All you need is a device designed to mimic "steps" that you put your FitBit on. Have it emulate walking, jogging or even sprinting. Then the employee wares this FitBit most of the day, except for the 2 hours when the "exercise" session takes place. I don't imagine that this device will be too expensive either, making the whole "I'm healthy so give me the bonus money" fiction worth the investment.
A coworker was notified of reaching some milestone for number of steps taken by her fitness tracker. It baffled her because she was at a family get together and definitely didn't take that many steps. Then she remembered she spent most of the time in a rocking chair that apparently counted the rocking as steps.
I see a FitBit fooling device on it's way.... You need 10K steps today? Put it on this device for 2 hours....
The major problem is clearly stated in the article:
The plan would require significant amounts of wireless spectrum, as well as satellites capable of 1 Tb/s or higher.
Where we could build the satellites, what doesn't exist is the wireless spectrum. This is basically going to suffer the same fate as Light Squared did when they attempted to get some spectrum reassigned for high power terrestrial use. All of this about spectrum space.. Well, most of it is.
This basically amounts to putting up 5K cell towers sans the towers using satellites. The Cellular spectrum is very crowded and expensive to obtain in the industrialized world. It's not going to happen, it's way too expensive and will be very difficult to internationally manage the legal aspects of such a system.
There where a number of accidents that happened with this reactor design that where successfully hidden from public view at the time. There where at least two partial meltdowns at various plants, including one at Chernobyl Unit 1 a few years before it exploded. This design was known to be risky by the Russians and others, but it was cheap, so they built a bunch of them.
There are safety issues in any plant design and if you look hard enough you can find them. The issue though is about inherent safety. How much operator interaction is required to render a plant inert? How complex are the systems, how much power does it require to keep the minimum safety systems working? These are the questions you need to ask...
That a specific reactor design uses a manually operated vent system, doesn't mean the plant is unsafe. It only means that in running though the accident scenarios on paper you need to account for needing someone to climb the stairs and open the vent when necessary. That may not be a huge risk, or it might be unacceptable. Considering that hydrogen production is really an indicator of MAJOR core damage, being manually operated might be OK. You just don't know until you walk though the scenarios and make your contingency plans.
See you ran afoul of the hippie energy crowd. Somebody needs to remind these people that a software engineering degree, is not knowledge of power systems
Yet this software engineer holds an Electrical Engineering Degree... And you are correct, they don't teach you ANYTHING about AC power in Computer Science classes and most software engineers wouldn't know their power factor corrector from a large capacitor (Or why anybody cares about them)...
You have to design your system to the WORST case scenario that you need to support. That means that if on the worst day your solar panel won't put out more than 1% of it's designed capacity because it is raining all day, and you don't want your lights to go out, then you need storage capacity to keep the lights on and generation capacity to recharge the batteries.
So all this talk about, "It's not usually that bad" has very little engineering impact when designing a system that can sustain a certain minimum level of performance when off grid or no other generation capacity is used (such as a fossil fueled generator).
Now, if you are connected up to the grid and using it for backup, THEN this average power generation DOES matter. If you are selling power back to the power company, then the average enters into the ROI calculations because excess power makes you money. However, even in that situation and where solar has a high availability rate (like in the southwest) it's ROI is somewhat lacking over just buying power off the grid..
IMHO neither nuclear or solar are viable right now with natural gas so cheap... Though, I do allow for the "environmentalists Wack'os" to make their CO2 point if they want. Problem for them is that nuclear is cheaper than Solar by a long shot, and seems to be about even par with Wind (though I don't have any numbers to prove that.)
They need to realize that if they want CO2 emissions to go down, nuclear is the ONLY workable technology they have that could possibly compete on cost with the other options. Not to mention that Solar and Wind simply cannot work as a 100% replacement for fossil fuels. We still need a lot of standing generation capacity which is not dependent on the wind, sun or rain...
There where a number of reactors built based on the same design as Chernobyl in the old Soviet Block nations. They had a horrible safety record, including a number of less serious accidents which put things like Three Mile Island to shame. Everybody knew they where unsafe so the EU demanded that they be decommissioned, and funded the efforts to replace them.
They where simply CHEAP-O sources of electric power, which where designed without any significant concerns about the public safety because as far as the government was concerned, it was worth the risk. There was nobody being held accountable, no civil recourse for anybody who happened to be harmed, no elections to throw out the leaders who let it happen, nothing. It was only about generating electric power and keeping the lights on. They where desperate and safety suffered.
