All of this furor is over call and subscriber data being sent to the NSA directly on a regular basis. If I wanted to build a computer platform capable of storing and doing queries on this information for the whole United States I could probably assemble one off the shelf for a couple grand.
I would not need a water-cooled data center in Utah, centrally located so you can lease dark fiber to carry multiple terabit streams into it. Among other data centers in other parts of the country which are in planning, already constructed, or just manage to stay under the radar because they were built from the black ops budget. I would not need secret agreements (negotiated voluntarily or by threat) with service providers to tap and split optic cables.
This issue of NSA bulk metadata collection is a straw man, a distraction to divert attention from NSA's full content backbone tapping capability. It is a little duck set loose for Congress to shoot down, so they can hold up the dead duck as they pose for a group photo, leaning on their rifles.
The horrifying truth is -- if and when, possibly now -- NSA has enough backbone taps in place, they would already have access to this data that is being sent to them. In the modern world there are but a few major telecoms and their call data converges at central billing and collection points. The telecoms would gladly keep these links unencrypted or leave the keys in the mailbox for a nudge nudge wink wink absolving them of public ire.
Even the judges are stalking this duck and believe me, they are relieved when the topic of conversation fixes on call data rather than bulk content interception. That is because there is legal precedent for law enforcement collection of so-called 'pen trace data' without warrants, and they have a leg to stand on.
I'll serious money that if YOU were to ask any member of Congress a very specific and impeccably worded question about bulk content collection and backbone taps, you would get a clumsy response about call metadata. And move on to the next question. It is that insidious.
NSA has crossed the line. It needs to be completely disbanded, its secret assets colocated at Tier 1 and Tier 2 exchanges completely disconnected, dismantled and sold at auction. Its employees sent home. Or we're all fucked.
A. A railroad crossing without signals B. A roundabout C. Construction work D. "Some specific turns"
As it approached the railroad crossing the Google Car coasted almost to a halt, at ~1% of full power. This was due to an excess 'poisoning' of Xenon-135, a persistent condition that was generally understood but specifics directly relating to operational safety at low power had not been addressed. At this point conditions for the driving test were inherently unfavorable and dangerous. Tuptunov sensed this, but he lacked the knowledge, vocabulary and resolve to communicate this to Dyatlov -- who ordered the car to be driven manually over the crossing.
This led them into the roundabout, where a single path to the destination exists but the Google Car was not configured to confidently know how and when to exit. The automated systems drove the car in circles for several minutes in low gear at high RPM. The car was still in a state of equilibrium and would eventually have allowed the excess Xenon to absorb neutrons and decay to Xenon-136, which has a much smaller cross-section. But again Dyatlov was impatient for the test to complete and he was getting dizzy, so he ordered to withdraw all but six of the control rods and manually lurch the car into the turnoff.
At this point the car was screaming at full RPM in low gear as it approached the Construction Zone, lurching and swaying. The operators knew they were in some sort of trouble, but the Google Car jerked forward automatically until it spotted the red cones and barricades. It disengaged to manual control and Tuptunov slapped the vehicle into its lowest possible gear. Under normal conditions this engine-assisted braking procedure was the best possible course of action. But the pistons and rods were tipped with graphite which causes a temporary neutron flux when inserted, which escalated power and deformed the rods.
At this point things in general took "some specific turns" for the worse.
If, 150 years ago, the average life expectancy was 30-40 years, but the average human level of general health in those 30-40 years was better than the same in the first 30-40 years of modern humans's lives, then you could say that something we did back 150 years ago was better and we were healthier and living well on whatever we were doing.
I believe that 150 years ago you were 'healthier'... IF:
1. you didn't live in a big city, OR were upriver. This in the time before water distribution networks with chlorine treatment and build-out of sanitary sewer projects, sewage treatment to help the poor folk downriver to avoid cholera. This is not strictly geographic. Thanks to some awesome engineering New York City is now 'upriver' because of their aqueducts.
2. you did not succumb as a child to smallpox or malaria. Vaccine and antibiotics kick ass here. I would also like to give a shout-out to my bud dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane a.k.a. DDT who cleared malaria out of the southern US states. Completely. The ongoing tragedy of malaria-affected children today is being marginalized by folks who parrot ddtcancerbad but fail to apply historic perspective to the (irresponsibly) massive amount that was used for agriculture and the (small) amount required for effective mosquito control.
For example, chlorine kills, but 1-3 parts per million of it placed in your drinking water... so long as the treatment plant properly filters organic material to discourage formation of trihalomethanes... just saved your life.
3. your teeth were ok through adulthood and when they became diseased you yanked 'em out quick. Gingivitis and its slow poisoning is a true killer. I think there are many people in a poorer general state of health today because their dentists are trying to "save" their teeth.
4. you did not have one of the (far fewer then) occupations that allowed you to sit more than half the day. These days a good percent sits while awake, working or Internet or television. I think this, more then obesity, is a death sentence. We were not evolved to sit! You don't have to pump iron or run Marathons. Just don't sit down!
There, some Significant Factors that do not include salt or fat or blood pressure or food quality.
From these humblest origins of freight -- where the simple brain of a duck determines terminus loci -- human kind has leveraged the Duck Foot Apparatus into a vast global network with computer-optimized logistics management. Producers and shippers of commodities no longer need to wait until they are stepped on or eaten by a duck. This confers numerous advantages for cargo weight and scheduling and the ability to choose destination.
Early inventors believed you merely needed to graft duck feet onto Medieval torture devices to harness the abilities of ducks. In the Wright Brothers' first aircraft design running duck feet gathered the seeds of grass and mosses during takeoff. The goose neck trailer arose from early attempts to shove large volumes of freight down the neck of a beheaded goose, until it was discovered that large swinging doors in back facilitate deeper penetration and ease of loading.
Anyway, "the rest is history", and what the hell does that mean?? From milligrams to mega tonnes, the modern network of Things That Do Duck Things though they no longer resemble ducks carries invasive species to every "corner" of the globe. And what the hell does that mean??
Ocean shipping networks carry so much freight you can see their routes arching and sagging on this map. This is partially offset by the buoyant effect of air cargo.
To those of us old enough to remember air travel in the bowels of fowls, what a marvel modern transportation is indeed.
OOPS yeah thanks. Only Elvish tech uses certain flowers and essential oils because the scents stir their shared cultural memory, traverse the elf blood brain barrier easily and allow them to perceive history as one glorious song. Selective cultivation over eons has allowed elves to tailor flower DNA to store their herd memory in complex organic molecules. Either that or the tales were written into flowers all along and the elves adopted that story as their own, who can say.
Other hominids lack these specific receptors so it can come across as a dull throbbing headache, low rushing sound or whispering voices. If you hear voices in elevators and hallways it is likely that elvish tech is used in the building. Elvetech should always be used with adequate ventilation.
Where one can specify a X1Y1+WIDTHHEIGHT region of the image and that, not the full image, becomes what is actually rendered or stretched by the element.
And if either the X and/or Y have a MINUS sign, then the same absolute coordinates are used -- but also the presence of the sign causes the browser to FLIP the image horizontally, vertically or both. This deals with the case of mirror elements.
Modern web pages are full of small design elements such as bits of custom corners, tiles that are stretched horizontally and vertically and small recurring icons and pieces that are common to many pages. There can be dozens of these unique elements all told.
Wouldn't it be nice if only ONE image that has been carefully crafted to contain these rectangular regions, is loaded to the client, thus keeping all these bits and pieces from spamming the world's server logs and keepalive sessions?
Yes one can do something like this active scripting and with layers and canvas, but putting clip'n'flip into a newly designed PICTURE tag would achieve what I've been suggesting since... 1995. It would give me personal closure. It would make me feel needed.
And over time the men of Dale had become complacent on privacy, liberty and freedom of association, and yet they prospered. No longer content with the wealth of accumulation, they valued innovation and the free exchange of information. To this end they did help to build the greatest communications network that had ever been. Through it all their wealth flowed like a river --- real wealth --- not the dusty treasure hordes of kings locked in windowless rooms.
