It's just a little more complicated. There's a gerrymandering 'game' out there.
All you need is to have the party's voters be unevenly distributed. Oh yeah, and most gerrymandering is a joint process where everybody who wants to keep their seat keeps it.
Then what you do, for example, is draw up a bunch of areas such that your party has a 5-10% lead in the target districts, resulting in an over representation of your party in most areas. Then you have hardly any of your party in the opposing districts.
With this you can turn a 60-40 lead into 80% of seats going for your party.
There have been some rather outrageous cases of gerrymandering in the USA.
To bad that they picked a cellphone service and network that reduces the iPhone to a brick with no service in my area.
I have the choice between Verizon, Alltel, and SRT(the local phone company).
Ah well...
Of course, I'm unusual in that I'd love to have a basic phone with a huge battery and big antenna(I'm pretty far from the cell towers). Just include bluetooth so I can leave the phone somewhere where it gets good reception while I use a headset.
I'm no expert on this, but it seems like it would be possible to get a 100C difference without complicated heat generating systems, or even mirrors. Drive a pole into the ground, where it's about 20C if you go down far enough, and use a specially designed greenhouse on the top.
Specialized greenhouse? That'd reach 120C? Yeah, right. You do realize that your 'greenhouse' would be filled with steam, as any water would quickly boil away, don't you? Unless it's pressurized, of course.
Or maybe you wouldn't even need a 'specially designed' one...black asphalt gets about halfway there by itself. If you were really clever, you could use a photovoltaic system to absorb the heat, while you were at it.)
Under direct sunlight, of course. And you do realize that photovoltiacs use light to generate power, not heat, right? It's still generally not enough of a differential to achieve good effciencies, which limits effectiveness. Though I have heard of a number of businesses that install piping under their parking lots to get hot water. That's just direct thermal transfer though, you're not transforming it into a different form, so efficiency can be near 100%.
It is, indeed, the problem that it needs to get insanely hot, and then we get nice large amounts of power out of it...if someone could invent something that only requires an eighth of the temp difference and gave an eighth, or even a tenth, of the power, it would be a lot more usable.
But we haven't. In nuclear plants, raising the temperature another couple hundred degrees can literally mean a 10% efficiency difference - which can change a 1GW reactor(50% efficient) into a 1.2GW one(60% efficient) and reduce their cooling needs at the same time(from having to disburse 1GW of power to.8GW). Do that with 5 reactors and you get the equivalent of a new reactor. This is sortof like the situation that's happened in the US- increases in rating, efficiency, and capacity factors have resulted in power production increases equivalent to a new reactor each year. Not too shabby. 1960's power plants have been upgraded to the point that they can produce power cheaper than coal plants, and that's pretty amazing. They do it by having a capacity factor of.9-.95. IE they're producing 100% power 95% of the time.
Actually, better would be something that only requires at twentieth of the difference and gave off a twentieth of the electricity. Or a fortieth.
Ain't happening. The efficiency thing is part of the equations. When I said theoretical, I meant it. You can't transform a 10 degree difference into electricity worth a darn.
Cheap.
The true killer It's a sad, but fact is that the more efficient you make something, the more expensive it is. If you take something that's 90% efficient, making it 99% efficient will generally cost 10 times as much. Making it 99.9% efficient would be 100X over the 90% one. So, once you customize the equations for your application, you look for the best economy point.
Fuel costs go up? More efficiency makes sense. Fuel costs go down? Build cheaper. Technology can decrease the cost of increasing effeciency, etc...
You could build houses with two of them...one between the outside and the ground, and one between the attic and the ground, and in the winter run the outside one off the 10C difference, and in the summer run the attic one off the 10C difference. Wouldn't be enough to power the house, but it couldn't hurt.
You wouldn't be able to get enough power to light a single CFL, and it'd likely cost tens of thousands.
Efficiency of a heat engine is regulated by the Carnot cycle.
Basically: (T_hot-T_cold)/T_hot, all in kelvin. 20C = 293K, 120C = 393K. 100/393=25% maximum theoretical efficiency.
Kick temperature up to 800C and dump it into a 20C heatsink, 780/1073K = 73% maximum efficiency.
Bit of a difference, isn't it? Your 10C difference in your house would be a mere 3% efficient. In a theoretically perfect system, not a realworld.
All of this could be fixed using the amazing power of technology.
With enough power and resources, you could run a pipe to the ocean and run a desalination plant.
