At least they sent the "killer poke" a week before the Superbowl instead of right before. This was a smart move, meant to rake in the bucks by those who want to see the super bowl but don't have time to hunt down another hackable or re-hacked card, so instead they have to go the legit route and pony up for a legit card + subscription.
I'm not an authority on the subject, but I think making these people pay for 2 months of service would make up for the cost of a new smart card.
The cost for a new smart card comes out of the customer's pocket, not DirecTV's. DirecTV charges $40-50 for a new smart card, which probably costs $1-2 to make. The number on the card is used once, never repeated on a different card, and is non-transferrable, just like a credit card number. If you sell (or even give) a receiver to someone else and want to subscribe, you have to order a new card. If last Sunday's "magic bullet" suddenly gave a lot of bootleggers a conscience and they all started ordering legit cards, DirecTV is going to make a killing. I can hear it now. Joe Blow: "I just bought my receiver at a flea market and want to activate it." DirecTV representative: "Yeah. Right. Suuure. Send us 50 bucks and we'll send you a new card. Then call us back to get it activated."
One of the oldest and best repositories of nuclear information on the web, both pro and anti, with everything from the locations of all reactors in the U.S., the utility companies that own them, statistics, descriptions of the reactor types, etc., plus links to various industry sites and government agencies, is Todd's Atomic Homepage at http://www.nuc.berkeley.edu/neutronics/todd/.
First of all, reducing C02 doesn't really lower greenhouse gases. The biggest greenhouse gas is water vapor, making up 98% of all greenhouse gases.
You forgot methane. Methane is more greenhouse inducing than CO2. Yep. Natural gas, what they burn to make electricity + heat + CO2 + water vapor. All methane in the atmosphere comes from decomposing biomass, and is the waste product of the bacteria that decompose it. Cattle have bacteria in their stomachs that convert cellulose plant material into sugars + methane, which they continuously burp/fart out. And the most numerous creature on Earth, termites, also have methane producing bacteria in their stomachs.
Natural gas deposits are formed when biomass in the oceans is decomposed by methane producing bacteria. Some bubbles to the surface and into the atmosphere, and some settles to the ocean floor. On the floor of the Gulf of Mexico and off the east coast of the U.S. are huge deposits of methane "ice". In time, this will either bubble up to the surface, or become covered with layers of silt, then thaw out and become trapped between layers forming natural gas deposits. There has been talk of mining this "ice", but it's still a finite resource that can't be replinished as fast as our appetite for energy can guzzle
One 1 cm dia x 2 cm long nuclear fuel pellet = energy of one ton of coal. But you have to mine one ton of uranium ore and put it through an extremely energy intensive process to concentrate enough of the U-235 isotope to make one civilian power plant grade fuel pellet of 1% U-235 enrichment. This leaves approximately one ton of depleted uranium (U-238 without the naturally occuring amount of U-235)which must be disposed of somehow.
Now take these fuel pellets, stack them in tubes to make fuel rods, rack up and then seal bundles of fuel rods inside a reactor, and start a controlled fission chain reaction and output a gigawatt continuously for a year and 1/2 or so. Then dismantle the reactor, remove the spent fuel rods, and store them in a 23 foot deep olympic sized pool. Then install new fuel rods, reassemble the reactor, and make another 1-1/2 gigawatt-years of electricity. (Assuming the plant doesn't break down constantly.)
After 10-20 years, remove the spent fuel rods from the pool, stuff them in huge white radiation proof kegs, and stack them outside in an abandoned plant contractor parking lot. Leave them there while waiting for a huge hole to be dug underneath a mountain, a final resting place for the kegs.
This is what is called an open-ended fuel cycle. Mine, use, dispose. But fuel rods can be recycled. They do it in Japan and France, among other countries. You see, not all the uranium in the fuel rods undergoes fission, in fact, less than 1% of the 1% enriched uranium is split. In fact, by a process called breeding, some of the U-238 absorbs a neutron and becomes Pu-238, which is even more desirable for the chain reaction. The overall effect is that the fuel rods are more potent when spent than when they were new. Unfortunately, what ultimately stops the chain reaction is fission by-products that absorb neutrons. A crude analogy would be burning one ton of coal, and getting back one ton of better coal, but it won't burn until 5 kg. of ash is sifted out.
