Originally, there were dozens of local carriers (back when local telephone service began). While prices were cheap, the phones were all based on different standards AND you couldn't necessarily be on one carrier and talk to someone else on another carrier. The government realized that two things had to take place.
#1. All the phones in the country had to be able to talk to each other (i.e. same electrial standard).
#2. All of the switches across the country had to be connected together (i.e. long distance).
Bell had the most lines and the patent on the telephone, so it was common sense to give him a regulated monopoly for wires in the ground and to install phone service everywhere.
Exactly. If you rent something from someone, there are usually certain restrictions to its use. You just can't go out and take a pair of copper and drop DSL over it. Especially when DSL has been known to interfere with DS-1 level services. Boy, wouldn't it sucks to know that you killed 911 so you could play Quake faster...
And yes, I know that a good portion of DS-1 local loops are on HDSL. Don't get me started on that.
In Illinois, when you pay to have a line installed, you bought the local loop(s) for however many pair they charged you to drop. I think the subloop (pole to your house) can be claimed by you. The rest of the loop is a grey area owned mostly by the phone company, but held in public trust by the charter granted to the phone company.
Umm, no. The ILEC (usually) owns the pole, the wire to your house, and the little box on the wall on the outside of the house (called a demarc). You connect your wiring to that box. That's why when a tree knocks down the wire after a storm, you don't get a bill for $3,000.
The problem with that theory is economies of scale. Most carriers have one or two engineers that cover a multi county area along with a cadre of techs that cover that same area. Now take that group of employees (which might cover 4 counties) and have them now cover the one county.
Your costs have now quadrupled. Guess where the money to pay for that is going to come from?
Also if it would be run like my water department is here, the price would vary by election year.
CLEC's can dig up the yard and drop OC-192 fiber in your backyard if they damn well wish to. There are no restrictions to this (besides filing for the right permits, etc).
Now, if we bring the COST perspective into this then we see WHY CLECs don't drop in their own copper loops. It is "COST INEFFICIENT" for them to pony up the $$$$ of dropping a loop at a site only to have said customer ditch it six months later because they got a good deal on a cell phone from Joe's Cell Phones 'R Us.
Any CLEC would be more than happy to drop a fiber in your backyard, provided that you sign a five year contract promising to pay $50k/month.
I am currently typing on a brand spanking new Dell PowerEdge 500SC with a 1.1G Celeron that I bought for $550 - a $250 Mail in Rebate. Total cost was $300. Sure, it only had a 40GB HD and no sound card, but let the users provide/screw that up. This stock box beats out my HP 733 with 640MB RAM.
Radio waves are nice, but maybe this isn't the preferred way that ET communicates? Just think about it, we're bitching about waiting the 20 minutes that data comes sputtering out of Galileo around Jupiter, would you really want to wait four years for "Landed on Planet @#ASFDE, was promptly eaten by large mantis."
No, you want faster communication that the speed of light. At this point, the only type of "communication" that can be done like that involves quantum entanglement. Maybe that's the way to go....
Small Problem on the math, a 5G acceleration would be around 109/mph/s. This is above what you would experience during takeoff of a fighter or in a dragster. I think putting your local yokle through a two minute-five G takeoff would be way too encumbering on a person (seeing as how NASA actually throttles down the shuttle after SRB seperation so the G-load isn't too strong on trained astronauts).
Power-Weight is going to be the deciding factor along with reusable systems that can handle the takeoff-landing cycles just like a 747. Getting 50,000 lbs to Mach 5 isn't exactly easy. The only experience we have with high-speed vehicles is the Concorde (at half the speed with a somewhat high safety record).
We're just now starting to work on 100 lb projectiles that death-spirals into the desert or ocean in the end, not something that has leather seating and a stewardess in a mini-skirt:-)
Scramjets operate at very high altitudes due to the thinner atmosphere. At sea level, the entire plane would probably turn into a very un-aerodynamic heap of aluminum slag in under 10 seconds. Travelling for 10 seconds at Mach 6+ is not very far figuratively, so pointing it towards a single target is not very effective.
