Investment in superconducting vs. alt. fuel...
on
Quantum Wires
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
So much work (and funding) is being poured into finding alternative energy sources, I wonder how much the discovery of a scaleable, inexpensive, widely deployable (as in converting the world's energy grid) superconducting power distribution system has been quantified.
I do understand that this isn't that, and that there are a million barriers to be overcome, and that fossil fuels need a replacement Real Soon Now, but I do wonder if anyone knows of any studies out there trying sort out how much energy is currently lost in the distribution of consumer power, and how much less we'd need to generate if a practical superconducting solution is found.
Factoring in a reasonable probability of success in both sides, it would be interesting to see whether the potential cost/benefit of investments in finding superconducting solutions all the way to the last mile might be as or more efficient in the long run than funding research in new power sources.
I know, it shouldn't be either or in any case, but it's just a thought...
"...ETS and a group of colleges and universities have collaborated to create the ICT Literacy Assessment, a comprehensive test of ICT proficiency specifically designed for the higher education environment...
Have you ever:
1. Kissed a friend or stranger on their hands or their head/neck region as a friendly gesture?
Kids are playing GTA, kids are looking at porno on the Net, kids are shooting each other with guns from their parents unlocked gun cabinets. But GTA, porn, and guns are not meant to "teach" kids anything. They're not meant to be anywhere near kids.
We cannot babyproof the entire world, parents should take responsibility for controlling what children see, where they go, what they do, and what they play. If every parent were as firm with their kids as Hillary wants to be with the industry, there wouldn't be a problem to solve.
Obseity in others is your best defense mechanism.:)
Certainly from predation, but speaking for fat people at McDonald's everywhere, I'd like to say that we're betting that the global food supply will run out before a T-Rex comes to life and chases us down.
We think that a better defense mechanism is taking two weeks longer to starve to death so we can eat you scrawny arrogant bastards as you drop like flies.
I don't care how thin you are, we'll still get a whole bunch of quarter pounders out of you...
Fair enough on one level, but your complaint assumes that the only role of leaf-like structures is photosynthesis.
Without light, plants would need some sort of large structures to extract nutrients from their environment, either large root systems to take it from the ground or large leaf structures to take it from the air.
Humans essentially have large surgace-area leaf-like structures designed to extract oxygen from the air, we just keep them inside our chest cavity where we can control the air flowing over them using our muscles.
So like I say, fair enough on an everything-is-like-earth level, but there's plenty of wiggle room once you're specualting on how ailien worlds might work.
I would suggest amazed - it's the most appropriate reaction to pretty things you don't understand at all.
But thanks for at least implying that cosmologists are part of a global conspirahoax, there's something kind of sexy about that. Finally something they can talk about at parties.
It seemed as though they were talking in the article about putting a separate, independent UPS system in place for their machines, that are independent of the EPO system. It sounds to me like that would keep their machines on for four minutes even after one or both of the facilities EPO systems have been triggered creating an electrocution danger.
Are you suggesting that their UPS would have a separate EPO just for it? I don't think that's the case, because they specifically mentioned wanting to have a 4 minute window if the main EPO was hit. But if they did that would put them right back where they started, because although they'd have four minutes in case the main EPO got triggered, they'd still have their own brand new EPO button hanging out there just waiting to be triggered accidentally.
"EPO, by the way, stands for Emergency Power Off and it's a national fire/electrical requirement for firefighters to be able to press these big red buttons near all exits that turn off all power in the entire data center."
"...all our DBs have redundant power supplies. we'll be plugging one side into Internap's, and the other side into our own UPS, which itself is plugged into Internap's other power grid. that way if EPO is pressed, we'll have 1-4 minutes to do a clean shutdown. (but if we do the rest of the stuff right, this step isn't even required, including having UPSes... in theory... but the UPSes would be comforting)
Isn't that circumventing the purpose of the EPO? If there's a smokey fire in there and the firefighters have to enter the room and start spraying water around, won't a few machines glowing for four minutes after the EPO was pressed put them in danger of electrocution? Or force them to wait four minutes beore they can enter?
I'm not trying to be a smartass here, since I'm not an expert in datacenters or the purposes behind EPOs - I'm asking. . .
By "they were arrested for telling lawyer jokes" you mean "they were arrested for 'being abusive and disturbing the peace'"
I was going to try to make some articulate argument about the scope of First Amendment rights as it applies to public places and the social contract, but I'll just sum it up like this:
Two retards act like dicks and get busted for it, and all of a sudden I have to read about it on Slashdot?
