up as RPMS go up. The Tesla is rated for 14k RPM. Factor of 7.7. That would get us up to 15.5 HP. Not 248 HP. Hmm... It notes that the 248 is the maximum - Standard ratings for electric motors are sustained - not max, like for engines. Factors of ten is possible for limited times, combined with a voltage increase (600V+), and removal of a considerable amount of housing weight and it sounds feasible.
BTW, from elsewhere in the thread, EEStor's unit is about the same size, physically speaking, but much lighter than the LiIon pack. The reduced weight will increase range some, but I'd say the biggest hope is cost savings. That's where the money is.
Oh, and the trunk is just large enough for a golf bag. Not what I'd call large. An electric snowmobile would have a hard time fitting the current EEStor unit into it's structure - even with a total redesign to optimize layout for the new technologies. There's also the environmental question - the EEStor unit would have to work down into the -40/-50 range to be on the safe side.
I was talking about the Tesla Roadster, not the Chevy Volt. Looks like you realized that as well. Going to be a pain in the butt until I clear it out. Still, the Tesla would be roomy only in comparison to other small two seat vehicles.
You, of course, still need the motor/generator to transfer power to and from the batteries/wheels. And even the 20 gallon tank on my trunk isn't that big, not in comparison to the battery packs mentioned. Generally the big weight savings is the engine and all it's associated equipment like the radiator, emissions, etc...
To put it another way, the Tesla's battery pack is bigger than my truck's fuel tank and far, far, heavier. We're comparing a truck's fuel tank vs a small car.
It's unfortunate fact that even with modern technology, despite not needing cooling and emissions equipment, an EV will still be heavier than a comparable gasoline vehicle, at any decent range.
Fortunately I'm neither scientist nor professional statistician. I'm a multipurpose computer guy, specializing in security at the moment. I'm just generally good with numbers and tend to remember stuff.
And if I'd put it as 14 I'd have probably gotten jumped at for that one. I just can't win.:(
As you said - problems increase in frequency as the mother gets older. There's some research that older fathers increase certain problems, but not as much.
Fine. Going by PURE physical statistics - incidents of birth defects, complications with the pregnancy, etc... The younger the mother, the better, as long as she's properly past puberty. In the USA, this is around 14 today.
Going by society, well, the increase in problems in the 20-25 age category is probably outweighed at this time by the increases in responsibility and family stability/maturity. Thus my suggestion of having the grandparents doing the raising.
Call it political correctness... I almost put in 14 as the number, but reconsidered. Didn't want to say I want 14 year olds to be having kids.
Thus the 16 number.
Then again, I've considered before a society where people have their kids young, but have grandparents take care of them.
Consider, people having kids at 14-16, their parents will be 28-32, easily ready to take care of the children. I'd tend to place the deliminter where the grandparents stop taking over around 20-21.
So how are the nurses going to operate this one without training or manuals? Not to mention the sheer nightmare of things built out of random parts.... every unit is unique.
Except they're not built out of random parts. The prototype was built out of entirely 4Runner* parts from the sounds of it. Presumably the factory building cheap incubators would build them in a standardized way. Best way to keep costs down anyways. They'd only become bastardized out in the field, presumably after their users have become familiar with the operation.
And, coming directly from the factory to the 3rd world medical facilities, presumably the manual wouldn't have been lost or not delivered, like the expensive, donated, used incubator.
*From the article. Presumably a production unit might use different parts.
That's why we're not going cold turkey - we've put EA on methadone for the moment.
Probably what they're finding out is that steam games are actually pirated less than their own Securom ones.
Of course, I looked to buy a EA game on steam to reward them, but I don't really care for spore, it's still too expensive, and Crysis Warhead still has securom on it. Oops...
I have to agree, 20A@220V is a bit on the low side. Electric Dryer sockets are 30A, and stoves are typically 50A. Though I'd suggest that you'd likely be able to run all four computers and the entertainment system from a single 20A@110V circuit. Assuming the computers are at all normal, and the entertainment is 'home' type.
While 200A is the modern standard, a LOT of homes have 100A or less. So I'd figure 50A being the max practical, for now.
Still, looking at the plug on my stove is a bit on the scary side.
As for the higher power levels - would require extensive rewiring and either transformers in all the houses to provide the lower voltage, or more high voltage lines running in neighborhoods.