The Sprint/Radio Shack store a few miles from me here sells wire cutters, soldering irons, and even Arduinos.
Have you been there lately? Like in the last few weeks? The bankruptcy liquidation sales just ended last month or so around here. I didn't figure Sprint would want to continue selling the electronics trinkets, just cell phones and accessories... But hey, I've not seen a remaining Radio Shack/Sprint store myself, all the local stores closed.
You do understand that Chernobyl used a flammable material for the neutron moderator and poring water onto the plant, where necessary, caused a significant amount of radiation to become airborne, even after the steam explosion blew it apart. What eventually brought the situation under control was the partial burying of the core in lead and sand to reduce the radiation so a makeshift containment building could be hastily assembled over the blown apart reactor.
Also, the problem with Chernobyl was more about the lack of safety engineered into the system, than a fault of Nuclear power persay. In Soviet Russia times the imperative was to generate power cheaply, and NOW. They literally built a house of cards, with inadequate safety, cut corners on all kinds of safety systems, and had complex interactions between seemingly unrelated systems. Then they skimped on operator training and safety standards. It's no wonder that this reactor design didn't blow up more often. It truly was an accident waiting to happen.
Modern reactors can be designed to be fail safe. One design I saw claimed that you could literally walk away from it running at full power and it was both thermally and physically safe. It would insert the control rods if it got too hot and there was nothing that could stop it. At that point, even a total loss of coolant pumps would not result in a melt down as a number of plugs would melt, flooding the area around the containment vessel and allow the conduction/convection cooling of the core. Even then, if the core continued to heat, it would release the fuel assemblies which would fall into deep pools of reserved cooling water and end up far apart in the bottom of the containment building. All this didn't require ANY operator input, or power to accomplish, it was totally mechanical and automatic and only required the reactor containment system to remain in tact and right side up.
There are a number of very safe and practical designs for nuclear power today, it's just impossible to get a permit to actually build one because the environmentalists won't let that happen..
Nuclear has gone from "too cheap to meter" to "too expensive to matter".
And solar isn't "too expensive to matter"? Solar is many times more expensive than nuclear and that's not going to change anytime soon. Wind isn't all that much better. Plus, all your "proven technology" doesn't really exist in cost effective forms, especially that battery storage idea.
BTW.. The reason nuclear is so expensive compared to other options is not so much that it's gotten more expensive, but that electric rates have fallen because natural gas has become so cheap. 20 years ago, who would have thought we would have this much Natural Gas? So in many ways it is Natural Gas that's putting Nuclear plants out of business, well that and plain age. Most of these plants are 30 years old now. How much does it cost to maintain a 30 year old car you drive every day? More than when it was new...
I think that some modern nuclear power plants would be a good idea. They would be more efficient, safer and a relatively cheap source of power we can use to charge up all those EV's people like you want to drive. We know it would be cheaper than wind or solar. Then we should take the money we save and invest it in Fusion research like this.
Does anyone want to venture a guess as to which will come first, the Year of Linux on the Desktop, or the widespread availability of this fusion reactor technology?
The jury is still out on both.... Somehow I think I'm going to die before either of those happen, and I have 20 years of work left before retirement..
Depends on if the device displays "local time" while being referenced to some time standard. If the device is being used to display local time and is using say NTP, then you are going to need to program/configure this new time zone.
IF it's a standalone device, who cares what time you have in it... But I'm talking about networked applications, or situations where you need some kind of standard reference time. Applications like navigation are very dependent on accurate time keeping.
SO, all Un really has done is made life harder for his military and for what little industrial complex he still has to really know what time it is and stay coordinated. Where they could once use off the shelf GPS (like everybody else) now none of their equipment will display the current local time correctly. Something tells me this will be perceived as a problem...
Of course you can just forget all this complexity and do what the US military does and do everything relative to a SINGLE time zone, which is basically GMT with a different name "Zulu time". But I'm just guessing that Little'Un would bristle at that suggestion, even though it means he could sleep a couple of more hours and still be up before 0600....
Once the researchers' dongle is attached
It's can still be an interesting tech read but I can also cut breaks with a set of 99 cent snips from Radio Shack.
Not any more.. Radio Shack has gone the way of Comp USA and Circuit City....
You are not within arms reach when the person receiving your angry assault is reacting to what you wrote, so you are unlikely to be physically assaulted...
On the other hand, you won't be there to see them react to all those stinging statements you made, nor can you stick out your tongue and go "Nana Nanna Na a" when you see their brow wrinkled in anger...
