Actually that doesn't follow. In any system of reasonable complexity, (using this example) sometimes a long wait for one car at one stop will optimize the overall performance of the system - even if there is apparently nothing going on in the opposite direction. You can't look at the problem solely as a static, one-intersection problem. It's akin to n-dimensional queuing models, where n is the number of intersections and the number of possible interactions is n! Or see neural networks.
Not say that their system is smart - I have no idea of how their system works.
Didn't I read a year or two ago that UK was planning to put cameras at every intersection everywhere in the country? If so, I would say that certainly meets the 'unchecked' part, if not the 'covert' part. While at present most of those cameras are probably not being 'looked through', if it's everywhere it's just as frightening as if it's hidden. A major characteristic of dictatorships and police states everywhere is that one never knows if someone is watching and listening.
did remind me of that old joke. "Everyone has a neighbor who's a jackass. So, look around. Are any of your neighbors jackasses? If not, then you're it!":D
Yes. I should have mentioned that. I always wondered how the Enterprise handled the tendency to do continuous loop-de-loops! It appears to me that the warp pods are off-axis. And, then of course, the structural strength required to pass all that thrust through to the rest of the hull means that that part of the ship that connects the drives and the main hull to the circular part must have taken up most of the space inside that part of the ship.
I don't know about planetary ships, but for various reasons I won't get into here, interstellar ships are likely to be measured in kiilometers - numbers like 10-40 km come up often.
Or, as my sig used to say, "Space is big, really big! Better pack a lunch.":)
I will just add that, if I recall correctly that acceleration would get you fairly close to lightspeed before exiting the solar system. Once you get above some significant fraction of light speed the real issue is not dying as a result of the relatively-accelerated particles the ship would be running into. So the front of the ship might have to be something like a small (100 meter?) water-ice asteroid that gradually ablates as it runs into stuff. Then, halfway to the next star, flip the ship around and you have another ball of ice on the other end.
Which is why the Enterprise design isn't ideal. Better to put the spin axis on the drive axis. Then the force is constant. The net force would be at some angle between axial and radial, depending on their relationship, which would vary as thrust varied. But thrust need not vary often, only when changing direction or flipping one end for the other to decelerate.
Of course, if we could get 1G acceleration for a few decades, it would be a moot issue. But that's unlikely for a long time, if ever.
Seriously (despite my earlier comment) I think this is a great step forward for getting us out there. IMHO we belong in space. Whether there are other occupied planets in the universe or not, we are the vector by which life on this planet can expand to other places. Most of those places will be highly technical and vulnerable for a long time, but life (and we) will evolve to fit new places.
IIRC a lightning strike can be up to a million volts at a million amps. That's both high voltage and high frequency - microwave range. Which explains some of the weird things it does. Even if the Home Depot thing did what it said, it still won't stop a direct hit. But it might prevent the various induced field currents (in every piece of wire in the vicinity) from leaking through. More importantly, it will help with the 5-10KV spikes from lightning hits on the wires a few miles away.
Ha. Sometimes you can rightfully blame IT manaagement for that money saving... Long ago (in the days when we worked on 'smart graphics terminals - in fact our company was at the time the largest maker of graphics terminals) I worked in a building with 400 other engineers. We had four mainframe computers (DEC-10 and DEC-20). The engineers, and finally even the marketing folks, lobbied hard to get a motor generator installed to power the computers because of the risk of power failure. But the head of the computer center insisted that it was a waste of $400,000. So, of course, one day lightning struck the power entrance into the building, and completely fried all four mainframes. At least one of them caught fire, so the Halon extinguishing system went off. Every circuit board in all four machines was literally toast. It took a full crew from DEC over a week to get parts in overnight, replace everything and get it working again. So we had 400 engineers playing tiddly-winks for over a week. Then we had to recover from backups, etc. At the time average salary in the building was probably $16/hour for engineers but the fully loaded cost was (benefits, capital amortization, etc.) was over $50. So, 400*$50*40 = at least $800,000 down the tubes.
The manager got 'promoted' - to a desk job with no underlings, and nothing to do. The company was one of those back then that didn't fire people, but they didn't have to use them either.
While we are at it, if the OP really wants to be isolated, a motor generator really is the best way to go. It won't prevent the possibility of getting fried via ground current, but use a motor separated from the generator by a significantly long non-conductive shaft, and you're going to be as safe a feasible.
