I believe I could solve every issue you have with implementing an electric tractor
Well no, you haven't, because you don't really understand much of the problem. Batteries have got a long way to go before they will work for this. Let's look at the Tesla Roadster - it has an electric motor providing around 280bhp flat out. If we derate to 200bhp (enough for a fairly large tractor) then a Tesla Roadster-size battery will last around two to three hours. Then you've got to stop work, drive back to the yard, and go through all the battery changing hassle, and leave it for 36 hours to charge fully.
I was trying to show you how you can work around your problems, you just want to shove more problems at me.
The point I'm trying to make is that these problems are *really really hard*. And at that, they're hard even before you consider that anyone trying to change the battery on a tractor will have two tools - a big hammer, and a *really* big hammer.
Have you never heard of replacing the batteries? This is one of the things being considered for electric vehicle charging stations, actually, if they can get the manufacturers to standardise on a single battery shape.
There's no way that's ever going to be practical, particularly for vehicles that are used in wet, muddy conditions. Can you think of a foolproof battery connector that can reliably handle hundreds of volts at hundreds of amps, while being safe to connect and disconnect quickly in a wet environment? How would you design a connector to meet those requirements?
If we are talking about cows or horses or goats etc the answer would be grass. I'm afraid you will have to allow them to graze just as nature intended.
That's exactly what they do at the moment, like most farms in the UK. As for the rest of you, well, if you haven't got the space to grow potatoes, keep some hens and graze a cow then you're SOL when the oil runs out;-)
I know of a guy out in the midwest that does this, and his power bill is in the teens...
Great, and he's how far south? I live in the UK. I'm further north than very nearly everyone on your entire continent.
Why, exactly, do electric tractors not make sense?
Because you need something that can produce a couple of hundred horsepower, more or less continuously, and with a minimal "recharge" time. The guy up the road is harvesting barley right now; his tractor is running for around 47 hours at a stretch (every two days it gets turned off to clean the air and fuel filters). Granted, it's not running like that all the time, but even in normal use you would probably struggle to find time to charge it.
And it's not encouraging sane practices. Allowing large areas of land to be fed to grazing animals does nothing to encourage top soil retention. Nothing your site presents sounds sustainable long term. Especially when oil powers the farmers house, the house that your swapping with and the machinery the farm uses.
What do you suggest I feed my animals with? Processed "hard feed" uses a lot of petrochemicals to produce, and isn't good for the animals. It's like feeding them a diet of burgers and sweets all the time - you end up with fat, unhealthy cows and sheep. No, turning the land over to arable farming isn't a good idea. Most of the world's farmland isn't rolling Iowa cornfields.
What do you suggest I heat my house with? Solar? Yeah, that's going to work just *great* in the winter when I get six hours of sunlight. At least my wood-burning stove works, and I've got a few hundred acres of quick-growing Sitka spruce to fall back on, not to mention peat to burn. What about the farm machinery, though? Here's a hint - you don't get hybrid tractors, and if you did they mostly wouldn't make sense. Neither would electric ones.
You have a president. Same thing, except you can't sell Obama tat to the tourists at anything like the rate we can sell Royal Family tat. For some reason American tourists just *love* all that stuff.
Did you notice the huge banks of monitors at the end of each platform? Usually quite high up on a pole? Ten of the cameras are for the driver of the train to get a good look all round when he's stopped at the station. They're not recorded, and probably not wired to the switcher in the ticket office.
I don't see how you can equate CCTV in the UK with the mess that the US has got itself into. Firstly, the oft-quoted 4 million cameras is a figure made up by one of the far-right tabloid newpapers based on the number of cameras in about a quarter mile of the main street of a fairly rough part of London. If that figure was even remotely accurate, you'd pass a CCTV camera every 50 metres or so on every road in the UK right down to farm tracks.
Here's the kicker. Every major city in the US has got just as much CCTV surveillance as London! Yes, you're "spied on" just as much in New York as you are in London, and you've got armed police ready and willing to shoot you, too. It must be awful living in the US, with that constant threat over you all the time.
I have seriously considered registering golfjulietcharliepapa.net in addition to gjcp.net, just to make it easier for people on the other end of the phone.
You can easily tell the difference between "f" and "s" over radio with the filtering described above - *if there isn't much noise*. If there is a fairly low signal-to-noise ratio "f" and "s" are hard to distinguish, and increasing the lowpass filter bandwidth will only make matters worse.
Incidentally, don't say "a as in alpha, b as in bravo". The "a as in..." bit is superfluous. Just say "alpha, bravo" and keep the clutter to a minimum.