You'd just have to pay with higher water bills. And maybe have to live with a nuclear plant to power the desalination plant. But it'd also reduce dependency on hydrocarbon power, so maybe it's a wash...
ICE already has to use a pressurized system WITH antifreeze that also increases the boiling point of the water.
The biggest problems with generating power using a steam turbine to recover some of the power would be ensuring even cooling on the part of the ICE.
Secondary problems would be keeping it lite enough to be used in a vehicle and keeping the cost and maintenance issues low enough that consumers would be willing to use them.
The larger the temperature difference, the more efficient a theoretically 'perfect' plant can be. This is also true for real world plants, though engineering limits often restrict how high of a temperature they can sustain and use.
Different technologies are differently capable at different temperature ranges - If this process is cheap enough and can get good results from a 'mere' 100 degree or so temperature difference, it can indeed increase the efficiency of many heat plants.
You might be surprised as to the monitoring that does go on.
If nothing else, sneaking in a number of missiles to that one area is going to raise the chances of getting caught drastically.
If the threat level rises enough, THEN you can look at these laser systems or buying that area and bulldozing it to have a clear field to spot anybody trying to drag missiles in.
Right now I figure we're more at risk of a IEDs at places like malls, schools, and churches. An IED can be manufactured from local materials, it doesn't have to be smuggled in from outside the states.
What prevents some terrorists from planing a coordinated attack on, say, 5 major airports, and 2 airliners landing/taking off each within a 5 min window?
Thus far, there have been a few attacks on aircraft - yet they've thus far been unsuccessful. A jetliner is a huge plane, and it doesn't hang around in the attackable range for very long. The multi-engine nature of jetliners tends to confuse missiles as well.
Remember, the missile systems we're talking about aren't small, or normally cheap in terrorist terms*. This makes them easier to intercept and difficult to deploy in large numbers.
You'd still have to save 133 planes get get the 'lives saved' numbers down below $1Million per life.
Generally speaking, I'd say today that a human life is worth ~1 Million. More or less, of course. For older people(especially), I'll start asking about quality of life - it does us no real good to spend a million extending a person's life by a year by having a tube stuck down their throat and hooked up to a dozen machines. I also tend to value criminals in the course of violent crime around $0 or less. Maybe -$20 or so, makes it worth it to plug them with some lead to increase their value.;)
Please note that I'd love to value human lives more, but as a matter of practicality, there are plenty of things we can do that'll save a human life for less than a million. Get some statistical analysis that says that something will save a human life for every $10k spent, I'd be like 'why aren't we spending it already?'. For $100k I'll be checking to see that it's not some inane life extension scheme that wouldn't have what I'd consider a decent quality of life**. Same deal with a million, but a lot more so. At that level we'd better be talking about saving lives, not merely extending them by a year or two.
Let's say that the missile threat was a quite real one and this system ended up saving lives at a 'cost' of $1million per life. Perhaps using a cheaper flare&chaff package system than a high-tech laser. I'd say it's worth it, as we're talking about the difference between a funeral and a safe flight to their destination. $1M to keep a cancer/heart/stroke victim alive for only an extra year - not really worth it(sadly enough). $1M to cure cancer in a 20 year old? Sold!
*They will occasionally get ahold of one cheap through alternate channels. **IE you'd put down a dog before having it live like that.
That said, anyone posting to slashdot that spends $40 on an hdmi cable is just f'ing lazy:)
Or in a hurry.
When I said 'not noticable' I was picturing a guy walking into a store and walking out with an order to deliver that new 50" HDTV, HDDVD/Blueray player, and HD DirecTV/DISH Network service plan w/installation.
At that point, a $40 cable or three is likely to get lost in the shuffle, and probably less than the sales tax.
He just wants it to work for the football game this saturday, he isn't interested in saving $20 and having to wait for it to show up in the mail.
account the economic costs caused by a loss of confidence in commercial air travel
By what I've read, we recovered very quickly from the loss of confidence inspired by 9/11, and more people avoid flying today because of the security theater put in place by the TSA, making flying less convenient/fast than driving in some situations.
Personally, I'd like to see some good high speed rail links - they'd have a real possibility of taking some of the load off the busiest airports.
For big installations the missing the point dream of 100% efficient panels is nonsense anyway
Don't need 100% efficient. Solar simply needs to get a lot cheaper per watt. One way to do this if you can't reduce the cost of the panel by area is to increase the efficiency.