Also, put up a lightning rod - it should be high enough to provide a 60 degree 'cone' over the house (that's a lot higher than they usually are) with a big, fat (0000 - about 3/4 inch) copper or aluminum cable down into a ground stake that preferably goes deep into damp strata. There is evidence that (on boats at least) that stuff inside that 60 degree cone is fairly well protected from direct hits.
I could see something happening more like a fracturing across regional boundaries. The Left Coast, Northwest Ecotopia, the Mountains, the Great Middle, the New South, the Rust Belt and the Northeast. At this point there isn't much that the folks in Iowa and the folks in Boston agree on. And L.A. has been on a different planet for years now.
Interestingly, the less control that Washington tries to impose on the country (overriding states' prerogatives and cultural norms) the less pressure this is to split. To maintaina unified nation, Washington needs to stop trying to impose unity!
I used to live in central Oregon, and a reservoir near where I lived had rocks that floated - even biggish ones. They are made of pumice, rocks full of air. (Hmm. I wonder - is it air by now, or is it the hellish fumes from the volcano still trapped inside?)
I think they are supplying the LEDs for many of the lighting manufacturers. Which is a good plan. While one manufacturer may do well, another poorly, if both are buying from Cree then Cree makes out either way. And they can stick to what they do best.
I haven't tested CFLs, but some time ago for an imaging project that needed very steady lighting we tested a variety of methods including high frequency solid-state ballasts with long-persistence phosphors. All of them still had a 60Hz cycle dimming overlaid on the high frequency output. So no matter what we did, we still had at least a 5% 60Hz (really 120Hz) flicker, albeit not the same as a normal fluorescent tube. At the time we found it hard to even get a UPS or power supply that didn't have at least some 120Hz flicker on a DC voltage. Of course things have changed a lot since then.
Actually Philips complained publicly about the whimsical nature of US politics. When the law outlawing incandescents (for 'normal' use - i.e. not most specialty bulbs) looked likely to pass, Philips began building out manufacturing to support LEDs. Then it passed, and Philips was on the way to making some dough on LED bulbs, going for the whole 'volume reduces unit cost' thing. Then the US politics began to look like the law might be repealed. If that happened, Philips multimillion dollar investment was going to look like a bad guess.
Philips makes all kinds of bulbs (a physicist friend of mine used to work at Philips in West Virginia in their fluorescent tube division), doesn't really care (from the economic point of view) which kind we buy. So they weren't lobbying significantly about the LED bulb law to my knowledge. But they do care, mightily, about making a $100 million investment based on laws that appear and disappear. Big companies that make things want a stable economic environment above all else. I know they went very public about this when the proposal to repeal the law became public - there were a number of news articles. So they probably did lobby to not repeal the law.
I recently bought two LED 60-watt equivalent bulbs, and two LED floodlghts, at a local grocery store for $10 each. I think they were subsidized by the local electric utility. They work fine (nice warm lamplight!), and I'd like to get more but I don't recall which store I got them at!:(
I used to live way out in the boonies. After my house there was one more house about 1/4 mile away, then a run of about 1 mile, and a couple of farms. One of the farms apparently ran some kind of equipment that thrashed the power factor in random patterns, and my UPS would take over for a minute or so, then would switch back to line mode - every couple of minutes for an hour at a time. As a result, it could never get fully charged, and after a day or so would whimper and shut down completely.
The power company (a rural co-op) didn't think there was a problem.
The vendor replaced it, but the new one did the same. Finally I just got a cheaper less sensitive UPS that didn't pay (much?) attention to the power factor.
So sometimes the power coming in is just bad, and there's not much one can do about it.
<statement type="worldview" style="amusing>And unlike Linux this is 100% GUI, no having to tweak CLI gobbledygook which is usually the case. Hell you can even send screen caps and your average grandma could do this one since revo is left at default settings. This is why I have said for years if Linux wishes to go anywhere CLI HAS TO BE BANNED because otherwise lazy devs use it as a crutch.</statement>
*GB opens a seltzer, sits back to watch the flame wars.*:D
$175 billion a year to end global extreme poverty (Jeffery Sachs)
This is a chimera - a mythical beast. It's also a false dichotomy, equivalent to "eat your peas, there are children starving in India". And it's a phony number do boot. One _might_ say that with $175 billion we could _mostly_ eliminate some of the most egregious problems that the extremely poor are subject to - such as that less than 1/2 of the people in India have access to toilets.