Actually the bandwidth is 3.1kHz, running from 300Hz to 3.4kHz. This is the range of frequencies that conveys the most information relevant to intelligibility. Anything else makes it easier to recognise the speaker but doesn't make it easier to understand them and can make it harder to understand in noisy environments.
If you low-pass filter speech below 3.4kHz then mostly you only lose the high frequencies in sibilants, but you also filter out a lot of background noise. If you're really interested you could set up a media player to play recorded speech through a tunable bandpass filter and see what you can filter out before the speech becomes hard to understand. Once you've got a feel for how the filters affect the intelligibility, try playing it back in a noisy environment (or mix in a recording of the inside of a car or something).
The 300-3400Hz filter is pretty standard in communications, and it crops up in all sorts of places. I wrote a software-defined radio app that defaults to 300-3400 but is easily tunable up to 15kHz for either low or highpass (although if you highpass filter at 15kHz you won't hear much). Occasionally I'll use it to roll off above about 2.8kHz to remove high-pitched squeaky noises from adjacent transmitters.
You can see the yellow strip representing the passband of the filter. The (fairly weak) signal shown doesn't really have any strong components much above about 2kHz, and I could reduce the noise by sliding the leftmost (lowpass) filter in a bit. A quick explanation of what you're looking at - that's a spectrum plot of a chunk of the 7MHz amateur band, with lower frequencies on the left as indicated by the scale at the bottom. Since on 7MHz we use lower sideband (LSB), the higher audio frequencies correspond to lower RF frequencies (further away from the red tuning cursor).
Some of them 2 lane country roads that would have been 1.5 lane roads in the US (when I first started driving there, I kept expecting my rearview mirror would collide with the oncoming vehicle's mirror - too awhile to get used to that).
I had some friends come to visit from the US, and it was their first time driving in the UK. Now, to be fair, the first part of their 240-mile journey from Glasgow Airport to my house included the infamous A82 Loch Lomond section, where the road is about a normal UK lane-and-a-half. It usually takes me five hours, maybe six if I'm hanging about. I got a phone call after six hours, telling me they were at Tyndrum - about a quarter of the way;-)
We actually have laws on the books now in America specifically to protect Americans from being sued under the UK's ridiculous libel laws. It's a terrible system, and it has to change. That is the story.
It's a better system than the one in place in the US, where anyone can say what they like about you and you'd better have deep pockets if you want to defend your name.
Simon Singh is an idiot if he thinks he can make libellous comments about the BCA *without having the proof to back up what he says*. There is the concrete defence against libel cases in the UK - be able to prove what you say. Simple.
Or perhaps you'd prefer a world without 911 services being available. ... Or perhaps you'd prefer to live in the world outside the US, and some of the more primitive parts of the Third World, where you are denied treatment unless you show up with cold hard cash.
This prioritizing of gaming traffic would be illegal if Net Neutrality existed.
Wrong. It would be illegal, if the law was framed badly. The whole point of "net neutrality" is to prevent ISPs and content providers from banding together to shut out other content providers.
This is more akin to ordering a private wire circuit from your telco.
How is that prior art? Those radios don't have broadcasting capability
In what way do they not have "broadcasting" capability? What would the point of a receive-only MPT1327 (or any other trunked system) radio be?
In general you have something that will lock out if not actually stun a radio if it appears to be doing something odd, like constantly trying to access a group it's not registered to.
Just about any radio system with some sort of ident signalling (5-tone, MDC, MPT1327, whatever) allows you to stun radios remotely, locking out all functions until they are either unstunned with the appropriate code or reprogrammed by the dealer. On many radios you can "kill" them by telling them to wipe their programming, requiring all the frequencies and idents to be programmed back in.
The problem is that they make a ton of money on Steam, so they don't have to care at all about their games business.
I don't know, I'd say that they make a ton of money on Steam, so they can afford to care *more* about their games business.
Think about it - you've got Steam, people are buying games, the money is rolling in... so you can pay the developers to finish the games properly. If the release date slips, no biggie (until you get to Duke Nukem Forever timescales). The money is still coming in, the bills are still being paid. You're not under undue pressure to start shifting units. Yes, it would be nice to catch the Christmas sales, but if it takes another three months to make a game that doesn't suck and make the customers hate you, I'd rather wait.
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I believe I could solve every issue you have with implementing an electric tractor
Well no, you haven't, because you don't really understand much of the problem. Batteries have got a long way to go before they will work for this. Let's look at the Tesla Roadster - it has an electric motor providing around 280bhp flat out. If we derate to 200bhp (enough for a fairly large tractor) then a Tesla Roadster-size battery will last around two to three hours. Then you've got to stop work, drive back to the yard, and go through all the battery changing hassle, and leave it for 36 hours to charge fully.
