I dare say, a coal fired power plant is going to be a much bigger land foot print.... Land that you won't ever put back to it's original use... So why not just build a new plant there?
There are residents in the Chernobyl exclusion zone who have lived there largely undisturbed and unhurt since right after the accident.
But the problem with the zone is that nobody has fully mapped the hot spots, so walking around can be somewhat dangerous to one's long term health should you happen to step in the wrong place and these hot spots move around due to the wildlife, wind and such.
Fukashema (sp) has a similar situation, where the radioactive materials have been randomly scattered about and although they present on immediate danger in most places, long term exposure could be a problem. But again, the wildlife refuge idea is viable there too. There really isn't that much radiation out there, apart from a few hot spots that you need to stay away from.
As I recall, the average commute is above 50 miles/day, which means this is useless as a commuter for more than half of us...
Then, consider that commuting is only a part of what most cars are used for and the percentage of people who can use a car with a 50 mile range drops further, and basically ends up to include only those who can afford a car for *just* commuting who own other vehicles for other uses.
I don't know about you, but I have a hard time affording just the cars I need so there is no way I'm adding one to the driveway just for getting to work and back, even though the distance is under 10 miles/day.
Uh... so how fast does it go? Y'know, in normal numbers?
The *real* question is "How FAR does it go on a charge?" Which is followed closely by a related question "How long does it take to recharge?"
Having high acceleration and top speed are nice, but if you only get 40 miles from a full charge which takes 4 hours to achieve, what's the point? It might be interesting for the race track, but as a practical means of transportation it's useless to 90% of us.
This coming from a guy that actively runs a torrent client which is serving up legal content 24/7 to the dismay of my ISP I'm sure.. I consider it my way to support CentOS and Debian to name a few.
I didn't say they have blanket powers to lie, but they can tell you things which are false. Things like "Your partner is telling us everything about this, you need to come clean to protect yourself." Or, they can call you and say you won free tickets to something, just show up at a specified place and time to collect them, then arrest you when you do.
You are correct to point out that there ARE some things they simply cannot do or lie about. But apart from a very narrow range of constitutional issues, it's pretty much a free for all.
Oh come on. I've seen the "I can run my on harvested RF energy!" scams come and go on Slashdot. Yes, they get shot down, but not for being *technically* impossible, but being *practically* impossible.
Yea, you can transfer energy using RF from one point to another without wires, but the problem here is it's pretty inefficient to do this because the amount of power falls by at least the square of the distance. So what may work at 1' fairly well using 10 watts of input RF power, is going to require something like 100 watts when you double the distance and 1,000 when you double it again (4'). (Please feel free to correct my math, but you get the idea).
So, yes, if you have a "low power" device, something that doesn't consume much power on average, you can likely scavenge enough power from the RF around you in most places to keep running. HOWEVER, most of the scam devices are for applications that REQUIRE always on radios and significant computational power. These devices consume too much power to be practically powered by foraging RF energy, especially in the home or office where the largest amount of RF power is likely coming from your Part 15 regulated WiFi devices which are limited to about half a watt and can be tens of feet away.
Well you are wrong about me, I've not had anybody close to me suffer from addiction. As close as I've come is an uncle who I saw about three times in my life and the conversations I've had with my grandmother who was an RN who worked at a methadone clinic...You are also wrong about your facts...
You are crazy to even try to make the claim that making drugs illegal hasn't kept anybody from taking them. Of course it has, that much is obvious despite your claims otherwise. Has it been 100% effective? Obviously not, but it clearly has made the street prices higher and availability lower because you don't just walk into the 5 and 10 on the corner and order up a dose of Meth (at least in most neighborhoods you don't). That alone has kept the drug out of the hands of at least *some* people.
Like it or not, the efforts to combat Meth in this country have been pretty effective in reducing it's manufacture and use. So there is one provable example where drug laws and enforcement HAS been at least partially effective. So there goes your premise... Laws and enforcement CAN be helpful.
I think it's a bit short sighted to say what we've done has failed... It may not have produced the results we where told it would, but I don't think it's fair to say it's a failure and needs to be scrapped. Especially given the alternative that total legalization would thrust upon us. You simply cannot legalize everything, I don't care how bad you think our current enforcement efforts have messed things up, there are illicit drugs out there which are exceedingly addictive and damaging to the person and society in general, they must remain illegal.