Though I have thought on using a transformer to increase the voltage to around 600V, you'd be able to use a dryer sized cord to provide three times the power you'd be able to over the 220V version. That'd still pull 120A at the breaker, but charge quickly enough to give an 80% charge in around a couple of hours max.
As for fast charges outside - I don't want to hang around a station for an hour, better to put them in next to restraunts. Let me 'fuel up' at the same time.;)
I'm suggesting that they are a high risk group that could be encouraged to delay having children until a time when there is less apparent risk.
Given the research I've seen, we already delay childbirth more than necessary, proper pre-natal care is more important today than delaying pregnancy. From what I've read, 16-18 for the age of the mother is also the category with the least number of problems, given proper care.
Poor people in Africa don't sue because most of Africa has a shitty legal system.
I might be wrong, but I think they also have much more of a 'bad stuff happens' view on life. Then again, rather than sueing they'll occasionally go to town with a machete or Ak-47, depending on the individual's resources.
Sueing is better than attacks.
Then again, I think that medical malpractice stuff needs to be toned down - especially when it comes to devices. What I'd ask is 'is the average patient better off with the device than without it?', and 'for a machine of it's class, is it within a standard deviation for reliability, safety, etc...?'
Basically, any suite would have to prove that the device isn't worth the money to get any money. Defects happen. Failures happen. Mistakes happen. We'd still be scratching in the dirt if we didn't accept some risk. Risk management, not risk avoidance.
Sir, you have the choice between this $40k rube goldberg incubator that fails, on average, every other week or whenever the power goes a bit wonky, and our nurses can't operate correctly because we can't find the manual, or this one built out of commodity parts with a MTBF of 40k hours that can be serviced by the guy who also works on our ambulances? By the way, it only cost us $5k*, so we'll give you a cut on your bill if you pick that one.
*I figure we'd still get a fancy one, so I upped the price a bit.
Slashdot Mirror
Doing some research... It looks like that's exactly it.
LED Christmas Lights, and how to fix them
Philips christmas lights - 60 LEDs using 2 legs of 30. Depends on the LED's own voltage/current resistance to prevent burnout by reverse current, and is actually 'lit' around 35% of the time.
Another AC design option might be to bridge-rectify the AC power to use both sides of the AC cycle. That would double the pulse rate, which might be better. But it would also double the average current flow, which would require a larger resistor to reduce it, with more power loss.
Alternately, a power supply with current control could produce high-voltage DC, which would eliminate light pulsing. That would come at substantial cost, and introduce potential reliability issues when compared to the resistor alternative.
One thing I think he's wrong on is that a simple rectifier circuit would decrease efficiency due to higher average current - I think it'd increase efficiency, but also double the apparent brightness of the string*. After all, it'd be lit 70% of the time, 'blinking' at 120Hz. You might need a 'larger' resister in the sense of higher wattage, but it wouldn't have to be larger in terms of ohms. With something built to a price point like this, they might be depending on that 35% duty cycle to halve the wattage rating of the resister.
If building from scratch, the solution might be to use smaller LEDs**.
As for the 'current limited high voltage DC supply', given that we don't need to change the voltage, a still pretty simple full-wave bridge rectifyer circuit with a cap and resister would work. You'd probably still be able to use the one that came with the lights; the voltage drop from the rectification would help.
*keeping in mind that human perception of 'brightness' is non-linear and highly variable due to our automatic adoption to wildly different illumination levels
**Possibly saving enough money to pay for the rectifyer circuit?
Yes, some viewers are indeed more aware. Remember when monitor refresh rates really mattered? A CRT@60HZ really, really bothers me. I can see the refresh(it looks like the screen is blinking), 70HZ usually fixed the problem, but normally found 85hz the easiest on my eyes. Yet, there's plenty of people who handle that 60hz monitor just fine. Otherwise it wouldn't have been a standard.
Given that people have managed to pick up information off of ethernet on the basis of blinking LED status lights on old hubs, LEDs can blink discretely, very, very fast. I can see a simple/cheap circuit that uses a single diode to simply chop off the negative voltage portion, resulting in lights that flicker at 60hz. A couple diodes would give you a 120Hz 'flicker', which most wouldn't be able to see. Add a capaciter to even even that out.
Hmmm... I'm already considering various possibilities...