This will be great for getting to orbital/suborbital speeds, but only for reconnissance purposes since ICBMs travel around Mach 19 during reentry. You really don't have a reason to go any faster than that....
Main Entry: satire
Pronunciation: 'sa-"tIr
Function: noun
Etymology: Middle French or Latin; Middle French, from Latin satura, satira, perhaps from (lanx) satura dish of mixed ingredients, from feminine of satur well-fed; akin to Latin satis enough -- more at SAD
Date: 1501
1 : a literary work holding up human vices and follies to ridicule or scorn
2 : trenchant wit, irony, or sarcasm used to expose and discredit vice or folly
synonym see WIT
"From there, the rocket will simultaneously disconnect from the balloon, ignite its engines and shoot out of the upper atmosphere and into space."
"Mr. Feeney hauls himself into the seven-metre-long bullet, carefully avoiding the pair of ominous black rocket nozzles and works his way up to the front windows that look as though they were stolen from the alien invaders of War of the Worlds".
Last time I checked my physics book, wouldn't the balloon be DIRECTLY IN THE PATH of his planned trajectory? All the pretty windows will give him a nice view of the insides of the balloon. If it's made of Mylar, maybe he will have a nice view of some guy screaming his head off as he zips uncontrolled into the outer atmosphere.
The best sys/network admins always have good war stories. Have the prospect tell you about the goofy situations (like a weird IOS bug which only crashes quad serial cards running broken-ring with IOS XX.X) and how they found it and fixed it. Have them tell stories about the dumb users they have helped in the past, how much they have wanted to strangle a certain "l"user who kept coming to them on stupid problems.
At least that should tell you what their technical level is and their experience. After that, you should have a decent idea how they will act in crisis mode (i.e. every day) and how they will trest your users...
Just want to make me move sooner. Somebody should put together a site of "fair-use friendly" countries with decent Internet access...maybe we should all move there.
Any type of encryption is almost impossible to create, especially when you KNOW what the end (unencrypted) result is. Unless someone comes up with some sort of random key which would be built within the encrypted text, there is no way that eventually, someone will figure out that "fcpeB fN fujC" means "Bite Me Adobe" in super backwards ROT-1 (patent pending).
There is no way it could "spill all over you," unless you're for some reason inside the reactor torus when the thing fails, in which case you might get a Darwin Award.
A$$hole physics answer OK....it wouldn't even start due to the additional mass inside of the torus. This would not allow the plasma to heat up even close to the temps needed to create it.
Humorous answer SanDiego, California (Reuters) Freddy "Two-Parts Hydrogen, One-Part Oxygen" Johnston was the first person to experience life about 1 second after the Big Bang when he crawled inside the DIII-D fusion test reactor last Saruday night. Just before a test firing of the reactor (and just after Freddy consumed 15 Mai-Tai's and 3 shots of Tequila), the father of twelve was looking for a nice warm spot to sleep off the effects of his earlier testing of mood-altering beverages. Freddy not only snuck by the three guards outside, but also several dozen surveilience cameras to finally find a nice, warm spot inside of the fusion reactor. Unfortunately for Freddy, the reactor core wasn't inspected before the reactor was closed, pumped down to near vacumm and heated to about 40 million degrees Celcius. As Freddy's molecules brokedown into their atomic components, and then into a plasma, scientists running the test were a bit perplexed by their readings (1 part deuterium, 2 parts tequila, 1 part sloe gin) which cause them to go inside and find the (now vaporized) remains of Freddy. Freddy's last thoughts caputred by the security microphone were "Ooh...looks like a big Jelly donut!".
The #1 issue in preventing people from moving to electric/renewable sources of power is one item: storage.
Basically, have you seen too many electric cars? No, because the batteries suck. And the hybrids basically take advantage of the high-energy reaction of the combustion of something to create electricity to store in a big battery.
Bottom line, if someone can come up with a cheap/light way to store electricity (either through a flywheel or through a superconducting coil), we'll still keep boosting my Exxon stock. And we'll do it by drilling in your backyard.