Decriminalization is not a panacea. I think you'd be trading one set of problems, for another set that is much worse. In this case, I think you would just buy yourself more problems, while the existing ones won't go away.
So.... What's the difference between that and taking your photo in a public place and capturing the images of bystanders? I don't see your argument as valid based on the surveillance happening to collect non-targeted individuals' information as a result.
A phone tap DOES collect from non-targeted individuals who happen to call that phone line as well... Are their constitutional rights violated with the warranted wire tap? Nope.. But you are discussing stuff that is covered under a warrant...
It may seem I'm missing your point, but I don't think that's true. I may not be answering your objections directly, but that's because you've not addressed my point. I think though that you are trying to dodge the point I'm trying to make that at least SOME drugs need to be prohibited for the good of all with your legalization of marijuana mantra..
So... Let's get into *specific* details....
Apart from weed... What drugs are you saying should be legalized? I get the impression that you want to take an arguably benign controlled substance like marijuana as your example and justify the legalization of such drugs as Meth, Cocaine, Opium and the like. If that's what you are advocating, then I'm guessing you've either already addicted to something and think making it legal will make your habit easier to service or you've never really seen the devastation of drug abuse up close and personal and don't fully understand how all this works.
There are some street drugs which are too dangerous to even consider making legal.... Arguing otherwise is just plain stupid.. Until we come to agreement on the question of if we need drug laws to start with, what's the point of debating individual kinds of drugs?
Yes and no. This "man in the middle" doesn't collect voice, just meta-data. So tell me how this is all that much different than observing you having a conversation with someone on the public street, or keeping a log of who enters your front door during the day?
Illicit drug use has historically shown to be a public health and welfare problem. Opium is the prime example, but other recreational drugs have similar negative affects upon users.
Don't be blind, there are valid arguments to NOT just legalize everything here and let the chips fall where they may and just blindly advocating for such legalization w/o at least acknowledging the issues being raised with your idea is plain stupid.
I'm not sure how this device is a problem. It operates in public spaces and impersonates a cell tower in order to obtain location information. It does not collect the content (audio) of any calls, just the meta-data and signaling information between the tower and the phone.
How's this different from what investigators are free to do when gathering information about a suspect? They can follow you around in public, observe you in your back yard (as long as they and their equipment stay in public spaces). They can intercept any RF emitted from your devices and use that to track your location. They can even listen to your conversations in public places using electronic devices in most jurisdictions...
Where I see we are on a slippery slope here, how's the stinger all that much different that what they can legally do w/o a warrant now?
In a way, I'm not sure this is really an issue. Apparently the device will now require that a search warrant be granted before it is used to collect evidence, at least in that jurisdiction.
However, I wonder if this will be overturned on appeal (not that it matters to the perp as the evidence collected has now been tossed) because the police are free to lie to you when questioning you. How's that different from a device claiming to be a valid cell tower? Or, how's that different than using a directional antenna to find a specific RF transmitter device which happens to be carried by a suspect? Where I understand the stinger works a bit differently, but in principle it's not that much different from totally acceptable surveillance methods we've used for centuries that don't require warrants. As a investigator, I can follow you around in your public travels, observe what I can from public spaces at any time without a warrant. How can the RF emitted by your cell phone, observed from a public space not be legally obtained evidence? Because it's encrypted? How's that relevant?
That's just it, drugs generally do really bad things to people and those around them and many are helpless to break the cycle of dependency.
Would you have us stand back and watch while people self destruct, killing themselves a little bit at a time? Where I get there is a limit to what government can do in a free society, but this question does not have a binary answer in the case of illicit drug use. Just taking the controls off and "making it legal" condemns a lot of people to needless lives of torment and early death, just as strict drug laws and enforcement with zero tolerance and total commitment to eradication of illegal substance use consumes vast resources, full jails and lives beset by a different kind of torment.
The correct answer is somewhere in between the binary extremes I believe. The only problem is that it is very hard to define exactly where along the continuum you get the best outcome for the most people. (Which, by the way, *should* be our goal...) So I disagree with the legalization argument, based on the fact it will be really bad for a lot of people to fall into drug dependency.
If you eliminate the rare earth magnets, you still need the magnetic field to make an electric motor go. After all, electric motors are really just using magnetic forces to turn the shaft of the motor. You can generate this magnetic field from rare earths or by using electromagnets. Electromagnets involve passing an electric current though copper windings. Generating this magnetic field consumes power (the IR losses in the wire to heat and the Flux losses from the running motor), lowering your motor's efficiency.