We cope well with big not paticularly efficent thermal plants at the moment and solar also works in that space - steam gives you the best MW per $ once you need a lot of megawatts in one spot.
If one of your loved ones were on such a flight, would you still be so coldly analytical?
To a point. I practically score vulcan on personality tests(100% analytical).
Here's the problem with your point - the pie(governmental money, economy as a whole, take your pick) is only so large at any given point in time. Saying 'oh we can just spend $100 Billion instead' isn't a great answer to my point 'Statistical evidence shows that spending the money in this fashion is unlikely to save any lives, so it's better spent elsewhere'. I know the pie is larger than the $11B this proposed system could cost(assuming no overruns), that it's divided into thousands, even millions of pieces. I'm just arguing about the distribution of the pie.
Given that my family doesn't fly every day(I'm normally on planes more than they are), and that we've had a number of fatal mall and school shootings in the last five years, yet no fatal manpad missile strikes on commercial aircraft, I think that my family would be safer spending the money to help with creating a system to catch nuts before they go on a rampage than trying to defend against a thus-far almost non-existent and ineffectual threat.
This is part of the issue, in and of itself. Bluetooth, WiFi, your rocketfish gadget all operate on the same part of the spectrum.
Running a high definition, somewhat decompressed video stream over 2.4Ghz in a real world situation would run into lots of noise problems, assuming it doesn't stomp over any other systems in the area, like the rocketfish, your 802.11n network, etc...
5Ghz would be better, but companies seem to hate it.
At this point I think it's too bad that they haven't come up with a gigabit fiber common bus type system - where you run a single pair of fiber from your disc system to the TV, a pair from your TV to your receiver(or vice versa), etc...
They then talk to each other and share data for configuration, and use the link to ship things like video and audio streams.
Anyone paying $40 for a fun of the mill HDMI cable is nuts.
Or just ignorant. If you're not used to shopping on the internet, your only knowledge of this stuff is likely from walmart, best buy, sears, and their ilk. Small HiFi stores that I've seen tend to price about the same.
Perhaps, after spending $1K and up on a HDTV, DVD player of some ilk, etc... Maybe a $40 cable just doesn't register anymore.
Less than 50% of the nation at this point doesn't have something other than OTA broadcast. A somewhat smaller fraction hasn't bought a new TV with a digital tuner yet. I'm one of them, but I'm fairly unusual.
Still, I know about the coupons, they've been broadcasting ads on the TV about the shutoff.
At this point I'm merely waiting for the boxes to be available. I think that relatively few people addicted to their OTA broadcasts are going to be caught unaware.
There will be some idiots that complain, but then, in a country of 300 million, I can find somebody to complain about most anything. Most caught by the changeover will simply go out and buy the converter box, coupon or not.
Actually Akabar more likely today to be equiped with an Iranian launcher paid for by Saudi money. Well, depending the launcher could be from various places such as Russia and China.
The cold war era missiles that are still around are unusable without refurbishing/maintenance that, at this point, is more expensive than buying a new missile.
I'm going to have to dial your paranoia back a bit. This isn't being done by the department of defense, this is being done by the department of homeland security. The Air Force, who'd be the principal of any scheme like this if it'd hatched in the DD, would much rather put the money into more F22s.
Though to be honest, I'd rather they went back to the old non-politically correct 'Dept of War' terminology.
Also, most sane people can tell the difference between a defense system like a moderate power laser or some chaff packs and offensive systems like bombs or missiles.
This sounds a lot like the DHS has too much money on their hands and are actively looking for ways to spend it. Can't even point the finger at any direct pork, as they're contracting with non-US firms.
This is just wasted effort. It would be better to spend the 40 billion dollars on training security staff.
This strikes me much like many other proposals: There are many other fields that a $40 billion investment would save many more lives. Improving car crash standards a bit, for example.
It's like banning the.50BMG in California because of it's usefulness to terrorists. Never mind that there haven't been many incidents worldwide of terrorists using it, much less in the USA/Europe. The only case I know of where it was used in a crime caused no fatalities - oh yeah, and it was the guy who built a tank out of his bulldozer. Not exactly a guy concerned with practicality. For the cost of a.50BMG rifle you can get a lot of explosives - which terrorists do have a history of using.