The fortune and fate of Dale is bound with that of the dwarves, for it is they who had built it. "Long ago in my grandfather Thror's time our family was driven out of the far North, and came back with all their wealth and their tools to this Mountain on the map." They were especially skilled in working gold, copper and silver into thin filaments which they strung far across the land. Where ever dwarves settled dial tone was sure to follow. But their skill was even greater with jewels and crystals, from which they built magical devices of geranium and silicon to carry voices and information in the aether. Altogether those were good days for us, and the poorest of us had money to spend and to lend, and leisure to make beautiful things just for the. fun of it, not to speak of the most marvelous and magical toys [...] and the toy-market of Dale was the wonder of the North."
But of all the wonders of that age the most precious was perhaps the least visible, hidden deep under the Mountain itself. "Discovered by my far ancestor, Thrain the Old, now they mined and they tunneled and they made huger halls and greater workshops." The Mountain they had built is actually many mountains and there is one in your own city. I refer to the telecommunications exchange points of Tier 1 and Tier 2 networks such as MAE-EAST and MAE-WEST, where rivers of voice and data converge into brilliant points of light, then spread out again.
The dwarves had not valued privacy per se, they had just built it for maximum throughput with minimum delay. Their vision was broad and down-to-earth and the data it carried was of practical use for the greatest number. "We use our own devices and just enough magic to make them go. Devices such as the palantir are of no interest to us, the Elves of Valinor can keep their silly patents. The palantir does work for distance communication but it is incredibly expensive and uses a lot of bandwidth. It is also dangerous. If you wish to talk to family and friend, or close a simple deal, why would you wish to link minds, wrestle in thought or lock souls with the other party? The dwarves deliver only voices and runes and stay clear of elvish mind-fuck. Besides, the palantir uses a proprietary network and has no user-servicable parts. Like the Blackberry."
But the dwarves' cleverness though inspired by wisdom was also their folly. While great wealth flowed through their network they were driven to perfect it, and that meant concentrating the flows of many through but a few interconnect points.
"Undoubtedly that was what brought the dragon. Dragons burrow themselves into networks to steal information you know, wherever they can find it; and they guard their plunder as long as they live (which is practically forever, unless they are outed by Congressional hearing), and --- if you would believe them --- they do it for only noble purposes and never enjoy a brass ring of it. Indeed they hardly know a good bit of information from a bad, though they usually have a good notion of the current market value; so despite noble aims of vigilant protection, their omnificent awareness inevitably leads to dull and stupid ends that rend the fabric of society. Insider trading, scheming false flag operations and a 'selective failure' to divulge clear warning of terrorism if it would serve their own ends, a dragon is easily turned to the dark side by its very
No, HVDC is good enough. You don't need 99% efficiency at 10x the cost of 90% efficiency. It's just not worth it. Besides, I doubt the efficiency of superconductors with their associated refrigeration would be competitive with HVDC anyway, or why else is it that HVDC is the market leader for long haul transmission right now?
I agree, HVDC can be made to work above or (preferably) below ground with a suitable amount of aluminum cross section and/or heat sink. There are some interesting calculations for 5-288GW transmission lines in this paper Faulkner [2005]: Electric Pipelines for North American Power Grid Efficiency Security which I use as a reference for raw capacity and conductor size. But Faulkner's 1-4 million VDC dream is unlikely in an age where practical Voltage Source Converters operate at ~345kV.
Faulkner is a hero of mine, we seem to share a feeling of urgency about re-structuring the grid to HVDC. His firm is desperately trying to make trench-friendly passively cooled HVDC 'elpipe' a reality, which sadly, is not gaining traction. In the supposed richest and cleverest country on Earth it grieves me to read this,
[from his website] " How do we acquire customers? This is the hard part. Though I am convinced that high capacity underground power transmission is absolutely required for us to move to a clean energy future, there is zero chance that a utility in North America or Europe will be a first adopter. We are looking to several places that need to innovate, and are less risk averse than the US (Brazil, India, China for example). There is no chance of a quick success, nor is there any other viable option that can deliver high transmission capacity underground, passively cooled; this will be a long term investment. But I see no other viable alternative for building a supergrid. Why do I continue to pursue such a difficult area as Long Distance Power Transmission? If not me, then who? The utilities believe in change that is so incremental that it cannot possibly deliver the degree of innovation that is needed to address global warming. They continue to build primarily high voltage AC lines, and point-to-point HVDC lines, when what is clearly needed is a change to multi-terminal HVDC systems (like the Atlantic Wind Connection), but arranged in loops to be self-redundant. The major suppliers to the utilities are nearly as risk averse as the utilities themselves. Utility mantras include such things as "underground is ten times as expensive as overhead lines" which is not true. Change will come, and it will be disruptive. Must we accept the self-fulfilling prophesies that keep us stuck?"
Forgive me... but will someone please give this man some fucking money?
There is a proposal afoot to build an HVDC submarine ring around the UK. A ring structure is the way to go -- with several overlapping rings across North America. They provide fault tolerance and (I've read recently somewhere) it would simplify load management if sources would design for and 'push' towards loads in a particular direction. Ring HVDC also optimizes plant design.
Tres Amigas SuperStation aims to bridge the North American East/West/Texas interconnects with superconducting HVDC at 5GW (scalable to 30GW). Their business model seems ENRONian with the twist they they'd actually own some unique infrastructure and not just leech-suck from others'. But is this project just a proving ground for superconductors? I wonder how the non-superconductor options would work out.
I loved the neat 3D simulator the BBC fabricated for their docudrama Supervolcano. After the run one of the geologists (played by Gary Lewis) says, "[laughing] That's great... and if frogs had wings they wouldn't bump their little green asses hoppin' around, eh? [...] You're letting yourself be spooked by a video game!"
I love the Slashdot headline "Feds Want Nuclear Waste Train, But Don't Know Where It Would Go". A most provocative issue of nuclear energy, stir in a bit of Fed-Fumbling with the idea of a ghost train and you have the perfect movie plot and Internet meme.
Drawing on most recent experience with politics in America, the way illegal immigration is being "handled" -- I conclude this announcement means that the Nuclear Ghost Train has Already Left The Station.
It is currently circumnavigating the continent. Soon it will pass through Your Town.
Folks like me who live near the tracks know of ones like it, those trains that pass through in the dead of night and (creepily) did not blow their horns, for you awaken to the low rumble of wheels that seems to go on forever. Yeah, those.
Every night the Ghost Train pulls onto a siding somewhere and dark figures with flashlights roll up and couple another boxcar. By 2015 the Train will be pulling more than half of all spent nuclear fuel in North America, and nuclear plant operators will sleep that much easier at night, since relieving them of this awful responsibility is the ONE thing the Federal Government promised to deliver all along.
It's going through Tennessee tonight. Listen for it. Pleasant dreams. Is this so farfetched? Could some one come up with any other examples of government action just as ludicrous? I see a lot of hands raised here.
I see a few others have brought up radioactive train movies, some of them with plots blatantly obvious and goofy. After all we're talking about a system of containment so secure that even a head-on with another train would roll the casks off the train and dint them slightly, as they wait to be picked up again. Cue up video of protesters dressed like skeletons with nuclear death symbols who caught a whiff of nuclear transport and scream "Not in our town!" as thin-skinned railroad tanker cars of chlorine gas, sodium hydroxide and cresol pass by.
If you're protesting, do not step out in front of the Nuclear Ghost Train. It has been instructed not to stop under any circumstances. Cleanup crews are on standby in all major cities and your bodies will never be found.
The Nuclear Ghost train does exist in a movie, but it's not a goofy disaster movie. It is a Argentinian film entitled Moebius [1996] made by Gustavo Mosquera. "Recent stories, fears and oblivion seen through a metaphor. A 30-passenger convoy vanishes in the closed circuit of the Buenos Aires underground system. Research will be initiated towards finding the cause of this dematerialization. A young topologist (surfaces mathematician) leads the investigation based on some lost maps and technical data sheets. He cannot find the whereabouts of the old scientist who designed the intricate weft of the subway web, until the unexpected aid from a young girl will ease the obtention of the first clues. Everything seems to be futile, but a random event that will risk his life gets him into an impossible train, were he will face up the amazing final revelation."This is an amazing movie though you may need to resort to [extreme][methods] to see it.
Never mind those too-obvious disaster films. Moebius [1996] is the perfect one to take in while you ponder the meaning of the Perpetually Moving Nuclear Ghost Train.