Let's just assume that $200 billion is suddenly made available to 'end poverty'. (that basically means sending or spending $66 dollars to every poor person.) $66 dollars per year is basically going to do nothing but inflate the cost of housing for the poorest, and (by the evidence of programs in the US) increase the jackpots for various lotteries - by some estimates as much as 10% of all of the food stamp aid in some states is going to buy lottery tickets (after being discounted in exchange for cash on the black market.)
Those are contemporary objections. But the real problem, and the one why I say it is a chimera, is that 'poverty' is an abstract that changes over time - poverty is essentially the point of view by those in upper tiers of society with respect to those who are in the lower tiers. If by some stroke of magic, every person on the planet suddenly started receiving, say, a minimum of $5000 per year guaranteed income, and assuming (again, by magic) no resulting inflation or other unintended consequences, then the definition of poverty would gradually move up the ladder, until, again, something between 20% and 50% of the populace would be seen by some groups as deprived of essentials because $5000 per year just wasn't enough to buy the 'things they need' - things that would have been considered the realm of the social elite a few generations before.
What is the definition of poverty? Of course it varies over time, place and culture. The 'poverty line' in the US is something like 60 times wealthier than the mean annual per capita income in India. Which one is poor? The US poor person has healthier food, more comfortable lodgings and much better health by almost any measure than the wealthiest king 200 years ago. In some states, welfare pays for cable TV. Is the aboriginal from the Brazilian rain forest who, having seen civilization, fights to be able to continue to live his old life without an 'economy', or the trappings of civilization, poor or rich? He eats as well as he desires, needs little or no clothes (that he makes himself), and sits by the river and fishes all day. His distant relative works in a sunless cubicle in the city, hoping someday to retire so he can sit by the river and fish all day.
F-111 redux - the last time DoD tried to satisfy multiple services with a 'one-size-fits-all' airframe. Only two services, USAF and USN. On paper you save money from the commonality, but in reality only 50% of the parts of the two versions are common, the plane isn't as good at anything as more specialized platforms (jack of all trades, master of none), it's too expensive to build and maintain.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually that doesn't follow. In any system of reasonable complexity, (using this example) sometimes a long wait for one car at one stop will optimize the overall performance of the system - even if there is apparently nothing going on in the opposite direction. You can't look at the problem solely as a static, one-intersection problem. It's akin to n-dimensional queuing models, where n is the number of intersections and the number of possible interactions is n! Or see neural networks.
Not say that their system is smart - I have no idea of how their system works.
Didn't I read a year or two ago that UK was planning to put cameras at every intersection everywhere in the country? If so, I would say that certainly meets the 'unchecked' part, if not the 'covert' part. While at present most of those cameras are probably not being 'looked through', if it's everywhere it's just as frightening as if it's hidden. A major characteristic of dictatorships and police states everywhere is that one never knows if someone is watching and listening.
Excellent point. But this:
everyone has a neighbor that's a jackass.
did remind me of that old joke. "Everyone has a neighbor who's a jackass. So, look around. Are any of your neighbors jackasses? If not, then you're it!" :D
River Rapids: High-Speed Internet With Riverdancers
This I'd like to see - would it be implemented as a highly parallel channel?
Yes. I should have mentioned that. I always wondered how the Enterprise handled the tendency to do continuous loop-de-loops! It appears to me that the warp pods are off-axis. And, then of course, the structural strength required to pass all that thrust through to the rest of the hull means that that part of the ship that connects the drives and the main hull to the circular part must have taken up most of the space inside that part of the ship.
I don't know about planetary ships, but for various reasons I won't get into here, interstellar ships are likely to be measured in kiilometers - numbers like 10-40 km come up often.
Or, as my sig used to say, "Space is big, really big! Better pack a lunch." :)
I will just add that, if I recall correctly that acceleration would get you fairly close to lightspeed before exiting the solar system. Once you get above some significant fraction of light speed the real issue is not dying as a result of the relatively-accelerated particles the ship would be running into. So the front of the ship might have to be something like a small (100 meter?) water-ice asteroid that gradually ablates as it runs into stuff. Then, halfway to the next star, flip the ship around and you have another ball of ice on the other end.
Which is why the Enterprise design isn't ideal. Better to put the spin axis on the drive axis. Then the force is constant. The net force would be at some angle between axial and radial, depending on their relationship, which would vary as thrust varied. But thrust need not vary often, only when changing direction or flipping one end for the other to decelerate.
Of course, if we could get 1G acceleration for a few decades, it would be a moot issue. But that's unlikely for a long time, if ever.