I've been testing Google Desktop Search for a while now, and I'm wondering whether Google's need to expand (like so many companies before them) could be the beginning of a slippery slide downward. The cynical answer in general terms is certainly yes, but I'm thinking of one specific point here...
I'll guess that most people fell in love with Google the search engine, and then Google the brand, for its Internet search performance - its results felt more intuitive, more in line with what I was really looking for, like it knew my intent.
Those search results were based in its then new and unique Pagerank algorithm -- ranking pages based on the weight of other pages linking to them, essentially finding an efficient way of turning the inter-connectedness of web pages into a defacto recommendation system.
But my experience with Desktop Search has be much different. Since no one is reading and then linking to files on my hard drive (although I run Windows XP, so who knows...) there is no oppotunity for a PageRank-type algorithm to do its work, and my feeling is that Desktop Search search results really suffer for it.
It's like the worst of both worlds, without PageRank it's just a Google-branded keyword search, and worse, a keyword search tool that doesn't really have a sophisticated query language in order to construct more complex searches.
My concern is that Google-the-functionality is getting slowly replaced with Google-the-brand, and that Google will simply become synonymous with "search" rather than "eerily great search."
I'd be interested in other's people's experiences with their off-Internet search tools. I'm sure they are efficient and such, but do you get that same "I know what you're thinking" vibe as you do from Google Internet search?
I was responding to the fact that you seemed to imply, by listing a set of extra-legal things police are already allowed to do and then saying "Just ain't fair, is it," that you felt we should be resigned to the fact that police have unfetterred powers. In response to that I was making an arguement for continued judicial review.
My response was pointed at your statement and I understood that it didn't adress the main point of the story, which is why I said it was tangential.
Maybe I misunderstood the point of your post. If so, sorry about that.
I think the point that is being made is that yes, we have given them those rights, within a well-defined set of rules and procedures.
The slippery slope that is concerning people is not whether they should have the right to attach GPS-enabled trackers, they should be able to take advantage of whatever new technologies become available, but instead what rules, procedures, and oversight is imposed on them. If (and this is tangential to this particular story) police take it upon themselves to put trackers on cars without needing a warrant or having a judge review the circumstances then that is a significant and, in my opinion, negative expansion of a police officer's rights.
Nothing wrong with using any of this technology, but the self-checks built into the system to protect us shouldn't be abandoned.
"Hello, Microsoft NT Technical Support, how may I help you?"
"Yes hello, what used version of NT do I need to buy off E-bay to qualify for the upgrade price on XP Professional?"
"That would be NT Workstation, sir."
"Great! Last thing. ..We're a big company, maybe 500 workstations in all, so do I get the 'no activation' crack from you, or do you need to transfer me to XP support?"
I'm not a VoIP specialist here, but you wouldn't need super-clean hand-off as in a cellular network, would you? Since they don't have to route the calls to a specific tower as in cellular, just to an IP address which looks the same no matter what wifi network it's on, they appear to have fewer technical challenges.
Technically the POTS calls only take place between the Vonage call center and whoever is on the POTS network. Vonage then routes them onto the Internet to point to the IP address of the hardware associates with the user. If the phone moves out of the WiFi network and contact is lost on the IP side, Vonage could easily still hold the POTS line open and then decide how to handle it with the POTS user. They could, for example, have a recorded message saying "connectivity with the Vonage caller has been temporarily lost, press 1 to wait for them to reconnect, press 2 to leave a message, press 3 to have an automatic call-back when they have re-connected."
Then, when the phone re-establishes with the same or a different wi-fi network, or the same or different IP address, then they simply link that IP stream back to that POTS connection.
As I say, I'm not a VoIP expert, but it seems to make sense, yes?
Incoming calls would be no problem, just as they aren't with their modems or softphone. The phone is basically a shrunken VoIP modem with a mic and a wireless card, so I'd assume that the phone declares its IP address to Vonage Central once it logs on to the local network. Vonage then maps your local number to that IP and your on your way.
Their modems and softphone work the same way. Once they navigate the firewall they log into the Vonage servers and your number is mapped. We use both all the time internationally - we've sent modems to our European offices which has made them accessable with a local New York call, and we use the softphone on business trips to Hong Kong, which has turned a multi-hundred dollar phone bill per trip into nearly zero.