Gather 'round kids, I'll tell you of the time when Google Self-Driving Cars were just around the corner. It was considered to be one of the 'last' frontiers in artificial intelligence, because AIs had already been tried -- and proved successful -- in other venues. A great many people, our smartest people, were concentrating on this and similar problems. AI was not a transformational experience.
In fact, this fixation with AI turned out to be a big mistake. You'd love to hear about some great struggle between man and machine, how we were brought low by our own cleverness. Here's the real why.
These AIs were not smarter or capable by any means. People just re-arranged their environment to make these machines comfortable, much as you would clean house and rearrange the furniture to better accommodate a handicapped guest. In manufacturing, specialized robots proved very adept for the most tedious and repetitive tasks of assembly but general object manipulation such as unpacking, but in sorting and placing parts the clumsiest of humans excelled. So the world became a place of conveyor belts and hoppers and jigs. Humans loaded the jigs, verified the proper operation of conveyors with a deft glance, and reigned supreme in the packing and shipping department. Once everything was in place and arrived at the proper moment, intelligent robots were able to construct incredible devices in seconds, where there once had been hundreds of steps spanning several days. So far so good.
If cleverer and more intricate devices were all it took to survive, the wheels of progress would still be turning.
No emergent intelligence, no revolution. The only machines that turned on their masters, turns out, were those specifically instructed to do so. Runaway killer drones suffering from software bugs, malfunctioning friend-or-foe systems, some hacked by dysfunctional or suicidal humans into becoming killing machines. But it was in the end quite impersonal, even boring. The machines did not seek to overrun Earth or join forces any more than a nail gun goes off in search of human wrists once its safety catch is removed. Except for that little skirmish where one million people were murdered in cold blood, but the machines doing it were too busy to notice the Corrective Forces moving in, they lacked the cleverness to hide or disguise themselves and... problem solved. A bit late for that One Million as they are called now but far less dangerous than say, a pandemic.
So Humans Need Not Apply. The automation of everything progressed. Clever humans do not need a reason to be clever because cleverness is its own reward -- something to do with endorphins and the "Ah Ha!" moment which we won't get into here -- we were clever. The most fascinating problems to solve were those which, when solved, put more people out of work. This happened gradually and mostly to other people, and no one shed a tear over it because it was easy to imagine liberated humans enjoying a life of leisure somewhere. A half-remembered snippet of an old film or Utopian anime was enough to do the trick.
So when it came to self-driving cars our best and brightest were right there. It is a sexy problem, successful negotiation of a task that even the dullest of humans seem to manage pretty well. And they were making progress, and predictably as in all these dystopian outcomes, the laziest among them would say, we are so close. But we'd be even closer if we could just get the humans off the roads.
They were screwed because there were more humans all over the roads then ever before, more than anyone could remember. These were people displaced by technology, the jobless seeking jobs, the homeless moving from place to place. While they had been busy making cell phones smaller and web apps more numerous, some of the 'true' engineers among them shaving
A little 8-white-LED key chain flashlight, it's cheap and what a miracle it is. Anyone old enough to remember strapping on 2 lb lantern batteries for a couple of hours' light knows. Really bright, runs cool with and extremely low current draw. All Glory to the Human Race. And Hypnotoad.
1. flickered on the first day when I tapped it against something. Probably shelf life corrosion patina, took out batteries, cleaned them, ok.
2. flickering again. spring on screw end not made of spring steel, weak. stretched out spring.
3. flickering again. top contact in flashlight tube is flat bent strip of copper or brass, no spring behind it. installed tiny ball of foil on top of battery.
4. flickering again. top contact now recessed into soft plastic and contact is unreliable even with foil or spring shim. flashlight goes into drawer.
5. need for tiny always-on light. take hacksaw to cut off aluminum battery tube, to reach and solder wire from 1.5V adapter to top contact. drill small hole to attach screw for wire (cannot solder, too much heat dissipation). Works today. Light always on.
6. flickering again. this time it is failing spring on push button. place small clamp around button squeezing it down tight.
7. flickering again. this time it is two of the eight individual LEDs around the circle going out when tapped. clearly the fabrication method involved little or no solder.
8. at this point 'fixing' this little light would involve rendering it down to part level and rebuilding it. Had enough. I decide to leave the light as it is and change my life instead. I have joined an Amish community.
8. flickering again. this time it is a light murmuring breeze on leaves in a glade of dappled sunlight. tie off branches and sew leaves together with thread.
9. flickering again. this time it is my campfire. A rhinoceros appears and stamps the fire out.
"Not a political map"? yes it is. the Howard Javis inspired 'tax foundation' that ignores the 40% effective net taxes paid by the bottom 50% of citizens is PURE politics, and false at that.
Thanks for the reply. "Proposition 13" Jarvis? Wow, it is fascinating to see how his influence has gelled and morphed in the generation since. I'm curious how any slice of economic sleight-of-hand applied across the board such as ignoring the 40%/50% might become a pure political issue. Is it one of those "Because ___ people tend to be ___" type of things? (I really am clueless here).
Since it was posted original map which averages by state has been updated with a more detailed one that averages by county. No doubt a mob of Upstate New Yorkers threatened to burn the website down for letting New York City turn their whole state blue=bad, costly. And the scoundrels reversed the color scheme too so the state/county maps are visually incompatible.
Regarding your cry of "politics"... I was struck with the similarity of the their State average map to another: here is a GIF showing their State averages and electoral 2012 results. Aside from a few states their $100 purchasing power distribution has an uncanny resemblance to the Presidential race. Is some of this not strictly party politics after all... rather, a glimpse of the battle line between city-states and rural-folk who are hanging on by an electoral thread? Or is it wealthy versus not?
I do sense that the city vs. rural divide is becoming a real battle, a country-wide struggle to secure resources and clout as the Water Wars divided California. In this Slashdot musing I lay out what I deem as a front line, the move by city-folk to abolish the electoral college. What think?
Wouldn't it be keen if Diablo Canyon and the other operating nucleaar plants could rise up on giant clawed feet and saunter over to a state that actually wants a clean source of emissions-free energy.
It would also be cool if nuclear electricity was shaped a bit differently, perhaps a little series of dips in the sinusoid like tumblers in a lock... that way the grid could reconfigure itself to gather carbon free energy and pool it for use in states that are not driven by anti-nuclear hysterics.
Then the minions of Enron could come out of retirement, and just as the kind gentleman did for the Yellow Bellied Sneetches, they could install an Apparatus that smooths the sinusoid making the energy appear to have come from Solar or Wind -- for a good price, so the Californians could have Stars Upon Thars.
I recognize that this assessment of Diablo Canyon comes from the NRC, not California. But cue the hysteria as the San Onorfe haters gather their torches and march on to battle evil. Leaving in its wake peace and natural gas for all.
I think marketing just sullied the word "gamer" by including people who play casual mobile games.
Well now. When Slashdot revealed shockingly that Whales Are Ecosystem Engineers... which should have shook the very foundation of nerddom to create a backlash of indignation... as a handful of researchers casually marginalized the hard work and extreme mental discipline required to obtain a degree in Engineering to some act of mammalian gut instinct... what did we get, ~60 comments?
But tamper with gamer and we come out in force.
It's all fun and GAMES until someone loses their social EYEdentity.
Okay, so we need disc 101 from tray 1010101 and the robot arm is busy, three other fetches already in the queue. After 30,000ms client Javascript times out and substitutes a "retrieving data, re-try for a few minutes" place holder, sets a longer camp-on timeout and releases the request.
The reason the robotic arm is busy is that despite random assignment to storage pools with some localized album grouping, web crawler activity for public albums, and bulk pre-fetch requests for semi-private albums by browser plugins run by logged-in users (which became more popular as access time increased)... the lukewarm storage facilities are running hot and queues are full most of the time.
Despite the polished and smoothly functioning presentation that encourages the users to "just wait a bit"... a dark rumor grows deep in the hearts of many that the data is not merely delayed, they must brush off dust and cobwebs, or root for it because it had been haphazardly tossed into a pile of rubbish somewhere, relegated to the digital Basement. Facebook does not think your photograph is of sufficient merit. Grandmother has long passed and you had not wished to look at her last week, so... why should you be interested now?