Seriously (despite my earlier comment) I think this is a great step forward for getting us out there. IMHO we belong in space. Whether there are other occupied planets in the universe or not, we are the vector by which life on this planet can expand to other places. Most of those places will be highly technical and vulnerable for a long time, but life (and we) will evolve to fit new places.
No doubt, someone's going to make a video of the first meeting of the '100 mile high club'.
IIRC a lightning strike can be up to a million volts at a million amps. That's both high voltage and high frequency - microwave range. Which explains some of the weird things it does. Even if the Home Depot thing did what it said, it still won't stop a direct hit. But it might prevent the various induced field currents (in every piece of wire in the vicinity) from leaking through. More importantly, it will help with the 5-10KV spikes from lightning hits on the wires a few miles away.
Ha. Sometimes you can rightfully blame IT manaagement for that money saving... Long ago (in the days when we worked on 'smart graphics terminals - in fact our company was at the time the largest maker of graphics terminals) I worked in a building with 400 other engineers. We had four mainframe computers (DEC-10 and DEC-20). The engineers, and finally even the marketing folks, lobbied hard to get a motor generator installed to power the computers because of the risk of power failure. But the head of the computer center insisted that it was a waste of $400,000. So, of course, one day lightning struck the power entrance into the building, and completely fried all four mainframes. At least one of them caught fire, so the Halon extinguishing system went off. Every circuit board in all four machines was literally toast. It took a full crew from DEC over a week to get parts in overnight, replace everything and get it working again. So we had 400 engineers playing tiddly-winks for over a week. Then we had to recover from backups, etc. At the time average salary in the building was probably $16/hour for engineers but the fully loaded cost was (benefits, capital amortization, etc.) was over $50. So, 400*$50*40 = at least $800,000 down the tubes.
The manager got 'promoted' - to a desk job with no underlings, and nothing to do. The company was one of those back then that didn't fire people, but they didn't have to use them either.
While we are at it, if the OP really wants to be isolated, a motor generator really is the best way to go. It won't prevent the possibility of getting fried via ground current, but use a motor separated from the generator by a significantly long non-conductive shaft, and you're going to be as safe a feasible.
Also, put up a lightning rod - it should be high enough to provide a 60 degree 'cone' over the house (that's a lot higher than they usually are) with a big, fat (0000 - about 3/4 inch) copper or aluminum cable down into a ground stake that preferably goes deep into damp strata. There is evidence that (on boats at least) that stuff inside that 60 degree cone is fairly well protected from direct hits.
Haha! I hadn't thought of that, but it works both ways. :)
I could see something happening more like a fracturing across regional boundaries. The Left Coast, Northwest Ecotopia, the Mountains, the Great Middle, the New South, the Rust Belt and the Northeast. At this point there isn't much that the folks in Iowa and the folks in Boston agree on. And L.A. has been on a different planet for years now.
Interestingly, the less control that Washington tries to impose on the country (overriding states' prerogatives and cultural norms) the less pressure this is to split. To maintaina unified nation, Washington needs to stop trying to impose unity!
I used to live in central Oregon, and a reservoir near where I lived had rocks that floated - even biggish ones. They are made of pumice, rocks full of air. (Hmm. I wonder - is it air by now, or is it the hellish fumes from the volcano still trapped inside?)
Cool! An Irish flame war - that's something I haven't seen on /. before! *GB fills his cup, sits back to watch.
I think they are supplying the LEDs for many of the lighting manufacturers. Which is a good plan. While one manufacturer may do well, another poorly, if both are buying from Cree then Cree makes out either way. And they can stick to what they do best.
I haven't tested CFLs, but some time ago for an imaging project that needed very steady lighting we tested a variety of methods including high frequency solid-state ballasts with long-persistence phosphors. All of them still had a 60Hz cycle dimming overlaid on the high frequency output. So no matter what we did, we still had at least a 5% 60Hz (really 120Hz) flicker, albeit not the same as a normal fluorescent tube. At the time we found it hard to even get a UPS or power supply that didn't have at least some 120Hz flicker on a DC voltage. Of course things have changed a lot since then.
Actually Philips complained publicly about the whimsical nature of US politics. When the law outlawing incandescents (for 'normal' use - i.e. not most specialty bulbs) looked likely to pass, Philips began building out manufacturing to support LEDs. Then it passed, and Philips was on the way to making some dough on LED bulbs, going for the whole 'volume reduces unit cost' thing. Then the US politics began to look like the law might be repealed. If that happened, Philips multimillion dollar investment was going to look like a bad guess.