If you're involved in international business, VoIP is the biggest cost-saving measure since e-mail.
Hey Fons - Thanks very much for the response. I'm sorry I didn't catch it sooner, but I somehow missed it in among all the others.
Please be assured that you were more of just the lightning rod for a rant that had been building for a while. In general I stand firmly behind my points, but I don't know you any more than the people now giving me a hard time know me, and the continuing discussion about it tends to polarize things enough that any of our respective subtleties have been long lost.
Thanks for the apology, and please accept mine for not realizing that in trying to magnify the issue, I unintentionally magnified the importance of your contribution way out of proportion.
Well, I suppose that my language skills are open to even broader debate than the one we're involved in now, but in my own estimation they range from excellent to colloquial depending on my intent and concentration level.
I agree that the most specific classical definition of the tragic dramatic form includes a protaganist that brings destructive events upon himself. In any more colloquial usage, however, it simply refers to an event that brings suffering, destruction and pain.
In this case, however, I was referring to 9/11, an event in which a friend of mine died. Whether I brought that upon myself in some way could probably be the object of yet another very long debate, but by any broader definition I think tragedy is the proper word to describe my experience.
So, to directly answer your question: No, I don't think it's a little harsh.
But isn't the important part of what you just wrote "...but amusing to the desensitized?"
It's exactly that desensitization that I'm objecting to. I'm not saying we wail for every dead child as though it were our own, just that we make an effort to keep ourselves at least somewhat sensitized to other people's situations, and speak and act with just a bit of consideration for the effects our actions have on other people - even people we have not and will never meet.
As for my threshold...As I said to an AC who made a similar point, it did take 118 thousand dead to get me to take a stand. Sure, it's no Holocaust, but I thought I'd start with something small and work up.
Slashdot Mirror
So much work (and funding) is being poured into finding alternative energy sources, I wonder how much the discovery of a scaleable, inexpensive, widely deployable (as in converting the world's energy grid) superconducting power distribution system has been quantified.
I do understand that this isn't that, and that there are a million barriers to be overcome, and that fossil fuels need a replacement Real Soon Now, but I do wonder if anyone knows of any studies out there trying sort out how much energy is currently lost in the distribution of consumer power, and how much less we'd need to generate if a practical superconducting solution is found.
Factoring in a reasonable probability of success in both sides, it would be interesting to see whether the potential cost/benefit of investments in finding superconducting solutions all the way to the last mile might be as or more efficient in the long run than funding research in new power sources.
I know, it shouldn't be either or in any case, but it's just a thought...
1. Wrap naked promotion of your upcoming album in the Cloak of IP Freedom.
2. Post on Slashdot.
3. Money!
Personally, I'll wait for: "Trent Reznor Releases Three Guitar Riffs as Halo 2 Weapons."
"...ETS and a group of colleges and universities have collaborated to create the ICT Literacy Assessment, a comprehensive test of ICT proficiency specifically designed for the higher education environment...
Have you ever:
1. Kissed a friend or stranger on their hands or their head/neck region as a friendly gesture?
2. Held hands with someone?
3. Had a date...
"
If there's one place Microsoft should feel right at home, it's in court. . .
Kids are playing GTA, kids are looking at porno on the Net, kids are shooting each other with guns from their parents unlocked gun cabinets. But GTA, porn, and guns are not meant to "teach" kids anything. They're not meant to be anywhere near kids.
We cannot babyproof the entire world, parents should take responsibility for controlling what children see, where they go, what they do, and what they play. If every parent were as firm with their kids as Hillary wants to be with the industry, there wouldn't be a problem to solve.
Obseity in others is your best defense mechanism.
Certainly from predation, but speaking for fat people at McDonald's everywhere, I'd like to say that we're betting that the global food supply will run out before a T-Rex comes to life and chases us down.
We think that a better defense mechanism is taking two weeks longer to starve to death so we can eat you scrawny arrogant bastards as you drop like flies.
I don't care how thin you are, we'll still get a whole bunch of quarter pounders out of you...
...and a good match for other Ohio laws that mandate tickets for people who "go real fast" and jail for people who "do bad stuff."
Fair enough on one level, but your complaint assumes that the only role of leaf-like structures is photosynthesis.