However, I would like to point out that by using electromagnets you can drastically change the motor's torque at a given RPM, so where the motor is less efficient, it's partially offset by less of a need for gear boxes and transmissions because you can get huge amounts of torque out of electric motors at various RPMs if you can precisely control both the field and armature currents and phases. (Actually this is why they use them on train locomotives..)
So, there are advantages, but you are going to get less miles out of your battery's charge if you don't have the rare earth magnets, and right now, the range and recharge times are a serious blocker for adoption of EV's so manufacturers are pushing for all the range they can get.
It's not a large factor on a train because they are not battery powered.... You either get your power from a diesel engine or from the overhead electric lines, so you don't have to be all that efficient. Second, you are not really weight constrained in a Train locomotive either, more weight doesn't affect the efficiency much.
In a battery powered device, efficiency is paramount and both motor efficiency and lower weight are advantages. It's all about going the most distance on a charge right now, and so far, battery powered vehicles are *really* lacking range over their fossil fueled siblings.
Hey, I've heard of lots of companies getting warned by the SEC for seemingly big violations of the rules. Happens all the time actually.
I'm not sure what exactly the SEC did here, or how serious they thought the violation was, but apparently the company and the SEC discussed it and came to a mutual agreement about this. It may be the actual fines are minimal for this violation or that the SEC felt it wasn't worth going to a long expensive trial in an effort to hold the company responsible. So they struck the plea deal and ended up with probation. You can bet the SEC has put the company on notice that further violations will not be tolerated and that if they do it again, action will be taken on BOTH violations.
Let's see if probation works before we pass judgment on this company's ethics.
Slashdot Mirror
Great Scott! 1.21 jiga flops! 1.21 jiga flops?! What was I thinking!!
Oh, it was on a dare...
I dare say, a coal fired power plant is going to be a much bigger land foot print.... Land that you won't ever put back to it's original use... So why not just build a new plant there?
Figures never lie, but liars figure..
Lies, Damn lies, and Statistics...
There are residents in the Chernobyl exclusion zone who have lived there largely undisturbed and unhurt since right after the accident.
But the problem with the zone is that nobody has fully mapped the hot spots, so walking around can be somewhat dangerous to one's long term health should you happen to step in the wrong place and these hot spots move around due to the wildlife, wind and such.
Fukashema (sp) has a similar situation, where the radioactive materials have been randomly scattered about and although they present on immediate danger in most places, long term exposure could be a problem. But again, the wildlife refuge idea is viable there too. There really isn't that much radiation out there, apart from a few hot spots that you need to stay away from.
As I recall, the average commute is above 50 miles/day, which means this is useless as a commuter for more than half of us...
Then, consider that commuting is only a part of what most cars are used for and the percentage of people who can use a car with a 50 mile range drops further, and basically ends up to include only those who can afford a car for *just* commuting who own other vehicles for other uses.
I don't know about you, but I have a hard time affording just the cars I need so there is no way I'm adding one to the driveway just for getting to work and back, even though the distance is under 10 miles/day.
Uh... so how fast does it go? Y'know, in normal numbers?
The *real* question is "How FAR does it go on a charge?" Which is followed closely by a related question "How long does it take to recharge?"
Having high acceleration and top speed are nice, but if you only get 40 miles from a full charge which takes 4 hours to achieve, what's the point? It might be interesting for the race track, but as a practical means of transportation it's useless to 90% of us.
IKEA.. It's a whole now concept in flat pack furniture. Frustration free, Now it assembles itself.
I nominate "LawsuitBait" as a replacement..
This coming from a guy that actively runs a torrent client which is serving up legal content 24/7 to the dismay of my ISP I'm sure.. I consider it my way to support CentOS and Debian to name a few.
Press coverage and it's a challenge (of sorts), that's why. Why climb Everest? These days the shurpas pretty much carry everything for you...
I didn't say they have blanket powers to lie, but they can tell you things which are false. Things like "Your partner is telling us everything about this, you need to come clean to protect yourself." Or, they can call you and say you won free tickets to something, just show up at a specified place and time to collect them, then arrest you when you do.