Yes, I'm performing risk analysis - I'm not saying that terrorists won't manage to shoot down a commercial aircraft with a manpad, but is it worth $40 BILLION to try to stop it? A full plane would average what, 300 people? Even if it saves a plane - that's $133 million per life saved. Makes health care look cheap.
Right now, going by history - 300 people X zero average incidents per year = 0 average dead per year.
I mean - this system isn't guaranteed to work, even if they do shoot a IR missile at the plane(and the odds are currently low that they will).
I think we need to step back and stop concentrating on air travel so much. I mean, the terrorists attack plenty of places other than airlines. That was, relatively speaking, a one time deal. We'd be better off spending the money protecting malls and schools.
Not lately, though I did return a DVD like that once. At least if it gets too annoying I'm sure that somebody will eventually make a player that ignores those flags Ala firefox and popups.
Robust design is indeed redundant and distributed - but after a certain point combining stuff can actually increase reliability.
A combined bus architecture can indeed increase reliability while reducing cost.
You just don't depend on one bus, you have redundant buses.
When you have the morass of wires that you say is superior, after a certain point you end up with cable channels carrying multiple hundreds of wires. A problem with any of them can result in a control signal not getting to where it needs to be - in a manner that might not be noticed immediately. It's also a maintenance nightmare.
Then look at a combined bus system - for my example, you could have sets of fiber lines running to a control box in the front, middle, and back of the plane, with each critical control device having a hookup to at least two of the boxes and still have more redundancy at less weight than the old system.
By running such advanced control systems, if any of the lines break, an alarm can be activated and a cockpit system can say where the problem is.
Slashdot Mirror
It's just a little more complicated. There's a gerrymandering 'game' out there.
All you need is to have the party's voters be unevenly distributed. Oh yeah, and most gerrymandering is a joint process where everybody who wants to keep their seat keeps it.
Then what you do, for example, is draw up a bunch of areas such that your party has a 5-10% lead in the target districts, resulting in an over representation of your party in most areas. Then you have hardly any of your party in the opposing districts.
With this you can turn a 60-40 lead into 80% of seats going for your party.
There have been some rather outrageous cases of gerrymandering in the USA.
To bad that they picked a cellphone service and network that reduces the iPhone to a brick with no service in my area.
I have the choice between Verizon, Alltel, and SRT(the local phone company).
Ah well...
Of course, I'm unusual in that I'd love to have a basic phone with a huge battery and big antenna(I'm pretty far from the cell towers). Just include bluetooth so I can leave the phone somewhere where it gets good reception while I use a headset.
I'm no expert on this, but it seems like it would be possible to get a 100C difference without complicated heat generating systems, or even mirrors. Drive a pole into the ground, where it's about 20C if you go down far enough, and use a specially designed greenhouse on the top.
.8GW). Do that with 5 reactors and you get the equivalent of a new reactor. This is sortof like the situation that's happened in the US- increases in rating, efficiency, and capacity factors have resulted in power production increases equivalent to a new reactor each year. Not too shabby. 1960's power plants have been upgraded to the point that they can produce power cheaper than coal plants, and that's pretty amazing. They do it by having a capacity factor of .9-.95. IE they're producing 100% power 95% of the time.
Specialized greenhouse? That'd reach 120C? Yeah, right. You do realize that your 'greenhouse' would be filled with steam, as any water would quickly boil away, don't you? Unless it's pressurized, of course.
Or maybe you wouldn't even need a 'specially designed' one...black asphalt gets about halfway there by itself. If you were really clever, you could use a photovoltaic system to absorb the heat, while you were at it.)
Under direct sunlight, of course. And you do realize that photovoltiacs use light to generate power, not heat, right? It's still generally not enough of a differential to achieve good effciencies, which limits effectiveness. Though I have heard of a number of businesses that install piping under their parking lots to get hot water. That's just direct thermal transfer though, you're not transforming it into a different form, so efficiency can be near 100%.
It is, indeed, the problem that it needs to get insanely hot, and then we get nice large amounts of power out of it...if someone could invent something that only requires an eighth of the temp difference and gave an eighth, or even a tenth, of the power, it would be a lot more usable.
But we haven't. In nuclear plants, raising the temperature another couple hundred degrees can literally mean a 10% efficiency difference - which can change a 1GW reactor(50% efficient) into a 1.2GW one(60% efficient) and reduce their cooling needs at the same time(from having to disburse 1GW of power to
Actually, better would be something that only requires at twentieth of the difference and gave off a twentieth of the electricity. Or a fortieth.