The effects are complex, but the cause is clear: the Internet is perverse. It re-routes around any attempt to take immediate access data off-line by degrees, accomplishing this through a series of countermeasures such as unwelcome crawlers depleting your cache, hitting your 'public' cold data systematically and regularly, then finally bankrupting your company as users migrate to another service whose superior performance does not arise from superior engineering -- merely the fact that fewer users are using it.
So the moral of the story is, if you are Facebook and wish to remain so, you will either strive to find a way to keep the random access time for everything down below 2000ms -- or die.
And also, Facebook would be wise to heed the following:
once / forgotten by tourists / a bicycle joined a herd of mountain goats/// with its splendidly turned horns / it became / their leader/// with its bell / it warned them / of danger/// with them / it partook / in romps / on the snow covered / glade/// the bicycle / gazed from above / on people walking; / with the goats/// it fought / over a goat, / with a bearded buck/// it reared up at eagles / enraged / on its back wheel/// it was happy / though it never / nibbled at grass/// or drank from a stream/// until once / a poacher / shot it/// tempted / by the silver trophy / of its horns/// and then / above the Tatras was seen / against the sparkling / January sky/// the angel of death erect / slowly / riding to heaven / holding the bicycle's / dead horns//////~Jerzy Harasymowicz
If someone stoops to classic, even dramatically ridiculous errors in logic, yet you totally 'get' what their point is, and 'get' where they are coming from (seeing the view and the person behind the view) is there a Latin phrase for that? Just simply understanding people?
There are a number of nuclear plants which are not being kept in operation due to the advent of cheap, clean, natural gas.
Yes, such as the Kewaunee Power Station which went offline in 2013 despite that it is in good condition, has maintained a healthy balance sheet, perfect safety record, operating license extended to 2033 ad six months' fuel in the reactor.
All because Dominion is riding the natural gas 'glut' at this brief moment in time. Also, the triggering of decommission status of a nuclear plant releases the funds set aside for that purpose creating a temporary vulture-culture 'industry' that employs many.
But it is all so short-sighted, an act of outright corporate vandalism. One of my working plans if (perhaps when) the economy and grid breaks down or some disaster strikes, was to relocate to Carlton Wis and help to maintain and defend this plant. The defending of operational nuclear power plants being a sensible course of action for any apocalyptic future suggested in the (excellent) novel Lucifer's Hammer.
Now Calrton, Wisconsin would never be a beacon of hope and assured survival in some grid-down scenario, it's just a town that will have to take its chances with the rest.
If there is a dark moral to this story... if you are a goose which lays golden eggs, do not let yourself be acquired by Dominion Energy.
The politicians have essentially made grid operators pay for the unreliability of wind & solar, instead of the people who actually own the thing and earn money from it. It's like making a public transport company pay for the lost wages of people who continuously oversleep and show up late for work, despite the public transport running on time.
This is the most apt and brilliant analogy for this issue I have yet seen... suitable for framing!
What you refuse to accept is that "less" access to guns by bad guys is still ample for them to shoot good defenseless people.
I second this.
Don't forget the (logical, inevitable) outcome of selective criminals-only carry in places with steep and escalating gun crime penalties: defenseless bystanders and potential witnesses -- even those who do not interfere with the perpetrators' exit -- are more likely to be pursued and targeted lethally.
How 'bout them bunny etters, ain't they hicks? Snarfin' them some bunny way out in the sticks. Shootin' them cottontail, snarin' them hares Jumpin' them a jackrabbit, nothing compares! How 'bout them hare flushers, ain't they snappy? Leapin' lepus in the boonies sure makes 'em happy! Them hugger-mugger hare raisers way down South stickin' yummy Hasenpfeffer in they mouth. How to be a hare-gitter no way to duck it, Git yerself a hare, stew it and suck it!
Geez, you're quoting someone at a thorium power conference? Who cares what his take is?
(Refering to THIS and THIS)... I sure do. Dodson is a bright, outspoken fellow who is working on his Masters in utility Electrical engineering. He has already demonstrated that he has a grasp of the issues surrounding proper impedance matching of transmission lines and power sources. He arrived at the conference with NERC animations showing synchronous resonance occurring on the grid and explains its significance. This is real stuff.
Yeah, I had to read carefully to make sure they weren't the same article. I can see the folks who gathered these numbers now. They're sitting in cubicles and each article presents an amalgamation of optimistic spreadsheet projections that leverage imagined costs and revenue streams tailored to arrive at a projected goal of 'X" percent renewables. It's money all the way down. Spreadsheet wizards. The planet is awash in such mind games. They're assuming that the grid is some modular component, the perfect sink, that they can click their renewable LEGO pieces into -- perhaps a little column labelled 'retrofit' with a dash of money in it -- and somehow... it will all work. There is a general need for such things but these are suffering from a deficit of engineering reality.
From all I've learned from people working on these problems whom I trust, it won't work. Intermittent sources are polluting the grid in a way that has begin to threaten its stability.
If the country was connected with overlapping rings of HVDC conduit (as it must be some day) then the mere introduction of potential into the ring -- whether it be intermittent or 'noisy' or not -- could happen with near 100% efficiency, AC would be pushed into the legacy grid (which would begin to decouple as the DC feeds become redundant and reliable) -- and ONLY THEN will those spreadsheets work nicely. With a little boost from natural gas here and there. We can even bridge the continents.
This is not that world or that continent, yet. In order to build out our existing resonant AC grid we need to feed it by adding a few, massive generating plants that run 24/7.
Every cent that has been spent attempting to put wind and solar onto the grid has been wasted. Because it has diverted resources away from more serious problems and more sensible approaches.
I wonder if it's possible at all to just retrofit in a modular way. for example, take 1 power line that goes down a few city blocks and touches 10 stepdown transformers. Could that entire line be taken down along with the transformers and replaced???
IF the area was literally paved with solar and wind, such that its output could not only provide for it completely but with surplus for export, then these resonance effects might be measurable and some adjustment to the original design might improve efficiency.
But the effects that Dodson refers to in the video linked above occur over a much larger region, when large wind turbines create an ebb and flow of hundreds of megawatts at a time, fast ripples in a pond. It's not that the transmission lines cannot handle these variations in flow -- the whole system was designed to remain in near perfect phase except when large, slow and regularly scheduled events 'push' or 'pull' it -- slowly. Only the trip of stations or the gradual rise and fall of loads would affect it. Grid operators and their physical machinery do take kindly to extraordinary, unplanned events and wind power has made every day a cacophony of them.
What you can do at the community level is take advantage of all this great stuff and become more self-sufficient -- help one another to install power sources that begin to take you off the grid for certain things or some of the time. As 'preppers' or 'conservationists' or maybe just for the hellacious fun of it.
In short, leave the government and the grid out of it. We will continue to need reliable power, and the grid is fragile. Paying by the kilowatt-hour to some well-designed, stable entity miles away is not an abomination, it is the best way we've come up with to solve the problem.
The net metering 'fad' with its Federal mandates and subsidies reminds me of the The Bank That Was Sent Through the Post Office back in 1913. 80,000 bricks needed to be moved 120 miles and freight was prohibitive, so this young entrepreneur 'pwned' the Post Office which had recently introduced its Parcel Post service with reasonable rates for packages under 50 pounds. No one believed for a minute that the Post Office should shrug off this large scale abuse and re-tool their organization to subvert the whole idea of bulk freight. But (for a time at least) they were powerless to do anything about it, and the Bank was built. Two hundred tons of bricks by Parcel Post.
Similarly -- it is my belief that given the purpose for which it was designed, and the way it was constructed, the North American Power grid is being abused dangerously by variable energy sources. And we cannot afford, nor should we strive to 'fix' it until we address the more pressing problem -- a lack of sustainable, reliable energy sources.
Slashdot Mirror
Fuck you and fuck no!
That's the spirit. Things have got to change, But first, you gotta get mad!
All of this furor is over call and subscriber data being sent to the NSA directly on a regular basis. If I wanted to build a computer platform capable of storing and doing queries on this information for the whole United States I could probably assemble one off the shelf for a couple grand.
I would not need a water-cooled data center in Utah, centrally located so you can lease dark fiber to carry multiple terabit streams into it. Among other data centers in other parts of the country which are in planning, already constructed, or just manage to stay under the radar because they were built from the black ops budget. I would not need secret agreements (negotiated voluntarily or by threat) with service providers to tap and split optic cables.