You are correct to point out that there ARE some things they simply cannot do or lie about. But apart from a very narrow range of constitutional issues, it's pretty much a free for all.
Oh come on. I've seen the "I can run my on harvested RF energy!" scams come and go on Slashdot. Yes, they get shot down, but not for being *technically* impossible, but being *practically* impossible.
Yea, you can transfer energy using RF from one point to another without wires, but the problem here is it's pretty inefficient to do this because the amount of power falls by at least the square of the distance. So what may work at 1' fairly well using 10 watts of input RF power, is going to require something like 100 watts when you double the distance and 1,000 when you double it again (4'). (Please feel free to correct my math, but you get the idea).
So, yes, if you have a "low power" device, something that doesn't consume much power on average, you can likely scavenge enough power from the RF around you in most places to keep running. HOWEVER, most of the scam devices are for applications that REQUIRE always on radios and significant computational power. These devices consume too much power to be practically powered by foraging RF energy, especially in the home or office where the largest amount of RF power is likely coming from your Part 15 regulated WiFi devices which are limited to about half a watt and can be tens of feet away.
Well you are wrong about me, I've not had anybody close to me suffer from addiction. As close as I've come is an uncle who I saw about three times in my life and the conversations I've had with my grandmother who was an RN who worked at a methadone clinic...You are also wrong about your facts...
You are crazy to even try to make the claim that making drugs illegal hasn't kept anybody from taking them. Of course it has, that much is obvious despite your claims otherwise. Has it been 100% effective? Obviously not, but it clearly has made the street prices higher and availability lower because you don't just walk into the 5 and 10 on the corner and order up a dose of Meth (at least in most neighborhoods you don't). That alone has kept the drug out of the hands of at least *some* people.
Like it or not, the efforts to combat Meth in this country have been pretty effective in reducing it's manufacture and use. So there is one provable example where drug laws and enforcement HAS been at least partially effective. So there goes your premise... Laws and enforcement CAN be helpful.
I think it's a bit short sighted to say what we've done has failed... It may not have produced the results we where told it would, but I don't think it's fair to say it's a failure and needs to be scrapped. Especially given the alternative that total legalization would thrust upon us. You simply cannot legalize everything, I don't care how bad you think our current enforcement efforts have messed things up, there are illicit drugs out there which are exceedingly addictive and damaging to the person and society in general, they must remain illegal.
Decriminalization is not a panacea. I think you'd be trading one set of problems, for another set that is much worse. In this case, I think you would just buy yourself more problems, while the existing ones won't go away.
So.... What's the difference between that and taking your photo in a public place and capturing the images of bystanders? I don't see your argument as valid based on the surveillance happening to collect non-targeted individuals' information as a result.
A phone tap DOES collect from non-targeted individuals who happen to call that phone line as well... Are their constitutional rights violated with the warranted wire tap? Nope.. But you are discussing stuff that is covered under a warrant...
It may seem I'm missing your point, but I don't think that's true. I may not be answering your objections directly, but that's because you've not addressed my point. I think though that you are trying to dodge the point I'm trying to make that at least SOME drugs need to be prohibited for the good of all with your legalization of marijuana mantra..
So... Let's get into *specific* details....
Apart from weed... What drugs are you saying should be legalized? I get the impression that you want to take an arguably benign controlled substance like marijuana as your example and justify the legalization of such drugs as Meth, Cocaine, Opium and the like. If that's what you are advocating, then I'm guessing you've either already addicted to something and think making it legal will make your habit easier to service or you've never really seen the devastation of drug abuse up close and personal and don't fully understand how all this works.
There are some street drugs which are too dangerous to even consider making legal.... Arguing otherwise is just plain stupid.. Until we come to agreement on the question of if we need drug laws to start with, what's the point of debating individual kinds of drugs?
Yes and no. This "man in the middle" doesn't collect voice, just meta-data. So tell me how this is all that much different than observing you having a conversation with someone on the public street, or keeping a log of who enters your front door during the day?
Illicit drug use has historically shown to be a public health and welfare problem. Opium is the prime example, but other recreational drugs have similar negative affects upon users.
Don't be blind, there are valid arguments to NOT just legalize everything here and let the chips fall where they may and just blindly advocating for such legalization w/o at least acknowledging the issues being raised with your idea is plain stupid.