Ain't happening. The efficiency thing is part of the equations. When I said theoretical, I meant it. You can't transform a 10 degree difference into electricity worth a darn.
Cheap.
The true killer It's a sad, but fact is that the more efficient you make something, the more expensive it is. If you take something that's 90% efficient, making it 99% efficient will generally cost 10 times as much. Making it 99.9% efficient would be 100X over the 90% one. So, once you customize the equations for your application, you look for the best economy point.
Fuel costs go up? More efficiency makes sense. Fuel costs go down? Build cheaper. Technology can decrease the cost of increasing effeciency, etc...
You could build houses with two of them...one between the outside and the ground, and one between the attic and the ground, and in the winter run the outside one off the 10C difference, and in the summer run the attic one off the 10C difference. Wouldn't be enough to power the house, but it couldn't hurt.
You wouldn't be able to get enough power to light a single CFL, and it'd likely cost tens of thousands.
Efficiency of a heat engine is regulated by the Carnot cycle.
Basically: (T_hot-T_cold)/T_hot, all in kelvin. 20C = 293K, 120C = 393K. 100/393=25% maximum theoretical efficiency.
Kick temperature up to 800C and dump it into a 20C heatsink, 780/1073K = 73% maximum efficiency.
Bit of a difference, isn't it? Your 10C difference in your house would be a mere 3% efficient. In a theoretically perfect system, not a realworld.
All of this could be fixed using the amazing power of technology.
With enough power and resources, you could run a pipe to the ocean and run a desalination plant.
You'd just have to pay with higher water bills. And maybe have to live with a nuclear plant to power the desalination plant. But it'd also reduce dependency on hydrocarbon power, so maybe it's a wash...
ICE already has to use a pressurized system WITH antifreeze that also increases the boiling point of the water.
The biggest problems with generating power using a steam turbine to recover some of the power would be ensuring even cooling on the part of the ICE.
Secondary problems would be keeping it lite enough to be used in a vehicle and keeping the cost and maintenance issues low enough that consumers would be willing to use them.
The larger the temperature difference, the more efficient a theoretically 'perfect' plant can be. This is also true for real world plants, though engineering limits often restrict how high of a temperature they can sustain and use.
Different technologies are differently capable at different temperature ranges - If this process is cheap enough and can get good results from a 'mere' 100 degree or so temperature difference, it can indeed increase the efficiency of many heat plants.
You might be surprised as to the monitoring that does go on.
If nothing else, sneaking in a number of missiles to that one area is going to raise the chances of getting caught drastically.
If the threat level rises enough, THEN you can look at these laser systems or buying that area and bulldozing it to have a clear field to spot anybody trying to drag missiles in.
Right now I figure we're more at risk of a IEDs at places like malls, schools, and churches. An IED can be manufactured from local materials, it doesn't have to be smuggled in from outside the states.
What prevents some terrorists from planing a coordinated attack on, say, 5 major airports, and 2 airliners landing/taking off each within a 5 min window?
;)
Thus far, there have been a few attacks on aircraft - yet they've thus far been unsuccessful. A jetliner is a huge plane, and it doesn't hang around in the attackable range for very long. The multi-engine nature of jetliners tends to confuse missiles as well.
Remember, the missile systems we're talking about aren't small, or normally cheap in terrorist terms*. This makes them easier to intercept and difficult to deploy in large numbers.
You'd still have to save 133 planes get get the 'lives saved' numbers down below $1Million per life.
Generally speaking, I'd say today that a human life is worth ~1 Million. More or less, of course. For older people(especially), I'll start asking about quality of life - it does us no real good to spend a million extending a person's life by a year by having a tube stuck down their throat and hooked up to a dozen machines. I also tend to value criminals in the course of violent crime around $0 or less. Maybe -$20 or so, makes it worth it to plug them with some lead to increase their value.
Please note that I'd love to value human lives more, but as a matter of practicality, there are plenty of things we can do that'll save a human life for less than a million. Get some statistical analysis that says that something will save a human life for every $10k spent, I'd be like 'why aren't we spending it already?'. For $100k I'll be checking to see that it's not some inane life extension scheme that wouldn't have what I'd consider a decent quality of life**. Same deal with a million, but a lot more so. At that level we'd better be talking about saving lives, not merely extending them by a year or two.