That's going to be a lot of batteries.
I was trying to show you how you can work around your problems, you just want to shove more problems at me.
The point I'm trying to make is that these problems are *really really hard*. And at that, they're hard even before you consider that anyone trying to change the battery on a tractor will have two tools - a big hammer, and a *really* big hammer.
... a great way to give yourself the shits in whole new and exciting ways previously unknown to mankind.
It's cryptosporidi-yummy!
Have you never heard of replacing the batteries? This is one of the things being considered for electric vehicle charging stations, actually, if they can get the manufacturers to standardise on a single battery shape.
There's no way that's ever going to be practical, particularly for vehicles that are used in wet, muddy conditions. Can you think of a foolproof battery connector that can reliably handle hundreds of volts at hundreds of amps, while being safe to connect and disconnect quickly in a wet environment? How would you design a connector to meet those requirements?
If we are talking about cows or horses or goats etc the answer would be grass. I'm afraid you will have to allow them to graze just as nature intended.
That's exactly what they do at the moment, like most farms in the UK. As for the rest of you, well, if you haven't got the space to grow potatoes, keep some hens and graze a cow then you're SOL when the oil runs out ;-)
I know of a guy out in the midwest that does this, and his power bill is in the teens...
Great, and he's how far south? I live in the UK. I'm further north than very nearly everyone on your entire continent.
Why, exactly, do electric tractors not make sense?
Because you need something that can produce a couple of hundred horsepower, more or less continuously, and with a minimal "recharge" time. The guy up the road is harvesting barley right now; his tractor is running for around 47 hours at a stretch (every two days it gets turned off to clean the air and fuel filters). Granted, it's not running like that all the time, but even in normal use you would probably struggle to find time to charge it.
And it's not encouraging sane practices. Allowing large areas of land to be fed to grazing animals does nothing to encourage top soil retention. Nothing your site presents sounds sustainable long term. Especially when oil powers the farmers house, the house that your swapping with and the machinery the farm uses.
What do you suggest I feed my animals with? Processed "hard feed" uses a lot of petrochemicals to produce, and isn't good for the animals. It's like feeding them a diet of burgers and sweets all the time - you end up with fat, unhealthy cows and sheep. No, turning the land over to arable farming isn't a good idea. Most of the world's farmland isn't rolling Iowa cornfields.
What do you suggest I heat my house with? Solar? Yeah, that's going to work just *great* in the winter when I get six hours of sunlight. At least my wood-burning stove works, and I've got a few hundred acres of quick-growing Sitka spruce to fall back on, not to mention peat to burn. What about the farm machinery, though? Here's a hint - you don't get hybrid tractors, and if you did they mostly wouldn't make sense. Neither would electric ones.
You have a president. Same thing, except you can't sell Obama tat to the tourists at anything like the rate we can sell Royal Family tat. For some reason American tourists just *love* all that stuff.
Did you notice the huge banks of monitors at the end of each platform? Usually quite high up on a pole? Ten of the cameras are for the driver of the train to get a good look all round when he's stopped at the station. They're not recorded, and probably not wired to the switcher in the ticket office.
There's a big block of wood and a very sharp axe in the Tower of London. We keep it sharp, because it's good to keep up the old ways.
I don't think you're allowed to have anything like that in the US. As far as I can tell, it's illegal to even talk about such a thing there.
The royal family don't really have anything to do with government. They're more of a tourist attraction. I prefer the zoo, myself.
I don't see how you can equate CCTV in the UK with the mess that the US has got itself into. Firstly, the oft-quoted 4 million cameras is a figure made up by one of the far-right tabloid newpapers based on the number of cameras in about a quarter mile of the main street of a fairly rough part of London. If that figure was even remotely accurate, you'd pass a CCTV camera every 50 metres or so on every road in the UK right down to farm tracks.
Here's the kicker. Every major city in the US has got just as much CCTV surveillance as London! Yes, you're "spied on" just as much in New York as you are in London, and you've got armed police ready and willing to shoot you, too. It must be awful living in the US, with that constant threat over you all the time.
I have seriously considered registering golfjulietcharliepapa.net in addition to gjcp.net, just to make it easier for people on the other end of the phone.
You can easily tell the difference between "f" and "s" over radio with the filtering described above - *if there isn't much noise*. If there is a fairly low signal-to-noise ratio "f" and "s" are hard to distinguish, and increasing the lowpass filter bandwidth will only make matters worse.
Incidentally, don't say "a as in alpha, b as in bravo". The "a as in..." bit is superfluous. Just say "alpha, bravo" and keep the clutter to a minimum.