Looks like we have some disagreement here. I didn't hit Norway(or the other northern ones) up when I toured around Europe, and I spent some time in Germany, and my brother in Italy.
One exemption doesn't a 'tradition' break - just because one US phone company might of charged for local calls, or one European one didn't, doesn't break the general rule - local calls have historically been free in the USA and toll in Europe.
. Norway, which is the only country I know the phone history of, had free local calls in most areas
But it has been the tradition of Germany, England, France, etc...
Then let me see if this is correct: You went from a free local call plan to a charge by the minute one, at 2 cents/minute?
Traditions are just a way to keep stupid unfair standards so they can benefit from it.
There's a solution, you know. Start your own cell phone company and steal customers on the basis of not charging for text messages.
At least those undesirable chemicals are pretty much 100% recyclable. For energy storage like this, you need two things. It needs to be cheap per kwh, keeping in mind maintenance and longevity. Efficiency is also huge - a few points of efficiency can make all the difference, cost wise. Still, a lesser factor than cost, especially when you're simply looking at recovering power that would otherwise not be used.
NiMH is around 66% efficient charge wise, LiIon, though twice as expensive(at this time), is 99.9% efficient.
The extra efficiency would make a huge difference - not so much in the cost of the batteries, but in how many turbines you need to build.
Looks like LiIon is in the same magnitude at durability, ~1200 cycles vs ~1000, assuming excellent battery management, which the power companies would presumably do.
Hmm... Cheap 18650 LiIOn battery 2.4Ah, 3.7V, 8.88 Wh, $5. $.56 per Wh (not suitable for usage in nonsmart charging systems)
Protected 18650 batteries 2.6Ah, 3.7V, 9.62 Wh, $6.69 ea/500+. $.70/Wh
Gotten a LOT cheaper.
Still, Industrial NiMH, 2.1Ah, 1.2V, 2.52Wh, $1.45/500+. $.57/Wh
No wonder so many devices have switched to LiIon!
Still, you're looking at $560-700 for a battery pack to store/distribute $.10 of electricity. Assuming full charge and discharge daily, that's $36.50 of electricity using today's retail prices in my area, but a THIRD of the battery's lifespan. $110 of electricity for the pack's life.
Sigh... Back to the problem with electric vehicles. We 'only' need lithium ion batteries to be around an order of magnitude cheaper to be economical.
Unless we control spending, lowering taxes won't help. The 'first' world is reaching the capacity for other nations to support our borrowing. Note: I blame MOST first world nations because most all are carrying similar debt to GDP levels as the USA.
It's one thing to borrow money to build a dam that will produce revenue generating electricity, that will prevent floods causing millions/billions of dollars of damage. It's quite another to fund operating costs that way. Right now we're funding stuff like police and medical care on loans. This can't go on.
I don't understand why, but that is the way it works here.
It's simple enough - you're paying for the radio time associated with your phone. It mostly stems from the 'local calls are free' tradition. Back in the days before cellular phones, when only doctors and stock brokers had them, they didn't want the equivalent of 900(extra charge) numbers, so they picked up the radio tab. That continued on into the cell phone age.
Doesn't mean text messages aren't profit gold for the cell companies. Part of the reason I don't use them.
WTF? Does that mean the US telcos are double dipping?!
Well, you have to understand the differences in evolution in telephone service. Traditionally in the USA, local phone calls are unmetered. That was never the case in Europe.
When the first radio phones started coming out(they weren't cellular yet), ALL calls were metered because you were paying for relatively expensive limited radio transmissions. Because such people were relatively rich, and didn't want to discourage calls too much with getting the equivalent of a 900 number, they accepted the charges.
Think of it as the tradition is that the owner of the cell phone pays for the radio transmission costs, outgoing or incoming. Thus the reason you get charged minutes for incoming as well as outgoing calls.
That's not to say that the charges for text messages aren't crazy. It's one of those things that I wouldn't be surprised that there's more bit traffic to charge for text messages than to send them. More expense to bill for a text message than to send one, etc...
People keep forgetting, Bill isn't exactly at the helm anymore. Steve Ballmer has replaced him.
As for Compuserve and AOL, well, metered billing made sense back then because, well, phone lines aren't free and can be a shared resource.
Metered billing for software doesn't make much sense unless you're running it on the company's hardware; today that better be a cluster, or at least a $5k server, with you having the whole thing.