While he was in office, Jimmy Carter signed legislation prohibiting the recycling of uranium fuel by the civilian nuclear power industry, based on fears that some of the recovered Pu-238 might be diverted to enemies wanting to make an atomic bomb. If only these fears could be laid to rest, we could recycle our fuel like other forward thinking countries, we wouldn't need a hole under a mountain, and we wouldn't need to strip mine for uranium ore as much as we do for coal.
At least it didn't start in the middle, go to the beginning, then the end, then finish somewhere in the middle like Pulp Fiction did. Even though the plot jumped all over, and some scenes were out of order, the timeline was still reasonably congruent.
Now if Ritchie really wants to make his mark, he should tackle the one book that reads as crazy as the way Snatch plays out (and is incomprehensible as the Pikeys)- Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon.
Having a cable modem means I can download in minutes, then turn off the computer when I'm done for the night, rather than leaving my computer up and running all night long and half the next day using a dialup modem and GoZilla to fetch all my warez, mp3s and pr0n.
Reactive power is consumed by large inductive devices like motors, transformers (yes, even partly those in eco-friendly fluorescent lighbulbs) and other devices that look like a coil when connected to power.
Well, SOME of the compact fluorescents still have magnetic ballasts, which is essentially a transformer with a small neon lamp sized gas discharge starter, you can tell these apart because they flicker briefly when switched on. Newer compact fluorescents have electronic ballasts that work on the same principle as a computer's switching power supply: The 120 volts AC is converted to DC via a bridge rectifier and a couple of small filter capacitors, then a high frequency oscillator is used to step up the voltage through a very small coil and a ladder of capacitors to the operating voltage of the fluorescent tube. These are the ones that wink on instantly without flickering.
A computer switching power supply that outputs 400 watts is much lighter weight and more efficient than a 400 watt transformer because the line voltage is converted directly to DC, then inverted back to AC but at a very much higher frequency than 60 HZ, like around 20 KHz, therefore the transformer to step the high frequency AC voltage down to the +5/+12/-12 volts a computer uses needs only to be the size of a match box, with filter capacitors the size of "C" batteries, rather than big buzzing transformers the size of golf cart battery chargers, with filter capacitors the size of quart paint cans. This is all made possible by high speed switching transistors which are now much more readily available than they were before the age of home PCs.
Converting line voltage directly to DC then feeding it to capacitors for rectification is seen as a pure resistive load by the power grid, regardless of what that rectified DC is used for, whether it is used to power an inverter, or run lights or DC motors. Some power companies are even toying with the idea of high tension DC lines for long runs, with the voltage being converted to AC at the substations, saying that energy lost during conversion from AC to DC then back to AC is less than that lost due to inductance along long runs of AC lines.
Imagine being handed some of the newest cutting edge technology, then being whisked to a foreign land, without notice, only to drag, haul, hurl, sail, or fly that cutting edge technology through snow, sand, dust, mud, water, terrifying weather conditions, etc. for an indeterminable period of time, praying that you do not die at the hands of the people that the cutting edge technology is supposed to help to defeat. This is what militaries do, have always done, and will continue to do so long as there are wars to be fought, and technology always has been and always will be developed in hopes of bringing a war to a quick conclusion.
The power companies of south Louisiana don't have to bother scheduling for rolling blackouts, that job belongs to racoons and squirrels. They get inside the substations, and BZZZZT-KABOOM! Short circuit + exploding transformer = sweating your ass off in the stifling afternoon heat for 4 hours.
It seems I once saw an article where there was a huge meth lab or something inside an old silo, and when they were finally busted, the DEA had to send in HAZMAT teams to dismantle and decontaminate the site.
I was drummed out of the Army in 1993 for being overweight. When asked if I would like to go to JAG (military court) and protest the decision, I politely declined. My commander advised me that I do not want to be in the military with Democrats in charge, and I agreed with him. (He was about to retire himself.) I joined during the Reagan administration, back when the cold war was still going strong, and the enemy was clearly defined. But since the fall of the Soviet Union, and then after Clinton was elected, I knew that the military's future missions would be vague at best.
Besides that, it was still an Honorable Discharge, even though it was for medical reasons. I was offered a discharge bonus, and got to keep all my benefits, including GI Bill. Accepting the discharge was the best thing I ever did, as I am expecting to graduate college with an electrical engineering degree this year.
Besides that, when has a.com ever fired anyone for being fat?