Actually the bandwidth is 3.1kHz, running from 300Hz to 3.4kHz. This is the range of frequencies that conveys the most information relevant to intelligibility. Anything else makes it easier to recognise the speaker but doesn't make it easier to understand them and can make it harder to understand in noisy environments.
If you low-pass filter speech below 3.4kHz then mostly you only lose the high frequencies in sibilants, but you also filter out a lot of background noise. If you're really interested you could set up a media player to play recorded speech through a tunable bandpass filter and see what you can filter out before the speech becomes hard to understand. Once you've got a feel for how the filters affect the intelligibility, try playing it back in a noisy environment (or mix in a recording of the inside of a car or something).
The 300-3400Hz filter is pretty standard in communications, and it crops up in all sorts of places. I wrote a software-defined radio app that defaults to 300-3400 but is easily tunable up to 15kHz for either low or highpass (although if you highpass filter at 15kHz you won't hear much). Occasionally I'll use it to roll off above about 2.8kHz to remove high-pitched squeaky noises from adjacent transmitters.
Obligatory screenshot: http://www.gjcp.net/~gordonjcp/lysdr.jpg
You can see the yellow strip representing the passband of the filter. The (fairly weak) signal shown doesn't really have any strong components much above about 2kHz, and I could reduce the noise by sliding the leftmost (lowpass) filter in a bit. A quick explanation of what you're looking at - that's a spectrum plot of a chunk of the 7MHz amateur band, with lower frequencies on the left as indicated by the scale at the bottom. Since on 7MHz we use lower sideband (LSB), the higher audio frequencies correspond to lower RF frequencies (further away from the red tuning cursor).
Getting rid of that annoying fade-in effect.
Some of them 2 lane country roads that would have been 1.5 lane roads in the US (when I first started driving there, I kept expecting my rearview mirror would collide with the oncoming vehicle's mirror - too awhile to get used to that).
I had some friends come to visit from the US, and it was their first time driving in the UK. Now, to be fair, the first part of their 240-mile journey from Glasgow Airport to my house included the infamous A82 Loch Lomond section, where the road is about a normal UK lane-and-a-half. It usually takes me five hours, maybe six if I'm hanging about. I got a phone call after six hours, telling me they were at Tyndrum - about a quarter of the way ;-)
We actually have laws on the books now in America specifically to protect Americans from being sued under the UK's ridiculous libel laws. It's a terrible system, and it has to change. That is the story.
It's a better system than the one in place in the US, where anyone can say what they like about you and you'd better have deep pockets if you want to defend your name.
Simon Singh is an idiot if he thinks he can make libellous comments about the BCA *without having the proof to back up what he says*. There is the concrete defence against libel cases in the UK - be able to prove what you say. Simple.
I was thinking the phone looked more like an HTC Desire.
you might want to keep in mind that 127 light years is a very long way--an almost unimaginable distance, in fact
I mean, you might think it's a long way down the road to the chemist, but that's just peanuts compared to space.
Or perhaps you'd prefer a world without 911 services being available.
... Or perhaps you'd prefer to live in the world outside the US, and some of the more primitive parts of the Third World, where you are denied treatment unless you show up with cold hard cash.
This prioritizing of gaming traffic would be illegal if Net Neutrality existed.
Wrong. It would be illegal, if the law was framed badly. The whole point of "net neutrality" is to prevent ISPs and content providers from banding together to shut out other content providers.
This is more akin to ordering a private wire circuit from your telco.
How is that prior art? Those radios don't have broadcasting capability
In what way do they not have "broadcasting" capability? What would the point of a receive-only MPT1327 (or any other trunked system) radio be?
In general you have something that will lock out if not actually stun a radio if it appears to be doing something odd, like constantly trying to access a group it's not registered to.
Just about any radio system with some sort of ident signalling (5-tone, MDC, MPT1327, whatever) allows you to stun radios remotely, locking out all functions until they are either unstunned with the appropriate code or reprogrammed by the dealer. On many radios you can "kill" them by telling them to wipe their programming, requiring all the frequencies and idents to be programmed back in.
The problem is that they make a ton of money on Steam, so they don't have to care at all about their games business.
I don't know, I'd say that they make a ton of money on Steam, so they can afford to care *more* about their games business.
Think about it - you've got Steam, people are buying games, the money is rolling in... so you can pay the developers to finish the games properly. If the release date slips, no biggie (until you get to Duke Nukem Forever timescales). The money is still coming in, the bills are still being paid. You're not under undue pressure to start shifting units. Yes, it would be nice to catch the Christmas sales, but if it takes another three months to make a game that doesn't suck and make the customers hate you, I'd rather wait.