This issue of NSA bulk metadata collection is a straw man, a distraction to divert attention from NSA's full content backbone tapping capability. It is a little duck set loose for Congress to shoot down, so they can hold up the dead duck as they pose for a group photo, leaning on their rifles.
The horrifying truth is -- if and when, possibly now -- NSA has enough backbone taps in place, they would already have access to this data that is being sent to them. In the modern world there are but a few major telecoms and their call data converges at central billing and collection points. The telecoms would gladly keep these links unencrypted or leave the keys in the mailbox for a nudge nudge wink wink absolving them of public ire.
Even the judges are stalking this duck and believe me, they are relieved when the topic of conversation fixes on call data rather than bulk content interception. That is because there is legal precedent for law enforcement collection of so-called 'pen trace data' without warrants, and they have a leg to stand on.
I'll serious money that if YOU were to ask any member of Congress a very specific and impeccably worded question about bulk content collection and backbone taps, you would get a clumsy response about call metadata. And move on to the next question. It is that insidious.
NSA has crossed the line. It needs to be completely disbanded, its secret assets colocated at Tier 1 and Tier 2 exchanges completely disconnected, dismantled and sold at auction. Its employees sent home. Or we're all fucked.
LYNCHPIN of warrantless spying: Hepting v. AT&T
Clap on! Clap off! Clapper's PRISM DISINFO Gambit
RAISE CONGRESS, while you still can!
A fable: NSA and the Desolation of Smaug
A. A railroad crossing without signals
B. A roundabout
C. Construction work
D. "Some specific turns"
As it approached the railroad crossing the Google Car coasted almost to a halt, at ~1% of full power. This was due to an excess 'poisoning' of Xenon-135, a persistent condition that was generally understood but specifics directly relating to operational safety at low power had not been addressed. At this point conditions for the driving test were inherently unfavorable and dangerous. Tuptunov sensed this, but he lacked the knowledge, vocabulary and resolve to communicate this to Dyatlov -- who ordered the car to be driven manually over the crossing.
This led them into the roundabout, where a single path to the destination exists but the Google Car was not configured to confidently know how and when to exit. The automated systems drove the car in circles for several minutes in low gear at high RPM. The car was still in a state of equilibrium and would eventually have allowed the excess Xenon to absorb neutrons and decay to Xenon-136, which has a much smaller cross-section. But again Dyatlov was impatient for the test to complete and he was getting dizzy, so he ordered to withdraw all but six of the control rods and manually lurch the car into the turnoff.
At this point the car was screaming at full RPM in low gear as it approached the Construction Zone, lurching and swaying. The operators knew they were in some sort of trouble, but the Google Car jerked forward automatically until it spotted the red cones and barricades. It disengaged to manual control and Tuptunov slapped the vehicle into its lowest possible gear. Under normal conditions this engine-assisted braking procedure was the best possible course of action. But the pistons and rods were tipped with graphite which causes a temporary neutron flux when inserted, which escalated power and deformed the rods.
At this point things in general took "some specific turns" for the worse.
If, 150 years ago, the average life expectancy was 30-40 years, but the average human level of general health in those 30-40 years was better than the same in the first 30-40 years of modern humans's lives, then you could say that something we did back 150 years ago was better and we were healthier and living well on whatever we were doing.
I believe that 150 years ago you were 'healthier'... IF:
1. you didn't live in a big city, OR were upriver. This in the time before water distribution networks with chlorine treatment and build-out of sanitary sewer projects, sewage treatment to help the poor folk downriver to avoid cholera. This is not strictly geographic. Thanks to some awesome engineering New York City is now 'upriver' because of their aqueducts.
2. you did not succumb as a child to smallpox or malaria. Vaccine and antibiotics kick ass here. I would also like to give a shout-out to my bud dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane a.k.a. DDT who cleared malaria out of the southern US states. Completely. The ongoing tragedy of malaria-affected children today is being marginalized by folks who parrot ddtcancerbad but fail to apply historic perspective to the (irresponsibly) massive amount that was used for agriculture and the (small) amount required for effective mosquito control.
For example, chlorine kills, but 1-3 parts per million of it placed in your drinking water... so long as the treatment plant properly filters organic material to discourage formation of trihalomethanes... just saved your life.
3. your teeth were ok through adulthood and when they became diseased you yanked 'em out quick. Gingivitis and its slow poisoning is a true killer. I think there are many people in a poorer general state of health today because their dentists are trying to "save" their teeth.
4. you did not have one of the (far fewer then) occupations that allowed you to sit more than half the day. These days a good percent sits while awake, working or Internet or television. I think this, more then obesity, is a death sentence. We were not evolved to sit! You don't have to pump iron or run Marathons. Just don't sit down!
There, some Significant Factors that do not include salt or fat or blood pressure or food quality.
I suspended the feet of a duck in an aquarium
From these humblest origins of freight -- where the simple brain of a duck determines terminus loci -- human kind has leveraged the Duck Foot Apparatus into a vast global network with computer-optimized logistics management. Producers and shippers of commodities no longer need to wait until they are stepped on or eaten by a duck. This confers numerous advantages for cargo weight and scheduling and the ability to choose destination.
Early inventors believed you merely needed to graft duck feet onto Medieval torture devices to harness the abilities of ducks. In the Wright Brothers' first aircraft design running duck feet gathered the seeds of grass and mosses during takeoff. The goose neck trailer arose from early attempts to shove large volumes of freight down the neck of a beheaded goose, until it was discovered that large swinging doors in back facilitate deeper penetration and ease of loading.
Anyway, "the rest is history", and what the hell does that mean?? From milligrams to mega tonnes, the modern network of Things That Do Duck Things though they no longer resemble ducks carries invasive species to every "corner" of the globe. And what the hell does that mean??
Ocean shipping networks carry so much freight you can see their routes arching and sagging on this map. This is partially offset by the buoyant effect of air cargo.
To those of us old enough to remember air travel in the bowels of fowls, what a marvel modern transportation is indeed.
They used FLOWERS???
Or did you mean germanium?
OOPS yeah thanks. Only Elvish tech uses certain flowers and essential oils because the scents stir their shared cultural memory, traverse the elf blood brain barrier easily and allow them to perceive history as one glorious song. Selective cultivation over eons has allowed elves to tailor flower DNA to store their herd memory in complex organic molecules. Either that or the tales were written into flowers all along and the elves adopted that story as their own, who can say.
Other hominids lack these specific receptors so it can come across as a dull throbbing headache, low rushing sound or whispering voices. If you hear voices in elevators and hallways it is likely that elvish tech is used in the building. Elvetech should always be used with adequate ventilation.
Where one can specify a X1Y1+WIDTHHEIGHT region of the image and that, not the full image, becomes what is actually rendered or stretched by the element.
And if either the X and/or Y have a MINUS sign, then the same absolute coordinates are used -- but also the presence of the sign causes the browser to FLIP the image horizontally, vertically or both. This deals with the case of mirror elements.
Modern web pages are full of small design elements such as bits of custom corners, tiles that are stretched horizontally and vertically and small recurring icons and pieces that are common to many pages. There can be dozens of these unique elements all told.
Wouldn't it be nice if only ONE image that has been carefully crafted to contain these rectangular regions, is loaded to the client, thus keeping all these bits and pieces from spamming the world's server logs and keepalive sessions?
Yes one can do something like this active scripting and with layers and canvas, but putting clip'n'flip into a newly designed PICTURE tag would achieve what I've been suggesting since... 1995. It would give me personal closure. It would make me feel needed.
~repost~
And over time the men of Dale had become complacent on privacy, liberty and freedom of association, and yet they prospered. No longer content with the wealth of accumulation, they valued innovation and the free exchange of information. To this end they did help to build the greatest communications network that had ever been. Through it all their wealth flowed like a river --- real wealth --- not the dusty treasure hordes of kings locked in windowless rooms.
The fortune and fate of Dale is bound with that of the dwarves, for it is they who had built it. "Long ago in my grandfather Thror's time our family was driven out of the far North, and came back with all their wealth and their tools to this Mountain on the map." They were especially skilled in working gold, copper and silver into thin filaments which they strung far across the land. Where ever dwarves settled dial tone was sure to follow. But their skill was even greater with jewels and crystals, from which they built magical devices of geranium and silicon to carry voices and information in the aether. Altogether those were good days for us, and the poorest of us had money to spend and to lend, and leisure to make beautiful things just for the. fun of it, not to speak of the most marvelous and magical toys [...] and the toy-market of Dale was the wonder of the North."