If a nuclear fueled car had to be refueled every 300 miles and that fuel costs the same as a tank of gas at current prices, believe me, someone is gonna get rich off of it. It can be done today: Drive an electric car, then at a charging station fed by a conventional nuke plant, plug up, then pay for however many kilowatts it takes to recharge. Better yet: Have a standardized battery pack, then swap out dead batteries for freshly charged ones, then pay the cost to charge plus a nominal maintenance fee. That way you're off and running after 5 minutes, just like filling a tank of gas. Too bad there's no way to deliver nuclear generated electricity to cars like a cellular phone signal.
It's not because of the decaying Am-241, but the reliability of the electronics starts to slack off after 10 years, they get clogged with dust, etc. That's why its recommended that they be replaced every 10 years. I have an old smoke detector kicking around that is ~15 years old, but it still works.
The flying car thing is less of a technological thing and more of a socio-political one. Enforcing no-fly zones would become a nightmare. (Would you want to build a cage over your property to keep thieves in flying cars out?) Also, getting tangled up in power lines or some drunk crashing into the side of a skyscraper would be a problem too, but all this could be prevented with some sort of automatic guidance system (perhaps based on GPS) with "horse sense" built into the flying cars, to automatically route them from point A to point B and to prevent them from flying to restricted zones (or each other). Maybe they could be restricted to flying between designated community flying car airports and rooftop lots in cities. And if you live out in the sticks, flying to privately owned lands will be by invitation/authorization only, if not authorized, the destination coordinates would be rejected before even taking off.
Velcro.:) Think about it -- what was velcro a refinement of? There were absolutely no temporary fasteners like it, short of tying two strings together.
Velcro was inspired by the way various seeds and cockleburrs attach themselves to animal fur via hooked spines. Velcro was a refinement of something that existed in nature. Besides that, the zipper was invented before Velcro.
Your monopoly ain't no worse off than our monopoly. In my locale, Cox Cable bought out AT&T after AT&T bought out TCI after TCI bought out Cablevision, all within a three year period. (Tell me our bill ain't screwed up.) Well, I recently signed up for @home, add their $40/mo to our having digital settop boxes at $35/mo X 2, and I have a cable bill of $110.
Cable modems and DSL modems are going the way of the cell phone- Who the hell ever BUYS their cell phone outright anymore?? The cost is absorbed in the fee. The same thing is happening with DSS satellite receivers- If you agree to pay for a whole year's subscription up front, you get the equipment and installation for free. If you purchase the equipment and install it yourself and pay by the month, the subscription for the service after one year is NOT ONE PENNY cheaper.
Has anybody experimented with the new Amiga DE using one of the small run-time Linuxes available? I can't see how it would work with something as bulky as Mandrake 7.2
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At least they sent the "killer poke" a week before the Superbowl instead of right before. This was a smart move, meant to rake in the bucks by those who want to see the super bowl but don't have time to hunt down another hackable or re-hacked card, so instead they have to go the legit route and pony up for a legit card + subscription.
The cost for a new smart card comes out of the customer's pocket, not DirecTV's. DirecTV charges $40-50 for a new smart card, which probably costs $1-2 to make. The number on the card is used once, never repeated on a different card, and is non-transferrable, just like a credit card number. If you sell (or even give) a receiver to someone else and want to subscribe, you have to order a new card. If last Sunday's "magic bullet" suddenly gave a lot of bootleggers a conscience and they all started ordering legit cards, DirecTV is going to make a killing. I can hear it now. Joe Blow: "I just bought my receiver at a flea market and want to activate it." DirecTV representative: "Yeah. Right. Suuure. Send us 50 bucks and we'll send you a new card. Then call us back to get it activated."
One of the oldest and best repositories of nuclear information on the web, both pro and anti, with everything from the locations of all reactors in the U.S., the utility companies that own them, statistics, descriptions of the reactor types, etc., plus links to various industry sites and government agencies, is Todd's Atomic Homepage at http://www.nuc.berkeley.edu/neutronics/todd/.
You forgot methane. Methane is more greenhouse inducing than CO2. Yep. Natural gas, what they burn to make electricity + heat + CO2 + water vapor. All methane in the atmosphere comes from decomposing biomass, and is the waste product of the bacteria that decompose it. Cattle have bacteria in their stomachs that convert cellulose plant material into sugars + methane, which they continuously burp/fart out. And the most numerous creature on Earth, termites, also have methane producing bacteria in their stomachs.