Philips makes all kinds of bulbs (a physicist friend of mine used to work at Philips in West Virginia in their fluorescent tube division), doesn't really care (from the economic point of view) which kind we buy. So they weren't lobbying significantly about the LED bulb law to my knowledge. But they do care, mightily, about making a $100 million investment based on laws that appear and disappear. Big companies that make things want a stable economic environment above all else. I know they went very public about this when the proposal to repeal the law became public - there were a number of news articles. So they probably did lobby to not repeal the law.
I recently bought two LED 60-watt equivalent bulbs, and two LED floodlghts, at a local grocery store for $10 each. I think they were subsidized by the local electric utility. They work fine (nice warm lamplight!), and I'd like to get more but I don't recall which store I got them at! :(
I used to live way out in the boonies. After my house there was one more house about 1/4 mile away, then a run of about 1 mile, and a couple of farms. One of the farms apparently ran some kind of equipment that thrashed the power factor in random patterns, and my UPS would take over for a minute or so, then would switch back to line mode - every couple of minutes for an hour at a time. As a result, it could never get fully charged, and after a day or so would whimper and shut down completely.
The power company (a rural co-op) didn't think there was a problem.
The vendor replaced it, but the new one did the same. Finally I just got a cheaper less sensitive UPS that didn't pay (much?) attention to the power factor.
So sometimes the power coming in is just bad, and there's not much one can do about it.
<statement type="worldview" style="amusing>And unlike Linux this is 100% GUI, no having to tweak CLI gobbledygook which is usually the case. Hell you can even send screen caps and your average grandma could do this one since revo is left at default settings. This is why I have said for years if Linux wishes to go anywhere CLI HAS TO BE BANNED because otherwise lazy devs use it as a crutch.</statement>
*GB opens a seltzer, sits back to watch the flame wars.* :D
Geez, that looks like something a Slackware user would do. And I thought Linux driver fixes could be painful!
$175 billion a year to end global extreme poverty (Jeffery Sachs)
This is a chimera - a mythical beast. It's also a false dichotomy, equivalent to "eat your peas, there are children starving in India". And it's a phony number do boot. One _might_ say that with $175 billion we could _mostly_ eliminate some of the most egregious problems that the extremely poor are subject to - such as that less than 1/2 of the people in India have access to toilets.
Let's just assume that $200 billion is suddenly made available to 'end poverty'. (that basically means sending or spending $66 dollars to every poor person.) $66 dollars per year is basically going to do nothing but inflate the cost of housing for the poorest, and (by the evidence of programs in the US) increase the jackpots for various lotteries - by some estimates as much as 10% of all of the food stamp aid in some states is going to buy lottery tickets (after being discounted in exchange for cash on the black market.)
Those are contemporary objections. But the real problem, and the one why I say it is a chimera, is that 'poverty' is an abstract that changes over time - poverty is essentially the point of view by those in upper tiers of society with respect to those who are in the lower tiers. If by some stroke of magic, every person on the planet suddenly started receiving, say, a minimum of $5000 per year guaranteed income, and assuming (again, by magic) no resulting inflation or other unintended consequences, then the definition of poverty would gradually move up the ladder, until, again, something between 20% and 50% of the populace would be seen by some groups as deprived of essentials because $5000 per year just wasn't enough to buy the 'things they need' - things that would have been considered the realm of the social elite a few generations before.
What is the definition of poverty? Of course it varies over time, place and culture. The 'poverty line' in the US is something like 60 times wealthier than the mean annual per capita income in India. Which one is poor? The US poor person has healthier food, more comfortable lodgings and much better health by almost any measure than the wealthiest king 200 years ago. In some states, welfare pays for cable TV. Is the aboriginal from the Brazilian rain forest who, having seen civilization, fights to be able to continue to live his old life without an 'economy', or the trappings of civilization, poor or rich? He eats as well as he desires, needs little or no clothes (that he makes himself), and sits by the river and fishes all day. His distant relative works in a sunless cubicle in the city, hoping someday to retire so he can sit by the river and fish all day.
F-111 redux - the last time DoD tried to satisfy multiple services with a 'one-size-fits-all' airframe. Only two services, USAF and USN. On paper you save money from the commonality, but in reality only 50% of the parts of the two versions are common, the plane isn't as good at anything as more specialized platforms (jack of all trades, master of none), it's too expensive to build and maintain.
I'm guessing that Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem begs to differ. :) Especially for infinite streams.