(Go ahead and score this as Flamebait...but it has to be said)
The only resonably close to perfect solar collector is a black hole (and there are theories that those efficicies are smaller than what we would believe depending on you view evaporation of mass from a black hole). The energies from photons from the sun are not highly energized (like the magnitude of 1.7eV in a photovoltaic reaction) while each atom in a fusion reaction would have a net gain of several thousand/million keV. Basically, to get the same level of energy in a solar reaction would require solar connectors the size of small countries.
OK, it's been years since my last physics class, but since we are in the business of high-energy reactions as opposed to low-energy ones, why do we keep saying "Solar is our Salvation"? I'm willing to admit some of my estimates might be wrong, so if someone actually reads this and wants to discuss it, by all means do so.
(Disclaimer: IANANP (I am not a Nuclear Physicist))
While the pressures required for fusion to take place are huge, the actual area that is compressed to that pressure is pretty small (the rest of the vessel exists in a near vacuum state).
Using standard thermodynamic laws, even if there was an instantaneous loss of magnetic confinement (on superconducting coils, that's a bit difficult to do) the expanding gases would cool as they expanded to the walls of the reactor. There "could" be thermal damage to the reactor walls, but most likely the damage would be minor and would not cause any problems with re-igniting the reactor.
Actually, the "worse case" scenario accident would involve any leaking of Tritium which (if I recall) can be generated by a DT-DT reaction (as opposed to HE-3 + 1N).
Slashdot Mirror
The seriously ironic thing is that millions of dollars of the money that is spent on the legitimate music industry is "channeled into the drugs trade.
:-)
So according to the commercials on TV:
RIAA Profits = Lots of Drugs = Terrorists
If you buy that CD, the terrorists win...
B
Telecom History 101:
Originally, there were dozens of local carriers (back when local telephone service began). While prices were cheap, the phones were all based on different standards AND you couldn't necessarily be on one carrier and talk to someone else on another carrier. The government realized that two things had to take place.
#1. All the phones in the country had to be able to talk to each other (i.e. same electrial standard).
#2. All of the switches across the country had to be connected together (i.e. long distance).
Bell had the most lines and the patent on the telephone, so it was common sense to give him a regulated monopoly for wires in the ground and to install phone service everywhere.
B
Exactly. If you rent something from someone, there are usually certain restrictions to its use. You just can't go out and take a pair of copper and drop DSL over it. Especially when DSL has been known to interfere with DS-1 level services. Boy, wouldn't it sucks to know that you killed 911 so you could play Quake faster...
And yes, I know that a good portion of DS-1 local loops are on HDSL. Don't get me started on that.
B
Umm...no. If you owned a house and someone decided to turn it into an airport landing strip, I think you would be quite peeved at your rentor.
B
In Illinois, when you pay to have a line installed, you bought the local loop(s) for however many pair they charged you to drop. I think the subloop (pole to your house) can be claimed by you. The rest of the loop is a grey area owned mostly by the phone company, but held in public trust by the charter granted to the phone company.
Umm, no. The ILEC (usually) owns the pole, the wire to your house, and the little box on the wall on the outside of the house (called a demarc). You connect your wiring to that box. That's why when a tree knocks down the wire after a storm, you don't get a bill for $3,000.
B
The problem with that theory is economies of scale. Most carriers have one or two engineers that cover a multi county area along with a cadre of techs that cover that same area. Now take that group of employees (which might cover 4 counties) and have them now cover the one county.
Your costs have now quadrupled. Guess where the money to pay for that is going to come from?
Also if it would be run like my water department is here, the price would vary by election year.
B
Where the hell do you live? In the frozen tundra?
CLEC's can dig up the yard and drop OC-192 fiber in your backyard if they damn well wish to. There are no restrictions to this (besides filing for the right permits, etc).
Now, if we bring the COST perspective into this then we see WHY CLECs don't drop in their own copper loops. It is "COST INEFFICIENT" for them to pony up the $$$$ of dropping a loop at a site only to have said customer ditch it six months later because they got a good deal on a cell phone from Joe's Cell Phones 'R Us.