But of all the wonders of that age the most precious was perhaps the least visible, hidden deep under the Mountain itself. "Discovered by my far ancestor, Thrain the Old, now they mined and they tunneled and they made huger halls and greater workshops." The Mountain they had built is actually many mountains and there is one in your own city. I refer to the telecommunications exchange points of Tier 1 and Tier 2 networks such as MAE-EAST and MAE-WEST, where rivers of voice and data converge into brilliant points of light, then spread out again.
The dwarves had not valued privacy per se, they had just built it for maximum throughput with minimum delay. Their vision was broad and down-to-earth and the data it carried was of practical use for the greatest number. "We use our own devices and just enough magic to make them go. Devices such as the palantir are of no interest to us, the Elves of Valinor can keep their silly patents. The palantir does work for distance communication but it is incredibly expensive and uses a lot of bandwidth. It is also dangerous. If you wish to talk to family and friend, or close a simple deal, why would you wish to link minds, wrestle in thought or lock souls with the other party? The dwarves deliver only voices and runes and stay clear of elvish mind-fuck. Besides, the palantir uses a proprietary network and has no user-servicable parts. Like the Blackberry."
But the dwarves' cleverness though inspired by wisdom was also their folly. While great wealth flowed through their network they were driven to perfect it, and that meant concentrating the flows of many through but a few interconnect points.
"Undoubtedly that was what brought the dragon. Dragons burrow themselves into networks to steal information you know, wherever they can find it; and they guard their plunder as long as they live (which is practically forever, unless they are outed by Congressional hearing), and --- if you would believe them --- they do it for only noble purposes and never enjoy a brass ring of it. Indeed they hardly know a good bit of information from a bad, though they usually have a good notion of the current market value; so despite noble aims of vigilant protection, their omnificent awareness inevitably leads to dull and stupid ends that rend the fabric of society. Insider trading, scheming false flag operations and a 'selective failure' to divulge clear warning of terrorism if it would serve their own ends, a dragon is easily turned to the dark side by its very
No, HVDC is good enough. You don't need 99% efficiency at 10x the cost of 90% efficiency. It's just not worth it. Besides, I doubt the efficiency of superconductors with their associated refrigeration would be competitive with HVDC anyway, or why else is it that HVDC is the market leader for long haul transmission right now?
I agree, HVDC can be made to work above or (preferably) below ground with a suitable amount of aluminum cross section and/or heat sink. There are some interesting calculations for 5-288GW transmission lines in this paper Faulkner [2005]: Electric Pipelines for North American Power Grid Efficiency Security which I use as a reference for raw capacity and conductor size. But Faulkner's 1-4 million VDC dream is unlikely in an age where practical Voltage Source Converters operate at ~345kV.
Faulkner is a hero of mine, we seem to share a feeling of urgency about re-structuring the grid to HVDC. His firm is desperately trying to make trench-friendly passively cooled HVDC 'elpipe' a reality, which sadly, is not gaining traction. In the supposed richest and cleverest country on Earth it grieves me to read this,
Forgive me... but will someone please give this man some fucking money?
There is a proposal afoot to build an HVDC submarine ring around the UK. A ring structure is the way to go -- with several overlapping rings across North America. They provide fault tolerance and (I've read recently somewhere) it would simplify load management if sources would design for and 'push' towards loads in a particular direction. Ring HVDC also optimizes plant design.
Tres Amigas SuperStation aims to bridge the North American East/West/Texas interconnects with superconducting HVDC at 5GW (scalable to 30GW). Their business model seems ENRONian with the twist they they'd actually own some unique infrastructure and not just leech-suck from others'. But is this project just a proving ground for superconductors? I wonder how the non-superconductor options would work out.
___
Please see Thorium
I loved the neat 3D simulator the BBC fabricated for their docudrama Supervolcano. After the run one of the geologists (played by Gary Lewis) says, "[laughing] That's great... and if frogs had wings they wouldn't bump their little green asses hoppin' around, eh? [...] You're letting yourself be spooked by a video game!"
Great TEOTWAWKI drama, decent science, I recommend it: Supervolcano Ep1, Supervolcano Ep2, and the companion factual documentary Supervolcano.The Truth About Yellowstone which re-uses CGI footage made for the drama between interviews.
I love the Slashdot headline "Feds Want Nuclear Waste Train, But Don't Know Where It Would Go". A most provocative issue of nuclear energy, stir in a bit of Fed-Fumbling with the idea of a ghost train and you have the perfect movie plot and Internet meme.
Drawing on most recent experience with politics in America, the way illegal immigration is being "handled" -- I conclude this announcement means that the Nuclear Ghost Train has Already Left The Station.
It is currently circumnavigating the continent. Soon it will pass through Your Town.
Folks like me who live near the tracks know of ones like it, those trains that pass through in the dead of night and (creepily) did not blow their horns, for you awaken to the low rumble of wheels that seems to go on forever. Yeah, those.
Every night the Ghost Train pulls onto a siding somewhere and dark figures with flashlights roll up and couple another boxcar. By 2015 the Train will be pulling more than half of all spent nuclear fuel in North America, and nuclear plant operators will sleep that much easier at night, since relieving them of this awful responsibility is the ONE thing the Federal Government promised to deliver all along.
It's going through Tennessee tonight. Listen for it. Pleasant dreams. Is this so farfetched? Could some one come up with any other examples of government action just as ludicrous? I see a lot of hands raised here.
I see a few others have brought up radioactive train movies, some of them with plots blatantly obvious and goofy. After all we're talking about a system of containment so secure that even a head-on with another train would roll the casks off the train and dint them slightly, as they wait to be picked up again. Cue up video of protesters dressed like skeletons with nuclear death symbols who caught a whiff of nuclear transport and scream "Not in our town!" as thin-skinned railroad tanker cars of chlorine gas, sodium hydroxide and cresol pass by.
If you're protesting, do not step out in front of the Nuclear Ghost Train. It has been instructed not to stop under any circumstances. Cleanup crews are on standby in all major cities and your bodies will never be found.
The Nuclear Ghost train does exist in a movie, but it's not a goofy disaster movie. It is a Argentinian film entitled Moebius [1996] made by Gustavo Mosquera. "Recent stories, fears and oblivion seen through a metaphor. A 30-passenger convoy vanishes in the closed circuit of the Buenos Aires underground system. Research will be initiated towards finding the cause of this dematerialization. A young topologist (surfaces mathematician) leads the investigation based on some lost maps and technical data sheets. He cannot find the whereabouts of the old scientist who designed the intricate weft of the subway web, until the unexpected aid from a young girl will ease the obtention of the first clues. Everything seems to be futile, but a random event that will risk his life gets him into an impossible train, were he will face up the amazing final revelation." This is an amazing movie though you may need to resort to [extreme] [methods] to see it.
Never mind those too-obvious disaster films. Moebius [1996] is the perfect one to take in while you ponder the meaning of the Perpetually Moving Nuclear Ghost Train.
Which has already left the station.
Gather 'round kids, I'll tell you of the time when Google Self-Driving Cars were just around the corner. It was considered to be one of the 'last' frontiers in artificial intelligence, because AIs had already been tried -- and proved successful -- in other venues. A great many people, our smartest people, were concentrating on this and similar problems. AI was not a transformational experience.
In fact, this fixation with AI turned out to be a big mistake. You'd love to hear about some great struggle between man and machine, how we were brought low by our own cleverness. Here's the real why.
These AIs were not smarter or capable by any means. People just re-arranged their environment to make these machines comfortable, much as you would clean house and rearrange the furniture to better accommodate a handicapped guest. In manufacturing, specialized robots proved very adept for the most tedious and repetitive tasks of assembly but general object manipulation such as unpacking, but in sorting and placing parts the clumsiest of humans excelled. So the world became a place of conveyor belts and hoppers and jigs. Humans loaded the jigs, verified the proper operation of conveyors with a deft glance, and reigned supreme in the packing and shipping department. Once everything was in place and arrived at the proper moment, intelligent robots were able to construct incredible devices in seconds, where there once had been hundreds of steps spanning several days. So far so good.
