Probably not. Surprisingly, this doesn't trigger any of the usual protest buttons. No animal testing, and no embryonic research.
You might think the pro-life side would object, but I know how those people think. They don't actually pay any attention to the brain at all - notice they get very determined to protect embryos from the moment of conception, long before there is anything you could call a brain. Even if they do ever object to this, it'll take at least a couple of weeks for them to achieve the mental gear-shift to add 'brains' to their collective radar.
Large-scale solar power isn't always photovoltaic. One common technique is to use mirrors to focus the sun to heat a transfer fluid (Some form of oil) to well over a hundred celcius, then use this fluid in a heat exchanger to boil water and drive a turbine off the steam.
There are political issues. Remember the backlash against something so simple as a light bulb efficiency requirement? Years of 'Liberals want to poison your children with mercury!' columns.
Now imagine the response if the government were to pass, say, a new car efficiency standard for personal vehicles that massive SUVs and other Road Tanks couldn't attain? There'd be rioting! Dubious safety claims would be perpetuated saying that the efficient cars endangered passangers. There'd be a storm of 'get the government out of my garage!' articles. It'd be a fiasco, and any politician who openly supported such a standard would be risking their next election.
The market would just figure out that the carbon tax is lower in China, and continue the trend of moving all the heavy industry over there to pollute freely.
Or that the best return on investment is to lobby politicians for exceptions to the tax.
P=IV. Good place to start. Now just consider V=IR too, and look at the implications.
House wiring does have resistance. Not much, but some. So, for the sake of argument, lets assume there is 4ohm in the cables from your transformer to the other side of your house (This is actually rather a lot, but something you might encounter on a long run such as powering an outbuilding), and that you want to run a decently powerful appliance - say, a kettle, 1KW (Make it resistive so we don't have to worry about power factor).
In a 230V Euro house: P=IV, I=P/V = 1000/230 = 4.35A. Voltage lost in the wiring is thus V=IR=4.35*4=17.4V, or 7.5% of your line voltage. That's not *too* bad - but it'll dim the lights in your shed if you want to make a cup of tea out there.
Run the same numbers in a 110V American house: P=IV, I=P/V = 1000/110 = 9.09A, voltage lose is V=IR=9.09*4=36V, or 33% of your line voltage. That's... nasty. That's into the territory where your computer crashes and your tea takes too long to boil.
This is also the reason long-distance transmission is done using very, very high voltages (Between 12KV and 1MV) on overhead pylons. Higher voltage means lower current means less voltage drop, and also means that drop makes up a smaller percentage of your total.
And even if it did work, it'd cost a ridiculous amount of money. So much money that the only way I can imagine any country building it would be as a covert weapons program.
Better than nukes. Nukes kill people - a microwave death star could fry anything with a long enough cable and leave people unharmed. Power lines, telephone cables. Zap a city before invading, or use it to disrupt enemy communications during air strikes to buy a few minutes longer before they can respond.
Modern nuclear plants have failsafe after failsafe. The control rods are held out of the core electromagnetically, so if the control system loses power they'll all drop instantly an initiate SCRAM.
The reactor can still be dangerous afterwards, though - the unstable isotopes produced as a byprodct of fission continue to delay. That's what happened at Fukushima - the SCRAM worked perfectly, rods dropped the moment the earthquake hit, but the earthquake and tsunami managed to destroy not only the cooling system backup generators, but also the switchgear that connecte up the backup backup generators and the backup backup backup 'We're really screwed now' emergency external power interface for connecting portable generators or feeding power back from the grid. There was a design flaw in there - although there were four seperate means of powering the cooling system and full redundency in the switching, both that switching and the redundant backup were located in the main turbine hall, a room that the tsunami flooded.
Despite all that panic though, Fukushima has a total of *zero* deaths as a result of any nuclear accident, and contamination of the surrounding land is minimal. The ocean took a lot of radiation, but all short-lived isotopes.
You wouldn't even have to focus it. Even at a low power level, it could very effectively impede the operation of radio communications.
There's only so much that a country like the US could do with that - they are as dependant on battlefield communications as anyone. But think of how it could be abused by, say, China. If there's an embarassing scandal somewhere (preventable disease outbreak, building collapse due to lax government maintainance, etc), they can 'misalign' a beam to knock out all radio-based communication for a couple of days while they get the web-filters reconfigured and a team of damage control specialists deployed to make it clear to the people what happens if word gets out to the media.