Any CLEC would be more than happy to drop a fiber in your backyard, provided that you sign a five year contract promising to pay $50k/month.
B
I am currently typing on a brand spanking new Dell PowerEdge 500SC with a 1.1G Celeron that I bought for $550 - a $250 Mail in Rebate. Total cost was $300. Sure, it only had a 40GB HD and no sound card, but let the users provide/screw that up. This stock box beats out my HP 733 with 640MB RAM.
B
Oh C'mon...all we have to do is wait 1000 years until Jupiter turns back into a white dwarf, then we can land there all we want.
B
Hey, lets put up a heavily graphic intensive site and then get 50,000 geeks to get on it all at once!!!!!
About Mark Shuttleworth? And if I recall, he's launching in two months.
Rosvikosmos says "He hasn't spoken to us as of yet". My guess is that the yet portion will take place in about 2 weeks.
B
Radio waves are nice, but maybe this isn't the preferred way that ET communicates? Just think about it, we're bitching about waiting the 20 minutes that data comes sputtering out of Galileo around Jupiter, would you really want to wait four years for "Landed on Planet @#ASFDE, was promptly eaten by large mantis."
No, you want faster communication that the speed of light. At this point, the only type of "communication" that can be done like that involves quantum entanglement. Maybe that's the way to go....
B
Small Problem on the math, a 5G acceleration would be around 109/mph/s. This is above what you would experience during takeoff of a fighter or in a dragster. I think putting your local yokle through a two minute-five G takeoff would be way too encumbering on a person (seeing as how NASA actually throttles down the shuttle after SRB seperation so the G-load isn't too strong on trained astronauts).
:-)
Power-Weight is going to be the deciding factor along with reusable systems that can handle the takeoff-landing cycles just like a 747. Getting 50,000 lbs to Mach 5 isn't exactly easy. The only experience we have with high-speed vehicles is the Concorde (at half the speed with a somewhat high safety record).
We're just now starting to work on 100 lb projectiles that death-spirals into the desert or ocean in the end, not something that has leather seating and a stewardess in a mini-skirt
B
Scramjets operate at very high altitudes due to the thinner atmosphere. At sea level, the entire plane would probably turn into a very un-aerodynamic heap of aluminum slag in under 10 seconds. Travelling for 10 seconds at Mach 6+ is not very far figuratively, so pointing it towards a single target is not very effective.
This will be great for getting to orbital/suborbital speeds, but only for reconnissance purposes since ICBMs travel around Mach 19 during reentry. You really don't have a reason to go any faster than that....
B
Main Entry: satire
Pronunciation: 'sa-"tIr
Function: noun
Etymology: Middle French or Latin; Middle French, from Latin satura, satira, perhaps from (lanx) satura dish of mixed ingredients, from feminine of satur well-fed; akin to Latin satis enough -- more at SAD
Date: 1501
1 : a literary work holding up human vices and follies to ridicule or scorn
2 : trenchant wit, irony, or sarcasm used to expose and discredit vice or folly synonym see WIT
Just in case you didn't know...
B
Am I the only one who is wondering about this:
"From there, the rocket will simultaneously disconnect from the balloon, ignite its engines and shoot out of the upper atmosphere and into space."
"Mr. Feeney hauls himself into the seven-metre-long bullet, carefully avoiding the pair of ominous black rocket nozzles and works his way up to the front windows that look as though they were stolen from the alien invaders of War of the Worlds".
Last time I checked my physics book, wouldn't the balloon be DIRECTLY IN THE PATH of his planned trajectory? All the pretty windows will give him a nice view of the insides of the balloon. If it's made of Mylar, maybe he will have a nice view of some guy screaming his head off as he zips uncontrolled into the outer atmosphere.
B
...can be found at www.darwinawards.com.
B
The best sys/network admins always have good war stories. Have the prospect tell you about the goofy situations (like a weird IOS bug which only crashes quad serial cards running broken-ring with IOS XX.X) and how they found it and fixed it. Have them tell stories about the dumb users they have helped in the past, how much they have wanted to strangle a certain "l"user who kept coming to them on stupid problems.