Seems like it would be pretty secure because windows would be nearly unusable... It is so huge and bloated as to be almost unusable on even fairly up to date hardware.
I have a Class B CDL with "P" endorsement (I can drive a buss with air brakes), and you are correct about state law up to a point. Purely private vehicles such as RV's and such can exceed the 13-Ton and length limits and still be driven by Class C license holders.
However local laws may apply here. In Dallas the city requires a "permit" they call a license in order to pick up paying passengers at the airports and other locations. You can drop off, just not pick anybody up. Even my CDL isn't good enough for the City of Dallas who wants their pound of flesh and to send me to a training course before I can carry passengers....
I always refuse to take the nuclear power protestors seriously until they agree to go out and pull their electric meters and refuse to do any business with anybody who uses electricity both directly and indirectly.
Please tell us what made you consider that to be a logical response. *pops corn* This should be insane, I mean good!
I'm saying "Lead by example". If you want me to consider your argument, prove to me you are really serious about it.
The world is full of people who "protest" all sorts of things, yet don't fully understand what they are really protesting, nor are they *really* committed to the cause. Al Gore comes to mind here. All sorts of bluster about CO2 emissions, rides in a private luxury jet. Or Michael Moore, who is out protesting the 1% when he's in the top 1/2% himself and could easily give enough away to prove he's serous. These two are nothing more than scammers. But then there is the environmentalist who's our advocating that we stop burring coal for electricity, but happily has an air-conditioned home that sucks oodles of power out of the grid that's powered by coal, oh they buy "renewable power" but when it's cloudy, calm and hot, they don't even know that fossil fuels are what's keeping them cool.
Then there is the "I don't burn fossil fuels to drive" crowd with their EV's. Lord help us when they find out where that electricity comes from....
Slashdot Mirror
Fit Bit fooling...
All you need is a device designed to mimic "steps" that you put your FitBit on. Have it emulate walking, jogging or even sprinting. Then the employee wares this FitBit most of the day, except for the 2 hours when the "exercise" session takes place. I don't imagine that this device will be too expensive either, making the whole "I'm healthy so give me the bonus money" fiction worth the investment.
Who's with me?
A coworker was notified of reaching some milestone for number of steps taken by her fitness tracker. It baffled her because she was at a family get together and definitely didn't take that many steps. Then she remembered she spent most of the time in a rocking chair that apparently counted the rocking as steps.
I see a FitBit fooling device on it's way.... You need 10K steps today? Put it on this device for 2 hours....
The major problem is clearly stated in the article:
The plan would require significant amounts of wireless spectrum, as well as satellites capable of 1 Tb/s or higher.
Where we could build the satellites, what doesn't exist is the wireless spectrum. This is basically going to suffer the same fate as Light Squared did when they attempted to get some spectrum reassigned for high power terrestrial use. All of this about spectrum space.. Well, most of it is.
This basically amounts to putting up 5K cell towers sans the towers using satellites. The Cellular spectrum is very crowded and expensive to obtain in the industrialized world. It's not going to happen, it's way too expensive and will be very difficult to internationally manage the legal aspects of such a system.
On contraire sir.
There where a number of accidents that happened with this reactor design that where successfully hidden from public view at the time. There where at least two partial meltdowns at various plants, including one at Chernobyl Unit 1 a few years before it exploded. This design was known to be risky by the Russians and others, but it was cheap, so they built a bunch of them.
There are safety issues in any plant design and if you look hard enough you can find them. The issue though is about inherent safety. How much operator interaction is required to render a plant inert? How complex are the systems, how much power does it require to keep the minimum safety systems working? These are the questions you need to ask...
That a specific reactor design uses a manually operated vent system, doesn't mean the plant is unsafe. It only means that in running though the accident scenarios on paper you need to account for needing someone to climb the stairs and open the vent when necessary. That may not be a huge risk, or it might be unacceptable. Considering that hydrogen production is really an indicator of MAJOR core damage, being manually operated might be OK. You just don't know until you walk though the scenarios and make your contingency plans.
See you ran afoul of the hippie energy crowd. Somebody needs to remind these people that a software engineering degree, is not knowledge of power systems
Yet this software engineer holds an Electrical Engineering Degree... And you are correct, they don't teach you ANYTHING about AC power in Computer Science classes and most software engineers wouldn't know their power factor corrector from a large capacitor (Or why anybody cares about them)...