North Korea would probably just maintain a radio blackout of their entire country - but they don't have any hope of building this type of technology, so that's not going to happen.
Processor helps with VMs, but the limit on how many you can run is usually RAM. I've never seen a 'regular' desktop PC with more than four slots - at 32GB (That's assuming the board will take 8GB sticks), that's still nowhere near as many VMs as the processor can support.
Servers and workstations tend to have a lot more memory slots. Twelve, usually - three channels, four slots per channel, that's as many as a single processor can support. Any more and you need a dual-processor board.
They might buy the ISK for cash on the grey market too - it might offer a better exchange rate.
If you just buy and sell money with one character it's stand out like a sore thumb in the audit logs, and records could be easily subpoened. So they probably need to have multible accounts, and shift the value between them using in-game-legitimate operations like a hauler-full-o-goods. Simple matter of avoiding easy tracking by hideing it in the noise of EVE's frantic economy. Even if investigators work out which character is responsible for buying the ISK for real money, it could be very difficult to work out where that ISK eventually ends up before being sold to get the real money back.
There'd be some losses in the process - in-game fees, differing exchange rates, and perhaps the occasional lost hauler (very low risk - hisec travel only with a covert ops cloak, very few players could hope to catch that!). But I think it could be done at an efficiency competative with the even higher overheads of more traditional operations.
I suggest the 'something like that' is to have them forced to attack a rival syndicate - if they can destroy one money-laundering convoy, the operators might see how such skills could be put to use.
You can get a really triumphant finale when word gets out and a fleet of five legitimate thousand players descend to suicide-gank the laundering ships, costing the mafia so much they have no option but to abandon their money-laundering operation.
And the leader of the money laundering can then get killed by his boss for this expensive failure.
Slashdot Mirror
That's what happens when you don't put a proper killswitch on your creations of mad science.
Probably not. Surprisingly, this doesn't trigger any of the usual protest buttons. No animal testing, and no embryonic research.
You might think the pro-life side would object, but I know how those people think. They don't actually pay any attention to the brain at all - notice they get very determined to protect embryos from the moment of conception, long before there is anything you could call a brain. Even if they do ever object to this, it'll take at least a couple of weeks for them to achieve the mental gear-shift to add 'brains' to their collective radar.
"Just because we can do a thing does not mean we must do that thing."
Yes.
Yes it does.
Large-scale solar power isn't always photovoltaic. One common technique is to use mirrors to focus the sun to heat a transfer fluid (Some form of oil) to well over a hundred celcius, then use this fluid in a heat exchanger to boil water and drive a turbine off the steam.
Expensive. Rivers are cheaper.
At least it's temporary pollution. No lingering toxins.
There are political issues. Remember the backlash against something so simple as a light bulb efficiency requirement? Years of 'Liberals want to poison your children with mercury!' columns.
Now imagine the response if the government were to pass, say, a new car efficiency standard for personal vehicles that massive SUVs and other Road Tanks couldn't attain? There'd be rioting! Dubious safety claims would be perpetuated saying that the efficient cars endangered passangers. There'd be a storm of 'get the government out of my garage!' articles. It'd be a fiasco, and any politician who openly supported such a standard would be risking their next election.
The radiation levels in the ocean after Fukushima were nasty, but all short-lived isotopes.
The market would just figure out that the carbon tax is lower in China, and continue the trend of moving all the heavy industry over there to pollute freely.
Or that the best return on investment is to lobby politicians for exceptions to the tax.
You could usr TOR over a VPN from a Pringles can.
If you're paranoid, it's possible to just use disposeable wallets.
I just attempted to take the adjective form of 'conviction.' I'm not sure if that is a legitimate gramatical move or not.
P=IV. Good place to start. Now just consider V=IR too, and look at the implications.
House wiring does have resistance. Not much, but some. So, for the sake of argument, lets assume there is 4ohm in the cables from your transformer to the other side of your house (This is actually rather a lot, but something you might encounter on a long run such as powering an outbuilding), and that you want to run a decently powerful appliance - say, a kettle, 1KW (Make it resistive so we don't have to worry about power factor).
In a 230V Euro house: P=IV, I=P/V = 1000/230 = 4.35A. Voltage lost in the wiring is thus V=IR=4.35*4=17.4V, or 7.5% of your line voltage. That's not *too* bad - but it'll dim the lights in your shed if you want to make a cup of tea out there.