Given people's known preference for flat rates and predictable bills; I don't think this is going to fly.
I mean, people already complain about unexpected cell phone bills from exceeding minutes or text messages. What happens when the kid forgets and leaves an office app open for a week?
Because a huge amount of their revenue stream still comes from windows boxes. Microsoft, as a whole, is still PC software centric.
Good point. Heck, I'm still using a 1280x1024 17" LCD as a secondary display. Heck, I use two of them at work. My home primary is a 26" LCD with a resolution of 1920x1200.
The extra 120 lines is just enough for a status panel on the bottem when I play 1080 content.
Anything beyond that is optional prettification and counts as luxury.
I have to agree, and how much of that will you really notice; especially for some otherwise lame FPS? I mean, how much detail are you going to notice while you're trying to kill the latest 20 hell-demons that are throwing flaming skulls at you?
Are you really going to pay much attention to the photorealistic framed picture of the Mona Lisa on the wall?
I see this sort of stuff being more realistic for a more laid back sort of game - and you generally don't have so much going along at once during such a game that modern video cards can't easily keep up.
there's no reason console games couldn't support the connection of usb keyboards and mice for those who want to play with them.
I think that Microsoft isn't quite ready for the general public to realize that that $399 'gaming' machine is perfectly powerful enough to run an office suite. With a 1080p HDTV, it's even got more resolution than monitors of 5-10 years ago. 80/160GB? Again, look back a few years, we did fine with less storage than that*.
There's not actually that much difference between an XBox 360 or a PS3 and a PC/Mac.
*I am, of course, talking about the average user. Think grandma and the secretary's desktop, not the machines in the server farms, or on our enthusiastic desktop.
One site lists the Tesla's motor as weighing in at 70 pounds!!! For any other motor of that horsepower(248 hp), I've been seeing weights of over a thousand pounds - the biggest difference I see is the Tesla motor maxes out at 13k rpms, the ones I was looking at are rated for a mere 2k or less. Found a 70 pound motor - rated at 2 hp@1800 RPM. 230/460Volts. Motor size/weight goes down as voltage goes up, and HP goes up as RPMS go up. The Tesla is rated for 14k RPM. Factor of 7.7. That would get us up to 15.5 HP. Not 248 HP. Hmm... It notes that the 248 is the maximum - Standard ratings for electric motors are sustained - not max, like for engines. Factors of ten is possible for limited times, combined with a voltage increase (600V+), and removal of a considerable amount of housing weight and it sounds feasible.
BTW, from elsewhere in the thread, EEStor's unit is about the same size, physically speaking, but much lighter than the LiIon pack. The reduced weight will increase range some, but I'd say the biggest hope is cost savings. That's where the money is.
Oh, and the trunk is just large enough for a golf bag. Not what I'd call large. An electric snowmobile would have a hard time fitting the current EEStor unit into it's structure - even with a total redesign to optimize layout for the new technologies. There's also the environmental question - the EEStor unit would have to work down into the -40/-50 range to be on the safe side.
Oops.. I've gotten a brain bug.
I was talking about the Tesla Roadster, not the Chevy Volt. Looks like you realized that as well. Going to be a pain in the butt until I clear it out. Still, the Tesla would be roomy only in comparison to other small two seat vehicles.
You, of course, still need the motor/generator to transfer power to and from the batteries/wheels. And even the 20 gallon tank on my trunk isn't that big, not in comparison to the battery packs mentioned. Generally the big weight savings is the engine and all it's associated equipment like the radiator, emissions, etc...
To put it another way, the Tesla's battery pack is bigger than my truck's fuel tank and far, far, heavier. We're comparing a truck's fuel tank vs a small car.
It's unfortunate fact that even with modern technology, despite not needing cooling and emissions equipment, an EV will still be heavier than a comparable gasoline vehicle, at any decent range.
Fortunately I'm neither scientist nor professional statistician. I'm a multipurpose computer guy, specializing in security at the moment. I'm just generally good with numbers and tend to remember stuff.
And if I'd put it as 14 I'd have probably gotten jumped at for that one. I just can't win. :(
As you said - problems increase in frequency as the mother gets older. There's some research that older fathers increase certain problems, but not as much.