Natural gas deposits are formed when biomass in the oceans is decomposed by methane producing bacteria. Some bubbles to the surface and into the atmosphere, and some settles to the ocean floor. On the floor of the Gulf of Mexico and off the east coast of the U.S. are huge deposits of methane "ice". In time, this will either bubble up to the surface, or become covered with layers of silt, then thaw out and become trapped between layers forming natural gas deposits. There has been talk of mining this "ice", but it's still a finite resource that can't be replinished as fast as our appetite for energy can guzzle
Now take these fuel pellets, stack them in tubes to make fuel rods, rack up and then seal bundles of fuel rods inside a reactor, and start a controlled fission chain reaction and output a gigawatt continuously for a year and 1/2 or so. Then dismantle the reactor, remove the spent fuel rods, and store them in a 23 foot deep olympic sized pool. Then install new fuel rods, reassemble the reactor, and make another 1-1/2 gigawatt-years of electricity. (Assuming the plant doesn't break down constantly.)
After 10-20 years, remove the spent fuel rods from the pool, stuff them in huge white radiation proof kegs, and stack them outside in an abandoned plant contractor parking lot. Leave them there while waiting for a huge hole to be dug underneath a mountain, a final resting place for the kegs.
This is what is called an open-ended fuel cycle. Mine, use, dispose. But fuel rods can be recycled. They do it in Japan and France, among other countries. You see, not all the uranium in the fuel rods undergoes fission, in fact, less than 1% of the 1% enriched uranium is split. In fact, by a process called breeding, some of the U-238 absorbs a neutron and becomes Pu-238, which is even more desirable for the chain reaction. The overall effect is that the fuel rods are more potent when spent than when they were new. Unfortunately, what ultimately stops the chain reaction is fission by-products that absorb neutrons. A crude analogy would be burning one ton of coal, and getting back one ton of better coal, but it won't burn until 5 kg. of ash is sifted out.
While he was in office, Jimmy Carter signed legislation prohibiting the recycling of uranium fuel by the civilian nuclear power industry, based on fears that some of the recovered Pu-238 might be diverted to enemies wanting to make an atomic bomb. If only these fears could be laid to rest, we could recycle our fuel like other forward thinking countries, we wouldn't need a hole under a mountain, and we wouldn't need to strip mine for uranium ore as much as we do for coal.
Now if Ritchie really wants to make his mark, he should tackle the one book that reads as crazy as the way Snatch plays out (and is incomprehensible as the Pikeys)- Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon.
Having a cable modem means I can download in minutes, then turn off the computer when I'm done for the night, rather than leaving my computer up and running all night long and half the next day using a dialup modem and GoZilla to fetch all my warez, mp3s and pr0n.
Well, SOME of the compact fluorescents still have magnetic ballasts, which is essentially a transformer with a small neon lamp sized gas discharge starter, you can tell these apart because they flicker briefly when switched on. Newer compact fluorescents have electronic ballasts that work on the same principle as a computer's switching power supply: The 120 volts AC is converted to DC via a bridge rectifier and a couple of small filter capacitors, then a high frequency oscillator is used to step up the voltage through a very small coil and a ladder of capacitors to the operating voltage of the fluorescent tube. These are the ones that wink on instantly without flickering.
A computer switching power supply that outputs 400 watts is much lighter weight and more efficient than a 400 watt transformer because the line voltage is converted directly to DC, then inverted back to AC but at a very much higher frequency than 60 HZ, like around 20 KHz, therefore the transformer to step the high frequency AC voltage down to the +5/+12/-12 volts a computer uses needs only to be the size of a match box, with filter capacitors the size of "C" batteries, rather than big buzzing transformers the size of golf cart battery chargers, with filter capacitors the size of quart paint cans. This is all made possible by high speed switching transistors which are now much more readily available than they were before the age of home PCs.
Converting line voltage directly to DC then feeding it to capacitors for rectification is seen as a pure resistive load by the power grid, regardless of what that rectified DC is used for, whether it is used to power an inverter, or run lights or DC motors. Some power companies are even toying with the idea of high tension DC lines for long runs, with the voltage being converted to AC at the substations, saying that energy lost during conversion from AC to DC then back to AC is less than that lost due to inductance along long runs of AC lines.