Run the same numbers in a 110V American house: P=IV, I=P/V = 1000/110 = 9.09A, voltage lose is V=IR=9.09*4=36V, or 33% of your line voltage. That's... nasty. That's into the territory where your computer crashes and your tea takes too long to boil.
This is also the reason long-distance transmission is done using very, very high voltages (Between 12KV and 1MV) on overhead pylons. Higher voltage means lower current means less voltage drop, and also means that drop makes up a smaller percentage of your total.
American house wiring runs on 110V, which is low enough for voltage drop to be a serious issue.
The same thing happens in EU house wiring too, but only with very, very high-power appliances like power showers.
Those things are rather abuseable. Zap a person in the right place, and they'll come out quite convicted they just had a personal experience with God.
And even if it did work, it'd cost a ridiculous amount of money. So much money that the only way I can imagine any country building it would be as a covert weapons program.
Better than nukes. Nukes kill people - a microwave death star could fry anything with a long enough cable and leave people unharmed. Power lines, telephone cables. Zap a city before invading, or use it to disrupt enemy communications during air strikes to buy a few minutes longer before they can respond.
Modern nuclear plants have failsafe after failsafe. The control rods are held out of the core electromagnetically, so if the control system loses power they'll all drop instantly an initiate SCRAM.
The reactor can still be dangerous afterwards, though - the unstable isotopes produced as a byprodct of fission continue to delay. That's what happened at Fukushima - the SCRAM worked perfectly, rods dropped the moment the earthquake hit, but the earthquake and tsunami managed to destroy not only the cooling system backup generators, but also the switchgear that connecte up the backup backup generators and the backup backup backup 'We're really screwed now' emergency external power interface for connecting portable generators or feeding power back from the grid. There was a design flaw in there - although there were four seperate means of powering the cooling system and full redundency in the switching, both that switching and the redundant backup were located in the main turbine hall, a room that the tsunami flooded.
Despite all that panic though, Fukushima has a total of *zero* deaths as a result of any nuclear accident, and contamination of the surrounding land is minimal. The ocean took a lot of radiation, but all short-lived isotopes.
You wouldn't even have to focus it. Even at a low power level, it could very effectively impede the operation of radio communications.
There's only so much that a country like the US could do with that - they are as dependant on battlefield communications as anyone. But think of how it could be abused by, say, China. If there's an embarassing scandal somewhere (preventable disease outbreak, building collapse due to lax government maintainance, etc), they can 'misalign' a beam to knock out all radio-based communication for a couple of days while they get the web-filters reconfigured and a team of damage control specialists deployed to make it clear to the people what happens if word gets out to the media.
North Korea would probably just maintain a radio blackout of their entire country - but they don't have any hope of building this type of technology, so that's not going to happen.
Processor helps with VMs, but the limit on how many you can run is usually RAM. I've never seen a 'regular' desktop PC with more than four slots - at 32GB (That's assuming the board will take 8GB sticks), that's still nowhere near as many VMs as the processor can support.
Servers and workstations tend to have a lot more memory slots. Twelve, usually - three channels, four slots per channel, that's as many as a single processor can support. Any more and you need a dual-processor board.
They still had their boat, and supplies, and the crew were all highly trained in polar survival.
If you think that's bad, you should try being a Doctor Who fan.
Such designs are in use for one-man submersibles.
http://fuelfix.com/files/2012/04/OTCphotoLogo.jpg
They might buy the ISK for cash on the grey market too - it might offer a better exchange rate.
If you just buy and sell money with one character it's stand out like a sore thumb in the audit logs, and records could be easily subpoened. So they probably need to have multible accounts, and shift the value between them using in-game-legitimate operations like a hauler-full-o-goods. Simple matter of avoiding easy tracking by hideing it in the noise of EVE's frantic economy. Even if investigators work out which character is responsible for buying the ISK for real money, it could be very difficult to work out where that ISK eventually ends up before being sold to get the real money back.
There'd be some losses in the process - in-game fees, differing exchange rates, and perhaps the occasional lost hauler (very low risk - hisec travel only with a covert ops cloak, very few players could hope to catch that!). But I think it could be done at an efficiency competative with the even higher overheads of more traditional operations.
I suggest the 'something like that' is to have them forced to attack a rival syndicate - if they can destroy one money-laundering convoy, the operators might see how such skills could be put to use.
You can get a really triumphant finale when word gets out and a fleet of five legitimate thousand players descend to suicide-gank the laundering ships, costing the mafia so much they have no option but to abandon their money-laundering operation.
And the leader of the money laundering can then get killed by his boss for this expensive failure.