Without light, plants would need some sort of large structures to extract nutrients from their environment, either large root systems to take it from the ground or large leaf structures to take it from the air. Humans essentially have large surgace-area leaf-like structures designed to extract oxygen from the air, we just keep them inside our chest cavity where we can control the air flowing over them using our muscles.
So like I say, fair enough on an everything-is-like-earth level, but there's plenty of wiggle room once you're specualting on how ailien worlds might work.
I would suggest amazed - it's the most appropriate reaction to pretty things you don't understand at all.
But thanks for at least implying that cosmologists are part of a global conspirahoax, there's something kind of sexy about that. Finally something they can talk about at parties.
Thanks, but I'll wait for eXeem E++
Sorry, but you confused me.
It seemed as though they were talking in the article about putting a separate, independent UPS system in place for their machines, that are independent of the EPO system. It sounds to me like that would keep their machines on for four minutes even after one or both of the facilities EPO systems have been triggered creating an electrocution danger.
Are you suggesting that their UPS would have a separate EPO just for it? I don't think that's the case, because they specifically mentioned wanting to have a 4 minute window if the main EPO was hit. But if they did that would put them right back where they started, because although they'd have four minutes in case the main EPO got triggered, they'd still have their own brand new EPO button hanging out there just waiting to be triggered accidentally.
Could you clarify?
"EPO, by the way, stands for Emergency Power Off and it's a national fire/electrical requirement for firefighters to be able to press these big red buttons near all exits that turn off all power in the entire data center."
"...all our DBs have redundant power supplies. we'll be plugging one side into Internap's, and the other side into our own UPS, which itself is plugged into Internap's other power grid. that way if EPO is pressed, we'll have 1-4 minutes to do a clean shutdown. (but if we do the rest of the stuff right, this step isn't even required, including having UPSes... in theory... but the UPSes would be comforting)
Isn't that circumventing the purpose of the EPO? If there's a smokey fire in there and the firefighters have to enter the room and start spraying water around, won't a few machines glowing for four minutes after the EPO was pressed put them in danger of electrocution? Or force them to wait four minutes beore they can enter?
I'm not trying to be a smartass here, since I'm not an expert in datacenters or the purposes behind EPOs - I'm asking. . .
By "they were arrested for telling lawyer jokes" you mean "they were arrested for 'being abusive and disturbing the peace'"
I was going to try to make some articulate argument about the scope of First Amendment rights as it applies to public places and the social contract, but I'll just sum it up like this:
Two retards act like dicks and get busted for it, and all of a sudden I have to read about it on Slashdot?
I've been testing Google Desktop Search for a while now, and I'm wondering whether Google's need to expand (like so many companies before them) could be the beginning of a slippery slide downward. The cynical answer in general terms is certainly yes, but I'm thinking of one specific point here...
I'll guess that most people fell in love with Google the search engine, and then Google the brand, for its Internet search performance - its results felt more intuitive, more in line with what I was really looking for, like it knew my intent.
Those search results were based in its then new and unique Pagerank algorithm -- ranking pages based on the weight of other pages linking to them, essentially finding an efficient way of turning the inter-connectedness of web pages into a defacto recommendation system.
But my experience with Desktop Search has be much different. Since no one is reading and then linking to files on my hard drive (although I run Windows XP, so who knows...) there is no oppotunity for a PageRank-type algorithm to do its work, and my feeling is that Desktop Search search results really suffer for it.
It's like the worst of both worlds, without PageRank it's just a Google-branded keyword search, and worse, a keyword search tool that doesn't really have a sophisticated query language in order to construct more complex searches.
My concern is that Google-the-functionality is getting slowly replaced with Google-the-brand, and that Google will simply become synonymous with "search" rather than "eerily great search."
I'd be interested in other's people's experiences with their off-Internet search tools. I'm sure they are efficient and such, but do you get that same "I know what you're thinking" vibe as you do from Google Internet search?
I was responding to the fact that you seemed to imply, by listing a set of extra-legal things police are already allowed to do and then saying "Just ain't fair, is it," that you felt we should be resigned to the fact that police have unfetterred powers. In response to that I was making an arguement for continued judicial review.
My response was pointed at your statement and I understood that it didn't adress the main point of the story, which is why I said it was tangential.
Maybe I misunderstood the point of your post. If so, sorry about that.
I think the point that is being made is that yes, we have given them those rights, within a well-defined set of rules and procedures.