Imagine being handed some of the newest cutting edge technology, then being whisked to a foreign land, without notice, only to drag, haul, hurl, sail, or fly that cutting edge technology through snow, sand, dust, mud, water, terrifying weather conditions, etc. for an indeterminable period of time, praying that you do not die at the hands of the people that the cutting edge technology is supposed to help to defeat. This is what militaries do, have always done, and will continue to do so long as there are wars to be fought, and technology always has been and always will be developed in hopes of bringing a war to a quick conclusion.
It was Wendy Carlos who first had the idea of using a vocoder for music, in 1964. See http://www.wendycarlos.com/vocoders.html
So is it an @home problem that puts up a "Connection refused" message when I try to access it?
The power companies of south Louisiana don't have to bother scheduling for rolling blackouts, that job belongs to racoons and squirrels. They get inside the substations, and BZZZZT-KABOOM! Short circuit + exploding transformer = sweating your ass off in the stifling afternoon heat for 4 hours.
It seems I once saw an article where there was a huge meth lab or something inside an old silo, and when they were finally busted, the DEA had to send in HAZMAT teams to dismantle and decontaminate the site.
Besides that, it was still an Honorable Discharge, even though it was for medical reasons. I was offered a discharge bonus, and got to keep all my benefits, including GI Bill. Accepting the discharge was the best thing I ever did, as I am expecting to graduate college with an electrical engineering degree this year.
Besides that, when has a .com ever fired anyone for being fat?
I want to read the article too, but I get a "Connection refused" message. Do you need a login/password to see it like NY Times articles??
If a nuclear fueled car had to be refueled every 300 miles and that fuel costs the same as a tank of gas at current prices, believe me, someone is gonna get rich off of it. It can be done today: Drive an electric car, then at a charging station fed by a conventional nuke plant, plug up, then pay for however many kilowatts it takes to recharge. Better yet: Have a standardized battery pack, then swap out dead batteries for freshly charged ones, then pay the cost to charge plus a nominal maintenance fee. That way you're off and running after 5 minutes, just like filling a tank of gas. Too bad there's no way to deliver nuclear generated electricity to cars like a cellular phone signal.
It's not because of the decaying Am-241, but the reliability of the electronics starts to slack off after 10 years, they get clogged with dust, etc. That's why its recommended that they be replaced every 10 years. I have an old smoke detector kicking around that is ~15 years old, but it still works.
The flying car thing is less of a technological thing and more of a socio-political one. Enforcing no-fly zones would become a nightmare. (Would you want to build a cage over your property to keep thieves in flying cars out?) Also, getting tangled up in power lines or some drunk crashing into the side of a skyscraper would be a problem too, but all this could be prevented with some sort of automatic guidance system (perhaps based on GPS) with "horse sense" built into the flying cars, to automatically route them from point A to point B and to prevent them from flying to restricted zones (or each other). Maybe they could be restricted to flying between designated community flying car airports and rooftop lots in cities. And if you live out in the sticks, flying to privately owned lands will be by invitation/authorization only, if not authorized, the destination coordinates would be rejected before even taking off.
Velcro was inspired by the way various seeds and cockleburrs attach themselves to animal fur via hooked spines. Velcro was a refinement of something that existed in nature. Besides that, the zipper was invented before Velcro.
Your monopoly ain't no worse off than our monopoly. In my locale, Cox Cable bought out AT&T after AT&T bought out TCI after TCI bought out Cablevision, all within a three year period. (Tell me our bill ain't screwed up.) Well, I recently signed up for @home, add their $40/mo to our having digital settop boxes at $35/mo X 2, and I have a cable bill of $110.
Cable modems and DSL modems are going the way of the cell phone- Who the hell ever BUYS their cell phone outright anymore?? The cost is absorbed in the fee. The same thing is happening with DSS satellite receivers- If you agree to pay for a whole year's subscription up front, you get the equipment and installation for free. If you purchase the equipment and install it yourself and pay by the month, the subscription for the service after one year is NOT ONE PENNY cheaper.
Has anybody experimented with the new Amiga DE using one of the small run-time Linuxes available? I can't see how it would work with something as bulky as Mandrake 7.2
"Mother very easily made a jam sandwich using no peanuts, mayonnaise or glue." - Robert Anton Wilson, _Schrodinger's Cat Trilogy_