I'm not sure how this device is a problem. It operates in public spaces and impersonates a cell tower in order to obtain location information. It does not collect the content (audio) of any calls, just the meta-data and signaling information between the tower and the phone.
How's this different from what investigators are free to do when gathering information about a suspect? They can follow you around in public, observe you in your back yard (as long as they and their equipment stay in public spaces). They can intercept any RF emitted from your devices and use that to track your location. They can even listen to your conversations in public places using electronic devices in most jurisdictions...
Where I see we are on a slippery slope here, how's the stinger all that much different that what they can legally do w/o a warrant now?
In a way, I'm not sure this is really an issue. Apparently the device will now require that a search warrant be granted before it is used to collect evidence, at least in that jurisdiction.
However, I wonder if this will be overturned on appeal (not that it matters to the perp as the evidence collected has now been tossed) because the police are free to lie to you when questioning you. How's that different from a device claiming to be a valid cell tower? Or, how's that different than using a directional antenna to find a specific RF transmitter device which happens to be carried by a suspect? Where I understand the stinger works a bit differently, but in principle it's not that much different from totally acceptable surveillance methods we've used for centuries that don't require warrants. As a investigator, I can follow you around in your public travels, observe what I can from public spaces at any time without a warrant. How can the RF emitted by your cell phone, observed from a public space not be legally obtained evidence? Because it's encrypted? How's that relevant?
Oh these things are useful and the evidence they generate is valid for criminal prosecution, Just get a warrant before you use it... Case closed..
That's just it, drugs generally do really bad things to people and those around them and many are helpless to break the cycle of dependency.
Would you have us stand back and watch while people self destruct, killing themselves a little bit at a time? Where I get there is a limit to what government can do in a free society, but this question does not have a binary answer in the case of illicit drug use. Just taking the controls off and "making it legal" condemns a lot of people to needless lives of torment and early death, just as strict drug laws and enforcement with zero tolerance and total commitment to eradication of illegal substance use consumes vast resources, full jails and lives beset by a different kind of torment.
The correct answer is somewhere in between the binary extremes I believe. The only problem is that it is very hard to define exactly where along the continuum you get the best outcome for the most people. (Which, by the way, *should* be our goal...) So I disagree with the legalization argument, based on the fact it will be really bad for a lot of people to fall into drug dependency.
Do so and be found in contempt as soon as the Judge orders you to provide the correct decryption key.. Go to jail to stay you are..
If you eliminate the rare earth magnets, you still need the magnetic field to make an electric motor go. After all, electric motors are really just using magnetic forces to turn the shaft of the motor. You can generate this magnetic field from rare earths or by using electromagnets. Electromagnets involve passing an electric current though copper windings. Generating this magnetic field consumes power (the IR losses in the wire to heat and the Flux losses from the running motor), lowering your motor's efficiency.
However, I would like to point out that by using electromagnets you can drastically change the motor's torque at a given RPM, so where the motor is less efficient, it's partially offset by less of a need for gear boxes and transmissions because you can get huge amounts of torque out of electric motors at various RPMs if you can precisely control both the field and armature currents and phases. (Actually this is why they use them on train locomotives..)
So, there are advantages, but you are going to get less miles out of your battery's charge if you don't have the rare earth magnets, and right now, the range and recharge times are a serious blocker for adoption of EV's so manufacturers are pushing for all the range they can get.
It's not a large factor on a train because they are not battery powered.... You either get your power from a diesel engine or from the overhead electric lines, so you don't have to be all that efficient. Second, you are not really weight constrained in a Train locomotive either, more weight doesn't affect the efficiency much.
In a battery powered device, efficiency is paramount and both motor efficiency and lower weight are advantages. It's all about going the most distance on a charge right now, and so far, battery powered vehicles are *really* lacking range over their fossil fueled siblings.
Hey, I've heard of lots of companies getting warned by the SEC for seemingly big violations of the rules. Happens all the time actually.
I'm not sure what exactly the SEC did here, or how serious they thought the violation was, but apparently the company and the SEC discussed it and came to a mutual agreement about this. It may be the actual fines are minimal for this violation or that the SEC felt it wasn't worth going to a long expensive trial in an effort to hold the company responsible. So they struck the plea deal and ended up with probation. You can bet the SEC has put the company on notice that further violations will not be tolerated and that if they do it again, action will be taken on BOTH violations.
Let's see if probation works before we pass judgment on this company's ethics.