The slippery slope that is concerning people is not whether they should have the right to attach GPS-enabled trackers, they should be able to take advantage of whatever new technologies become available, but instead what rules, procedures, and oversight is imposed on them. If (and this is tangential to this particular story) police take it upon themselves to put trackers on cars without needing a warrant or having a judge review the circumstances then that is a significant and, in my opinion, negative expansion of a police officer's rights.
Nothing wrong with using any of this technology, but the self-checks built into the system to protect us shouldn't be abandoned.
Why stop at the gasoline? Why not charge them for shipping, with an added fee for failing to address it correctly?
"Hello, Microsoft NT Technical Support, how may I help you?"
"Yes hello, what used version of NT do I need to buy off E-bay to qualify for the upgrade price on XP Professional?"
"That would be NT Workstation, sir."
"Great! Last thing. . .We're a big company, maybe 500 workstations in all, so do I get the 'no activation' crack from you, or do you need to transfer me to XP support?"
To put that in perspective, that makes their virtual world slightly larger in population than Madison, Wisconsin.
And the weather's probably better, too.
Weird.
I'm not a VoIP specialist here, but you wouldn't need super-clean hand-off as in a cellular network, would you? Since they don't have to route the calls to a specific tower as in cellular, just to an IP address which looks the same no matter what wifi network it's on, they appear to have fewer technical challenges.
Technically the POTS calls only take place between the Vonage call center and whoever is on the POTS network. Vonage then routes them onto the Internet to point to the IP address of the hardware associates with the user. If the phone moves out of the WiFi network and contact is lost on the IP side, Vonage could easily still hold the POTS line open and then decide how to handle it with the POTS user. They could, for example, have a recorded message saying "connectivity with the Vonage caller has been temporarily lost, press 1 to wait for them to reconnect, press 2 to leave a message, press 3 to have an automatic call-back when they have re-connected."
Then, when the phone re-establishes with the same or a different wi-fi network, or the same or different IP address, then they simply link that IP stream back to that POTS connection.
As I say, I'm not a VoIP expert, but it seems to make sense, yes?
Incoming calls would be no problem, just as they aren't with their modems or softphone. The phone is basically a shrunken VoIP modem with a mic and a wireless card, so I'd assume that the phone declares its IP address to Vonage Central once it logs on to the local network. Vonage then maps your local number to that IP and your on your way.
Their modems and softphone work the same way. Once they navigate the firewall they log into the Vonage servers and your number is mapped. We use both all the time internationally - we've sent modems to our European offices which has made them accessable with a local New York call, and we use the softphone on business trips to Hong Kong, which has turned a multi-hundred dollar phone bill per trip into nearly zero.
If you're involved in international business, VoIP is the biggest cost-saving measure since e-mail.
Hey Fons - Thanks very much for the response. I'm sorry I didn't catch it sooner, but I somehow missed it in among all the others.
Please be assured that you were more of just the lightning rod for a rant that had been building for a while. In general I stand firmly behind my points, but I don't know you any more than the people now giving me a hard time know me, and the continuing discussion about it tends to polarize things enough that any of our respective subtleties have been long lost.
Thanks for the apology, and please accept mine for not realizing that in trying to magnify the issue, I unintentionally magnified the importance of your contribution way out of proportion.
Well, I suppose that my language skills are open to even broader debate than the one we're involved in now, but in my own estimation they range from excellent to colloquial depending on my intent and concentration level.
I agree that the most specific classical definition of the tragic dramatic form includes a protaganist that brings destructive events upon himself. In any more colloquial usage, however, it simply refers to an event that brings suffering, destruction and pain.
In this case, however, I was referring to 9/11, an event in which a friend of mine died. Whether I brought that upon myself in some way could probably be the object of yet another very long debate, but by any broader definition I think tragedy is the proper word to describe my experience.
So, to directly answer your question: No, I don't think it's a little harsh.
But isn't the important part of what you just wrote "...but amusing to the desensitized?"
It's exactly that desensitization that I'm objecting to. I'm not saying we wail for every dead child as though it were our own, just that we make an effort to keep ourselves at least somewhat sensitized to other people's situations, and speak and act with just a bit of consideration for the effects our actions have on other people - even people we have not and will never meet.
As for my threshold...As I said to an AC who made a similar point, it did take 118 thousand dead to get me to take a stand. Sure, it's no Holocaust, but I thought I'd start with something small and work up.
Okay, so *that* was funny!