You have to design your system to the WORST case scenario that you need to support. That means that if on the worst day your solar panel won't put out more than 1% of it's designed capacity because it is raining all day, and you don't want your lights to go out, then you need storage capacity to keep the lights on and generation capacity to recharge the batteries.
So all this talk about, "It's not usually that bad" has very little engineering impact when designing a system that can sustain a certain minimum level of performance when off grid or no other generation capacity is used (such as a fossil fueled generator).
Now, if you are connected up to the grid and using it for backup, THEN this average power generation DOES matter. If you are selling power back to the power company, then the average enters into the ROI calculations because excess power makes you money. However, even in that situation and where solar has a high availability rate (like in the southwest) it's ROI is somewhat lacking over just buying power off the grid..
IMHO neither nuclear or solar are viable right now with natural gas so cheap... Though, I do allow for the "environmentalists Wack'os" to make their CO2 point if they want. Problem for them is that nuclear is cheaper than Solar by a long shot, and seems to be about even par with Wind (though I don't have any numbers to prove that.)
They need to realize that if they want CO2 emissions to go down, nuclear is the ONLY workable technology they have that could possibly compete on cost with the other options. Not to mention that Solar and Wind simply cannot work as a 100% replacement for fossil fuels. We still need a lot of standing generation capacity which is not dependent on the wind, sun or rain...
There where a number of reactors built based on the same design as Chernobyl in the old Soviet Block nations. They had a horrible safety record, including a number of less serious accidents which put things like Three Mile Island to shame. Everybody knew they where unsafe so the EU demanded that they be decommissioned, and funded the efforts to replace them.
They where simply CHEAP-O sources of electric power, which where designed without any significant concerns about the public safety because as far as the government was concerned, it was worth the risk. There was nobody being held accountable, no civil recourse for anybody who happened to be harmed, no elections to throw out the leaders who let it happen, nothing. It was only about generating electric power and keeping the lights on. They where desperate and safety suffered.
I like that one... Thanks..
Is Google broken again? Shesh...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Look at the "Passively safe" designs...
The Sprint/Radio Shack store a few miles from me here sells wire cutters, soldering irons, and even Arduinos.
Have you been there lately? Like in the last few weeks? The bankruptcy liquidation sales just ended last month or so around here. I didn't figure Sprint would want to continue selling the electronics trinkets, just cell phones and accessories... But hey, I've not seen a remaining Radio Shack/Sprint store myself, all the local stores closed.
You do understand that Chernobyl used a flammable material for the neutron moderator and poring water onto the plant, where necessary, caused a significant amount of radiation to become airborne, even after the steam explosion blew it apart. What eventually brought the situation under control was the partial burying of the core in lead and sand to reduce the radiation so a makeshift containment building could be hastily assembled over the blown apart reactor.
Also, the problem with Chernobyl was more about the lack of safety engineered into the system, than a fault of Nuclear power persay. In Soviet Russia times the imperative was to generate power cheaply, and NOW. They literally built a house of cards, with inadequate safety, cut corners on all kinds of safety systems, and had complex interactions between seemingly unrelated systems. Then they skimped on operator training and safety standards. It's no wonder that this reactor design didn't blow up more often. It truly was an accident waiting to happen.
Modern reactors can be designed to be fail safe. One design I saw claimed that you could literally walk away from it running at full power and it was both thermally and physically safe. It would insert the control rods if it got too hot and there was nothing that could stop it. At that point, even a total loss of coolant pumps would not result in a melt down as a number of plugs would melt, flooding the area around the containment vessel and allow the conduction/convection cooling of the core. Even then, if the core continued to heat, it would release the fuel assemblies which would fall into deep pools of reserved cooling water and end up far apart in the bottom of the containment building. All this didn't require ANY operator input, or power to accomplish, it was totally mechanical and automatic and only required the reactor containment system to remain in tact and right side up.
There are a number of very safe and practical designs for nuclear power today, it's just impossible to get a permit to actually build one because the environmentalists won't let that happen..
Nuclear has gone from "too cheap to meter" to "too expensive to matter".
And solar isn't "too expensive to matter"? Solar is many times more expensive than nuclear and that's not going to change anytime soon. Wind isn't all that much better. Plus, all your "proven technology" doesn't really exist in cost effective forms, especially that battery storage idea.
BTW.. The reason nuclear is so expensive compared to other options is not so much that it's gotten more expensive, but that electric rates have fallen because natural gas has become so cheap. 20 years ago, who would have thought we would have this much Natural Gas? So in many ways it is Natural Gas that's putting Nuclear plants out of business, well that and plain age. Most of these plants are 30 years old now. How much does it cost to maintain a 30 year old car you drive every day? More than when it was new...