Let's say that the missile threat was a quite real one and this system ended up saving lives at a 'cost' of $1million per life. Perhaps using a cheaper flare&chaff package system than a high-tech laser. I'd say it's worth it, as we're talking about the difference between a funeral and a safe flight to their destination. $1M to keep a cancer/heart/stroke victim alive for only an extra year - not really worth it(sadly enough). $1M to cure cancer in a 20 year old? Sold!
*They will occasionally get ahold of one cheap through alternate channels.
**IE you'd put down a dog before having it live like that.
That said, anyone posting to slashdot that spends $40 on an hdmi cable is just f'ing lazy :)
Or in a hurry.
When I said 'not noticable' I was picturing a guy walking into a store and walking out with an order to deliver that new 50" HDTV, HDDVD/Blueray player, and HD DirecTV/DISH Network service plan w/installation.
At that point, a $40 cable or three is likely to get lost in the shuffle, and probably less than the sales tax.
He just wants it to work for the football game this saturday, he isn't interested in saving $20 and having to wait for it to show up in the mail.
account the economic costs caused by a loss of confidence in commercial air travel
By what I've read, we recovered very quickly from the loss of confidence inspired by 9/11, and more people avoid flying today because of the security theater put in place by the TSA, making flying less convenient/fast than driving in some situations.
Personally, I'd like to see some good high speed rail links - they'd have a real possibility of taking some of the load off the busiest airports.
They're out there, maybe mine is? ;)
Could explain why I don't have any trouble skipping most of them.
Solar collectors in space aren't necessarily needed.
I'm a big advocated for nuclear, but that's mostly because of the cost and availability of solar/wind.
Make solar an order of magnitude or so cheaper and I'd be installing a set on my roof or at least in my yard.
If nothing else, in many areas there's plenty of roofs that could have solar on them without much trouble.
For big installations the missing the point dream of 100% efficient panels is nonsense anyway
Don't need 100% efficient. Solar simply needs to get a lot cheaper per watt. One way to do this if you can't reduce the cost of the panel by area is to increase the efficiency.
We cope well with big not paticularly efficent thermal plants at the moment and solar also works in that space - steam gives you the best MW per $ once you need a lot of megawatts in one spot.
Agreed.
That's a lotta mirrors for 2.5 gallons of gas a day, once they perfect the process.
Consider that covering an electric car with solar panels is generally considered insufficient to power a vehicle enough for commuting purposes.
2.5 gallons of gas, figure ~75 miles of travel.
Commuting? I'd figure 30 miles average.
At a rough guess, I'd figure a 5.3 meter radius would be 4-6 cars worth.
Doesn't sound too bad to me. Cost, of course, is an issue, but then, when isn't it?
If one of your loved ones were on such a flight, would you still be so coldly analytical?
To a point. I practically score vulcan on personality tests(100% analytical).
Here's the problem with your point - the pie(governmental money, economy as a whole, take your pick) is only so large at any given point in time. Saying 'oh we can just spend $100 Billion instead' isn't a great answer to my point 'Statistical evidence shows that spending the money in this fashion is unlikely to save any lives, so it's better spent elsewhere'. I know the pie is larger than the $11B this proposed system could cost(assuming no overruns), that it's divided into thousands, even millions of pieces. I'm just arguing about the distribution of the pie.
Given that my family doesn't fly every day(I'm normally on planes more than they are), and that we've had a number of fatal mall and school shootings in the last five years, yet no fatal manpad missile strikes on commercial aircraft, I think that my family would be safer spending the money to help with creating a system to catch nuts before they go on a rampage than trying to defend against a thus-far almost non-existent and ineffectual threat.
This is part of the issue, in and of itself. Bluetooth, WiFi, your rocketfish gadget all operate on the same part of the spectrum.
Running a high definition, somewhat decompressed video stream over 2.4Ghz in a real world situation would run into lots of noise problems, assuming it doesn't stomp over any other systems in the area, like the rocketfish, your 802.11n network, etc...
5Ghz would be better, but companies seem to hate it.
At this point I think it's too bad that they haven't come up with a gigabit fiber common bus type system - where you run a single pair of fiber from your disc system to the TV, a pair from your TV to your receiver(or vice versa), etc...
They then talk to each other and share data for configuration, and use the link to ship things like video and audio streams.
Anyone paying $40 for a fun of the mill HDMI cable is nuts.