If cleverer and more intricate devices were all it took to survive, the wheels of progress would still be turning.
No emergent intelligence, no revolution. The only machines that turned on their masters, turns out, were those specifically instructed to do so. Runaway killer drones suffering from software bugs, malfunctioning friend-or-foe systems, some hacked by dysfunctional or suicidal humans into becoming killing machines. But it was in the end quite impersonal, even boring. The machines did not seek to overrun Earth or join forces any more than a nail gun goes off in search of human wrists once its safety catch is removed. Except for that little skirmish where one million people were murdered in cold blood, but the machines doing it were too busy to notice the Corrective Forces moving in, they lacked the cleverness to hide or disguise themselves and... problem solved. A bit late for that One Million as they are called now but far less dangerous than say, a pandemic.
So Humans Need Not Apply . The automation of everything progressed. Clever humans do not need a reason to be clever because cleverness is its own reward -- something to do with endorphins and the "Ah Ha!" moment which we won't get into here -- we were clever. The most fascinating problems to solve were those which, when solved, put more people out of work. This happened gradually and mostly to other people, and no one shed a tear over it because it was easy to imagine liberated humans enjoying a life of leisure somewhere. A half-remembered snippet of an old film or Utopian anime was enough to do the trick.
So when it came to self-driving cars our best and brightest were right there. It is a sexy problem, successful negotiation of a task that even the dullest of humans seem to manage pretty well. And they were making progress, and predictably as in all these dystopian outcomes, the laziest among them would say, we are so close. But we'd be even closer if we could just get the humans off the roads.
They were screwed because there were more humans all over the roads then ever before, more than anyone could remember. These were people displaced by technology, the jobless seeking jobs, the homeless moving from place to place. While they had been busy making cell phones smaller and web apps more numerous, some of the 'true' engineers among them shaving
A little 8-white-LED key chain flashlight, it's cheap and what a miracle it is. Anyone old enough to remember strapping on 2 lb lantern batteries for a couple of hours' light knows. Really bright, runs cool with and extremely low current draw. All Glory to the Human Race. And Hypnotoad.
1. flickered on the first day when I tapped it against something. Probably shelf life corrosion patina, took out batteries, cleaned them, ok.
2. flickering again. spring on screw end not made of spring steel, weak. stretched out spring.
3. flickering again. top contact in flashlight tube is flat bent strip of copper or brass, no spring behind it. installed tiny ball of foil on top of battery.
4. flickering again. top contact now recessed into soft plastic and contact is unreliable even with foil or spring shim. flashlight goes into drawer.
5. need for tiny always-on light. take hacksaw to cut off aluminum battery tube, to reach and solder wire from 1.5V adapter to top contact. drill small hole to attach screw for wire (cannot solder, too much heat dissipation). Works today. Light always on.
6. flickering again. this time it is failing spring on push button. place small clamp around button squeezing it down tight.
7. flickering again. this time it is two of the eight individual LEDs around the circle going out when tapped. clearly the fabrication method involved little or no solder.
8. at this point 'fixing' this little light would involve rendering it down to part level and rebuilding it. Had enough. I decide to leave the light as it is and change my life instead. I have joined an Amish community.
8. flickering again. this time it is a light murmuring breeze on leaves in a glade of dappled sunlight. tie off branches and sew leaves together with thread.
9. flickering again. this time it is my campfire. A rhinoceros appears and stamps the fire out.
"Not a political map"? yes it is.
the Howard Javis inspired 'tax foundation' that ignores the 40% effective net taxes paid by the bottom 50% of citizens is PURE politics, and false at that.
Thanks for the reply. "Proposition 13" Jarvis? Wow, it is fascinating to see how his influence has gelled and morphed in the generation since. I'm curious how any slice of economic sleight-of-hand applied across the board such as ignoring the 40%/50% might become a pure political issue. Is it one of those "Because ___ people tend to be ___" type of things? (I really am clueless here).
Since it was posted original map which averages by state has been updated with a more detailed one that averages by county. No doubt a mob of Upstate New Yorkers threatened to burn the website down for letting New York City turn their whole state blue=bad, costly. And the scoundrels reversed the color scheme too so the state/county maps are visually incompatible.
So I changed the colors back. Here is an animated GIF I made with corrected colors which flips between their State and County map. In it we see that duh, their "purchasing power" is a function of rural versus metropolis.
Regarding your cry of "politics"... I was struck with the similarity of the their State average map to another: here is a GIF showing their State averages and electoral 2012 results. Aside from a few states their $100 purchasing power distribution has an uncanny resemblance to the Presidential race. Is some of this not strictly party politics after all... rather, a glimpse of the battle line between city-states and rural-folk who are hanging on by an electoral thread? Or is it wealthy versus not?
I do sense that the city vs. rural divide is becoming a real battle, a country-wide struggle to secure resources and clout as the Water Wars divided California. In this Slashdot musing I lay out what I deem as a front line, the move by city-folk to abolish the electoral college. What think?
Wouldn't it be keen if Diablo Canyon and the other operating nucleaar plants could rise up on giant clawed feet and saunter over to a state that actually wants a clean source of emissions-free energy.
It would also be cool if nuclear electricity was shaped a bit differently, perhaps a little series of dips in the sinusoid like tumblers in a lock... that way the grid could reconfigure itself to gather carbon free energy and pool it for use in states that are not driven by anti-nuclear hysterics.
Then the minions of Enron could come out of retirement, and just as the kind gentleman did for the Yellow Bellied Sneetches, they could install an Apparatus that smooths the sinusoid making the energy appear to have come from Solar or Wind -- for a good price, so the Californians could have Stars Upon Thars.
I recognize that this assessment of Diablo Canyon comes from the NRC, not California. But cue the hysteria as the San Onorfe haters gather their torches and march on to battle evil. Leaving in its wake peace and natural gas for all.
California is becoming more BLUE as time goes on. Hint: Take a peek -- that is not a political map.
I think marketing just sullied the word "gamer" by including people who play casual mobile games.
Well now. When Slashdot revealed shockingly that Whales Are Ecosystem Engineers ... which should have shook the very foundation of nerddom to create a backlash of indignation ... as a handful of researchers casually marginalized the hard work and extreme mental discipline required to obtain a degree in Engineering to some act of mammalian gut instinct... what did we get, ~60 comments?
But tamper with gamer and we come out in force.
It's all fun and GAMES until someone loses their social EYEdentity.
</smile>
Okay, so we need disc 101 from tray 1010101 and the robot arm is busy, three other fetches already in the queue. After 30,000ms client Javascript times out and substitutes a "retrieving data, re-try for a few minutes" place holder, sets a longer camp-on timeout and releases the request.
The reason the robotic arm is busy is that despite random assignment to storage pools with some localized album grouping, web crawler activity for public albums, and bulk pre-fetch requests for semi-private albums by browser plugins run by logged-in users (which became more popular as access time increased) ... the lukewarm storage facilities are running hot and queues are full most of the time.
Despite the polished and smoothly functioning presentation that encourages the users to "just wait a bit" ... a dark rumor grows deep in the hearts of many that the data is not merely delayed, they must brush off dust and cobwebs, or root for it because it had been haphazardly tossed into a pile of rubbish somewhere, relegated to the digital Basement. Facebook does not think your photograph is of sufficient merit. Grandmother has long passed and you had not wished to look at her last week, so... why should you be interested now?
The effects are complex, but the cause is clear: the Internet is perverse. It re-routes around any attempt to take immediate access data off-line by degrees, accomplishing this through a series of countermeasures such as unwelcome crawlers depleting your cache, hitting your 'public' cold data systematically and regularly, then finally bankrupting your company as users migrate to another service whose superior performance does not arise from superior engineering -- merely the fact that fewer users are using it.
So the moral of the story is, if you are Facebook and wish to remain so, you will either strive to find a way to keep the random access time for everything down below 2000ms -- or die.