I think that some modern nuclear power plants would be a good idea. They would be more efficient, safer and a relatively cheap source of power we can use to charge up all those EV's people like you want to drive. We know it would be cheaper than wind or solar. Then we should take the money we save and invest it in Fusion research like this.
Does anyone want to venture a guess as to which will come first, the Year of Linux on the Desktop, or the widespread availability of this fusion reactor technology?
The jury is still out on both.... Somehow I think I'm going to die before either of those happen, and I have 20 years of work left before retirement..
Depends on if the device displays "local time" while being referenced to some time standard. If the device is being used to display local time and is using say NTP, then you are going to need to program/configure this new time zone.
IF it's a standalone device, who cares what time you have in it... But I'm talking about networked applications, or situations where you need some kind of standard reference time. Applications like navigation are very dependent on accurate time keeping.
SO, all Un really has done is made life harder for his military and for what little industrial complex he still has to really know what time it is and stay coordinated. Where they could once use off the shelf GPS (like everybody else) now none of their equipment will display the current local time correctly. Something tells me this will be perceived as a problem...
Of course you can just forget all this complexity and do what the US military does and do everything relative to a SINGLE time zone, which is basically GMT with a different name "Zulu time". But I'm just guessing that Little'Un would bristle at that suggestion, even though it means he could sleep a couple of more hours and still be up before 0600....
Bankruptcy has taken all three... Sprint just purchased some of Radio Shack's stores so they could keep selling cell phones from them.
LOL... Hope it happens in the winter then....
...which basically consists of "drive a '92 Jeep where the only major electronics in the car are my cell phone".
It doesn't even have power windows.
Hack that wirelessly,
Well, to improve things, get yourself an older diesel powered vehicle and then not even the spark ignition stuff is necessary....
Once the researchers' dongle is attached It's can still be an interesting tech read but I can also cut breaks with a set of 99 cent snips from Radio Shack.
Not any more.. Radio Shack has gone the way of Comp USA and Circuit City....
You are not within arms reach when the person receiving your angry assault is reacting to what you wrote, so you are unlikely to be physically assaulted...
On the other hand, you won't be there to see them react to all those stinging statements you made, nor can you stick out your tongue and go "Nana Nanna Na a" when you see their brow wrinkled in anger...
Seems like it would be pretty secure because windows would be nearly unusable... It is so huge and bloated as to be almost unusable on even fairly up to date hardware.
I have a Class B CDL with "P" endorsement (I can drive a buss with air brakes), and you are correct about state law up to a point. Purely private vehicles such as RV's and such can exceed the 13-Ton and length limits and still be driven by Class C license holders.
However local laws may apply here. In Dallas the city requires a "permit" they call a license in order to pick up paying passengers at the airports and other locations. You can drop off, just not pick anybody up. Even my CDL isn't good enough for the City of Dallas who wants their pound of flesh and to send me to a training course before I can carry passengers....
You share some of the money you make with Uber.
They 'share' all of the risk with you.
First one, sure, they take your money. Second one? Not so much.
Uber is not about risk sharing, it's a money grab.
I always refuse to take the nuclear power protestors seriously until they agree to go out and pull their electric meters and refuse to do any business with anybody who uses electricity both directly and indirectly.
Please tell us what made you consider that to be a logical response. *pops corn* This should be insane, I mean good!
I'm saying "Lead by example". If you want me to consider your argument, prove to me you are really serious about it.
The world is full of people who "protest" all sorts of things, yet don't fully understand what they are really protesting, nor are they *really* committed to the cause. Al Gore comes to mind here. All sorts of bluster about CO2 emissions, rides in a private luxury jet. Or Michael Moore, who is out protesting the 1% when he's in the top 1/2% himself and could easily give enough away to prove he's serous. These two are nothing more than scammers. But then there is the environmentalist who's our advocating that we stop burring coal for electricity, but happily has an air-conditioned home that sucks oodles of power out of the grid that's powered by coal, oh they buy "renewable power" but when it's cloudy, calm and hot, they don't even know that fossil fuels are what's keeping them cool.
Then there is the "I don't burn fossil fuels to drive" crowd with their EV's. Lord help us when they find out where that electricity comes from....
How come they're saying how much costs have risen since 2011, instead of since they shut the nukes down?
Oh that's easy.... Figures never lie, but liars figure... Somebody is massaging their data set.