Or just ignorant. If you're not used to shopping on the internet, your only knowledge of this stuff is likely from walmart, best buy, sears, and their ilk. Small HiFi stores that I've seen tend to price about the same.
Perhaps, after spending $1K and up on a HDTV, DVD player of some ilk, etc... Maybe a $40 cable just doesn't register anymore.
I've heard that aluminum is cheaper. You generally have to use a larger gauge of it, so it's a little more complicated, but it's generally cheaper.
Less than 50% of the nation at this point doesn't have something other than OTA broadcast. A somewhat smaller fraction hasn't bought a new TV with a digital tuner yet. I'm one of them, but I'm fairly unusual.
Still, I know about the coupons, they've been broadcasting ads on the TV about the shutoff.
At this point I'm merely waiting for the boxes to be available. I think that relatively few people addicted to their OTA broadcasts are going to be caught unaware.
There will be some idiots that complain, but then, in a country of 300 million, I can find somebody to complain about most anything. Most caught by the changeover will simply go out and buy the converter box, coupon or not.
Actually Akabar more likely today to be equiped with an Iranian launcher paid for by Saudi money. Well, depending the launcher could be from various places such as Russia and China.
The cold war era missiles that are still around are unusable without refurbishing/maintenance that, at this point, is more expensive than buying a new missile.
I'm going to have to dial your paranoia back a bit. This isn't being done by the department of defense, this is being done by the department of homeland security. The Air Force, who'd be the principal of any scheme like this if it'd hatched in the DD, would much rather put the money into more F22s.
Though to be honest, I'd rather they went back to the old non-politically correct 'Dept of War' terminology.
Also, most sane people can tell the difference between a defense system like a moderate power laser or some chaff packs and offensive systems like bombs or missiles.
This sounds a lot like the DHS has too much money on their hands and are actively looking for ways to spend it. Can't even point the finger at any direct pork, as they're contracting with non-US firms.
This is just wasted effort. It would be better to spend the 40 billion dollars on training security staff.
.50BMG in California because of it's usefulness to terrorists. Never mind that there haven't been many incidents worldwide of terrorists using it, much less in the USA/Europe. The only case I know of where it was used in a crime caused no fatalities - oh yeah, and it was the guy who built a tank out of his bulldozer. Not exactly a guy concerned with practicality. For the cost of a .50BMG rifle you can get a lot of explosives - which terrorists do have a history of using.
This strikes me much like many other proposals: There are many other fields that a $40 billion investment would save many more lives. Improving car crash standards a bit, for example.
It's like banning the
Yes, I'm performing risk analysis - I'm not saying that terrorists won't manage to shoot down a commercial aircraft with a manpad, but is it worth $40 BILLION to try to stop it? A full plane would average what, 300 people? Even if it saves a plane - that's $133 million per life saved. Makes health care look cheap.
Right now, going by history - 300 people X zero average incidents per year = 0 average dead per year.
I mean - this system isn't guaranteed to work, even if they do shoot a IR missile at the plane(and the odds are currently low that they will).
I think we need to step back and stop concentrating on air travel so much. I mean, the terrorists attack plenty of places other than airlines. That was, relatively speaking, a one time deal. We'd be better off spending the money protecting malls and schools.
Not lately, though I did return a DVD like that once. At least if it gets too annoying I'm sure that somebody will eventually make a player that ignores those flags Ala firefox and popups.
s long as you're not breaking privacy laws which aren't a concern if the cheating couple is caught kissing in public, going into a motel, etc.
Depending upon the region, this could indeed violate privacy laws.
And I was picturing rather more than the public stuff...
I'll both agree and disagree here.
Robust design is indeed redundant and distributed - but after a certain point combining stuff can actually increase reliability.
A combined bus architecture can indeed increase reliability while reducing cost.
You just don't depend on one bus, you have redundant buses.
When you have the morass of wires that you say is superior, after a certain point you end up with cable channels carrying multiple hundreds of wires. A problem with any of them can result in a control signal not getting to where it needs to be - in a manner that might not be noticed immediately. It's also a maintenance nightmare.
Then look at a combined bus system - for my example, you could have sets of fiber lines running to a control box in the front, middle, and back of the plane, with each critical control device having a hookup to at least two of the boxes and still have more redundancy at less weight than the old system.
By running such advanced control systems, if any of the lines break, an alarm can be activated and a cockpit system can say where the problem is.