And also, Facebook would be wise to heed the following:
once / forgotten by tourists / a bicycle joined a herd of mountain goats /// with its splendidly turned horns / it became / their leader /// with its bell / it warned them / of danger /// with them / it partook / in romps / on the snow covered / glade /// the bicycle / gazed from above / on people walking; / with the goats /// it fought / over a goat, / with a bearded buck /// it reared up at eagles / enraged / on its back wheel /// it was happy / though it never / nibbled at grass /// or drank from a stream /// until once / a poacher / shot it /// tempted / by the silver trophy / of its horns /// and then / above the Tatras was seen / against the sparkling / January sky /// the angel of death erect / slowly / riding to heaven / holding the bicycle's / dead horns //////~Jerzy Harasymowicz
%22feed%22%3A%227day_m25%22%2C%22search%22%3Anull%2C%22sort%22%3A%22newest%22%2C%22basemap%22%3A%22grayscale%22%2C%22autoUpdate%22%3Atrue%2C%22restrictListToMap%22%3Atrue%2C%22timeZone%22%3A%22local%22%2C%22mapposition%22%3A[[30.221101852485987%2C-131.30859375]%2C[43.229195113965005%2C-106.69921875]]%2C%22overlays%22%3A{%22plates%22%3Atrue}%2C%22viewModes%22%3A{%22map%22%3Atrue%2C%22list%22%3Afalse%2C%22settings%22%3Atrue%2C%22help%22%3Afalse
You really shouldn't try to type during an earthquake.
If someone stoops to classic, even dramatically ridiculous errors in logic,
yet you totally 'get' what their point is,
and 'get' where they are coming from
(seeing the view and the person behind the view)
is there a Latin phrase for that?
Just simply understanding people?
Blood in the streets!
you actually achieved a slippery slope argument.
Ergo, San Francisco.
Are these,
I. Google Driverless Cars
II. Ambulance Chasing Google Cars
III. Ambulance Chasing Google Cars with Lawyers Inside
There are a number of nuclear plants which are not being kept in operation due to the advent of cheap, clean, natural gas.
Yes, such as the Kewaunee Power Station which went offline in 2013 despite that it is in good condition, has maintained a healthy balance sheet, perfect safety record, operating license extended to 2033 ad six months' fuel in the reactor.
All because Dominion is riding the natural gas 'glut' at this brief moment in time. Also, the triggering of decommission status of a nuclear plant releases the funds set aside for that purpose creating a temporary vulture-culture 'industry' that employs many.
But it is all so short-sighted, an act of outright corporate vandalism. One of my working plans if (perhaps when) the economy and grid breaks down or some disaster strikes, was to relocate to Carlton Wis and help to maintain and defend this plant. The defending of operational nuclear power plants being a sensible course of action for any apocalyptic future suggested in the (excellent) novel Lucifer's Hammer.
Now Calrton, Wisconsin would never be a beacon of hope and assured survival in some grid-down scenario, it's just a town that will have to take its chances with the rest.
If there is a dark moral to this story... if you are a goose which lays golden eggs, do not let yourself be acquired by Dominion Energy.
The politicians have essentially made grid operators pay for the unreliability of wind & solar, instead of the people who actually own the thing and earn money from it. It's like making a public transport company pay for the lost wages of people who continuously oversleep and show up late for work, despite the public transport running on time.
This is the most apt and brilliant analogy for this issue I have yet seen... suitable for framing!
What you refuse to accept is that "less" access to guns by bad guys is still ample for them to shoot good defenseless people.
I second this.
Don't forget the (logical, inevitable) outcome of selective criminals-only carry in places with steep and escalating gun crime penalties: defenseless bystanders and potential witnesses -- even those who do not interfere with the perpetrators' exit -- are more likely to be pursued and targeted lethally.
[to] the sticks to shoot bunnies
How 'bout them bunny etters, ain't they hicks?
Snarfin' them some bunny way out in the sticks.
Shootin' them cottontail, snarin' them hares
Jumpin' them a jackrabbit, nothing compares!
How 'bout them hare flushers, ain't they snappy?
Leapin' lepus in the boonies sure makes 'em happy!
Them hugger-mugger hare raisers way down South
stickin' yummy Hasenpfeffer in they mouth.
How to be a hare-gitter no way to duck it,
Git yerself a hare, stew it and suck it!
~Hat tip to Parent, my own tribute to Mason Williams in the style of Them Poems, esp. "Them Toad Suckers"
Geez, you're quoting someone at a thorium power conference? Who cares what his take is?
(Refering to THIS and THIS )... I sure do. Dodson is a bright, outspoken fellow who is working on his Masters in utility Electrical engineering. He has already demonstrated that he has a grasp of the issues surrounding proper impedance matching of transmission lines and power sources. He arrived at the conference with NERC animations showing synchronous resonance occurring on the grid and explains its significance. This is real stuff.
Let's look around and see what we can see... hmmm, Ars has a whole collection:
http://arstechnica.com/science...
http://arstechnica.com/science...
http://arstechnica.com/science...
Yeah, I had to read carefully to make sure they weren't the same article. I can see the folks who gathered these numbers now. They're sitting in cubicles and each article presents an amalgamation of optimistic spreadsheet projections that leverage imagined costs and revenue streams tailored to arrive at a projected goal of 'X" percent renewables. It's money all the way down. Spreadsheet wizards. The planet is awash in such mind games. They're assuming that the grid is some modular component, the perfect sink, that they can click their renewable LEGO pieces into -- perhaps a little column labelled 'retrofit' with a dash of money in it -- and somehow... it will all work. There is a general need for such things but these are suffering from a deficit of engineering reality.
From all I've learned from people working on these problems whom I trust, it won't work. Intermittent sources are polluting the grid in a way that has begin to threaten its stability.
If the country was connected with overlapping rings of HVDC conduit (as it must be some day) then the mere introduction of potential into the ring -- whether it be intermittent or 'noisy' or not -- could happen with near 100% efficiency, AC would be pushed into the legacy grid (which would begin to decouple as the DC feeds become redundant and reliable) -- and ONLY THEN will those spreadsheets work nicely. With a little boost from natural gas here and there. We can even bridge the continents.
This is not that world or that continent, yet. In order to build out our existing resonant AC grid we need to feed it by adding a few, massive generating plants that run 24/7.
Every cent that has been spent attempting to put wind and solar onto the grid has been wasted. Because it has diverted resources away from more serious problems and more sensible approaches.
I wonder if it's possible at all to just retrofit in a modular way. for example, take 1 power line that goes down a few city blocks and touches 10 stepdown transformers. Could that entire line be taken down along with the transformers and replaced???
IF the area was literally paved with solar and wind, such that its output could not only provide for it completely but with surplus for export, then these resonance effects might be measurable and some adjustment to the original design might improve efficiency.
But the effects that Dodson refers to in the video linked above occur over a much larger region, when large wind turbines create an ebb and flow of hundreds of megawatts at a time, fast ripples in a pond. It's not that the transmission lines cannot handle these variations in flow -- the whole system was designed to remain in near perfect phase except when large, slow and regularly scheduled events 'push' or 'pull' it -- slowly. Only the trip of stations or the gradual rise and fall of loads would affect it. Grid operators and their physical machinery do take kindly to extraordinary, unplanned events and wind power has made every day a cacophony of them.
What you can do at the community level is take advantage of all this great stuff and become more self-sufficient -- help one another to install power sources that begin to take you off the grid for certain things or some of the time. As 'preppers' or 'conservationists' or maybe just for the hellacious fun of it.
In short, leave the government and the grid out of it. We will continue to need reliable power, and the grid is fragile. Paying by the kilowatt-hour to some well-designed, stable entity miles away is not an abomination, it is the best way we've come up with to solve the problem.
The net metering 'fad' with its Federal mandates and subsidies reminds me of the The Bank That Was Sent Through the Post Office back in 1913. 80,000 bricks needed to be moved 120 miles and freight was prohibitive, so this young entrepreneur 'pwned' the Post Office which had recently introduced its Parcel Post service with reasonable rates for packages under 50 pounds. No one believed for a minute that the Post Office should shrug off this large scale abuse and re-tool their organization to subvert the whole idea of bulk freight. But (for a time at least) they were powerless to do anything about it, and the Bank was built. Two hundred tons of bricks by Parcel Post.
Similarly -- it is my belief that given the purpose for which it was designed, and the way it was constructed, the North American Power grid is being abused dangerously by variable energy sources. And we cannot afford, nor should we strive to 'fix' it until we address the more pressing problem -- a lack of sustainable, reliable energy sources.