At least that should tell you what their technical level is and their experience. After that, you should have a decent idea how they will act in crisis mode (i.e. every day) and how they will trest your users...
B
Just want to make me move sooner. Somebody should put together a site of "fair-use friendly" countries with decent Internet access...maybe we should all move there.
B
Any type of encryption is almost impossible to create, especially when you KNOW what the end (unencrypted) result is. Unless someone comes up with some sort of random key which would be built within the encrypted text, there is no way that eventually, someone will figure out that "fcpeB fN fujC" means "Bite Me Adobe" in super backwards ROT-1 (patent pending).
B
Too late, Pizza Hut and Popular Mechanics were advertised within Alpha on Dennis Tito's flight.
B
There is no way it could "spill all over you," unless you're for some reason inside the reactor torus when the thing fails, in which case you might get a Darwin Award.
A$$hole physics answer
OK....it wouldn't even start due to the additional mass inside of the torus. This would not allow the plasma to heat up even close to the temps needed to create it.
Humorous answer
SanDiego, California (Reuters)
Freddy "Two-Parts Hydrogen, One-Part Oxygen" Johnston was the first person to experience life about 1 second after the Big Bang when he crawled inside the DIII-D fusion test reactor last Saruday night. Just before a test firing of the reactor (and just after Freddy consumed 15 Mai-Tai's and 3 shots of Tequila), the father of twelve was looking for a nice warm spot to sleep off the effects of his earlier testing of mood-altering beverages. Freddy not only snuck by the three guards outside, but also several dozen surveilience cameras to finally find a nice, warm spot inside of the fusion reactor. Unfortunately for Freddy, the reactor core wasn't inspected before the reactor was closed, pumped down to near vacumm and heated to about 40 million degrees Celcius. As Freddy's molecules brokedown into their atomic components, and then into a plasma, scientists running the test were a bit perplexed by their readings (1 part deuterium, 2 parts tequila, 1 part sloe gin) which cause them to go inside and find the (now vaporized) remains of Freddy. Freddy's last thoughts caputred by the security microphone were "Ooh...looks like a big Jelly donut!".
B
The #1 issue in preventing people from moving to electric/renewable sources of power is one item: storage.
Basically, have you seen too many electric cars? No, because the batteries suck. And the hybrids basically take advantage of the high-energy reaction of the combustion of something to create electricity to store in a big battery.
Bottom line, if someone can come up with a cheap/light way to store electricity (either through a flywheel or through a superconducting coil), we'll still keep boosting my Exxon stock. And we'll do it by drilling in your backyard.
B
(Go ahead and score this as Flamebait...but it has to be said)
The only resonably close to perfect solar collector is a black hole (and there are theories that those efficicies are smaller than what we would believe depending on you view evaporation of mass from a black hole). The energies from photons from the sun are not highly energized (like the magnitude of 1.7eV in a photovoltaic reaction) while each atom in a fusion reaction would have a net gain of several thousand/million keV. Basically, to get the same level of energy in a solar reaction would require solar connectors the size of small countries.
OK, it's been years since my last physics class, but since we are in the business of high-energy reactions as opposed to low-energy ones, why do we keep saying "Solar is our Salvation"? I'm willing to admit some of my estimates might be wrong, so if someone actually reads this and wants to discuss it, by all means do so.
B
(Disclaimer: IANANP (I am not a Nuclear Physicist))
While the pressures required for fusion to take place are huge, the actual area that is compressed to that pressure is pretty small (the rest of the vessel exists in a near vacuum state).
Using standard thermodynamic laws, even if there was an instantaneous loss of magnetic confinement (on superconducting coils, that's a bit difficult to do) the expanding gases would cool as they expanded to the walls of the reactor. There "could" be thermal damage to the reactor walls, but most likely the damage would be minor and would not cause any problems with re-igniting the reactor.
Actually, the "worse case" scenario accident would involve any leaking of Tritium which (if I recall) can be generated by a DT-DT reaction (as opposed to HE-3 + 1N).
B