Fine. Going by PURE physical statistics - incidents of birth defects, complications with the pregnancy, etc... The younger the mother, the better, as long as she's properly past puberty. In the USA, this is around 14 today.
Going by society, well, the increase in problems in the 20-25 age category is probably outweighed at this time by the increases in responsibility and family stability/maturity. Thus my suggestion of having the grandparents doing the raising.
Call it political correctness... I almost put in 14 as the number, but reconsidered. Didn't want to say I want 14 year olds to be having kids.
Thus the 16 number.
Then again, I've considered before a society where people have their kids young, but have grandparents take care of them.
Consider, people having kids at 14-16, their parents will be 28-32, easily ready to take care of the children. I'd tend to place the deliminter where the grandparents stop taking over around 20-21.
Yes, but to replace that energy in the same time would take 150 amps in.
Also, how fast are you accellerating with that power? You can't brake much faster than that and still have most of the power show up in the battery.
The Tesla can.
So how are the nurses going to operate this one without training or manuals? Not to mention the sheer nightmare of things built out of random parts .... every unit is unique.
Except they're not built out of random parts. The prototype was built out of entirely 4Runner* parts from the sounds of it. Presumably the factory building cheap incubators would build them in a standardized way. Best way to keep costs down anyways. They'd only become bastardized out in the field, presumably after their users have become familiar with the operation.
And, coming directly from the factory to the 3rd world medical facilities, presumably the manual wouldn't have been lost or not delivered, like the expensive, donated, used incubator.
*From the article. Presumably a production unit might use different parts.
That's why we're not going cold turkey - we've put EA on methadone for the moment.
Probably what they're finding out is that steam games are actually pirated less than their own Securom ones.
Of course, I looked to buy a EA game on steam to reward them, but I don't really care for spore, it's still too expensive, and Crysis Warhead still has securom on it. Oops...
Maybe next month, EA.
I have to agree, 20A@220V is a bit on the low side. Electric Dryer sockets are 30A, and stoves are typically 50A. Though I'd suggest that you'd likely be able to run all four computers and the entertainment system from a single 20A@110V circuit. Assuming the computers are at all normal, and the entertainment is 'home' type.
While 200A is the modern standard, a LOT of homes have 100A or less. So I'd figure 50A being the max practical, for now.
Still, looking at the plug on my stove is a bit on the scary side.
As for the higher power levels - would require extensive rewiring and either transformers in all the houses to provide the lower voltage, or more high voltage lines running in neighborhoods.
Though I have thought on using a transformer to increase the voltage to around 600V, you'd be able to use a dryer sized cord to provide three times the power you'd be able to over the 220V version. That'd still pull 120A at the breaker, but charge quickly enough to give an 80% charge in around a couple of hours max.
As for fast charges outside - I don't want to hang around a station for an hour, better to put them in next to restraunts. Let me 'fuel up' at the same time. ;)
I'm suggesting that they are a high risk group that could be encouraged to delay having children until a time when there is less apparent risk.
Given the research I've seen, we already delay childbirth more than necessary, proper pre-natal care is more important today than delaying pregnancy. From what I've read, 16-18 for the age of the mother is also the category with the least number of problems, given proper care.
Poor people in Africa don't sue because most of Africa has a shitty legal system.
I might be wrong, but I think they also have much more of a 'bad stuff happens' view on life. Then again, rather than sueing they'll occasionally go to town with a machete or Ak-47, depending on the individual's resources.
Sueing is better than attacks.
Then again, I think that medical malpractice stuff needs to be toned down - especially when it comes to devices. What I'd ask is 'is the average patient better off with the device than without it?', and 'for a machine of it's class, is it within a standard deviation for reliability, safety, etc...?'
Basically, any suite would have to prove that the device isn't worth the money to get any money. Defects happen. Failures happen. Mistakes happen. We'd still be scratching in the dirt if we didn't accept some risk. Risk management, not risk avoidance.
What if they phrased it a bit differently?
Sir, you have the choice between this $40k rube goldberg incubator that fails, on average, every other week or whenever the power goes a bit wonky, and our nurses can't operate correctly because we can't find the manual, or this one built out of commodity parts with a MTBF of 40k hours that can be serviced by the guy who also works on our ambulances? By the way, it only cost us $5k*, so we'll give you a cut on your bill if you pick that one.
*I figure we'd still get a fancy one, so I upped the price a bit.